The southern diaspora: how the great migrations of black and white southerners transformed America

Abstract

The Southern Diaspora: How the of Black and White Southerners Transformed America. By James N. Gregory. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Pp. xiv, 446. Preface, illustrations, graphs, maps, tables, appendices, notes, index. $59.95, cloth; $19.95, paper.) James N. Gregory returns to familiar territory with his ambitious The Southern Diaspora: How the of Black and White Southerners Transformed America. Almost two decades after examining Okie migration and culture in California, Gregory attempts the first comprehensive study of migrations from the South to the North and West during the twentieth century. While the interpretations found in The Southern Diaspora are not quite as earthshaking as the introduction would suggest, this is a valuable book that covers a lot of important ground in its 300-plus pages. Gregory concedes the challenge of packaging two migration streams that have traditionally been treated separately, and his use of the plural Great Migrations in the subtitle suggests that he has no plans to ignore that paradigm. In fact, the experience of black and white migrants differed significantly, as African Americans discovered in the North and West a de facto segregation that generally confined them to black neighborhoods that became dominated, at least numerically, by southerners and that bred a level of cross-class association and political activism not achieved by whites. White migrants, on the other hand, found no racial barriers to assimilation and generally spent a brief time, if any at all, living in southern white ghettos. They also remained minorities within the larger white community and thus in many ways exercised less of a transformative influence than fellow migrants who were black. But, Gregory writes, [black and white migrations] were also related, and he addresses this potential conundrum by making use of what he calls a stereoscopic view of the diaspora-side-by-side examinations of black and white migrations and migrants that when viewed together present the southern diaspora in a new and fuller dimension (p. 5). Following the recent historiographical trend of finding or granting agency among those traditionally viewed as dispossessed or downtrodden, Gregory argues that southern migrants in the North and West by and large did not succumb to cultural barriers and devolve into an underclass, that they fared better in their new homes than the writings of mid-twentieth-century media and some recent scholars would suggest. To prove his point, the author makes use of an impressive and comparatively new statistical source, the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), a resource he first trumpeted a decade ago in an article in the Journal of American History. …