Black Migrants Research Articles

Moving Pictures

Reviewed by: South Side Girls: Growing Up in The Great Migration by Marcia Chatelain LaShawn Harris SOUTH SIDE GIRLS: Growing Up in The Great Migration. By Marcia Chatelain. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2015. Historians studying the African American experience have written extensively on the complexities of the First and Second Great Migrations. Studies by Darlene Clark Hine, Joe Trotter, James Grossman, Luther Adams, and others demonstrate the various socioeconomic and political and personal factors drawing millions of black southerners to urban northern, southern, and midwestern communities. Much of what scholars already know about African Americans’ migratory journeys and adjustment to urban terrains is indeed well documented and primarily centered on the experiences of adults. Filling a much-needed historical gap within the subfields of African American, urban, and women and childhood studies, scholar Marcia Chatelain’s South Side Girls provides a nuanced interpretation of black migration. South Side Girls situates African American girls at the center of the Great Migration, unmasking their less familiar accounts of settlement to one of the nation’s most fascinating cities. Focusing on Chicago between 1910 and 1940, Chatelain maintains that the city’s shifting socioeconomic and political landscapes, as well as black city dwellers’ real and imagined anxieties about city living, impacted African American parents, community leaders, and social scientists’ perceptions of black girlhood. Constructing vulnerable images of urban black girls, “Chicago community leaders scrutinized black girls’ behavior, evaluated their choices, and assessed their possibilities as part of a larger conversation about what urbanization ultimately meant for black citizens” (2). For middle-class leaders black girlhood, often discussed within the context of racial uplift and respectable politics, symbolized both promise and problems. In turn, adults’ concerns about adolescent females shaped reform campaigns and programs aimed at employing, educating, and protecting girls. Chatelain makes several important interventions. She offers a thorough examination of Chicago’s less familiar African American political reformers. Profoundly committed to the socioeconomic advancement of black girls, social workers and activists—such as industrial school founder Amanda Smith, black sorority members, Black Camp Fire Advocates, and National Youth Administration Resident School for Girls employees—launched educational, vocational, and recreational programs. These reform movements situated black girls’ socioeconomic needs at the center of broader African American political agendas focusing on the construction of respectable families and communities. Reform-minded individuals asserted that a solid education, decent employment, recreational activities, and displays of outward respectability would transform less privileged and sophisticated girls into poised race women and mothers. Connecting girls to race motherhood, leaders grounded black girls’ usefulness to the African American community and the era’s materialist politics. At the same time, for urban leaders the “strategy of focusing on future race mothers denied girls of their child status, did not address the sexual stereotyping of girls in integrated spaces, and failed to create a concrete vision of black girlhood” (169). Another significant intervention that Chatelain makes lies in her discussion of how black girls, particularly those entering the urban labor force, interpreted and participated in Chicago’s burgeoning commercial and religious markets. Earning a living wage granted girls the opportunity to financially contribute to their households and become urban consumers. Chatelain writes that: “migration transformed [girls] into shoppers, and more importantly, choosers, and provided the experience of choice, pleasure, and rebellion” (169). Intrigued by city life and dismissing parents’ and reformers’ warnings about mass culture, girls adorned their bodies in fashionable attire, cosmetics, and hairstyles, [End Page 169] they purchased records and magazines, and they frequented popular nightclubs. Those not enthralled with popular culture became members of Chicago’s New Negro inspired storefront churches and non-Christian institutions, including the Moorish Science Temple. Their involvement in both commercial and religious marketplaces demonstrated urban girls’ capacaties to choose their own social and religious activities, and it illuminated how they intended to map out their lives as urban citizens. South Side Girls renders a fascinating interpretation of the African American migration. Marcia Chatelain has produced an engaging study that challenges historians to re-conceptualize ideas about urban migration, African American reform, and black girls’ thoughts about family and community, consumer culture, and religion. She offers provocative insights on the diverse ways African American...

Comparative Racialization, Immigration Law, and James Williams’s Life and Adventures

Wong’s essay investigates James Williams’s largely forgotten postbellum slave narrative, The Life and Adventures of James Williams, A Fugitive Slave (1873) to chart the various constellations of racial formations emerging from the politics and cultures of early black westward migration. Williams’s once-popular autobiography chronicling his experiences as a fugitive slave and California gold miner knits together stories from the Underground Railroad with firsthand observations on Chinese labor migration and Indian resettlement in the West. This essay reads Williams’s narrative alongside the key legal and political contexts that gave its narrative shape (and to which Williams addressed his text), including California Governor John Bigler’s anti-coolieism campaign (1852), the California Supreme Court ruling in People v. Hall (1854), and the widely publicized Modoc War (1872–73). It builds upon the analytics for articulating racial difference honed in US race and ethnic studies to help illuminate Williams’s literary efforts to formulate an early politics of comparative racialization.

"Not of the Nation": Canadian History Textbooks and the Impossibility of an African-Canadian Identity

The historical experience of blacks in Canada has continued to be one of partial remembrance and recognition set against a highly developed and dominant Anglo portrayal of Canadian history. This partiality has greatly limited the development of identity for Canadian blacks due to general non-recognition of them on the part of the white Canadian majority. Historiographically, the historical presence of blacks in Canada has been constructed as distinctly provisional. This study will illustrate the historical exclusion of black Canadians from the Canadian historical narrative by examining pre-Confederation Canadian black history as it appeared in thirty-two intermediate level (grades 7-10) textbooks authorized for use in Ontario between 1950 and 1985. These textbooks were evaluated based on their coverage of slavery in Canada, the Loyalist migration, the War of 1812, the Rebellions of 1837, and the Underground Railroad. These events are helpful in this assessment because they exist at the intersection of noteworthy events in Canadian history and significant moments in the history of black migration and black contribution to the nation. By uncovering these omissions, this study will also discuss the extent to which "black Canadian-ness" was constructed within these texts as a contradiction in terms. Informed by anti-racist pedagogy concerning the hegemonic effects of curricula on racial identity formation, it will focus on where such exclusions affected the process of identity formation of Canadian blacks and how it contributed to the alienation of black children's sense of belonging to the Canadian nation, curtailing the development of an identifiably black and Canadian identity for indigenous black.

Devil in the grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the dawn of a new America

Devil in the Grove, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, is a gripping true story of racism, murder, rape, and the law. It brings to light one of the most dramatic court cases in American history, and offers a rare and revealing portrait of Thurgood Marshall that the world has never seen before.As Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns did for the story of America's black migration, Gilbert King's Devil in the Grove does for this great untold story of American legal history, a dangerous and uncertain case from the days immediately before Brown v. Board of Education in which the young civil rights attorney Marshall risked his life to defend a boy slated for the electric chair--saving him, against all odds, from being sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit.

When the Levee Breaks: Black Migration and Economic Development in the American South

In the American South, postbellum economic development may have been restricted in part by white landowners' access to low-wage black labor. This paper examines the impact of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 on black out-migration and subsequent agricultural development. Flooded counties experienced an immediate and persistent out-migration of black population. Over time, landowners in flooded counties modernized agricultural production and increased its capital intensity relative to landowners in nearby similar non-flooded counties. Landowners resisted black out-migration, however, benefiting from the status quo system of labor-intensive agricultural production. (JEL J15, J43, N32, N52, N92, Q54, R23)

The organization of an ethnic economy: Urban black communities in the early twentieth century

Pioneering investigations of urban black communities have asserted that during the early twentieth century, the diverse activities of black entrepreneurs were not organized into a coherent ethnic economy. However, in the present study, multivariate analyses of Census data cast doubt on this assertion. They show that in large northern cities, measures of black participation in numerous entrepreneurial and professional occupations were positively and significantly associated with one another and were, in some cases, positively associated with measures of black participation in various public service, artistic, entertainment, and mass media occupations. There is evidence, then, for a revisionist view of black enterprise that suggests that important economic and social endeavors coexisted in beneficial relationships within the black communities of cities that were the principal destinations of black migrants from the South in the early twentieth century.

Out of Africa

Out of Africa Eric Arnesen (bio) Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott. Fly Away: The Great African American Cultural Migrations. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. xviii + 408 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $45.00. In early 2011, a New York Times reporter posed several crucial questions concerning the newest addition to the Smithsonian Institution, currently under construction in Washington D.C. "What story will it tell?" she asked of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. "Will its tale be primarily one of pain, focused on America's history of slavery and racial oppression, and memorializing black suffering? Or will it emphasize the uplifting part of the story, highlighting the richness of African-American culture, celebrating the bravery of civil rights heroes and documenting black 'firsts' in fields like music, art, science and sports?"1 Important questions indeed. But the challenges confronting curators—with their multiple audiences of Capital Hill legislators, donors, scholars, and the broader public—are not usually ones that weigh too heavily on the minds of academics, at least not explicitly. Because academics operate largely out of the limelight (save for brief reviews in specialized journals), few external constituencies weigh in to constrain their scope of operation. And yet, when it comes to race in America, the tension between competing impulses to highlight racial oppression, resistance, or examples of transcendence is often all-too-visible in scholarly analyses. Over the past century, these impulses have defined the literature on black migration in the United States. The first studies, carried out by government officials as the first Great Migration of the World War I era unfolded, were sober and unromantic attempts to make sense of the unprecedented movement of black people from the agricultural South to the industrial North. Focusing on black objections to Southern conditions and on new opportunities created by the reduction in European immigration, these writers showcased the mechanics of migration, the life conditions of migrants in their new homes, and black motivations for moving; they were, after all, trying to explain to white America just why the migration was happening.2 Decades later, in the 1960s and 1970s, migration figured prominently in the "making of a ghetto" genre which, while acknowledging the achievements and institution-building of black [End Page 270] professionals, stressed persistent discrimination in housing and employment, high disease and death rates, social disorganization, and human suffering. At the conclusion of his study of Harlem, Gilbert Osofsky invoked Alain Locke's depressing reminder that the ghetto, by the 1930s, was a "nasty, sordid corner into which black folk are herded."3 From the 1980s onward, the impact of the new social history was evident in migration studies. Migrants—sharecroppers, domestic servants, and industrial workers, among others—came into much clearer focus, their aspirations no longer inaudible, their activities no longer invisible, their politics no longer reduced simply to following black elites' guidance.4 Occasionally a celebratory quality marked the new scholarship: black migrants didn't just get herded into nasty, sordid corners, the ubiquity of discrimination and oppression notwithstanding. Rather, they built effective institutions informed by the rich cultural traditions carried with them from the South and resisted oppression in ways large (politics) or small (infrapolitics).5 Ultimately, they forged lives of their own and established vibrant and sustaining communities. In their geographically sweeping and thematically focused study, Fly Away: The Great African American Cultural Migrations, Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott continue this tradition. There is, by way of backdrop, attention to oppression. The authors certainly make clear the brutalities of slavery and the incomplete freedom of the post-Civil War years. They describe the conditions of life that prompted black migration and resulted in disappointment in their new homes—poverty and the denial of economic mobility for sharecroppers, persistent employment and housing discrimination, lynching, police brutality, and other forms of racial violence. At the same time, they demonstrate that, no matter what white America threw at them, the descendants of slaves continued to strive, drew on a collective heritage, and forged new cultural, religious, and political institutions. They transformed not only the black communities they entered; they changed the nation as well. Unlike many...

‘Foreign Bodies’: George Lamming's The Emigrants

By the time Sheila Patterson had completed and published Dark Strangers, her 1963 report on West Indians in London, Notting Hill had become famous for riots rather than rom-coms. A considerable change in perceptions had occurred in the ten years separating the newspaper headlines of ‘Welcome Home’ that greeted the SS Empire Windrush in 19482 and the violence of 1958, when ‘race’ riots spread across British cities. This rapid descent from welcome to violent conflict is perhaps all the more marked since the reference to ‘home’ here was quite literal. West Indian islanders shared a common citizenship with the British population and enjoyed a right of residence. However, as John McLeod points out, such emigrants ‘would be subjected to a series of attitudes which frequently objectified and demonized them, often in terms of race, while questioning their rights of citizenship and tenure’.3 Under such circumstances, ‘home’ for black migrants was always elsewhere: the sons of Empire had evolved quickly into an unwanted, foreign intrusion. For Patterson, this foreignness is registered by the British at the level of appearance, but two factors would seem to mitigate against this. Firstly, while black seamen and slaves did represent a foreign element in British ports and major cities, they had been doing so as a consistent presence since the seventeenth century. They may not have been a common sight, but they were not entirely strange. Secondly, the appearance of black migrants, their outward image, could not have altered in the period

The African American struggle for secondary schooling, 1940-1980: closing the graduation gap

This is the first comprehensive account of African American secondary education in the postwar era. Drawing on quantitative datasets, as well as oral history, this compelling narrative examines how African Americans narrowed the racial gap in high school completion. The authors explore regional variations in high school attendance across the United States and how intraracial factors affected attendance within racial groups. They also examine the larger social historical context, such as the national high school revolution, the civil rights movement, campaigns to expand schooling and urging youth to stay in school, and Black migration northward. Closing chapters focus on desegregation and the urban crisis of the 1960s and 1970s that accelerated White flight and funding problems for urban school systems. The conclusion summarizes these developments and briefly looks at the period since 1980, when secondary attainment levels stopped advancing for Blacks and Whites alike. Book Highlights: A comprehensive history, drawing on statistical analysis, archival research, and interviews with African Americans who attended school in the 1940s and 1950s. Lessons from the past, showing how parents and local communities played the most direct and dynamic role in the fight for access to education. Today's major challenges, including the growth of inner-city poverty and changing family structures.

Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (review)

Reviewed by: Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World Kennetta Hammond Perry Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World. By Alexander X. Byrd. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. 408 pp. $49.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). The transatlantic migrations between the Bight of Biafra and Jamaica that resulted in the enslavement of tens of thousands of African men and women, and those that brought black settlers to Sierra Leone in the late eighteenth century, do not necessarily represent obvious sites of comparison. However, by coupling the violent, catastrophic, and ultimately transformative nature of these two migration streams, Alexander Byrd offers a fresh perspective on the ways in which black bodies in motion defined the shifting parameters of slavery and freedom in the British Atlantic world. The first half of Byrd's story details the experiences of captives moving from West Africa who endured what he describes as a long middle passage, from the interior to the coast, into the bowels of slave ships, before confronting a seasoning process in Jamaica that aimed to ready black migrants for bondage in the local sugar-producing plantation economy. The final chapters of the book are devoted to the sojourns of black voyagers moving to West Africa seeking to enhance the conditions of their liberty. Byrd rightly acknowledges the stark differences between these two movements, particularly [End Page 190] as it relates to the status of the migrants and the sheer magnitude of people involved. However, he is careful to note that the conditions of migration that took black settlers to Sierra Leone were indeed by-products of those that brought enslaved West Africans to Jamaica. Most importantly, his study demonstrates how these overlapping cycles of movement collectively allowed black migrants to engender a British Atlantic world in which they forged identifications and communities that challenged the institution of slavery and the denial of black freedom that buttressed its existence. Central to Byrd's analysis is how the process of migration—marked by the circumstances surrounding departure, movement, arrival, and settlement—functioned as the crucible through which black migrants cultivated relationships with one another and responses to the impositions of white power. In one of his most compelling arguments, Byrd contends that the Igbo identifications in the Americas were not transplants of something that would have existed in any coherent form in the Biafran interior. Rather, he insists that this diasporan ethnicity was forged through "affinities of language, cosmology, politics and philosophy" that were tested by "the centripetal exigencies of violence and suffering that defined the ordeals of enslaved men and women from the Biafran interior" (p. 32). Treading the generative path of Saidiya Hartman's Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (1997), which highlights the ways in which the terror, privation, and dislocations of slavery shaped acts of self-making and the formation of ethnic identifications, Byrd takes the reader on the inhumane journey from the Biafran interior to the littoral towns of Bonny, Elem, and Old Calabar and spends an entire chapter outlining the terms of the harrowing imprisonment that enslaved Africans endured aboard slave ships. There, in the quotidian routines of violence, death, disease, confinement, scarcity, and the power of whites to impose order and discipline on black bodies, Byrd finds that Igbo identifications crystallized in such a way that articulated the melancholia, suffering, and exile that was part and parcel of the process of enslavement. In making this argument, Byrd rethinks the terms of long-standing historiographical debates about the extent to which elements of local so-called African cultures survived the middle passage. Subsequently, his interpretation challenges historians to consider the role of migration—and in the case of the slave trade, its attendant dislocating affects and effects—in shaping the cultural transformations that defined what it meant to become African in the Americas. Once in Jamaica, Byrd finds black migrants confronting a seasoning process marked by forms of brutality and degradation akin to those [End Page 191] experienced during the middle passage. Despite offering only a cursory nod to the gendered terms of violence and exploitation that would have certainly...

A Generation at War: The Civil War Era in a Northern Community (review)

Reviewed by: A Generation at War: The Civil War Era in a Northern Community Patricia Richard (bio) A Generation at War: The Civil War Era in a Northern Community. By Nicole Etcheson. (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2011. Pp. x, 371. $39.95 cloth) The book under review considers the impact of the Civil War on the home front and in particular on Putnam County, Indiana. Examining the war from a communal perspective has deep roots in Civil War scholarship and one of the most famous of these studies was done by Edward L. Ayers, In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859–1863 (2003). Ayers compared two counties: one in Pennsylvania and one in Virginia. Mathew Gallman and Phillip Paludan provided more general studies of the northern home front in The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front (1994) and “A People’s Contest”: The Union and the Civil War, 1861–1865 (1996), respectively. Nicole Etcheson continues a home-front focus with a microhistory of Putnam County in which she considers class, gender, and race as influenced by the national events before, during, and after the war. A Generation at War is a multifaceted study that builds on Civil War political and social history by expanding the examination to include [End Page 211] the prewar and postwar periods to gain, as she puts it, “a better sense of the changes the war brought” to this rural Indiana county and “contrast the urban focus of previous Northern home-front studies” (p.12). Divided into three logical parts consisting of prewar (beginning in 1850), the war, and postwar (beyond 1877), she then divides each section into men’s sphere and politics, women’s sphere and their dependence on men, and the issue of race in Putnam County. She ties each section together by following the lives of local citizens throughout this period. She argues that all Americans were influenced by the issue of slavery and race whether they were intimately involved in or opposed to abolition or not. Basing her conclusions on an impressive array of town, county, state, and national records, newspapers, diaries, correspondence, and memoirs, she provides a complex look at Putnam County and how it fits into this tumultuous period. It is the scope of this study that gives it weight. By examining both prewar and postwar history, Etcheson is able to show the lasting impact of the conflict. Among many of her important points, she reminds us that northern states had complex ideas about race and war goals. Antebellum Indiana, for instance, had pervasive racism represented in antiblack laws that forbade the migration of blacks into the state and provided few civil protections for black residents. In spite of the small black community of Putnam though, after the war prominent African American residents encouraged North Carolina blacks to migrate to Indiana. The partisan politics that split over race issues before the war and resorted to violence continued after the war by attacking these newcomers who challenged white supremacy. Likewise, she cleverly uses pension benefits to consider gender and race. While pensions bolstered veterans as the breadwinners of their families, in an ironic twist they also gave soldiers’ widows an independence that they had never enjoyed while their husbands were alive. Furthermore, pensions allowed black veterans to enjoy the benefits and thus were a “radical break with white supremacy” (p. 212). [End Page 212] Overall, this work is well suited to undergraduate study. It could be used to discuss the impact of national political issues on local politics, Indiana history as part and parcel of the war effort, gender roles and race relations, the issues of divided citizenry and the Copperheads, and more. Etcheson’s scope of the 1850s to the 1880s provides scholars with a broad look at the impact of the war that is rarely seen on such an intimate level. This work has much to offer both student and Civil War scholar. Patricia Richard Patricia Richard is associate professor of history at Metropolitan State College of Denver in Denver, Colorado, and author of Busy Hands: Images of the Family in the Northern Civil War Effort (2003). Copyright © 2012 Kentucky...

Great Migrations, Great Stories, Great History?

Great Migrations, Great Stories, Great History? James N. Gregory (bio) Isabel Wilkerson . The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration. New York: Random House, 2010. x + 622 pp. Notes and index. $30.00. There have been many great migrations in American history, not to mention global history. But for the last half century the term connects most readily to the twentieth-century relocation of African Americans from the farms of the South to the cities of the North and West. In the six decades following the outbreak of World War I, some six million black Southerners left that region, dramatically altering the nation's racial landscape. By the mid-1970s, nearly half of all African Americans lived outside the South. But the Great Migration was great less because of numbers than because of impact. The black Southerners who moved north and west transformed cities, rearranged political and racial systems, and, as a result, rebalanced the nation's regions, easing some of the distinctions between them. Many historians have tackled this great subject, along with legions of demographers, sociologists, and economists. Not surprisingly, journalists have also taken up the topic. In 1991 Nicholas Lemann produced the best-known of these books, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America.1 Now a second journalist, Isabel Wilkerson, has answered with The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, putting forth a different perspective. Lehmann, concerned about the urban crisis of the 1980s, concluded that the Great Migration was a disappointment; Wilkerson sees it as a triumph of hope and new beginnings. Journalists have different aims and methods than academic historians. They look for compelling stories and vivid personalities, preferring to build narratives around biographical subjects. That can be a challenge when the topic involves the experiences of multitudes. They also prefer to do their research through personal interviews rather than using materials, even oral histories, gathered by others. That too can be a challenge unless the history is quite recent. Isabel Wilkerson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for journalism while with the New York Times, has written a gorgeous book that demonstrates the art of great writing and great storytelling. It is impossible not to admire the literary qualities [End Page 96] of this near-best seller that has earned glowing reviews in newspaper after newspaper. As history, I have some reservations, mostly because of limitations that derive from the journalistic-historical method. Years of research went into the book, including an extensive bibliography of works by historians and demographers along with an enormous number of personal interviews. Wilkerson talked with nearly 1,200 individuals before deciding to base her book on three people whose life stories give the book not just its spine but most of its bulk. This means that she focuses tightly on the personal dimensions of relocation, not on the great migration's impact on communities, politics, or culture. The three individuals she has chosen represent some of the important class, gender, and geographic variations among migrants. Ida Mae Brandon grew up poor in rural Mississippi, married George Gladney at age sixteen and moved into a tiny sharecropper's cabin. For seven years, she and her husband worked in the cotton fields. She was pregnant with her third child when the family moved to Chicago in 1937, part of a Deep South to Upper Midwest stream of migrants. George Starling and his unhappy wife Inez began in Lake County, Florida, "a place of cocksure southern sheriffs, overworked pickers, root doctors, pool hustlers, bootleggers, jackleg preachers, barely a soul you could trust, and a color line as hard as Mississippi's" (p. 48). He graduated from high school, briefly attended college, and then joined his father and neighbors working in the orange groves. In 1944 he tried to organize a union and soon had to flee for his life, catching a train to New York, becoming part of the northbound exodus out of the southern Atlantic region. The son of school teachers, Robert Pershing Foster grew up in Monroe, Louisiana, attended Morehouse College in Atlanta and medical school in Nashville, after which he spent four...

“Call to Home?” Race, Region, and Migration to the U.S. South, 1970–20001

This research examines recent migration patterns of native‐born blacks and whites to the U.S. South. Our primary research questions concern race and regional migration dynamics, and whether new insights into such can be gleaned by comparing migrants to the South with persons moving within the non‐South. Using samples of 1970–2000 census data, we focus on race differences in the tendency to choose the South as a migration destination, and whether whites and blacks differ in key selection mechanisms shaping movement to different regional destinations. We observe increasing rates of black (compared to white) migration to the South. Additionally, patterns of selectivity within this growing African‐American migration stream are especially dramatic when southern migrants are compared to persons moving within the non‐South. Our analyses also show that black migrants are targeting particular parts of the South (e.g., states where blacks are a larger share of the population), suggesting that future research should disaggregate the “Census South” region to provide a more comprehensive picture of contemporary interregional migration in the United States.

PAUL T. MILLERThe Postwar Struggle for Civil Rights: African Americans in San Francisco, 1945-1975. (Studies in African American History and Culture.) New York: Routledge. 2010. Pp. xvi, 167. $95.00

The study of African American urban communities following World War II remains one of the most exciting fields in American history. Indeed, many excellent monographs have appeared in the past two decades. Thomas Sugrue's magisterial work, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (2008), challenged scholars to reconsider the southern framework that they have adopted in assessing the civil rights movement. Few historians have paid careful attention, however, to a parallel civil rights movement in the western states and territories. Paul T. Miller's brief book reveals that black westerners waged a civil rights struggle every bit as vigorous as that of their northern counterparts. Although the book is largely a work of synthesis, Miller has effectively mined local newspapers, particularly the San Francisco Sun‐Reporter and the San Francisco Chronicle, in his effort to reconstruct the black community's attempt to gain full equality. Like that of many West Coast cities, San Francisco's African American population exploded during the World War II era as southern migrants poured into the bay cities in search of work in wartime defense industries. The bay area shipyards proved especially attractive to African Americans because they paid high wages and actively recruited black southern migrants. Yet black wartime workers also brought a new militancy and desire to end racial discrimination in wartime industries. Thus Joseph James, a black migrant and president of the San Francisco branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), successfully organized black shipyard workers to fight their relegation to a segregated auxiliary union in a case that reached the California Supreme Court.

A Brief Ascendency: American Labor After 1945

In 1945, American labor unions optimistically expected considerable growth in the coming decades. The New Deal policies continued their influence, and organized labor achieved its highest density rating (35 percent) ever recorded in the United States. By the mid-1950s, however, that figure began to decline, slowly at first and then, after 1970, swiftly. At the close of 2011, it had fallen to 11.8 percent. The cause of this reduction was not simply employer opposition, although that did occur. Rather, the American working class itself underwent a political and sociological sea change, propelled by southern migration of whites and blacks into the industrial North, sharp changes in political attitudes during and after the 1960s, and the economic transformation of the American and global economy that began in the 1970s. Some of these changes were beyond the scope of organized labor’s ability to alter; regarding others, labor proved to be slow, even hesitant, in its response. One consequence was the resurgence of a sharply conservative political vision among American working people that had a powerful impact on national elections and the policy choices followed.

“Same as a Nigger on an Excursion”: Memphis, Black Migration, and White Flight in Sanctuary

“Same as a Nigger on an Excursion”: Memphis, Black Migration, and White Flight in Sanctuary

The Peculiar Immobility: Regional Affinity and the Postbellum Black Migrant

Why did newly freed slaves and their descendants wait a half a century before migrating in large numbers to the superior economic opportunities in the North? Census lifetime migration data on both movers and stayers are examined intertemporally for both whites and blacks. Regression analysis reveals that before 1920 blacks had a very strong affinity for the Southern way of life.

The Suppression Hypothesis Reconsidered: Competition Between Blacks and White Immigrants in the Retail Trade in Large Northern Cities, 1910-1930

Introduction The development of entrepreneurship in retail trade in large northern cities during early 20th century was viewed by many leaders as essential to economic progress of blacks as group. If retail entrepreneurs could monopolize local trade in communities that were created in these cities by first wave of Black Migration to North (circa 1915-1930), then, it was believed, number of benefits would follow: These entrepreneurs would expand their businesses, hire additional employees, and, over long run, sustain network of black-owned wholesaling and manufacturing enterprises that could provide foundation for economy, that is, a cooperative arrangement of industries and services within Negro group such that group tends to be closed economic circle largely independent of surrounding white world (Du Bois 1907: 179, quoted in Waldinger and Aldrich 1990: 59). The basis of this belief was doctrine of double-duty dollar, which was popularized by church and press in urban North in 1920s and 1930s. This doctrine, which was evidently based on concept of multiplier effect in economic theory (Pearce 1986: 288), argued that money spent in retail stores owned by blacks would circulate within community and, in so doing, generate greater employment and incomes for blacks, locally and nationally (Drake and Cayton 1962: 430-431; see also Light 1972: 119, citing Harris 1936; Myrdal 1944). Accordingly, in wake of Great Migration, support for entrepreneurship in retail trade was vigorously encouraged in northern cities by churches, newspapers, and voluntary organizations, such as lodges and fraternal orders. This support often took form of buy black campaigns. These campaigns originated in urban North (Frazier 1957: 166) and emphasized the duty of to trade with Negroes and promised to blacks ultimate 'racial' salvation through their loyal patronage of black-owned retail stores (Drake and Cayton 1962: 430; see also Ofari 1970: 52). Sometimes support for entrepreneurship took form of attempts to promote cooperative ventures among those entrepreneurs who sought to become retail merchants. These attempts were motivated by belief that in retail trade would be achieved through efficiencies gained by pooling of resources, coordination of business practices, such as advertising, and standardization of goods and equipment. The Colored Merchants Association, founded in New York City by Albon Holsey in 1929 under auspices of late Booker T. Washington's National Negro Business League, was an example of such collective venture (Light 1972: 125, citing Harris 1936). In spite of these efforts, though, entrepreneurs struggled to establish themselves in retail trade in urban North. They faced numerous obstacles, including racial bias in lending and in extension of credit, exclusion from main commercial districts, restricted access to business training, and denial of both property rights and police protection (Boyd 2001: 242, citing Bates 1973; Butler 1991; Harmon 1929; Harris 1936; Higgs 1977; Myrdal 1944). Furthermore, by some accounts, they were also hampered by limited opportunities to gain experience in buying and selling (Frazier 1949: 411), dearth of entrepreneurial success symbols (Foley 1966: 572), and absence of socio-cultural heritage that included rotating credit associations that could generate financial capital for business startups (Light 1972: 22). As consequence of these and other difficulties, blacks were greatly underrepresented in retail trade. For example, in 60 large northern cities in 1930, number of retail merchants was, on average, 81 percent less than what would be expected on basis of representation of blacks in these cities' workforces (Boyd 2003a: 451). …

Skin deep

This article tracks the history of ska in Britain in terms of its relationship with the mainstream white population. The article tracks a brief history from The Equals, through the impact of reggae during the punk era, to the use of ska by the Two Tone, and similar, groups. One of the article’s most important concerns is with the relationship between the reception of ska and the ways that issues related to race were played out in Britain. The article argues that, while Jerry Dammers, the instigator of The Specials and founder of the Two Tone ska/punk sound, claimed that the reworking of ska by punk-influenced groups comprised of both black and white members was an assertion of racial equality, in reality the resurrection of ska marked a retrograde step full of nostalgia for an earlier time when black migrants were clearly positioned as subordinate to the white, British population.

Black Labor Migration in Caribbean Guatemala, 1882-1923 - by Opie, Frederick D.

Black Labor Migration in Caribbean Guatemala, 1882-1923 - by Opie, Frederick D.