Keneshia N. Grant. The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century.

Abstract

Keneshia Grant’s The Great Migration and the ­Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century examines how the 6.5 million Black migrants who left the South between 1915 and 1965 helped transform political regimes in Detroit, Chicago, and New York. Grant is a political scientist, which means her primary arguments and methodologies are situated in political science. But historians of urban history, political parties, and twentieth-century political realignment will find this book of interest. In 1949, journalist and civil rights activist Henry Lee Moon published Balance of Power: The Negro Vote, which argued that if Black voters in northern cities voted as a bloc they could hold the balance of power in key elections. Moon’s intent was to awaken both Black voters and white politicians to the new political power accrued by Black citizens in northern cities since the 1920s. In The Great...