Plot

The film follows the personal stories of African-Americans, now in their 80's and 90's who migrated north in the 1940's to the war factories of Muskegon Michigan.

Up From the Bottoms: The Search for the American Dream tells the story of the massive migration of African Americans from the rural south to the prosperous north during the World War II years and beyond They left behind the legacy of slavery and segregation and set out to find the American dream. The voice of Cicely Tyson guides us through these touching, thoughtful and often funny stories as told by fifteen residents of Muskegon, Michigan. During the late 1930s through the 1960s, factory jobs in the north were abundant while farming jobs in the south were disappearing. It started as a trickle but once word got back to families in the south, it turned into a flood of people uprooting their lives and moving to the land of prosperity, the industrial north.