To ring in Black History Month, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, located in Harlem USA, announced the creation of an education project on the black migration experience over the past 400 years.

The project, which includes a new Web site, will provide the public with access to articles, photographs, maps and historic documents.

Entertainer Harry Belafonte said yesterday that the “In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience” project will help people learn about the “profound impact the African- Americans have had in shaping the culture and history” of the United States.

“This web site documents our journey,” said Belafonte, who immigrated from the Caribbean island of Jamaica and worked as a janitor in Harlem before beginning a successful acting and singing career. “It will help us get on with the business of understanding who we are, make us become more prideful and for the rest of the world to understand what they have done to us, for us and with us.”

Inmotionaame.org, has over 17,000 pages of text from books and manuscripts, 8,000 photographs and 65 maps, many specially designed to trace international and domestic migration patterns of approximately 35 million blacks and their ancestors.

Recently at the UMOJA celebration held at the Schomburg, Mr. Dodson, its director spoke on the importance and scope of such a dynamic work being released in the 80th year since the conception of Schomburg and the 80th anniversary of Black History Month. Originally dubbed Negro History Week, the month of February was chosen in order to pay homage to Frederick Douglas. This website is a testimony to how far we have come and how much we have contributed to the world since 1925.

Every parent should seize this opportunity to sit down at the computer and visit www.inmotionaame.org . The greatest gift you can give your child is knowledge of self, and the Schomburg just made it a whole lot easier.