African American Migration Research Articles

Way Up North in Louisville: African American Migration in the Urban South, 1930-1970

Way Up North in Louisville: African American Migration in the Urban South, 1930-1970

Way up north in Louisville: African American migration in the urban South, 1930-1970

Way up north in Louisville: African American migration in the urban South, 1930-1970

King cotton in modern America: a cultural, political, and economic history since 1945

King Cotton in Modern America places the once kingly crop in historical perspective, showing how was actually part of the larger culture of the United States despite many regarding its cultivation and sources as hopelessly backward. Leaders in the industry, acting through the National Cotton Council, organized the various and often conflicting segments to make the commodity a viable part of the greater American economy. The industry faced new challenges, particularly the rise of foreign competition in production and the increase of man-made fibers in the consumer market.Modernization and efficiency became key elements for cotton planters. The expansion of cotton- growing areas into the Far West after 1945 enabled American growers to compete in the world market. Internal dissension developed between the traditional cotton growing regions in the South and the new areas in the West, particularly over the USDA cotton allotment program. Mechanization had profound social and economic impacts. Through music and literature, and with special emphasis placed on the meaning of cotton to African Americans in the lore of Memphis's Beale Street, blues music, and African American migration off the land, author D. Clayton Brown carries cotton's story to the present.

Fly Away: The Great African American Cultural Migrants

Fly Away: The Great African American Cultural Migrants

INCREASING POWER IN A BLACK COMMUNITY: A NETWORKED APPROACH

Although social network analysis can contribute insight about social relationships embedded in ethnographic data, such as oral history interviews, seemingly few anthropologists use social network analysis as a method for examining ethnographic data. Expanding upon a study of an African American migration from southern regions of the United States to Saginaw, MI, this article uses network analysis to examine a 1967 dual mobilization network structure that emerged as two combative African American networks fought to increase black power in the small community. This research demonstrates that social network analysis can provide qualitative researchers insights not easily or even readily gained through simple narrative analysis. [network analysis, anthropological methods, social movement].

Street Scenes: Staging the Self in Immigrant New York, 1880–1924 , and: The Immigrant Scene: Ethnic Amusements in New York, 1880–1920 (review)

Reviewed by: Street Scenes: Staging the Self in Immigrant New York, 1880–1924, and: The Immigrant Scene: Ethnic Amusements in New York, 1880–1920 Jennifer Schlueter Street Scenes: Staging the Self in Immigrant New York, 1880–1924. By Esther Romeyn. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008; pp. xxxi + 273. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper. The Immigrant Scene: Ethnic Amusements in New York, 1880–1920. By Sabine Haenni. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008; pp. ix + 323. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper. Esther Romeyn's Street Scenes: Staging the Self in Immigrant New York, 1880–1924 and Sabine Haenni's The Immigrant Scene: Ethnic Amusements in New York, 1880–1920 offer richly interdisciplinary analyses of the contentious construction of American identity in the crucible of performance by, about, and (only sometimes) for New York city immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century. While the two authors use some of the same evidence to make their cases, their approaches and their conclusions are significantly different. Both books, however, are worthy of attention from performance scholars working on ethnicity or popular entertainment during the period. Romeyn is trained in American studies, and Street Scenes has a predictably literary bent. In her project, she addresses a variety of texts, including urban guidebooks, "mystery-and-misery" novels, the print coverage of the 1909 Chinatown murder of Elsie Sigel, and Italian, Irish, Yiddish, and blackface dialect comedy. Throughout, she argues that the native-born New York audience, drawn both to slumming tours of Chinatown, as well as to the clown Farfariello's vaudeville acts, saw (or thought they saw) authenticity in these theatricalized and mediated performances in the streets and on the stage. Thus for the immigrant—Romeyn uses the word broadly, to include African American migrants to the city—authenticity and theatricality were crucially at odds. As her subtitle indicates, Romeyn asserts that the immigrant self was performed in anxious response to the knowledge that, in the maelstrom of [End Page 140] New York streets, surfaces mattered and judgments about one's ethnic heritage and social status were quickly made. Immigrant audiences could not help having a DuBoisian sense of double consciousness in response. But native-born audiences also were anxious—about cultural mobility, and about a growing awareness that what begins as Americanized quickly becomes, simply, American. With eight chapters plus an introduction, Street Scenes is divided into two sections. Part 1, "The City as Theater: Performativity and Urban Space," focuses on the representation of immigrants in novels and guidebooks, such as Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) and Helen Campbell's Darkness and Daylight, or Shadows of New York Life (1895). Here, Romeyn is particularly interested in how immigrant neighborhoods were represented as dangerous and miserable and, at the same time, as potential sites for outsider adventure and thrill-seeking; that is, she examines how authors, tour operators, and journalists presented enclaves like Chinatown as available for native-born, middleclass leisure-time consumption. While compelling, part 1 is probably of less use to the theatre scholar than part 2, "Stages of Identity: Performing Ethnic Subjects." Here, Romeyn moves gracefully through close readings of Italian, Yiddish, Irish, and blackface plays, musicals, and vaudeville acts. Her examination of the career of Eduardo Migliaccio (known onstage as Farfariello) in chapter 5 is an outstanding piece of archival work. Throughout, Romeyn emphasizes what she calls "grotesque realism" in these performances, envisioning caricature on the comic stage as a site for negotiating identity. She plays with notions of passing and masquerade, and deftly addresses the "cultural pastiche" of Irish performers in blackface doing Jewish acts (189). Invoking Ann Douglas's notion of a mongrel Manhattan, Romeyn proposes the possibility that these apparent slippages actually "questioned the idea of inherent racial character" (193). Street Scenes is not a perfect book. There are a few factual bobbles and sweeping assumptions to be found in part 2. In addition, some of the examples Romeyn turns to—like Edward Harrigan—are already familiar and well-worn territory. Finally, the book would benefit from a conclusion to integrate the work that unfolds quite separately in the two parts. Nevertheless, the book is worth consulting. Her introduction, which...

Writing African American Migrations

Efforts to write the history of the African American migrations of the Civil War era, the Gilded Age, and the Progressive Era began soon after the start of these historically significant movements. Early scholarship labored to surmount the same methodological obstacles faced by modern scholars, notably scarce documentation, but still produced pathbreaking studies such as W. E. B. Du Bois'sThe Philadelphia Negro, Carter Woodson'sA Century of Negro Migration, and Clyde Kiser'sSea Island to City. Modern scholarship since the 1950s falls into eight distinct genres. An assessment of representative works in each genre reveals a variety of configurations of strengths and weaknesses, while offering guidelines for future research.

Skin Inc: Identity Repair Poems, and: Amnesiac, and: The Black Automaton, and: Quantum Spit

Reviewed by: Skin Inc: Identity Repair Poems, and: Amnesiac, and: The Black Automaton, and: Quantum Spit Gregory Pardlo (bio) Ellis, Thomas Sayers. Skin Inc: Identity Repair Poems. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf, 2010. Harris, Duriel E. Amnesiac. Riverdale, NY: Sheep Meadow Press, 2010. Kearney, Douglas. The Black Automaton. Albany, NY: Fence Books, 2009. Kearney, Douglas. Quantum Spit. Philadelphia: Corollary Press, 2010. Recently, I have been struck by the willingness to revisit, for example, the lynching of Emmet Till, and similarly iconic occasions in our historical memory of racial terror. If only because they are so conspicuous, I’ve grown sensitive to the incidence of poems that will trope on grotesque and stigmatic deformations inflicted on the racialized body sooner than engage the discourse of inequality that historicizes such violence. It might be reasonable to suspect poets’ intentions in these cases are more to shock the reader than to ply the reader’s sympathies—or that the poets are at such a historical remove that they are willing to risk treating such sensitive material inelegantly. I doubt first, however, any reader’s ability to be shocked by depictions of the body—whatever its condition—considering the speed, abundance and impersonality of information exchange we witness today. I also doubt, given the historical significance of Emmet Till’s brutal murder, that some of our finest poets would exploit that or any similar event for sensational effect. No, I believe there is a degree of re-contextualization our poets are pursuing that they feel can be achieved through a quality of seeing that exceeds contemplation. But what spurs this effort? A range of unique sociological conditions distinguishes our historical moment. Data from our last census show the number of Americans self-identifying as multiracial has grown exponentially, revealing definitions of race to be increasingly fluid. The reverse migration of African Americans from Northern urban centers to the Southern states tests the durability of conventional (“street”) etiquette and social wisdom. Growth of the black middle class, with its information resources and access to education, continues to marginalize poor and working class African Americans. Our technologies for literary production, while democratizing, are the same alienating technologies we use to engage in war and commerce. The accumulation of texts that are all the more disposable because they can be infinitely reproduced and warehoused in virtual clouds of collective memory estranges poet and reader across wastelands of binary code. Our cultural affinity with the author of a text may rely entirely on our trust in the accuracy of an online bookseller’s logarithms. Given all of this, and the historically recent scientific confirmation that there is no biological basis for racial categorization, we could forgive black poets today for suffering the malaise of the motherless child. Yet, like the placards (which we shouldn’t forget are likewise texts) of striking sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968, the African American poet today is compelled to make the [End Page 959] founding assertion, “I am a wo/man.” She does this not because her humanity has been called into question, but, I surmise, because technology threatens to obscure the fact of the racialized body, the one material certainty black poets still have, altogether. Employing strategies that are both conventional and idiosyncratic, poets representative of this trend implicate bodies on both sides of the page, producer and consumer, by elevating the lyric moment beyond the merely descriptive, and beyond the damaged grammar of our age. Indeed, it is striking the way poets increasingly resort to visual culture to circumvent the obscuring effects of the page. Black poets today foreground the role of the body in both literary production and consumption. While there are often overt references to the body composing the poem, what I find equally compelling are the demands contemporary black poets make on the body of the reader. By employing formal strategies that call for an active engagement with the page, the three poets I am particularly interested in here, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Duriel E. Harris, and Douglas Kearney, enlist the reader in the performance of blackness, and thereby (re)establish the poem as the site of communal engagement. All three poets are interested in the various ways blackness is...

S. J. Makielski: Designer of African American Schools for the Episcopal Church in the Rural South, 1930–1944

S. J. Makielski: Designer of African American Schools for the Episcopal Church in the Rural South, 1930–1944

Leslie A. Schwalm . Emancipation's Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest . (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture.) Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press . 2009 . Pp. xii, 387. Cloth $65.00, paper $24.95.

For a region including few blacks, the Upper Midwest states of Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin in the late nineteenth century have yielded a rich historiographical lode to the persistent and wide-ranging explorations of Leslie A. Schwalm. Tracing the fortunes of the African-American migrants who arrived during the Civil War, this study sheds new light on Reconstruction as a national phenomenon, race relations in a supposedly racially liberal society, and gender relations within the communities the migrants created. The book begins by demonstrating that, while the 1787 Northwest Ordinance in theory defined freedom as the normative status in the antebellum Upper Midwest, white racism made a form of bondage for blacks too often the practice. Through a heritable form of indentured servitude, slave-owning privileges for army officers, and loose adoption laws, whites succeeded in holding African Americans to long terms of service. All three states disfranchised blacks and banned them from jury service; Iowa also adopted statutes prohibiting black settlement, testimony against whites, militia service, practice of law and intermarriage with whites, and requiring school segregation. “Racism,” Schwalm concludes, “was not imposed on Midwestern whites by outsiders; it was integral to the region's history and development” (p. 29).

African American Migration to the Midwest: A Review Essay

Review of: "Emancipation's Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest," by Leslie Schwalm and "A Little More Freedom: African Americans Enter the Urban Midwest, 1860–1930," by Jack Blocker.

Immigration and Religion in America: Comparative and Historical Perspectives. Ed. by Richard Alba, Albert J. Raboteau, and Josh DeWind. (New York: New York University Press, 2009. vi, 407 pp. Cloth, $78.00, isbn 978-0-8147-0504-9. Paper, $26.00, ISBN 978-0-8147-0505-6.)

In contrast with scholarship on previous immigrations, many early studies of post-1945 immigrant groups showed only a minor interest in religion. The September 11, 2001, tragedy, religious upheaval in regions from which those immigrants hailed, and the success of their religions in the United States have drawn attention to the religious context of immigration. As a consequence, the Social Science Research Council's International Migration Program “organize[d] a project to support research and convene scholars to examine relations between Religion, Migration, and Civic Life” (p. 3). Funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, social science immigration experts joined religious studies and humanities-based scholars to explore religion as an institution and as a system of meaning in select communities. The resulting volume of essays pairs the study of religion in one “new” immigrant group with a related, well-studied immigrant group that had arrived earlier: Mexican immigration is explored and compared to the Italian experience; the Korean experience is compared with that of the Japanese; the Arab Muslim experience is compared with the immigration experience of Jews; and—in a slight methodological departure—the Haitian immigration experience is contrasted with the post-World War I Great Migration of Af rican Americans within the United States. For each of the four paired groups, the editors wrote a comprehensive introduction focusing on religion. The first substantive essays in each section look at religious development in an older immigrant group to establish continuities and differences as compared with the newer group. The remaining essays in each section provide descriptive narratives and conceptual investigation into religion's role among the new populations.

African Americans on the Great Plains: An Anthology (review)

Reviewed by: African Americans on the Great Plains: An Anthology Diane Quantic, Professor African Americans on the Great Plains: An Anthology. Edited by Bruce A. Glasrud and Charles A. Braithwaite. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. 395 pages, $35.00. African Americans on the Great Plains offers the reader an opportunity to examine the lives of African Americans in a region that is not often acknowledged in the history of civil rights in the United States. Gathered from the journal Great Plains Quarterly, these essays, ranging from accounts of the military experiences of black soldiers and the region’s role in the civil rights struggle to the contributions of artists and musicians from the region, present a vibrant African American history on the Great Plains. Kansas is central to a number of essays, perhaps because of its historical significance in the abolitionist unrest before the Civil War or because of the persistence of discrimination in the state or simply because the scholars’ interests led them to investigate this state. Analyses range from studies of the frontier fort-town conflicts in Fort Hays and of “Pap” Singleton’s failed Exoduster colony in eastern Kansas to accounts of the civil rights activism in Topeka before 1954 and of the Sit-In Movement in Wichita and Oklahoma that predated similar resistance in the South. Two other Kansas essays focus on the Afro-American Council’s attempts to realize civil rights for African Americans in the segregated state and the relationship between race and homicides in four eastern Kansas counties. Essays that concentrate on Nebraska, Texas, and Oklahoma round out the discussions of social issues. One essay compares the relatively benign treatment that African American troops enjoyed at Fort Niobrara in Nebraska with the violent response to the troops’ arrival in Texas and another examines the efforts of Canada to prevent the migration of African Americans from Oklahoma. Yet another study highlights the broad inclusion of economic classes in Nebraska’s African American Masonry as opposed to the more restrictive national African American Masonry. African American cultural contributions to the Great Plains are of importance as well. Era Bell Thompson’s American Daughter, her autobiography of her years in rural North Dakota, is examined through the oppositions in her life. An account of Aaron Douglas, an artist of the Harlem Renaissance who grew up in Great Plains towns, focuses on his work in New York and other venues beyond the Great Plains. Finally, music gets its due in two essays: one on Alphonso Trent’s jazz orchestra that enjoyed success in places as disparate as Kansas City [End Page 405] and Deadwood, South Dakota, and another one on the development of gospel music in Omaha. Arranged chronologically, these critical works underscore the importance of the Great Plains as a region that anticipated many of the issues and experiences of African Americans in twentieth-century America. Those familiar, perhaps, with one of these subjects will find their understanding of the Great Plains experience shifting as they take into account other factors that make this region even richer and more interesting. An index makes it easy for readers to follow their own threads through the anthology. Diane Quantic, Professor Wichita State University, Kansas Copyright © 2010 The Western Literature Association

Memory and the Phantom South in African American Migration Film

Memory and the Phantom South in African American Migration Film

Youth of Color and the City

Youth of Color and the City Matt Delmont (bio) Mean Streets: Chicago Youths and the Everyday Struggle for Empowerment in the Multiracial City, 1908–1969. By Andrew Diamond. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. 416 pages. $60.00 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II. By Luis Alvarez. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. 336 pages. $34.95 (cloth). $21.95 (paper). Missing: Youth, Citizenship, and Empire after 9/11. By Sunaina Marr Maira. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. 352 pages. $23.95 (paper). Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age. By Philip Kasinitz, John Mollenkopf, Mary Waters, and Jennifer Holdaway. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. 432 pages. $45.00 (cloth). The books under review here highlight the innovative work being done on the histories and contemporary experiences of young people of color. Rather than focusing on youth strictly as a consumption-based subculture, these texts draw together sites such as schools, homes, workplaces, and public spaces, with subjects such as gangs, political engagement, immigration, assimilation, and commercial and grassroots media and popular culture. While these texts are methodologically diverse—drawing on archival research, oral history, media analysis, ethnography, surveys, and quantitative analysis—they are connected by their interest in the everyday lived experiences of young people of color in urban settings. Andrew Diamond’s Mean Streets and Luis Alvarez’s The Power of the Zoot call for urban historians to pay attention to youth by showing how young people shaped and navigated twentieth-century Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Sunaina Maira’s Missing and Philip Kasinitz, John Mollenkopf, Mary Waters, and Jennifer Holdaway’s Inheriting the City chart the successes and obstacles for young people of color in terms of their cultural, political, and economic belonging in present-day New England and New York. Compelling in their own right, the topics examined in these books will become increasingly [End Page 955] relevant for American studies scholars, since demographers project that young people of color will become the majority of their age cohort by 2023.1 The two historians, Diamond and Alvarez, approach youth culture from a comparative ethnic studies perspective. In Mean Streets, Diamond demonstrates how white, black, and Latino youth gangs and peer groups helped to shape the racial geography of Chicago between the 1910s and 1960s. Diamond focuses his study of these youth subcultures on grassroots political action and the formation of racial and ethnic identities. This focus is important because it enables Diamond to show not only how young people came to see themselves as Irish, Polish, Italian, African American, Mexican, or Puerto Rican, but also how they played “leading roles in articulating community identities” and in “defending neighborhood boundaries” (4). Diamond also makes a clear connection between youth subcultures and politics, arguing that “these fighting-gang subcultures served as conduits into the political sphere . . . because they served to magnify racial injustices in the field of everyday life, as well as to articulate and reify ethnic and racial bonds that constituted powerful bases for grassroots mobilization” (8). Diamond emphasizes how young people, by playing essential roles in community formation and collective action, also became integral parts of the political culture of working-class Chicago. One of the strengths of Diamond’s study is that he provides evidence, across a period of more than fifty years, of how youth gangs played highly visible roles both in everyday racial tensions and in large-scale race riots. Diamond begins by looking at the white ethnic (primarily Irish American) athletic clubs who created a culture of gang violence in the 1910s. Hundreds of male social and athletic clubs populated Chicago’s neighborhoods. Most of these clubs functioned as street gangs who exercised their physical and symbolic power through fights over neighborhood turf. This culture of intra-and interethnic gang violence was already well established by the mid-1910s, but as the migration of southern African Americans increased, the athletic clubs’ violence became more antiblack in its orientation. From 1917 to 1919 white gangs bombed twenty-four black homes and vandalized dozens of others. This violence peaked in the Chicago race riot of 1919. The...

Lessons from the Fields: A Migrant HIV Prevention Project

Migrant and seasonal workers are vulnerable to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) due to poverty, inadequate knowledge of preventive strategies, and lack of access to health care. This study addresses the disparate impact of HIV among Hispanic and African American migrant workers in Immokalee, Florida, who use alcohol and other drugs. Through pilot testing to adapt the experimental and comparison interventions to these two distinct populations, research staff have learned the importance of (1) establishing and maintaining trust between outreach staff and the migrant community; (2) being aware of cultural nuances and practices that might create challenges to the research process, and the interaction of these factors with poverty; and (3) having flexibility in recruitment and intervention. As one of the first intervention studies in this population to use an experimental design and to focus on the social and contextual factors that contribute to risky behaviors, these lessons may provide guidance for future researchers.

The effect of income taxes on interstate migration: an analysis by age and race

The topic of interstate migration and the effects of taxes on migration have been extensively studied. Prior research has examined not only many possible determinants of migration but also the migrations of various populations, including the elderly, African-Americans, and the college educated. The present study will attempt to differentiate itself from this prior research by looking at the effect of income taxes on the interstate migration of both whites and African-Americans at various ages. Another distinguishing feature of the present study is that it will use data from the NLSY-Geocode, a data set not used previously for this type of study. Results of the present study are similar to the results of prior works; income taxes have an effect on migration for most races and age groups. Individuals move from states with high income taxes to states with low income taxes; these results corroborate the results obtained from the use of aggregate, state-level data. In addition, results of the present study suggest that non-economic factors, such as ties to a particular state and changes in employment status, are also important factors in an individual’s migration decision.

Performing American: Ragtime Dancing as Participatory Minstrelsy

This article considers ragtime dancing within the contexts of American minstrelsy, African American migration, and European immigration. Based on archival research and drawing upon contemporary minstrelsy scholarship, I argue that ragtime dancing of the early twentieth century can be understood as a form of participatory minstrelsy that allowed dancers to embody markers of “blackness.” I further suggest that, as they danced “black” to ragtime music, European immigrant youths distanced themselves from African Americans and facilitated their own strategic assimilation as Americans.

Don't deny my name: words and music and the black intellectual tradition

This book offers reflections on the relationships between black American intellectuals and African American musical traditions from blues to hip hop.These learned but engagingly personal essays by the late poet and critic Lorenzo Thomas explore the interrelationships among African American music, literature, and popular culture, from the Harlem Renaissance to the present. Thomas (1944-2005) was an important American poet and a leading literary figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. His own work was profoundly influenced by black musical forms, providing a unique historical and aesthetic perspective that sets this book apart from other books that examine black music.Don't Deny My Name (which takes its title from a blues song) begins by laying out the case for the blues as constituting a body of literature, one that confronts the situation of African American migrants to the urban North and newer territories to the West. The essays that follow collectively provide a tour of the movement through classic jazz, bop, and the explosions of the free jazz era, followed by a section on R&B and Soul. The collection ends with a polemical essay about the hip hop phenomenon.

Does Racism Affect a Migrant's Choice of Destination?

I explicitly introduce racial conflict and cultural attitudes on racial diversity as determinants of destination choice to test their continued relevance to African Americans. I construct several measures of racial intolerance towards African Americans using hate crime activity and the feelings of white Americans about race extracted from a national social attitudes survey. Recognizing that African American migration may actually spawn hate crimes against them, I use a control function method with assaults on white police officers and hate crimes against Jews as instruments to correct for potential endogeneity. The results show that the probability of African American migrants choosing a city is significantly reduced by per capita hate crimes against them, the level of race-based crimes against them, by racially intolerant attitudes held by whites, and by poor evolution in whites' feelings about racial diversity ? all regardless of the region in which a city is located. Also striking is the previously undocumented divide among African Americans with respect to region, after controlling for racial intolerance. Those starting in the North exhibit an extreme distaste for the South at the margin, which contrasts sharply to the extreme taste for the South displayed by African Americans originating in the South.