African American Great Migration Research Articles

The Mountain Minor

The Mountain Minor

The Dialectics of Race: Proletarian Literature, Richard Wright, and the Making of Revolutionary Subjectivity

Abstract As the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács noted, class has both an objective and a subjective quality: workers are reified as alienated commodities while at the same time they perceive their interests as qualitatively different from those of the capitalist who purchases their labour-power. This essay will argue that one of the most complex theorisations of the material production of working-class subjectivity emerges from Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices, a second-person collective narrative of the African-American Great Migration. Wright locates African-American subjectivity in the contradiction of its formation, at once trapped in the neo-feudal relations of the Jim Crow South, and brutally thrust into the matrix of Northern racialised and ghettoised industrial production. This produces for Wright acute misery, but also a proletarian revision of Du Bois’s Hegelian concept of ‘double consciousness’, as Black workers have a unique insight into the totality of the capitalist world-system.

Reading Hebrews and 1 Peter with the African American Great Migration: Diaspora, Place, and Identity by Jennifer T. Kaalund

Reading Hebrews and 1 Peter with the African American Great Migration: Diaspora, Place, and Identity by Jennifer T. Kaalund

A layover stop in the African American great migration: identity, ruination, and memory

ABSTRACTGone Home challenges dominant representations of Appalachia as white, placing in the foreground the life histories of African Americans who hail from the coalfields of eastern Kentucky. The book reveals how mass migration shapes subjectivities, examining two generations of African Americans who migrated into and out of the coalfields between 1910 and 1970. The coalfields were a layover stop in an intergenerational migration from the rural South to urban centres in the North, Midwest, and West. This review reflects on the significance of the layover stop, both empirically and conceptually. One of the key contributions of Gone Home is to show how the layover stop was important not only in terms of time and place, but also in terms of collective identity. The review concludes by reflecting on interconnected themes of industrial ruination and intergenerational memory.

In deep: the boom and bust of the coal mining industry through the eyes of Black Appalachians

ABSTRACTThis review discusses Gone Home by Karida Brown as a project about the boom and bust of the coal mining through the eyes of Black Appalachians. Attention is paid to how the boundary-making projects of Blacks in Harlan County, Kentucky were ultimately made against the backdrop of seismic structural changes that built and then ruined the coal industry. This boom–bust cycle is told through the eyes of second-generation coal miners – that is, the children of the coal miners who migrated from the Birmingham, Alabama region. These children experience their childhood in eastern Kentucky but then are shipped off to the North, West, and East because by the time they come of age, the coal industry is kneeling to mechanization technologies. Brown presents a compelling narrative that introduces a “new” story of the Deep South and the African American Great Migration, one well worth reading.

Intergenerational altruism in the migration decision calculus: evidence from the African American Great Migration

It is widely believed that many migrations are undertaken at least in part for the benefit of future generations. To provide evidence on the effect of intergenerational altruism on migration, I estimate a dynamic residential location choice model of the African American Great Migration in which individuals take the welfare of future generations into account when deciding to remain in the Southern USA or migrate to the North. I measure the influence of altruism on the migration decision as the implied difference between the migration probabilities of altruistic individuals and myopic ones who consider only current-generation utility when making their location decisions. My preferred estimates suggest that intergenerational altruism explains between 24 and 42% of the Northward migration that took place during the period that I study, depending on the generation.

Gone Home: Race and Roots Through Appalachia by Karida L. Brown

Reviewed by: Gone Home: Race and Roots Through Appalachia by Karida L. Brown Selena Sanderfer Doss Gone Home: Race and Roots Through Appalachia. By Karida L. Brown. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. [xii], 252. $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-4703-6.) For much of the twentieth century, the study of Appalachia has been marred by voyeurism, geographic determinism, and charges of cultural pathology. Recent studies have begun to challenge this trend, emphasizing instead the region's history of liberalism, environmentalism, and organized labor. Karida L. Brown's work continues to complicate Appalachian history by surveying the lived experiences of black residents in Harlan County, Kentucky. She places her work solidly within the literature on identity and migration, while seeking to deconstruct "what it was like to grow up as a black person in a company-owned town in Appalachia in the era of Jim Crow segregation, and then to transform into an entirely new type of citizen by coming of age at the height of the civil rights movement and the African American Great Migration" (p. 6). Using the snowball method, the author conducted more than 150 interviews. Each chapter begins with a short literature review on a particular topic such as education or family life before interrogating the oral histories. Chapters 1 and 2 serve as introductions to the region's industrialization at the turn of the twentieth century and detail the wave of black southerners, mostly from the [End Page 725] coal-producing regions of Alabama, who migrated to Appalachia's coal towns before World War II. The vitality of black life, despite the limitations placed on these communities by Jim Crow, is assessed in chapters 3 and 4. Coal companies followed the South's racial order and supported segregated schools, housing, and community centers for both white and black employees. Not succumbing to the degradation embedded in these racial barriers, black residents found solace in nurturing family life, lively social organizations, and participation in cultural rituals such as separate Independence Day celebrations that cultivated racial solidarity and pride. Chapters 5 and 6 describe segregated education in the towns of Benham and Lynch, Kentucky. Brown finds that black students in Appalachia were given inferior textbooks and underfunded facilities compared with their white counterparts. However, she also finds a community that valued learning and encouraged its children to pursue higher education. Marked feelings of nostalgia for the loss of community schools and the cultural sanctuaries that they provided before desegregation are present in many interviewees' sentiments. In the last chapter, Brown, whose own family hails from Lynch, poignantly recognizes the declining number of black residents since the 1950s and interprets this departure as part of a larger story where the progeny of first-generation immigrants move in search of greater educational and employment opportunities. Claiming great affinity for Appalachia, the author concedes that the region "belongs to no one" and laments that somehow black families knew that "it was never really theirs" (p. 161). In chapter 2, "The Great Migration Escape," Brown characterizes black relocation to Appalachia as escape and, in doing so, overlooks the literature that grounds black migrations as organized movements. Recounting stories of impulsivity ignores the forethought, planning, and deliberateness of those choosing to migrate. This one portrayal, however, is a quibble. The personal stories of black Appalachians provide useful data for seasoned researchers. The author has deposited the interviews in their entirety in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A monumental contribution to black southern history, the Eastern Kentucky African American Migration Project's collection of interviews, ephemera, and photos is currently available to researchers wishing to conduct detailed investigations of black Appalachian life. Selena Sanderfer Doss Western Kentucky University Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Immigration and wages: new evidence from the African American Great Migration

Abstract During the African American Great Migration, millions of blacks left the Southern USA in favor of cities in the North. Despite the social and economic consequences of this migration, the question of its impacts on labor markets in the North has largely been overlooked in the literature. In this paper, I use both local wage comparisons and structural simulations of the aggregate Northern labor market to provide new evidence on the effects of the Great Migration on wages in the North, redoubling the evidence that it caused large declines in wages for blacks, with little effect for whites. The agreement between my local and aggregate wage effect estimates has implications for our general understanding of how immigration and wages are related and how that relationship can be measured.

Creating transregional collective nostalgia: the organising role of Catholic parishes among Louisiana migrants in Great Migration-era Los Angeles

ABSTRACTScholarship on the African American Great Migration insufficiently examines the interactional, emotional, religious, ethno-regional, and generational diversity of migrant experiences. This study applies insights from the transnational migration literature to illuminate complexities of Black internal migration and incorporation during this era. Using data from 47 in-depth interviews with first- and second-generation Louisianans who arrived in Los Angeles between 1931 and 1973, the article elucidates the distinctive organising role that local Catholic religious institutions played in creating and reinforcing transregional collective nostalgia and a sense of ‘being from’ Louisiana during resettlement. First, within the Black migrant concentration in Los Angeles, Louisiana migrants created an enclave in which Catholic parishes were used to geographically organise the city. Second, parishes organised social life and reinforced the migrant community by stimulating co-migrant contact, Louisiana-centred interaction, and support for adaptation. Finally, migrants shaped how parishes functioned by incorporating elements of Louisiana-based practices into Los Angeles routines, thereby preserving continuity between two places in both practical and nostalgic terms.

Was the African American Great Migration Delayed by Outlawing Emigrant Agents?

The question of why more African Americans did not migrate earlier out of the stagnant and repressive South after emancipation remains open. Previous work has highlighted the role of demand and supply conditions. At the time, though, there was much concern about the role of emigrant agents who actively recruited African Americans to migrate away from their homes such that several states introduced emigrant agent laws to effectively drive them out of business. In this paper we provide the first estimates of the quantitative significance of these agents to African American migration. Specifically, we take advantage of a natural experiment provided by different outcomes in court cases in Georgia and Alabama, which resulted in Alabama being prevented from re-introducing these laws between 1882 and 1903 while Georgia’s laws remained. Analyzing gross migration out of the two states, we find that the emigrant agent laws had no direct effect on migration. Though there is some limited evidence that the sensitivity of migration flows to economic differences within the South was lower if an emigrant agent law was in place. This suggests that small changes to the emigrant agent laws are unlikely to have led to an earlier Great Migration. Interestingly we also find that the increase in migration began before 1920 which provides some support for the supply-based explanations.

The African American Great Migration Reconsidered

Movement has always characterized the African American experience. Whether forcibly removed from Africa during the slave trade or sold across plantations in the American South and Caribbean, people of African descent in the Americas remained acutely aware of how movement—open or clandestine—set the terms of their existence. As historian Steven Hahn so astutely reminds us, even before the Civil War, African Americans voted with their feet, utilizing mass migration as a powerful indictment of slavery and white supremacy's dehumanizing effects (1). Therefore, when slavery ended in 1865, African Americans did what most had never done: they cast down their pickets and hoes and began walking off the plantations many had occupied their whole lives. In his acclaimed autobiography Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington, whose family members essentially walked the five hundred miles to their new home in a West Virginia salt mining town, recalled that...

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Literature, Social Science, and the Development of American Migration Narratives in the Twentieth Century

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Literature, Social Science, and the Development of American Migration Narratives in the Twentieth Century

Front Porch

Front Porch Harry L. Watson Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. In "Kure Beach to Asheville: Snapshots from North Carolina's I-40 Corridor," Gyoung-Youl Jeong photographs some of the state's sights along its longest highway. Southerners, unite. It's time we put a stop to pernicious innovations. Even nostalgia is not what it used to be. In the good old days, I'll have you know, "nostalgia" was just a fancy term for homesickness. Nowadays, in an unforgivable neologism, linguistic barbarians define it as sentimental longing for times past. How dare they tamper with nostalgia? If you don't believe me, check the Oxford English Dictionary. O tempora! O mores! While we fight that rearguard action, however, we might as well admit that nostalgia by either definition has long been a standard option on southern sensibilities. Before the "late unpleasantness," for example, popular romances portrayed the plantation as a fond anachronism that was sadly doomed to fade against the pressure of modernity. Decades ago, critic William Taylor aptly pegged these images [End Page 1] as efforts to soothe the sting of booming northern capitalism by contrasting it with a kinder, gentler South. Nostalgia of place and time also suffused the nineteenth-century minstrel show, especially in famous tunes like "Carry Me Back to Ol' Virginny," "Old Folks at Home," and "My Old Kentucky Home." And we all remember that pensive line from the most famous minstrel tune of all: "Old times there are not forgotten." Fed by sentiments like these, some people could ignore the plantation's real brutality and start feeling nostalgic for the Old South before it was even old. Both as homesickness and as longing for the good old days, nostalgia is still a powerful force in southern culture. The minstrel show is gone, but southern singers still "wanta go home," as Flatt and Scruggs put it. For while southerners are famously attached to place, migration and dispersal have been central to their modern experience, from the African American Great Migration to the lesser known journeys that took whites to outposts like Bakersfield, California. The resulting regrets transcend the usual racial barriers—compare the passenger on the "Midnight Train to Georgia," who is "goin' back to find the simpler place and time," to "The Man of Constant Sorrow," whose troubles started when he "bid farewell to old Kentucky, the place where [he] was born and raised." Nostalgia isn't necessarily a bad thing. Some of it's just plain inevitable, as when parents try to pass along memories to baffled children. Bland Simpson starts this issue off with a beautiful example of that kind of nostalgia, as he tells the story of Machelhe Island, located in the Pasquotank River near Elizabeth City, North Carolina. Simpson grew up on that river, and in this excerpt from his latest book, he reflects on his memories of the place and the many barriers between those memories and the perceptions of his son. Simpson's admiration for times past is palpable but realistic, as he reviews the human procession of Indians, slaves, boatmen, and industrialists who have passed along the Pasquotank for centuries. He does not seem to want to return to past time so much as to honor the people who struggled then by holding them in memory. Simpson struggles with the difficulty of conveying all these fading memories to his boy, but I think he will succeed. After all, Simpson learned these stories from others before him, and with his help, we and his son can do the same. Nostalgia has an innate affinity for the natural world. Beloved memories always seem to lean toward times when things were cleaner, greener, and purer than they are in the world of industry and pollution. But industry has now been around the South for a pretty long time, and if you look at Bland Simpson's memories closely, the Pasquotank's industrial past seems more prominent than its older wildness. Whether it's the exhausted oyster beds or the bankrupt lumber mill or the vanished boat traffic, Simpson keeps evoking the people who tried to get rich off his river, some succeeding for a time...

Canaan Bound: The African-American Great Migration Novel

Drawing on a wide range of major literary voices, including Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison, as well as lesser-known writers such as William Attaway (Blood on the Forge) and Dorothy West (The Living Is Easy), Rodgers conducts a kind of literary archaeology of the Great Migration. He mines the writers' biographical connections to migration and teases apart the ways in which individual novels relate to one another, to the historical situation of black America, and to African-American literature as a whole. In reading migration novels in relation to African-American literary texts such as slave narratives, folk tales, and urban fiction, Rodgers affirms the southern folk roots of African-American culture and argues for a need to stem the erosion of southern memory.

Canaan bound: the African-American great migration novel

Canaan bound: the African-American great migration novel

Altruism and Migration: Evidence from Korea and the United States

Previous articleNext article No AccessAltruism and Migration: Evidence from Korea and the United StatesMoonjoong TchaMoonjoong Tcha Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Economic Development and Cultural Change Volume 44, Number 4Jul., 1996 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/452248 Views: 6Total views on this site Citations: 9Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1996 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Eli Berman, Zaur Rzakhanov Fertility, migration, and altruism, Journal of Demographic Economics 86, no.33 (Sep 2020): 367–402.https://doi.org/10.1017/dem.2020.18John Gardner Intergenerational altruism in the migration decision calculus: evidence from the African American Great Migration, Journal of Population Economics 33, no.11 (Jun 2019): 115–154.https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-019-00738-5Nicholas Wilson Altruism in preventive health behavior: At-scale evidence from the HIV/AIDS pandemic, Economics & Human Biology 30 (Sep 2018): 119–129.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ehb.2018.05.004Emmanuel Thibault Is GDP a Relevant Social Welfare Indicator? A Savers-Spenders Theory Approach, The Japanese Economic Review 68, no.33 (Oct 2016): 333–351.https://doi.org/10.1111/jere.12116Debasis Chakraborty, Pravat Kumar Kuri The Household Level Determinants in the Choice and Level of Migration, Environment and Urbanization ASIA 8, no.11 (Mar 2017): 94–104.https://doi.org/10.1177/0975425316683864Yi-Lin Chiang, Emily Hannum, Grace Kao It’s Not Just About the Money: Gender and Youth Migration from Rural China, Chinese Sociological Review 47, no.22 (Mar 2015): 177–201.https://doi.org/10.1080/21620555.2014.990328Akira Shimada Migration decisions, expected remittances, and altruism, International Review of Economics 59, no.33 (Oct 2011): 285–296.https://doi.org/10.1007/s12232-011-0137-6Akira Shimada The Role of Altruism in Sending and Spending Remittances, Journal of East Asian Economic Integration 15, no.22 (Jun 2011): 61–82.https://doi.org/10.11644/KIEP.JEAI.2011.15.2.230J. Edward Taylor, Philip L. Martin Chapter 9 Human capital: Migration and rural population change, (Jan 2001): 457–511.https://doi.org/10.1016/S1574-0072(01)10012-5

Interstate Migration of Negro Population

Previous articleNext article FreeInterstate Migration of Negro PopulationWm. O. ScroggsWm. O. Scroggs Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Political Economy Volume 25, Number 10Dec., 1917 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/253049 Views: 72Total views on this site Citations: 6Citations are reported from Crossref PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Bryan A. Stuart, Evan J. Taylor Migration Networks and Location Decisions: Evidence from US Mass Migration, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 13, no.33 (Jul 2021): 134–175.https://doi.org/10.1257/app.20180294William J. Collins The Great Migration of Black Americans from the US South: A guide and interpretation, Explorations in Economic History 80 (Apr 2021): 101382.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eeh.2020.101382Christine Leibbrand, Catherine Massey, J. Trent Alexander, and Stewart Tolnay Neighborhood Attainment Outcomes for Children of the Great Migration, American Journal of Sociology 125, no.11 (Jun 2019): 141–183.https://doi.org/10.1086/703682William J. Collins, Marianne H. Wanamaker The Great Migration in Black and White: New Evidence on the Selection and Sorting of Southern Migrants, The Journal of Economic History 75, no.44 (Dec 2015): 947–992.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050715001527Kha Yen Prentice, Laszlo Konya, David Prentice Was the African American Great Migration Delayed by Outlawing Emigrant Agents?, SSRN Electronic Journal (Jan 2013).https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2296257Stewart E. Tolnay, E. M. Beck Black Flight: Lethal Violence and the Great Migration, 1900–1930, Social Science History 14, no.33 (Jan 2016): 347–370.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0145553200020836