The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (review)

J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 7 63 domain. Once serving state sovereignty, the railroad company bridged the Savannah, marginalizing Hamburg to connect with its former nemesis Georgia. Textile manufacturers who once honored riparian rights now violated them. The state responded with succor not censure, essentially nullifying the 1823 river navigation statute, dooming small upriver sawyers and millers. Into their places moved the South Carolina Paper Manufacturing Company and the South Carolina Porcelain Manufacturing Company, both incorporated firms. Once largely agricultural and rural, Downey showed that on the eve of the Civil War, the Edgefield and Barnwell districts were places with incorporated firms staffed by slave and wage labor and incorporated towns managed by urban slaveholding “men of capital ” (p. 227). These were all “capitalist features” prevalent in a society not yet capitalist , Downey insists (p. 227). Agriculture did not preclude capitalism; the North was a capitalist society and also predominantly agricultural, he explains (pp. 4–5, 226). Attitudes did not bar it; by the end of the period his actors had substituted “corporate self-interest” for publici juris (p. 202). Slavery looms as a disqualifying feature, but Downey, who recognizes its centrality, does not offer it as an explanation. At the end of an elegantly argued, meticulously researched work, equally relevant to social history as to the history of southern industrialization, the author hedged. ANGELA LAKWETE Auburn University The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America. By James N. Gregory. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xiv, 446 pp. $59.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-80782983 -8. $19.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8078-5651-7. From the outset of James N. Gregory’s The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America, the author ambitiously attempts to redefine the way in which both scholars and laypeople alike have thought about the migrations of southerners to the North from the turn of the century to the early 1960s. Seeking to fill a void in the historiography and understanding of these large, internal population movements, Gregory boldly but reasonably proclaims that his book is “the first historical study of the Southern Diaspora in its entirety. T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 64 Historians have until now fragmented the subject along lines of race and time period” (p. 5). Essentially, Gregory is correct in this assessment. The large majority of previous studies of twentieth-century American migrations have focused either on southern African Americans or on groups of whites such as the Dust Bowl migrants of the 1930s. Hence, Gregory’s work indeed blazes fertile new ground in combining accounts of both of these migrations in one monograph and examining anew their socio-cultural , economic, and political effects on northern and national identity. At its best, Gregory’s endeavor raises some intriguing points. For example , he debunks the myth that only poor, uneducated, white southerners made up the predominant flow of people out of the South throughout the first phase of southern migration (pre–World War I to the beginning of World War II). His research shows that among these migrants were also a number of educated individuals who moved north and west to find better economic opportunities. Gregory argues that the ensuing brain drain that occurred included a plethora of southern intellectuals such as Thomas Wolfe, and that these individuals helped shape northern attitudes about southern culture. Yet for all of the imaginative theories Gregory offers, there are just as many questions raised as answers provided . For example, when discussing southern music’s influence on the North, Gregory asserts that “hillbilly music would find its chief market, most of its performers, and most of its symbolic references in the South, as would its descendant, country music. More than any other major segment of commercial popular culture, country music has remained a strikingly regional product” (p. 175). Thus, here we see that Gregory can, at times, undermine his central thesis that southern culture migrated with its population. When dealing with African Americans who participated in the grand drama of migration, Gregory raises other...