Race over Region

What does everyone on the following list have in common: musical greats Gene Autry, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, Woody Guthrie, and Aretha Franklin; religious leaders Robert Shuler, Father Divine, C. L. Franklin, and J. Frank Norris; sports stars Ty Cobb, Dizzy Dean, Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, and Joe Louis; entertainers Lily Tomlin, D. W. Griffith, and Will Rogers; writers Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, Thomas Wolfe, Lillian Hellman, Charles S. Johnson, and E. Franklin Frazier? According to James Gregory, these twenty-five famous figures are just a few of the twenty-eight million participants in a Southern Diaspora that reshaped American culture, religious life, race relations, and political alignments during the twentieth century. The Southern Diaspora is a provocative and pathbreaking book, the first scholarly effort to synthesize what Gregory calls the "two Great Migrations out of the South," meaning the parallel resettlement of southern-born black and white populations in the North and West (p. 5). Between 1900 and the mid-1970s, this Southern Diaspora included twenty million white southerners, eight million African Americans, and approximately one million Latinos as well. In Gregory's comparative analysis, "southern migrants of both races became agents of change who used the opportunities of geography to alter the cultural and political landscape of the nation and all its regions" (p. 7). The simultaneous Great Migrations of black and white southerners played a critical role in "collapsing what had been huge cultural differences" between the South and the rest of the nation while highlighting the centrality of race over region in the experiences of the migrants themselves (p. xii).

By placing internal migration at the center of modern American history, The Southern Diaspora presents scholars with a conceptual model based on the twin themes of racial divergence and regional convergence. The first half of the book contains the most convincing arguments, grounded in traditional social history and an extraordinary new census resource, the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) compiled by researchers at the University of Minnesota. Many scholars and teachers, including specialists in urban and African-American history, will find it necessary to rethink their approaches and rewrite their lectures based on the census data and demographic tables found in the book's first and third chapters and very useful appendix. The total figure of twenty-eight million participants in the Southern Diaspora is substantially higher than most previous estimates, based on a more accurate methodology that factors in mortality rates and temporary migrants who returned to the South. Although the Great Migration (with capital letters) has generally referred to African-American relocation to the urban North and West, the IPUMS data demonstrate that "white out-migrants outnumbered blacks during every decade [of the twentieth century] and usually by a very large margin" (p. 15). In relative terms, however, a higher percentage of the black population left the South and a much lower percentage of black than white migrants returned. By 1970, one-third of all southern-born blacks were living outside the region, compared to one-fifth of southern-born whites. Although Gregory believes that both migrations transformed the national landscape, the African-American exodus proved to be "more comprehensive and consequential" (p. 326).

In a second major revision of the conventional wisdom, The Southern Diaspora decisively refutes the maladjustment thesis that southern-born migrants of both races struggled to survive in new urban-industrial settings and lagged far behind those already living in the metropolitan North and West. Gregory's statistical evidence drawn from the IPUMS database reveals a substantial racial gap in the aggregate economic standing of white and black migrants, alongside a very close correlation of both family income and rates of poverty between each of these southern-born populations and nonsouthern counterparts of the same race. In the post-World War II decades that brought the numerical peak of the Great Migrations, southern-born whites achieved almost the...