Southern Journey: The Migrations of the American South, 1790-2020 by Edward L. Ayers

Abstract

Reviewed by: Southern Journey: The Migrations of the American South, 1790-2020 by Edward L. Ayers Chad Berry (bio) Southern Journey: The Migrations of the American South, 1790-2020. By Edward L. Ayers. Maps by Justin Madron and Nathaniel Ayers. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. xii, 153. $39.95 cloth) New ways to tell a story can be revelatory. In Edward L. Ayers's Southern Journey, innovative maps are the essential story, made possible by the intersection of data, computing, and visuality to "reveal patterns that are too complex to reduce to columns and rows," he [End Page 338] writes, "too shifting and simultaneous to convey in words alone" (p. ix). Ayers and his team employ a twenty-first century overlay of hexagons across the country, echoing the eighteenth-century's Cartesian coordinate system onto the Old Northwest, allowing readers "to see complexities and continuities otherwise invisible" (p. ix). The result is fascinating, and the book's coffee-table trim size makes these maps come to life. The first part of three explains how "[m]igration created the anomalies that defined the slave South" (p. 1). And Kentucky, of course, figures prominently in this section, becoming "a frontier for slavery as well as for free people" (p. 4). In the nineteenth century, the Commonwealth would typify the "birthright of white southern men . . . having the right to move when and where" they wanted (p. 37). It would be an enduring ideology, he eloquently writes, "long after the plantations and farms had been plowed under or paved over" (p. 37). And then came war, which transformed a "unique settler-slave society . . . without a blueprint or example to follow" (p. 43). Migration was always a part of the story. New South migrations included white and Black folk moving intraregionally to towns and cities, although some African Americans left the South for northern cities, an indication of migrations to come. For white southerners, 90 percent born there resided there in 1900, but this too would change dramatically (p. 62). In the twentieth-century ebb-and-flow movements, Black, white, and Latinx would leave the South in the millions: eight, twenty-plus, and one, respectively. It would not be the largest internal migration in the U.S., but it would arguably have one of the most significant impacts. The great migration of southerners had begun, and the maps chronicle it in exquisite detail. It is indeed difficult to put the book down. For Black migrants, northern cities marked significant gains between 1910 and 1920. Ayers's maps also show how most Black migration between 1900 and 1920 was to the South's cities. White southerners, however, enjoyed the "passport of skin color" and were much less noticed than Black migrants (p. 71). [End Page 339] After 1920, massive changes shaped the South: global war, infusions of federal dollars, freedom quests, immigrants choosing to call the South home, all centered around migration in different times and places. During the Great Depression, Black rural populations in places like Kentucky declined, as the Midwest and Northeast continued to beckon. The maps representing mid-century population loss for Black and white rural southerners is striking, from Texas to South Carolina for African Americans, and in Texas, Kentucky, and Tennessee for whites. Appalachia hemorrhaged people between 1940 and 1970; eastern Kentucky would lose a third of its population. The maps Ayers's team have produced are striking and poignant, as blue shades representing growth are full of stories, of course, that changed families and communities deeply, offering new political and economic freedoms for people whose ancestors were part of the South's tri-racial beginnings. Equally so are the copper shades representing loss. After 1970, the South moved the population pendulum from loss to gain, due to a mixture of Native people, immigrants from Latin America and Asia, retirees, new professionals (white and Black), and rural folk. The South would acutely notice some of these newcomers, often in sinister and violent ways, while ignoring others. Some southern sub-regions, however, were not a part of this paradigm shift, and by 2016, the familiar places of southern poverty remained: the Delta, the Black Belt, and Appalachia. One manifestation...