Arizona isn’t really included in lessons about the Great Migration that brought generations of Black Americans out of the South and across the country.
Mcdell Otha Jackson came here as a girl in the 1940s — and moved to south Phoenix. She and her mother and grandmother came from the South to get health care — they heard it was being offered to Black people here.
McDell became the matriarch of a big family that’s still in the Valley today. But after her death a little more than a decade ago, her family grew apart. They stopped gathering for holidays and sold the south Phoenix home she had lived in.
That is, until her granddaughter, Shelley Jackson, brought them all back together and filmed them as they attempted to navigate their family history amid loss and gentrification.
It’s the subject of Jackson’s new documentary, “Black Emergence: Traveling Mercy to the Desert Sun,” which will be screening Saturday, Feb. 28, as part of the Living Black Worlds event at Phoenix Center for the Arts. It was produced in collaboration with the nonprofit Black River Life, which works to tell Black migration stories.
Jackson is also the executive director at Instituto. The Show spoke with her more about her film.
Full conversation
SHELLEY JACKSON: When folks hear about the Great Migration, they think of people going to Detroit, going to New York — but really Arizona was a part of that story as well. And what I learned was that there were other families that not only came to Arizona for health care, but they came to access work as well.
They came to help build the airport and build some of the vital infrastructure we actually have in Phoenix today. And I think that that’s really remarkable.
My family was fleeing the Jim Crow South, which was a place where my family had also witnessed folks be lynched. They had witnessed segregation in a very brutal way up close and personal.
And so when I think about her migrating to Phoenix for health care, to me it’s also like they were seeking refuge. They were seeking possibility and opportunity for a greater life for themselves and for the future of their family.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So they came to south Phoenix, as you said, this historically Black part of Phoenix, and you grew up, born and raised there. What was it like for you? Like, how has this played out in your own life?
JACKSON: Oh, my goodness. Well one, I love south Phoenix. I feel so incredibly lucky to have grown up in a place that celebrated all of my history and all that I am. I grew up going to the Roosevelt School District, which was a place that I ended up becoming the school board president of.
But when I was growing up, my grandma was also a volunteer nurse in the district. And so our family had beautiful roots there. I’ll give you an example, a little bit of what it’s like to grow up in that neighborhood at that point in time.
Martin Luther King Day was like a whole neighborhood holiday. I went to Martin Luther King School, and that whole week leading up to Martin Luther King Day, the whole school was making posters. We were singing songs. We were watching movies about Martin Luther King Day.
And then on the actual holiday, the whole neighborhood, including my grandma, because we lived right down the street from the school, they would pull out their lawn chairs and they would watch the kids march.
And literally the whole school and the school across the street, Percy L. Julian, all the kids would come out with our posters, and we would march through the neighborhood just like Martin Luther King did. And the neighbors and the families would come out on the lawn chairs, and they would be cheering us on and singing along.
And that’s just like a small snippet of an example of what it was like to grow up in that time frame. But I felt very loved. Loved by my school, loved by my community and loved by my family.
GILGER: How have I never heard that? That’s amazing.
JACKSON: Yes. You should look it up. It was on the news and everything. I remember feeling like a celebrity.
GILGER: Marching down the streets, that’s amazing. So. And it sounds like your grandma was kind of a big part of that, that sense of community that you had as a kid in south Phoenix. Tell us about just like, what was she like?
JACKSON: Yeah, as I mentioned, she was always my muse. When I was in third grade, I actually brought her to show and tell for Black History Month.
GILGER: Like, she was your show and tell?
JACKSON: Yeah, exactly. I brought in my grandmother and made her tell everyone about herself.
GILGER: That’s awesome.
JACKSON: But she was such a pillar in the community. Everyone would always stop by for a snack, would stop by to ask her opinion on things, to ask for her perspective. She was also a foster parent, so I grew up with other kids in and out of the house with us that would go to school with us, that would walk to school with us.
And when their time was up at our grandmother’s, it was really sad. But then they got placed in a different home or got reunified, and then we would have another kid a couple months later.
And so she wasn’t just a safe haven for myself and my family, but she was also welcoming in kids all the time and inviting them into this beautiful community she created.
GILGER: Yeah, so she passed away a little over a decade ago, it sounds like. And tell us what happened to your family after that, after her loss. Like the loss of this matriarch.
JACKSON: Yeah, after my grandmother’s loss, our family really disconnected. I think that we didn’t have a person anymore to rally around and to bring us all together. But also after she passed, the house ended up being sold.
So this place that we had all gathered in, you’ll see in the film that we talk about how we had all lived together at one point in time. I’ve lived with so many of my cousins. That is because when someone fell off or they needed support, they would go live with Grandma. And that was just the natural piece of our family.
And when that was gone, it just. I think we all felt displaced in a way, and we all felt lost. The only time we saw each other in that decade after she passed was for funerals.
GILGER: Wow. So that sort of mirrors each other, right? Like, the loss of this family connection and this community and the loss of the house where it all kind of happened. And that sounds like it’s not a rare occurrence in south Phoenix today. Like, we’ve seen housing prices go up everywhere across the Valley, but in south Phoenix as well.
JACKSON: One thousand percent. Our family lost our home for, I think, a multitude of reasons. The other family that lived around my grandmother — so when I was growing up, I lived three, four minutes away from everyone, OK? I couldn’t walk down any street without seeing a family member.
GILGER: Right, right.
JACKSON: And aside from my grandmother’s house, what I had learned was that other family members had ended up just moving out of south Phoenix because they got priced out. And so us coming together was also a reminder of this extended connection that I don’t think we even realized was lost until we gathered.
GILGER: Yeah. OK, so in the film, you document this gathering, right? Your family coming back together for the first time in a long time. And you kind of talk about these issues together and about the broader kind of forces that brought you there.
What was it like? What was it like to see everyone to be all in one place together and to talk about these things that probably are not easy to talk about?
JACKSON: I was, one, so scared. I remember one feeling like, is this worth it? Am I a fraud for wanting to tell a family story without talking to my own family in a decade? Like, is this even gonna work? Are people gonna show up? I was just so nervous to bring people in a space together after being estranged for so long.
But once we got there, magic happened. You see in the film, we all start hugging, and we’re laughing together. We’re a very lively family. We all have a really great sense of humor.
GILGER: It looked like fun.
JACKSON: Yes. It was such a beautiful time. And I want to shout out Black River Life and Colette and Brian because you’ll see that we actually had facilitators there, too. And these were folks who came into the home and supported us through grieving together, supported us through navigating this really tough conversation that I think was needed.
I don’t think we could have done it alone, but I’m so glad we did because it actually has changed our whole family dynamic since then.
GILGER: Yeah, where has it brought you? Where has the whole experience of making this film ended up?
JACKSON: Yes. So we filmed this September 2024. And after that, we had spent our first family Thanksgiving and Christmas together for the first time in a decade. And it was beautiful, and it was magical. And ever since then, now we actually get together on holidays again. We show up for birthdays and celebrations in a way that we just hadn’t before.
And I think it’s really just opened up our hearts and reminded us that even though we’ve lost a matriarch, we actually all have a responsibility to still show up for each other. And we have a responsibility to reshape what the future of our family looks like.
GILGER: That’s pretty great.
JACKSON: Yeah.
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