Arc of Justice opens with an imagining of the journey taken by millions of black Americans from the American South to the Midwest, Northeast, and West between 1916 and 1930: the Great Migration. The year is 1925, and groups of these black migrants board trains in towns across the South. They carry their belongings "cardboard suitcases" or beat-up trunks. The landscape changes as the train moves northwards, the cotton fields and tobacco plantations of the South give way to "coal towns of Appalachia" and "mill villages of Carolina Piedmont." Reminders of the Jim Crow South dot the scenes, with every station having separate waiting rooms: one for "whites" and one for "coloreds" (1). The migrants, having heard about recent lynching of blacks at the hands of whites, wonder whether these atrocities took place just beyond the traintracks.

As the train passes into the Midwest, the signs designating segregation disappear. The agricultural fields are replaced by "vast steelworks," "tools shops and warehouses," and the Ford automobile factory. Skyscrapers come into view, dwarfing any building in the South. Though in the past, migrants had celebrated crossing into the North by "breaking into song or prayer" (2), lynching and murder of blacks even in Midwestern cities have dampened some spirits.