America’s Great Migration Is Remembered With Rescued Greyhound Bus Art Museum

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America’s Great Migration Is Remembered With Rescued Greyhound Bus Art Museum

17/7/2025

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A travelling art exhibit that explores modern history is always a good idea. When the historical event is travel itself and the mode of travel is an authentic example of the period, it becomes a masterstroke. That’s exactly what migration academic and artist Robert Louis Brandon Edwards is doing with his freshly acquired 1947 Greyhound Bus. Its 1970's mobile home interior has been torn out and replaced with as much genuine art and design from the era that Edwards can produce or locate. The Great Migration occurred between the 1950s and 1970s and is when many African American families left their ancestral home in the South and moved to what was a more liberal, more welcoming, and more labour rich Middle, North, and West America, or so they thought.

The entire demographic map of the nation changed in just a short period of time, within two generations the country has diversified and adapted to take on new workers and school children from a more traditional life. When the past meets the present, it can be a difficult time for people, conversative and progressive, and this melting pot of identity, idea, culture, and story became enriched and strained in equal amounts at the time. Now that these people are our elder generation and their children are in positions of power where they can actually bring about change, it’s a great time to re-ignite the conversation all these years later. Doing it in a way that’s constructive and valuable is a problem that an artist is best placed to solve.

The travelling museum will bring to light some of the big questions of the day and relive some of the schemes and social structures set up to challenge and support the transition to a more liberal and free society. Not shying away from the difficult realities and the ghost-pepper style flavour of some of the subject matter, attitude such as racism will not be hidden. The artist fully intends to tell it how it really is and make use of all the darkness in the truth palette to bring his exhibition to life. Segregation and Jim Crow laws will be talked about and discussed as well as the food, music, clothing, and everything good about African American culture.

The Raymond Loewy definitive model once did business around the Great Lakes region and so was instrumental in the era’s movement of people. States and cities such as Cleveland, New York, Chicago, and Detroit all have distinctive and rich histories surrounding the Great Migration. Currently parked up at the Cleveland Chester Avenue Greyhound Terminus, the bus is preparing to move on when the bus stop shuts its doors for good later this year. The lower airfares and the car share apps available make bus and coach travel less profitable for owners. It’s certain that the life of this bus is not over, and even as it hits 80 years old, its new story has only just begun.

A great little book available on Kindle: The Great Migration: An Epic Journey of Hope and Change in America

Make sure to read the latest book from the author of Alternative Fruit: Parenting Superintelligence: From Code to Conscience by Rowan B. Colver

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