The Great Migration — the historical event that has helped define some of America’s major cities, industries, music, food and politics — is the focus of a new PBS documentary series produced by Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. The new series, “Great Migrations: People on The Move,” premieres Jan. 28. It documents the Black exodus to the North and the American West, with Detroit as a primary destination for many of those individuals and families.

Scholars define the Great Migration as the period between 1910 and 1970, beginning before World War I, continuing through the Great Depression and World War II, and spanning into the Civil Rights era of the 1960s.

In conjunction with the series premiere, One Detroit has been collecting stories of families who came to the Motor City as part of the migration. One Detroit’s Bill Kubota talked with Stephen Henderson, the host of “American Black Journal” and a One Detroit contributor, about how his family made their way to Detroit from Georgia and Mississippi and what happened when they got to the city.

They talk about the impact his grandfather had as a union official with the United Auto Workers during the early 1960s, including the historic Detroit Walk to Freedom with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Plus, Henderson discusses his effort to find out more about the life of his father, Mose, who grew up in Natchez, Mississippi and later died in Detroit when Henderson was a teenager.