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

Abstract

The Great Migration was an indelible mass movement of people. Over approximately fifty years, starting in 1915 and ending in 1965, at least 6 million American descendants of enslaved Africans, along with other Black denizens, drove, rode, and strode out of the South. Their destinations, often predetermined, sometimes disappointing, and occasionally temporary, were anywhere and everywhere North, West, and between those cardinal directions.Like many Black people today, a portion of my family was part of the Great Migration. Most of my family departed the Eastern Shore of Virginia for New York City. Specifically, they left a Northampton County community not far from the tip of the Delmarva Peninsula. True of many southern locales Black migrants left, the landscape of their departure point was acre upon acre of mostly white-owned pines and other agricultural lands, sustained and profitable often because of strong and knowledgeable Black hands. Northampton County was a common type of southern space. It provided limited opportunities for the vast number of Black people to own land, generate wealth, and experience full citizenship. And white supremacist mores, aided by white menace, terror, and murder, made Northampton County and other southern plots, crossroads, towns, and cities ripe for Black flight across and away from the South. Leaving them meant more opportunity and progress, more security and liberty.Historians and other humanities scholars, along with a mix of social scientists (e.g., demographers, sociologists, and economists), have long noted the import and lasting effects of Black Americans who left the South during the Great Migration. Unquestionably, it was a truly consequential migration of people in US history, generally, and Black American history, specifically. Journalists with popular books, such as Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, have reinvigorated interest in the period and people, plus terminuses and transformations, of the Great Migration. Yet very little of the contemporary attention to the Great Migration, or previous attention to it, focuses on the political products of the Great Migration, including the migrants who became politicians and policymakers. It is an important point Keneshia N. Grant’s Great Migration and the Democratic Party makes.Across 160 pages of introduction, argument, and conclusion, The Great Migration and the Democratic Party takes up the immense sweep and wake of the Great Migration. The book capably directs our attention to the value of studying the local transformations associated with the remarkable resettlement of Black people outside the South. The central thesis of Grant’s Great Migration is that the multi-decade, mass exodus of Black people from southern locales to northern cities changed party politics and local and state politics where Black migrants settled in large numbers. Specifically, the multitudes of Black migrants from the South to the North contributed to changing the electoral calculus of political parties and politicians, altered the composition of local electorates, and shifted the “balance of power” in the municipal elections of an undetermined number of cities. Although other social scientists writing about the period have made a similar observation, Great Migration provides more clarity and sharpens it.Chapter 1 presents the argument of the book—that the Great Migration altered “the political landscape in at least two important ways: (1) northern politicians’ interactions with Black voters changed as the [Black] population grew and (2) the Great Migration led to an increase in the number of Black elected officials” (11). Basically, as Black citizens became blocs of generally unified Black voters, white politicians and parties came to treasure or just need generally unified Black electoral behavior. This resulted in opportunities for Black voters to make claims on politicians and parties. Black claims sometimes resulted in municipal responsiveness to Black interests and sometimes yielded political, economic, and social improvements of Black communities.Furthermore, chapter 1 challenges a view that Black voters during the Great Migration mainly became Democrats through defection and conversion from the Republican Party. Assuming that most Black migrants from the South were not strong partisans for either party on their arrival in the North meant, according to the book, that a big bloc of Black voters awaited “mobilization” (i.e., recruitment and nurturing) by the political parties, with the Democratic Party ultimately proving the best mobilizer of “the Black vote.”Chapter 2 is a primer on the Great Migration in the United States. It provides uninformed or forgetful readers with the basics of the time frame of the multi-decade, two-wave event, a precise definition of the Black migrant, general characteristics of Black migrants, summaries of the causes of the migration, and the relevance of the migration to the racial diversification of voting age populations in key destinations of the migration.Chapters 3 through 5 are case studies of Black political development and racial politics in Detroit, New York, and Chicago respectively. The choice of those cities is logical. They comprise the primary and perhaps most important sites of Black resettlement in the Northeast and Midwest. Each of these cities, to varying degrees, would become key sites for Black municipal empowerment, offering scholars many opportunities for case studies of the development, production, and mixed effects of Black municipal empowerment. Some of that scholarship by others informs The Great Migration and the Democratic Party. But the book rests, too, on the informed and persuasive scholarship of its author. Also, the chapters would have been less developed were it not for Grant cataloging Black elected officials—local, state, and federal—during the Great Migration. Beyond identifying names and offices, the book identifies them by birthplace and whether they were migrants. That demonstrates how present and influential Black migrants were during the decades Black voters tested, strengthened, and amplified their electoral voices.Packed with tidbits and morsels of urban politics history, the three chapters are symmetrical in structure. Grant walks readers through each city, providing an overview of the political contexts of the cities, particularly their party politics and forms of municipal government upon the arrival of Black migrants and how the contexts changed throughout the period. Then Grant assesses the potential of Black voters to influence campaign promises by candidates and outcomes of mayoral elections in the three cities. Finally, Grant describes the rise and work of Black elected officials (local, state, and federal) and their general efforts as descriptive representatives and (sometimes successful) substantive representatives.Additionally, the descriptive chapters engage the matter of whether Black voters, generally, were pivotal voters in mayoral elections, at least in the moments where the local circumstances aligned to possibly permit them to hold a “Black balance of power” in such elections. Plus, Grant argues that even if the prior votes of Blacks citizens did not always equal Black voters being extra important to mayoral electoral elections, often white politicians and parties believed Black voters were extra important. Their belief alone, according to Grant, was likely adequate to change the tenor and tone of mayoral campaigns vis-à-vis Black voters.The chapters also employ calculations of when and how often Blacks may have held a “Black balance of power” in mayoral elections. Due to the dearth of municipal data on race and voter registration in the three cities, however, Grant is forced to make a lot of assumptions about the meaningfulness of Black voting-age populations for determining the “Black balance of power.” Nonetheless, the estimates of such balance are interesting as a thought experiment across the three chapters.Patterning good political science books, The Great Migration and the Democratic Party generates new questions for future research. A first set of questions pertains to matters of Black civil society and intragroup conflict and cooperation. How did Black communities receiving migrants from the South negotiate the political energy, awakening, and activism of the new arrivals vis-à-vis Black denizens already in them? A second set of questions goes beyond the election of Black migrants as descriptive representatives. How did the Great Migration influence the emergence and future of the Black middle class via municipal employment? Yes, The Great Migration touches briefly on matters of hiring, but it is silent about the important roles Black migrants played in breaking open municipal bureaucracies for Black employment, as well as policy influence via political appointments, plus administration, implementation, and service delivery. A third set of questions involve local politics in the places the Great Migration left behind. Recognizing that the terminuses of the Great Migration included final destinations and original starting points, what did the Great Migration do to the politics and citizenship of Black people unable or unwilling to join the movement out of the South?Overall, The Great Migration and the Democratic Party is a welcome addition to the study of Black politics, urban politics, and party politics.