Race over Region

Abstract

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