Way Up North in Louisville: African American Migration in the Urban South, 1930–1970 by Luther Adams (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 88 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Way Up North in Louisville: African American Migration in the Urban South, 1930-1970 Luther Adams Too many histories of black migration have focused on movement to the urban North during the First World War, argues historian Luther Adams in Way Up North in Louisville. Largely ignored has been the “second ” Great Migration that occurred between the 1940s and early 1970s, and the equally large numbers of African Americans who relocated within the South. Using Louisville, Kentucky, as a case study, the author illustrates that most of this southern migration occurred between urban areas, rather than from rural locations to cities. The urban South was more than a place where African Americans “tarried” en route to Chicago or New York City; it was just as often a terminus. Viewing the South as “home,” black migrants to Louisville contributed to building that city’s thriving African American community. They also played a pivotal role in contesting white power to shape the post-World War II urban landscape. This approach reconfigures the South as a place of not only “violence and oppression” controlled by whites, but also as a site of “raced and gendered agency” exercised by African Americans (1). “For many migrants,” Adams concludes, “the decision to stay in the South was linked to their desire to combat oppression. Viewed in this light, migration within the South takes on a new meaning, as an act of resistance” (55). A southern migrant identity anchored black freedom struggles in the 1940s and 1950s for the desegregation of public accommodations and schools, and expanded economic opportunity. These were waged through institutions including the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and local union coalitions involving whites. Like historian Tracy E. K’Meyer, Adams suggests that much of Louisville’s black activism occurred alongside white moderates and liberals, as well as anti-racist white radicals. But Adams is unabashed in his emphasis on African Americans’ determination to act independently . Thus, when 1950s and 1960s urban renewal dismantled the city’s historically black Walnut Street business district it made open housing a key target of militant black protest that alienated white moderates. By the 1970s, Louisville’s uneven tradition of interracial activism had foundered on the shoals of white anti-busing campaigns that helped pave the way for the 2007 Supreme Court ruling on school integration that undermined the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision. Adams offers a fine-grained biographical treatment of key black migrants who seeded the soil for postwar activism. He also skillfully captures the texture of everyday black life with solid attention to the internal nuances of gender and class, and the competing definitions of “respect and respectability” these dynamics generated (73). The author convincingly argues that migrants represented a disproportionate number of leading black freedom activists, though the narrative might have benefited from greater discussion about the factors that made this the case. Likewise, are “violence and oppression” (1) as endemic to the existing literature on black southern life as Adams indicates? Earl Lewis’s study of Norfolk, Virginia, and Leslie Brown’s recent book on Durham, North Carolina, for instance, both suggest that the field is more diverse than Adams initially allows. Along similar lines, Adams positions his work as southern history; yet the earlier scholarship of George C. Wright, as well as more current work by Peter Levy, Andors Skotnes, K’Meyer, and others suggest that Kentucky might be better understood as part of the border South region—a liminal political, BOOK REVIEWS SUMMER 2011 89 social, and cultural space between the North and South. As Adams himself describes it, Kentucky occupied a “peculiar position in the South” (39). How might these peculiarities add to a broader conceptualization of the region? Adams nonetheless exhibits great sensitivity to the centrality of place, which goes against the grain of recent studies on the “long civil rights movement” that have blurred regional boundaries in the African American experience. The author’s conceptualization of southern migration as an act of resistance is similarly likely to invite healthy debate about how best to interpret African American...