Black Migrants Research Articles

“Goodbye God, I’m Going to Texas”: The Migration of Louisiana Creoles of Colour and the Preservation of Black Catholic and Creole Traditions in Southeast Texas

Abstract: This article examines the migration of French-speaking blacks and Creoles of Colour from Southern Louisiana to Texas during the first half of the twentieth century. It centers on the importance of Catholic churches as cultural centers for the preservation of Creole culture beyond Louisiana’s borders and shows how religious orders attempted to preserve the faith of migrant black Catholics by insulating them from many aspects of racial inequality and segregation in its religious environment. The Church helped Creole communities maintain their ethnic and cultural ties to Louisiana. However, the resulting cultural exclusivity of a Catholic and Creole identity alienated the broader African American community.

Documenting the Social and Historical Margins in the Films of Philip Donnellan

This article examines the career of Philip Donnellan, an innovative BBC documentarist whose work frequently tested the boundaries of what was aesthetically and politically permissible in television documentary. For Donnellan, working-class culture was inadequately registered by the BBC, which was not only limited in its coverage but in the way it portrayed and communicated with its audience. Donnellan sought out working people and under-represented social groups: the Irish, travellers and Black migrants for instance. He created a space within his films that would allow them to speak for themselves without any overt intercession from the authorial tones and spurious objectivity of the filmmaker or the BBC. More than a document of the contemporary condition of the marginalized however, Donnellan’s films persistently convey a sense of the weight of history, exploring memory and archival evidence in order to pose difficult questions about the construction of history. In their aim to rescue the experiences of social groups from what E. P. Thompson called “the enormous condescension of posterity”, films such as Passage West (1975), The Pilgrimage of Ti-Jean (1978) and Gone for a Soldier (1980) can be compared with the Thompsonian “history from below.”

Race and Rights: Fighting Slavery and Prejudice in the Old Northwest, 1830–1870 by Dana Elizabeth Weiner (review)

Race and Rights: Fighting Slavery and Prejudice in Old Northwest, 1830-1870. By Dana Elizabeth Weiner. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013. Pp. 327. Cloth, $38.00.)Reviewed by Kyle G. VolkHistorian Dana Weiner's Race and Rights is a welcome addition to growing body of literature examining abolitionists who battled slavery and racial prejudice in antebellum Midwest. Focusing on struggles of activists-female and male, black and white-in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois, Weiner argues that these four states constituted the central battleground over race and rights in antebellum America (3). This key claim about significance of Old Northwest over other regions is difficult to gauge, especially given absence of substantial comparative analysis. Nonetheless, Weiner illustrates that this region was an important hotbed of controversy over slavery, race, and freedom of expression. This well-researched study will interest scholars of abolitionism and civil liberties and should be read alongside recent work of Stephen Middleton, H. Robert Baker, and Stacey Robertson, among others.1Weiner's nine chapters are arranged both thematically and chronologically, and within each chapter Weiner uses repeated section breaks to bring order to many controversies occurring in region over space and time. A preliminary chapter sets stage for ascension of abolitionist activism in 1830s by detailing Old Northwest's racial, political, religious, and reform landscape. The second chapter focuses on early battles over fugitive slave laws and region's notorious Black Laws, which restricted black migration into these states and hampered black residents by denying them a range of rights that were enjoyed by whites. From continued black migration and black conventions to court action, petitions, and use of rights arguments, Weiner describes ways that activists contested these hostile measures. In final chapter, Weiner returns to these issues as they persisted in era of sectional crisis, Civil War, and Reconstruction. In both chapters, she persuasively makes case that resistance to Black Laws constituted a vital aspect of Midwestern abolitionism and that these efforts at legal reform advanced new egalitarian conceptions of rights. Especially in light of repeated failures of activists to change public policy and only limited signs of local progress (232) that appeared by post-Civil War period, public reception and lasting impact of these rights claims, particularly outside of activist circles, is less clear.The middle four chapters explore perils of publicly advocating abolitionism and racial equality in Old Northwest. At least since Russel Nye's classic Fettered Freedom: Civil Liberties and Slavery Controversy, 1830-1860, abolitionism's role in provoking controversies over civil liberties has been well known.2 Weiner's study, however, takes readers away from gag rules in Washington, DC, to show how freedoms of speech, assembly, and press were contested on ground in combustible Old Northwest. In describing vitality of public meetings, itinerant lecturers, and press to Midwestern abolitionists' grassroots crusade against slavery and racial prejudice, Weiner provides new readings of such well-known events as murder of abolitionist printer Elijah Lovejoy in 1837. …

Way Up North in Louisville: African American Migration in the Urban South, 1930-1970 by Luther Adams (review)

Reviewed by: Way Up North in Louisville: African American Migration in the Urban South, 1930-1970 by Luther Adams Gerald L. Smith (bio) Way Up North in Louisville: African American Migration in the Urban South, 1930-1970. By Luther Adams. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Pp. 288. $52.50 cloth; $52.50 ebook) This book examines African American movement within the South during the Second Great Migration. It covers a significant amount of historical ground: migration, civil rights, southern identity, busing, urban renewal, and open-housing demonstrations. The volume highlights the organizations, personalities, issues, and events which shaped the city of Louisville during the modern civil rights era. In doing so, Adams’s work fits nicely with George C. Wright’s study, Life Behind a Veil: Blacks in Louisville, Kentucky, 1865-1930 (1985). Adams offers a compelling narrative on the circumstances which brought southern African Americans to Louisville and the reasons they chose to make the city their home. He notes its proximity to the North, the growing number of defense-industry plants during World War II, and the fact that Kentucky African Americans could vote in political elections. Black migrants to Louisville found that the city connected them to the South. It was part of their southern identity which was built around family, culture, and place. Instead of leaving the South because it was a region known for segregation, discrimination, and racial violence, migrants chose to work and live in the South. They came to Louisville determined to fight for racial equality. From their perspective, Louisville was the South; Louisville was home. One of the migrants who came to Louisville was Lyman T. Johnson who migrated from Columbia, Tennessee, in 1930. Johnson was a schoolteacher and a civil rights activist. He divided Kentucky “into two parts, Louisville and the rest of the state. Louisville is oriented to [End Page 591] the North, culturally and commercially. The rest of Kentucky looks to the South” (p. 39). On the surface, Louisville appeared to be more progressive and racially tolerant. Public transportation was not legally segregated; African Americans served on the police force, and school desegregation underwent a peaceful transition in the 1950s. Segregation in housing and public accommodations existed in the city, but interracial coalitions which included the Urban League, YWCA, YMCA, and the Louisville Council of Churches, among others, sought to erase these forms of discrimination. Yet, as Adams’s book deftly notes, white Louisvillians were not willing to surrender power and authority to a rising African American population easily. As the civil rights movement gained momentum on the national front, African Americans in Louisville engaged in various strategies to expand their rights. There were demonstrations at Taylor’s Drugstore, Ben Snyder’s Department Store, and Stewart’s Department Store. The participation of African American high school students was critical to the local movement. In February 1961, a “Nothing New for Easter” boycott placed even greater pressure on downtown businesses to treat African Americans equal to whites. At the forefront of the demonstrations were members of the NAACP and the Congress of Racial Equality. Following three years of demonstrations, the city passed the first public-accommodations ordinance in the state in May 1963. While Adams’s book does a nice job exposing the differences between civil rights leaders and the strategies they employed to end segregation, his most interesting discussion revolves around the commitment of black migrants to eradicating discrimination in the city. African American migrants augmented the civil rights leadership in the city. They came to the city ready to build upon networks, work with coalitions and civil rights groups, and exercise black political power to push for racial change. Because whites controlled the process and timing of urban renewal, Africans Americans found themselves facing a never-ending challenge. The historic black business district on Walnut Street was [End Page 592] abolished. The fight for open housing and school desegregation in Louisville revealed quite explicitly the level of resistance whites would exercise to prevent attempts to further desegregate the city. And, while an open-housing ordinance and state law was passed, these measures did not alter the urban landscape to the degree blacks had hoped for...

Black Europe? Some Views from Afro-Surinamese Migrants in the Netherlands

Today, when comes to racism and ethnicity-based discriminations, the attention of European media and policymakers is predominantly on discriminations against Muslims, Roma and other minorities. Instead, the preoccupation of people who consider they are oppressed because of their skin colour generally remains without a response. This paper thus contributes to the discussion around the specificities of discrimination based on people’s skin colour, and what this means for society in general and, especially, for the people who experience it in person. These are also the concerns of the scholars who have elaborated the notion of a ‘Black Europe’ that I am choosing as reference framework with the aim of drawing attention to the question of blackness and to the way it affects the experience of migration to Europe. In order to do this, I will refer to the subjective experience of a group of women who migrated from Suriname to the Netherlands during the 60s and 70s. As I will show, this group shares the common self-identifications of Blacks and at the same time of postcolonial migrants – as was the case for many of those who migrated to Europe from former colonies. Moreover, these women have in common the fact that they found employment in the domestic work sector in the city of Rotterdam. Their memories are a small and yet significant example of the negotiations that Black migrants in Europe have made in order to resist the race-based discriminatory attitudes they encountered after their arrival.

African American Women's Sexuality

I would like to thank Joanne Meyerowitz for organizing and inviting me to participate in this roundtable and for giving me the opportunity to refl ect briefl y on the importance of John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s seminal work, Intimate Matters. Few works have infl uenced the development of a fi eld both in laying the groundwork for future scholarship and in shaping pedagogical practice as powerfully as Intimate Matters has done in the fi eld of the history of sexuality in the United States. It is hard to believe it has been twentyfi ve years since its initial publication— like many others I continue to use it in my history of sexuality courses and to turn to it as a touchstone in my ongoing eff orts to grapple with the sweep of America’s sexual past and present and the place of black sexuality and, in particular, the sexual lives of African American women within that history. I reached for this book early and oft en in my own work on black women’s sex work in turnofthecentury Chicago. Th e interpretive framework John and Estelle off er in Intimate Matters provided a backdrop against which the crucial role of black women’s sexual labor and the interracial and intraracial politics surrounding it became visible for me. It helped me to understand the central connection between black migration and sexual modernization in the early twentieth century. And it provided a lens through which to see and further probe the historical criminalization of black sexuality and the role that the regulation of black bodies played in defi ning citizenship in earlytwentiethcentury cities. Th e analytical frameworks that John and Estelle developed in Intimate Matters— the mapping of the transformation in the meaning of sexuality from its primary association with reproduction and the family to an association with individual sexual pleasure, the development of the concepts of civilized morality and sexual liberalism, and their steady focus on the ways that sexuality has simultaneously refl ected and served to maintain systems of class, gender, and racial oppressions within the United States— have provided the scaf-

Africa in Florida: Five Hundred Years of African Presence in the Sunshine State ed. by Amanda B. Carlson and Robin Poynor (review)

AFRICA IN FLORIDA: Five Hundred Years of African Presence in the Sunshine State. Edited by Amanda B. Carlson and Robin Poynor. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 2014.Africa in Florida offers a fresh perspective on U.S. History, American Cultural Studies and scholarship about the African Diaspora. Originally based on a student-curated exhibit at the University of South Florida (2001), the work evolved in response to the erasure of the African and Native American presence in the 2013 celebration of 500 years of Spanish heritage to honor Ponce de Leon's landing on the Florida coast. The editors of this volume are Africanist art historians who emphasize spatial knowledge and visual images as the lens through which to grapple with established categories of knowledge that tend to separate European, African, and Native American experience while challenging the standard narrative that reduces the story of Africans in Florida to one of slavery in the deep south. Accordingly, the contributors offer a way of looking at Florida that goes beyond the nineteenth-century notion of Florida as untouched nature and the twentieth-century notion of Florida as a fantasy world. The editors contend that this approach allows for a more nuanced understanding of how and why individuals in Florida situate themselves in relation to Africa (as an idea or as place) and the importance of the African influence on personal, local, state, and national histories.A comprehensive volume that spans from African ethnicities in the colonial era to neo-Yoruba iconography in Florida today, the work is divided into five sections. Part I introduces Africa in Florida by way of geography, an overview of historical themes, and the work of visual artists Adrian Castro and Gordon Bleach who explore what it means to cross the Atlantic and re-imagine home as Africans in Diaspora. Part II, Seeking Freedom in and out of Florida: Slaves and Maroons, deals with the problem of slavery and freedom from various perspectives including the relationship between Florida's maroon communities and Seminole Indians and the migration of free blacks to Veracruz. One essay deals with the porous nature of the Florida-Georgia frontier for fugitive slaves seeking refuge as well as for smugglers and slave catchers engaged in the illegal slave trade. Part III examines the formation of new identities by considering Africanisms in African American cemeteries, cultural survivals in anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston's writings on black life, and the legacy of Mother Laura Adorkor Kofi, a female Garveyite. …

"We didn't have any other place to live": Residential Patterns in Segregated Arlington County, Virginia

Utilizando teorías establecidas sobre la selección de vecindarios como marco teórico, así como métodos cualitativos y cuantitativos y fuentes de datos mixtos, el presente trabajo documenta un estudio que explora los patrones residenciales de los afroamericanos viviendo en Arlington, Virginia, durante la segregación (1900-1970). Una ciudad del sur, colindante con Washington, DC, Arlington ha sido hogar de afroamericanos desde que los esclavos trabajaron en un inicio las plantaciones de tabaco en la década de 1600. Durante el período en que los vecindarios negros de las ciudades del norte fueron inundados por sureños, migrantes negros durante la Gran Migración, las granjas y asentamientos de Arlington, muchos de ellos integrados, fueron inundados de manera similar por trabajadores federales blancos del otro lado del río Potomac. Tanto los desarrolladores, el Condado y el gobierno federal jugaron un papel en la aceleración de la transición de Arlington de una colección de granjas a un populoso suburbio blanco con tres vecindarios negros altamente segregados. El estudio presenta un nuevo procedimiento para la agregación de datos del censo para su uso con índices de segregación.

Sold It to the Blues-Devil: The Great Migration, Lost Generations, and the Perils of the Urban Dance Hall

Although the devil of the blues tradition has generally been interpreted as a Deep South phenomenon—an African-sourced crossroads spirit, a “devil's music” condemned by black evangelicalism—the urban north, too, was a key location in which the meaning of the blues-devil was arbitrated. This essay explores the way in which the very first devil-blues recording, Clara Smith's “Done Sold My Soul to the Devil” in 1924, along with other recordings by Sippie Wallace and Ma Rainey, evoke the promises and perils of urban modernity in a context dominated by public anxiety about the sexuality of black female migrants and the broader youth rebellion being engaged in by the so-called Lost Generation.

Black Caribbean Labor Radicalism in Panama, 1914-1921

While the role of Caribbean immigrants in the “New Negro” movement in the United States is now well established, the concurrent militancy of black Caribbean workers in Panama is much less understood. The present article examines the rise and fall of Afro-Antillano militancy in both the U.S.-controlled Canal Zone and the Republic of Panama from 1914–1921. The presence of black people in the Panamanian isthmus went back centuries; West Indian migrants were especially discriminated against because they were English-speaking and Protestant. The Canal Zone authorities instituted Jim Crow style segregation (under the “Gold” and “Silver” system) to divide the work force, leaving black Caribbean workers paid less, discriminated against, and oppressed. In the face of this, these workers were not so passive or pro-British as they are often depicted. Instead, there was an outpouring of labor militancy in this period, including two massive strikes. However, the defeat of these strikes undercut the development of a united-working-class movement in Panama, caused many black Caribbean migrants to leave Panama, and made many of those remaining wary of labor radicalism. The Universal Negro Improvement Association of Marcus Garvey—the most prominent black Caribbean organization in Panama at the time—had originally sympathized with the labor militancy, but in the wake of working-class defeats, became increasingly anti-labor.

Routing Black Migration to the Urban US South: Social Class and Sources of Social Capital in the Destination Selection Process

This article examines sources of migrant social capital (i.e. social networks and institutional assistance) that facilitated destination selection among African American migrants to a US southern metropolitan area—Charlotte, North Carolina. Charlotte is an emerging magnet city in the net in-migration of blacks to the US South since the 1970s. While research on black migration to the South suggests that family ties assist migrants in selecting destinations, scholars speculate that family ties are less important for migrants of high socio-economic status, who are born outside the South or who move to urban areas. Using qualitative narrative interviews with non-southern-born black migrants to Charlotte, this study identifies other sources of assistance that route blacks to their destination—employers, educational institutions (especially historically black colleges) and the ethnic media. Working-class migrants relied primarily on family and friends when selecting their destination, but middle-class migrants relied on a broader range of sources. Implications for theory about how class shapes the destination selection process are discussed.

A “New” Black Nationalism in the USA and France

This essay examines the relationship between Black Nationalism and demographic change in the Black population of the USA and France. It shows that, unlike previous generations, most Blacks in France are born in France and share common sociopolitical and cultural reference points. As a result, this Black French population deploys new Black Nationalist expressions advocating that Blackness is an integral part of the French nation and that Black citizens are entitled to the same opportunities as Whites. Subversively, people of African descent are inserting Blackness into a supposedly color-blind nation. In contrast to France, the African Diaspora in the USA is increasingly diverse. But due to the misrepresentation of African-American identities and cultural differences, many Black migrants seek to distance themselves from African Americans, a relationship that ironically mirrors intra-Black relations in France of the 1960s and 1970s. Like France, however, demographic change within the Black population in the USA has also reconfigured the parameters of Black Nationalism. I contend that Black Nationalism in the USA is increasingly transnational in character. Indeed, in the post-civil rights era, the Caribbean and African migration has expanded the scope of Black Nationalism from primarily focusing on empowering Black America to offering Caribbean and African countries a better place in the global village. In the process, as the activities of the numerous African chambers of commerce reveal, not only do these “new” transnational Black Nationalist expressions flirt with neoliberal policies but they also adopt a color-blind perspective.

Flush Times & Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson by Joshua D. Rothman (review)

Flush Times & Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson. By Joshua D. Rothman. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. Pp. 440. Cloth, $29. 95.)Reviewed by Richard BellIn his 1838 address to the Springfield Lyceum, Abraham Lincoln warned his audience of the perilous consequences of lawlessness in the rapidly expanding republic. Accounts of outrages committed by mobs, form the every-day news of the times, Lincoln lamented, before singling out recent riots in Mississippi and St. Louis:In the Mississippi case, they first commenced by hanging the regular gamblers; set of men, certainly not following for livelihood, very useful, or very honest occupation; but one which, so far from being forbidden by the laws, was actually licensed by an act of the Legislature, passed but single year before. Next, negroes, suspected of conspiring to raise an insurrection, were caught up and hanged in all parts of the State: then, white men, supposed to be leagued with the negroes. Thus went on this process of hanging,. till, dead men were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every road side; and in numbers almost sufficient, to rival the native Spanish moss of the country, as drapery of the forest.1To Lincoln, the events in Mississippi were the dangerous in example of broader phenomenon: the trampling of the rule of law on the fringes of American empire. To Joshua D. Rothman, this plague of violence in the Cotton Kingdom represents something more: the anxieties attending the birth of new society in the Deep South, founding built on slave labor and on speculation, on hustle and on confidence, on avarice and on insecurity.By 1835, Mississippi was flush. Possessing some of the most fertile soil on the continent, newly cleared of Choctaw Indians, and filling quickly with white settlers and many more enslaved black migrants, the state was booming. Cotton production spurred massive investment and a rampant culture of speculation there. Men accumulated'paper fortunes' (7). Indeed, Rothman argues, much of this overnight affluence was projection, a series of bookkeeping fictions (8) that required careful elaboration and maintenance.Among the company of fast-talking lawyers, hustlers, and confidence men setting up shop in Mississippi was Virgil Stewart. The protagonist in Rothman's account of social and cultural upheaval on the leading edge of the market revolution, Stewart was protean figure, ever-ready with tall tale or an alias as the situation required. Red-haired and of Scotch-Irish ancestry, Stewart arrived in Mississippi around 1831 in hopes of taking share of the spoils from the Choctaw Cession, only to find the land auction rigged to favor the state's nascent elites. Stewart had to settle for just 40 acres, hardly enough to transform himself into gentleman farmer and plantation master. Disappointed and disillusioned, he took to doing favors and running errands for better-established older men, ingratiating himself.One such errand in January 1834 found Stewart hot on the trail of John Murrell, Virginia transplant and sometime horse thief, who had apparently stolen slaves from local plantation. Giving false name, Stewart won Murrell's confidence and gathered enough incriminating information to see to it that Murrell was arrested and tried. Enamored of his own achievement and eager to impress his fellow settlers, Stewart soon took to bragging about their time together, exaggerating Murrell's villainy and boasting of his own moral principle and derring-do in sensational tell-all pamphlet. …

Internal Migration of Blacks in South Africa: An Application of the Roy Model

AbstractThis study investigates the internal migration of black males in South Africa over the period after the formal end of Apartheid using the 1996 census data. The two issues of our primary interests are the following: (i) whether migration patterns of black individuals are consistent with the income‐maximising hypothesis as related to the destination choice; and (ii) whether the redistribution of human capital is detected in internal migration. The results from conditional logit regressions on choices among individuals in 318 districts show that individuals prefer districts with higher expected wages, conditional on other regional characteristics. In addition, there exist differing preferences on the share of population with post‐secondary education by individuals with commensurate educational attainments. Black individuals with post‐secondary education tend to migrate into areas with a higher share of population with post‐secondary education and vice versa, which confirms the divergence of human capital levels across districts.

‘Just Talking About It Opens Your Heart’: meaning-making among Black African migrants and refugees living with HIV

Meaning-making has emerged as a core construct in addressing trauma, loss or crisis. This paper considers how diasporic Black Africans living with HIV, who come from interdependent collectivist cultures where the norm is one of implicit support, extend their meaning-making strategies when faced with a diagnosis of HIV. In this qualitative study, 13 Black African migrants and refugees living with HIV in New Zealand were interviewed and the transcripts analysed. After their diagnosis, participants began a journey of reconceptualising situational and global meaning. They extended their meaning-making strategies to include a community of like others to gain explicit support. Caregivers in host countries must understand the meaning-making processes of HIV-positive Black African migrants in order to provide competent services that lead to good social and health outcomes. All healthcare and social services workers should regularly assess Black African migrants and refugees living with HIV for positive social connectedness as well as medication adherence and more specific health concerns.

Oscar Handlin and the Problem of Ethnic Pluralism and African American Civil Rights

AS THE NATION grappled with African American civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, historian Oscar Handlin, like many scholars of his generation, set out to make sense of the role of race in American democracy and to determine the proper path of black liberation. Handlin, already a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of immigration, viewed both civil rights and the experiences of American blacks through a lens of ethnic pluralism. Like many historians and social scientists following the Second World War, Handlin rejected race as an analytical category, asserting in Race and Nationality in American Life (1957) “that there is no evidence of any inborn differences of temperament, personality, character, or intelligence among the races.” Instead, he argued that ethnicity was “the only meaningful basis on which one can compare social and cultural traits.” The notion that American society was composed of disparate ethnic groups with their own particular cultural affinities resonated with liberal social scientists and historians of the 1950s and 1960s for a number of reasons. Ethnic pluralism was, of course, consistent with models of interest group politics that had gained primacy following the New Deal. More to the point, in identifying culture as the nexus of group identity, ethnic pluralism constituted a formal rejection of eugenics and other biological metaphors of race. Handlin’s identification of African Americans as an ethnic rather than racial group would ultimately lead him to draw fairly optimistic conclusions about the future of American race relations. In 1959, for example, Handlin’s The Newcomers assessed the character and consequences of Puerto Rican and black migration to New York City. The study, which was commissioned by the nonprofit Regional Plan Association, Inc., of the greater New York metropolitan area, rejected the charge that these groups were uniquely prone to social ills such as crime, vice, and family dissolution. Instead, Handlin argued that many of the problems associated with African Americans and Puerto Ricans generally paralleled those of previous immigrant

Twenty‐First‐Century Trends in Black Migration to the U.S. South: Demographic and Subjective Predictors

ObjectiveWe examine (1) whether black migration trends from the final few decades of the 20th century continued during the first decade of the 21st century, (2) whether the black southern migration stream continues to be demographically distinctive, and (3) whether incorporating subjective/motivational factors into our models advances our understanding of race and interregional migration.MethodsUsing data from the 2000 to 2010 Current Population Surveys, we employ descriptive and inferential statistics to (1) map recent patterns of interregional migration in the United States by race and (2) estimate the effects of race, other sociodemographics, and subjective/motivational factors on people's propensity to migrate to the United States South.ResultsWe find that the rate of black migration to the South continues to exceed that of whites, and that black migrants differ from their white counterparts both demographically and motivationally. We also observe selected gender differences within the black southern migration stream.ConclusionsOur results underscore the need for more research on race, gender, and interregional migration in the United States. We suggest directions for such work, with particular focus on possibilities for further inquiry when 2010 census materials become more widely available.

Space and Status in Chicago’s Legal Landscapes

In Progressive Era Chicago, jobless men, sex workers, and black migrants were regulated through scales of vice, vagrancy, and race. But this regulation was challenged. The jobless and homeless men in Chicago’s vagrancy scale rejected popular censure and criminal sanction. The sex workers who made up Chicago’s vice scale resisted vice prohibitions. Like jobless and homeless men, they disaggregated and produced mini scales that defied the efforts of authorities to contain and eliminate their practices. Black migrants contested the de facto segregation and the racial covenants that bolstered Chicago’s race scale, which developed during the Great Migration on the city’s south side. Tracking the shifts and fluctuations of Chicago’s legal landscapes, this article stresses the agency of marginal men and women in the design and organization of the built environment in the industrial city.

BOOK/MEDIA REVIEWS

Race and Renaissance: African Americans in Pittsburgh Since World War II, by Joe W. Trotter and Jared N. Day. Pittsburgh, PA, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010, 328 pp., $29.95, hardback.Reviewed by John R. Tilghman, Howard University.Historians Joe W. Trotter and Jared N. Day of Carnegie Mellon University have completed the first book on Black life in postwar Pittsburgh. Trotter, the current director of Carnegie's Center for African American Urban Studies and Economy (CAUSE), helped redefine interwar African American urban history by challenging the theory with Black community building. The paradigm was resurrected by Arnold Hirsch (1983) as the ghetto to Black life in the postwar U.S. In Race and Renaissance, Trotter and Day challenges the second argument emphasizing Black agency as a response to racial exclusion by creating communities, institutions, and organizations. However, the emergence of a global capitalism helped made life difficult through deindustrialization, underemployment and unemployment, housing shortage, and community neglect.The first chapter emphasizes the First Great Migration and Black community building in Pittsburgh's Hill District. Trotter and Day show how Black self-determination was eminent. During segregation, Black migrants helped create independent churches, mutual aid societies, schools, and fraternal orders. Other migrants established or joined local NAACP and National Urban League chapters to advocate for access to employment and local New Deal social programs, and also participated in electoral politics.The second chapter details the intermingling of the Second Great Migration and Renaissance I, an urban redevelopment scheme promoted by civic leaders of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development. The restructuring of Pittsburgh's economy from a steel-manufacturing to a service-technology sector was accompanied with the exclusion of Black workers from jobs in urban redevelopment projects, denial of decent housing, and displacement from neighborhoods seized by eminent domain. Blacks responded to Jim Crow through organizations-Negro American Labor Council, Pittsburgh Interracial Action Council, and the Greater Pittsburgh Improvement League-to campaign for equal access to education, housing, jobs, and labor unions. They also helped their migrant relatives by caring for families while moving from job to job to stay employed.The third chapter reveals how grassroots and Black Power organizations exposed the racial and class limitations within the Renaissance I plan. Neighborhood grassroots organizations such as United Movement for Progress and the United Negro Protest Committee protested against employment discrimination in local neighborhood stores and demanded control over social welfare programs. Operation Dig, another grassroots organization, advocated for affirmative action in building and construction trades. According to Trotter and Day, the emergence of Black Power through the Black Construction Coalition and Democratic Association of Black Brothers forced the city power brokers to shift from urban redevelopment to creating social programs in poor neighborhoods. …

PERCEPTIONS OF RACE AND REGION IN THE BLACK REVERSE MIGRATION TO THE SOUTH

AbstractThis study examines how African Americans perceive and manage race and region as they migrate to the U.S. South—a region with a tenuous image of racial prejudice. The analysis is juxtaposed to literature that provides an inconsistent view of regional differences in prejudice. Some researchers argue that regional differences in levels of prejudice are now small, while other researchers argue that the South continues to be a place of much greater racial hostility. Guided by a spatial boundaries approach and using 127 narrative interviews with Black interregional migrants to Charlotte, North Carolina, results indicate that Black migrants focus less on levels of racial prejudice across regions and focus more on six dimensions of everyday racism they consider during migration. These dimensions include—the overtness/subtlety of prejudice, verbal and physical harassment, group economic opportunity, physical distance, racial symbols, and paternalism. Among these migrants, there is no consensus that the South is more or less racially hostile than other regions. They perceive most saliently that they are trading more subtle prejudice, higher levels of racial residential segregation, and greater constraints on Black economic opportunity in the North, for more overt prejudice, greater paternalism, and exposure to Confederate symbols in the South. Patterns also emerged in perceptions of regional boundaries based on class, motivation for moving, gender, and generation. Implications for theories of race and regionalism are discussed.