African American Migration Research Articles

Editors' Introduction

Nine of the eleven contributions to this number of Éire-Ireland explore areas of Irish Studies that we have chosen as subjects for special issues, both past and future. In designating those subjects and in selecting guest editors, we seek to highlight research in areas attracting fresh attention and yielding innovative new scholarship. We also hope to encourage more work in these areas, establishing a productive relationship between our regular issues and our more focused ones. Thus the scholarship that we include here reaffirms our commitment to innovative work being done, for example, on gender, unionism, Irish America, visual art, and language and identity—all subjects of special issues that we have commissioned during the last decade. The final two contributions in this number of the journal concern themselves with contemporary Irish poetry, an area long enjoying extraordinary health, but one that we have less frequently explored. The first three essays turn to gender and sexuality in Ireland, serving as a preview of the Spring/Summer 2006 special issue that guest editors Nancy Curtin and Marjorie Howes are preparing. Sociologist Tom Inglis points out and redresses the avoidance of that topic in history and the social sciences, observing the "huge lacuna when it comes to understanding the sexual nature of the Irish." Noting the paucity of historical records on the subject, his essay explores the distinctiveness of Irish attitudes toward sexuality and the long duration of Victorianism in this realm of human behavior. Inglis also traces the major shift [End Page 5] over the last fifty years in Ireland—from a Catholic culture emphasizing social control of pleasure and desire to one of far less repression. Contributions by cultural and literary critics have helped to create just such a shift, resulting, for example, in the developing field of Irish queer studies. In this issue Éibhear Walshe examines how even in the deeply homophobic society of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland, journalists and artists managed to develop strategies by which they brought Oscar Wilde, widely viewed as the most notorious sexual offender of that era, into their own nationalist discourse. Focusing on Jamie O'Neill's At Swim Two Boys (2001), Joseph Valente explores a more recent expression of a related strategy in a fictional portrayal of the affinities between dissident sexuality and an Irish ethno-colonial identity. Valente reminds us that the major historical presence haunting the novel is "the specter of Oscar Wilde, in his own times a totem of both Irish eccentricity and homosexual deviancy—the prototypical ethnic-erotic queer." In another essay Tony Crowley builds on the area of language studies that guest editors Maria Tymoczko and Colin Ireland considered in their special issue on language and identity in 2003. Crowley explores dictionaries in Ireland, not as neutral explorations of language but as ideological instruments of imperial or nationalist goals—a subject of increasing interest both to cultural critics in literary studies and to historians. Lauren Onkey's article on James Farrell and Irish-American racism reflects continuing research in the growing field of Irish-American studies, the focus of two special issues edited by Kevin Kenny in 2001 and 2002. Drawing on controversial "whiteness studies," Onkey demonstrates the potent, even pathological, hold that anxieties about African-American migration into Chicago had on an insecure Irish-American masculinity in the early twentieth century. Mary Cosgrove's study of the republican hero Ernie O'Malley as an important figure in the development of twentieth-century visual art extends the work of our lavishly illustrated special issue on art, organized in 1998–99. There we committed ourselves both to the inclusion of an expanding field of scholarly endeavor and exhibition as well as to a policy of incorporating the color images on the covers of the journal into its content. We especially thank Cormac O'Malley for his support of the color-plate supplement included in this issue. Both Naomi Blumberg at the McMullen Museum of Boston College and Yvonne [End Page 6] Davis at the University of Limerick helped us to locate photographic images...

In motion: The African-American migration experience

In motion: The African-American migration experience

“For the Advancement of the Race”

This article builds on the scholarship of Black urban history in general and the Great Migrations in particular. It examines the migration, community-building, class consciousness, and sociopolitical activist efforts of African American migrants who made their way to Houston, Texas, from farms, small towns, and medium sized cities in eastern Texas and Louisiana between 1914 and 1941. It defines migration to Houston as a form of accommodation-activism, one of many vehicles used by people of color to gradually achieve socioeconomic, sociopolitical, spiritual, personal, and racial autonomy. Relying on themselves and the chain migration networks of others, these individuals and families decisively abandoned their birthplaces for better wages, quality schools, decent homes, improved lifestyles, advanced social equality, and civil rights in industrializing Houston.

The Real Live, Invisible Languages of A Different Drummer: A Response to Trudier Harris

Trudier Harris's essay raises many important questions about the past, present, and future of southern literary studies, chief among them the nagging questions of how and why particular texts and writers come to be both formative and neglected. My response to Harris begins by affirming that the novel she places under discussion, William Melvin Kelley's A Different Drummer, has been unduly overlooked by critics and teachers alike. Then I join with her in arguing that this deceptively Anglo-centered novel finds ways of making very telling points about African American identity in the South and, analogously, about African American literature as a driving force in southern U.S. literature. Kelley chooses to tell a story of black resistance by focusing much of his narrative on white resistance: how various white characters react to the complete, unanimous, and remarkably efficient black migration that happens before their eyes. Along with Harris, I address this paradox of a powerfully present African American absence; I also speak to other, related questions of personal, regional, racial, and cultural identity, such as the roles of problematic patriarchs and feminized male precursors in the novel. And I argue that the novel, finally and paradoxically, broadcasts the real live, invisible sounds of a different drummer, the words we never hear, the words African Americans use to make African American migration, resistance, and survival possible for themselves.

To Live and Learn from L.A.

Josh Sides.L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. xiv + 288 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95. "Los Angeles hurt me as much racially as any city I have ever known," Chester Himes wrote of his experiences in Los Angeles in the 1940s, "much more than any city I remember from the South" (p. 54). Himes's heartbreaking admission is at the core of Josh Sides's illuminating and pointed L.A. City Limits. While many African Americans in the middle decades of the twentieth century found much to celebrate in the relative personal freedoms and job opportunities available to them in Los Angeles, racial exclusion and violence—from police abuse to housing and employment discrimination to unequal schools—remained an insidious force in the lives of most black Angelenos. This maddening paradox was, according to Sides, due in large measure to the distinctive qualities of Los Angeles. Placing Los Angeles in a national context, Sides argues that three broad characteristics, "its diverse racial composition, its dynamic economic growth, and its dispersive spatial arrangements," distinguished the city from its urban counterparts throughout twentieth-century America (p. 6). First, unlike the largely binary racial dynamics in most cities in the East and Midwest, "successive waves of Latin American, Asian, and European immigrants" joined African Americans in Los Angeles over the course of the twentieth century, leading to a racial heterogeneity unprecedented in its size and scope (p. 6). Second, the city experienced relatively novel forms of industrial growth, led by the rise of the aerospace industry, which created a "striking contrast to the steady decline in manufacturing jobs that began in the 1950s in Chicago and Detroit" (p. 6). Third, Los Angeles was remarkable it its "vast geographic size and relatively low population density" (p. 7). Focusing on economic transformations and political activism, the book argues that fundamental to the success of African Americans in this exceptional setting was the appearance, and disappearance, of blue-collar jobs. Chapter one explores the development of a sustained African American community in Los Angeles in the 1920s and 1930s. Migration from the South, [End Page 545] principally from Texas and Louisiana, led to a growth in population from a little over two thousand in 1900 to nearly forty thousand in 1930. In several respects, L.A. proved a boon for African Americans, especially compared to elsewhere in the nation, both in the North and the South. In 1910, in Los Angeles County, for example, some 40 percent of African Americans owned their own homes, "compared to only 2.4 percent in New York and 8 percent in Chicago" (p. 16). Nonetheless, African American migrants were, according to Sides, "justifiably ambivalent" about their prospects in pre-WWII Los Angeles. Industrial jobs remained relatively scarce, especially compared to northern cities, and other major industries, like the entertainment business, refused to hire blacks in any substantial numbers. Sides ends the chapter with a discussion of African American political activity during the Depression, including a look at prominent labor organizers like Charles Upton and influential newspaper editors like Leon Washington and Loren Miller. Sides also offers in the chapter his first detailed discussion of a topic that he will fruitfully examine throughout the book: the complicated relationship between African Americans and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles. Prewar Los Angeles, he notes, was "clearly divided by a color line" (p. 18). That racial divide, however, merely separated whites from non-whites and created a "large and vibrant patchwork of races and ethnicities" and "some of the most racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the country," which included a large number of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans (p. 18). In the memory of one Watts resident, "In the thirties in the Watts area where I grew up, we had whites, Japanese, Mexicans, and Blacks living "together" and it worked. We got along fine" (p. 19). In...

African American miners and migrants: the Eastern Kentucky Social Club

African American miners and migrants: the Eastern Kentucky Social Club

Nation on the Move: Mobility in U.S. History. Ed. by Cornelis A. van Minnen and Sylvia L. Hilton. (Amsterdam: vu University Press, 2002. 176 pp. Paper, $35.00, isbn 90-5383-839-2.)

Nation on the Move is a collection of ten original essays and a comprehensive introduction focusing on the importance of geographic and social mobility in American history. The essays were selected from eighteen papers presented at the Roosevelt Study Center's Fifth Middelburg Conference of European Historians of the United States in 2001. Cornelis A. van Minnen and Sylvia L. Hilton both organized the conference and edited the essays for publication. The essays range from James Baird's analysis of the migration of slave overseers in colonial Virginia to Giovanni Fabbi's study of the migration of African Americans from South Carolina during World War I to Ole Moen's historiographical assessment of geographical and social mobility today. They embrace a variety of methodologies from David Brown's traditional biographical approach—focusing on the effect of travel on Hinton Rowan Helper's changing attitudes toward slavery—to Howell John Harris's quantitative analysis of the migration of members of the International Molders Union of North America to Robert M. Lewis's study of the meaning of daguerreotypes of migratory gold miners during California's gold rush.

Introduction: African Americans and the Urban Landscape

The movement of African Americans from the South to the North following the Civil War and culminating with the mass migrations that followed World Wars I and II changed the American urban landscape. Moreover, U.S. African Americans subsequently changed from a largely rural to an urban population. This urban-based population was critical in the success of the 20th century reform movements for social justice, and as a result African American communities gained unprecedented political power. The migration and settlement of African Americans in cities has led to some of the most exciting research in the field of African American history. During the 1960s and 1970s historians of the African American urban experience took their clues from the sociologists. The studies that emerged emphasized racial segregation and the so-called tangle of pathology that resulted when African Americans migrated to cities. In this conceptualization families and communities were impacted negatively by the increase in the black population. Most of these studies were conducted in the major cities of the North and scholars contended that the migrants suffered from anomie, disease, poverty, and weakened family ties. This view held that solving the immediate problems of food, shelter, and making a livelihood sapped most of the migrants' energies. These studies focused upon the formation of the black ghetto in northern cities, the physical and institutional development of black residential areas. Invariably, African Americans' experiences were perceived as deleterious to the maintenance of their culture and to their goals of self-determination. Racism was the key to understanding African American communities according to this view, and African Americans were passive in the process. (1) Yet this paradigm limited our understanding of the intricacies of the migration, resettlement, and their meaning for African Americans. Historian John W. Blassingame, writing in 1973, noted that African American communities also were centers of black life and culture and questioned the emphasis on relations. He observed that 19th century Savannah, Georgia, provided African Americans with a large arena to develop a variety of social, intellectual, and creative talents and to build [a] community infrastructure.... (2) Blassingame highlighted the limitations of the race relations model and challenged scholars to raise new questions when examining African Americans in urban America. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed a new wave of publications that bore such titles as Life Is What We Make It and In Their Own Interests. (3) These cultural and political studies focused on African American agency during the important post-World War I migration era. (4) Scholars extended the case study genre into other regions of the country, including the South and the West. (5) Some also began an examination of African American urban experiences in communities with small black populations. Myra Young Armstead's Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August: African Americans in Newport and Saratoga Springs, 1870-1930 offers a refreshing comparative examination of two small African American communities in the resort towns of Saratoga Springs, New York, and Newport, Rhode Island. (6) Armstead argues that the black populations of these towns exhibited the same strengths and characteristics as those who resided in the major metropolises. This phenomenon was fueled, in part, by chain migration and a continued support system from African Americans in other nearby towns. James Borchert and Allen Ballard had described the importance of chain migration, as well as the return to their homelands to attend family celebrations in maintaining their culture, in promoting economic relations within the African American communities of Washington, DC, and Philadelphia. (7) In my book Strangers in the Land of Paradise, I provided a detailed analysis of the impact of migration, and the economic circumstances surrounding the development of Buffalo's African American community, and found that southern black family traditions, far from having a debilitating effect on the community of newcomers, actually provided the armor that migrants needed to challenge their difficult social and economic situation. …

"Passing on" Death: Stealing Life in Toni Morrison's "Paradise"

And it is upon these women in flight from and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage.... (Barnes & Noble Paradise website; my emphasis) Many reviews and critical analyses of Paradise, Toni Morrison's seventh novel, note that it is the final novel of a trilogy, beginning with Beloved and continuing with Jazz. (1) And while many of these reviews contend that Morrison has written pivotal chapters in African-American migrations, the trilogy maintains a much deeper connection: that of the cycle of life itself. (2) With Paradise, Morrison demonstrates unequivocally that is a necessary condition of and for life; that is, the acceptance of mortality is a critical aspect of life's and death's journeys. The trilogy's first novel, Beloved, is replete with birth imagery, from Sethe's water-breaking following the carnival to Paul D's re-birth through mud in Georgia. And yet Morrison makes abundantly clear that birth is intricately interwoven with both life and death. Beloved, Seth, Paul D, and Denver flee or hide from life throughout most of Beloved, so each must be reborn by accepting and experiencing the painful conditions of life. Likewise, the second novel of the trilogy, Jazz, contains a multitude of metaphors for life. The music is alive, the photograph of Dorcas that Violet places the mantle becomes alive with its own personality, and even the narrator of Jazz takes life. Yet Joe and Violet merely go through the motions of life rather than truly live. When the dying Dorcas asks Felice to tell Joe that is only one apple, she reminds him that life does not exist without death; the fall of Adam and Eve, while condemning eaters to mortality, also endows them with the knowledge of life. To refuse that knowledge is to refuse life. Paradise completes the cycle with explorations of death. The citizens of Ruby have re-created Eden to their own specifications; and like the original death-less Eden, nobody dies in Ruby. Yet nobody in Ruby either, as the town exists within the isolated parameters of its citizens' powerfully executed will. By allowing no outside encroachment, Ruby remains dead to change, static. As Patricia Cato observes, there are no new stories in Ruby; only the founding narratives exist, told endlessly by the men. Richard Misner likewise wonders, But why were there no stories to tell of themselves? About their own lives they shut up. Had nothing to say, pass on (161). Peter Widdowson notes, 'immortally' frozen in its own stasis, has no politics because the very conception of change is a contradiction in terms: the town is because it cannot change, and it cannot change because it is ideal (329). Seventeen miles away, another paradise has arisen. Inhabited by women who have fled from their lives (or deaths), the Convent--a building that Ruby's men see as dark and malevolently disconnected from God's earth--represents another kind of sanctuary of (18). There the women, who have all experienced a death of love, (3) learn to accept self-love. Their supposed jangling and Jezebel life disturbs the males of Ruby, and thus these men plan to kill the Convent women, although in truth, Consolata's recognition of the women as broken girls, frightened girls, weak and lying is a more appropriate description (222). Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, and Pallas are suspended in stasis, women in hiding, attempting a condition-less existence. Consolata believes, Not only did they do nothing except the absolutely necessary, they had no plans to do anything (222). Unlike the sin of forgetting the past so prevalent in Beloved and Jazz, the inhabitants of Ruby--and its female double--refuse to let go of the past, to let time soften the edges of history's indignities; they deny the processes of and regeneration. After all, most of its residents are dead long before Ruby's men raid the Convent. …

Stephen A. Vincent, Southern Seed, Northern Soil: African-American Farm Communities in the Midwest, 1765–1900. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999. xvii + 224pp. $35.00 cloth; $19.95 paper.

Stephen A. Vincent's Southern Seed, Northern Soil challenges some of the cornerstone views of African-American migration to the North. By examining the migration of African Americans to the rural North in the nineteenth century, Vincent highlights the fact that African-American northern migration did not solely take place in the twentieth century, particularly after the start of World War One, and that all migrants did not move to northern cities. Vincent's welcome book focuses on the migration of free blacks from North Carolina and Virginia to two communities in Indiana in the 1830s—the Beech and Roberts settlements located in Rush and Hamilton counties. Vincent charts the southern precursors to this migration, the building of the Beech and Roberts settlements in Indiana, the success of these communities in the 1850s and 1860s, and then their decline that began in the wake of the Civil War and continued throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. By the turn of the twentieth century, almost all African Americans had left the Beech and Roberts settlements. Concurrently, these two communities began a new form of existence in the living memory of former residents as annual homecoming festivities were begun to celebrate “the neighborhoods' exceptional character and history.” These events, which continued throughout the twentieth century, became the “second phase in the communities' histories,” a phase that Vincent's book is certainly a part (151).

Images of African Americans in Southern Painting, 1840-1940

The paintings featured here are from the private collections of A. Everette James and Nancy Farmer and are frequently on view at the University of North Carolina and other locations throughout the Southeast, From the 1840s through World War II, paintings by artists working in the South for the most part mirrored images fashioned throughout America. These paintings were different from those created in other parts of the country, however, in that they reflected the southern sense of place and the intimacy of black and white relationships in the region. From the mid-nineteenth century through Reconstruction, southern paintings by white artists showed African Americans as largely dehumanized caricatures, black stereotypes rather than distinct individuals. Skin color appeared coal black; lips were thick and red, supported by protruding, overly large teeth. The contrived and exaggerated physical features, poor quality of clothing, and subservient activities of the African American subjects clearly cast them as outside or beneath the dominant, white social order. Sambo, Top Hat, Zip Coon, and other stock figures, often from the minstrel tradition and imposed upon African Americans by whites, were popular subjects for white artists working in the South during this time period. These restrictive, demeaning stereotypes relegated African Americans to inferior roles and served to justify white denial of their humanity. In the early years following the Civil War, changes in depictions of African Americans in paintings by white artists working in the South reflected to some extent the massive social upheaval that followed in the war's wake. By the mid 1870s, however, as Reconstruction drew to a close, an idealized nostalgia for the prewar relationship between the races, as whites chose to remember it, began to appear more frequently. Perhaps this was in response to the hardships and frustrations brought about by the unanticipated complexity of Reconstruction. The images from this period selectively depicted the era before the Civil War as a time of harmony and tranquility between whites and blacks. Although this characterization is, to say the least, not entirely accurate, in some memories it rang true and became a popular myth in the South as well as to a lesser extent in the rest of the country. Memory is unintentionally selective, and white southern artists gave certain symbolic relationships--Mammy and her white charges, for example--more prominence than they deserved in representing the social relationships between the races. Artists painting in the South presented a meticulous but one-sided image of African American life after the Civil War. Despite the postwar nostalgia for the good ole days, Charleston-born William Aiken Walker's numerous portrayals of black carpetbaggers were much sought after, and his rare larger nostalgic images were equally as popular among whites in both the North and South. (His larger depictions of plantation life still fetch vast sums from museums and collectors despite their simplistic and inaccurate portrayal of African American life.) Portrayals of African Americans in southern art remained nostalgic, rural, and frequently demeaning from Reconstruction until the rapid sweep of urbanization and migration of African Americans to the North in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The changes to the U.S. social structure wrought by this shift from an agrarian base to an industrial, urban life improved the status of African Americans. Images of African Americans in paintings gradually evolved to reflect these changes and came to affect their portrayal in areas of the deep South as well. White artists sometimes dignified African Americans in southern paintings with a clear individuality, and their physical characteristics were not nearly as exaggerated and demeaning as they had been in the middle-to-late nineteenth century. These images far more accurately represented African American culture and society than the paintings executed during the period immediately following the Civil War and during Reconstruction. …

The Flesh and Blood Triangle in Paule Marshall's The Fisher King

The Fisher King, by Caribbean-American author Paule Marshall, encompasses many tales: two feuding families, the rise and fall of a jazz musician, and the intricacies of friends turned lovers. As in her previous novels The Chosen Place, the Timeless People and Daughters, Marshall dips in and out of the lives of characters who encounter important historical events, in this case the Great Migration of African Americans to the North of the USA and the later migration of Black artists to Paris.

Black Unionism in the Industrial South

In spite of the broad perspective suggested by the book's title, this fine study is about labor, race, and class in one specific area of the industrial South—the upper Texas Gulf Coast region—from the late nineteenth century through the World War II period. Its purpose is the careful examination of the difficult historical struggle of black workers and unionists in particular southern industries, specifically longshoring, oil, railroad, steel, and shipbuilding, as they developed in one Texas region. It also makes the case for southern black workers as class-conscious agents who strongly desired unionization and group empowerment. This book is about black union activism. Accordingly, it deals with African American migrations to industrial centers and the subsequent growth of black union activity. Black workers dealt with a whole host of inequities such as white unionists who discriminated against them in job classification and placement, wage rates, seniority, and so forth. In every industry black workers encountered different forms of mistreatment and abuse.

Crime and justice in the context of resource scarcity

This concept paper presents a theory of environmental scarcity developed byHomer-Dixon. Homer-Dixon developed a model to describe the consequences of scarcity for sub-national violence in third world countries. This paper hasfour interrelated purposes. First, it presents the model of scarcity developedby Thomas Homer-Dixon in 1999. Second, it assesses the way in which the scarcity model contextualizes criminal justice and criminology research, andby extension, how research in crime and justice processes can broaden the scarcity model. Third, it applies elements of the model to the United States,a goal that represents a generalization of the model from third-world to first-world settings. Fourth, it presents a particular case, the migrationof African-Americans from the rural South to urban centers in the 1950s and1960s and consequent inner-city violence in the 1960s, that displays manyelements of the environmental scarcity model.

Stony the Road They Trod: Forced Migration of African Americans in the Slave South, 1790-1865

Stony the Road They Trod: Forced Migration of African Americans in the Slave South, 1790-1865

Black and Multiracial Politics in America Edited by Yvette M. Alex-Assensoh and Lawrence J. Hanks. New York: New York University Press, 2000. 404p. $55.00 cloth, $21.00 paper.

The waves of immigrants arriving in the United States over the last 20 years, largely from Latin America and Asia, have settled in a few states—mainly California, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey—and in big cities in those states. Like the migration of African Americans to northern cities in the twentieth century and the suburbanization of whites, this demographic transformation is remaking urban politics. Black and Multiracial Politics in America, a collection of original essays, addresses the implications of this change for “the practice and process of black and multiracial politics in American society” (p. xiii). The authors seek to forge a new link between the study of black and the study of multiracial politics.

Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. By Heather Ann Thompson. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Pp. viii, 295. $29.95.

By the mid-1980s, the city of Detroit had become an icon in U.S. urban history. Many saw it as the most extreme example of what went wrong in Northern industrial cities in the late twentieth century. The sequence of events is well known: the rapid influx of African American migrants from the South, combative reaction from the white community, civil unrest culminating in the 1967 riot, white flight, the loss of manufacturing jobs, and the development of a desperately poor, socially alienated, primarily black underclass. Other cities experienced similar events, but Detroit's descent was certainly among the most dramatic.

"Nordics" and "Negroes"

The 2000 census marked a significant change in American racial classification: for the first time Americans could check more than one racial category. This policy shift has been heralded by some as the dawning of a new era when America sees beyond black and white to acknowledge and celebrate multiple ethnic heritages. Matthew Pratt Guterl, however, suggests that this future will be elusive. In his lucid and revealing book, The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940, Guterl describes the emergence of bi-racialism, marked by a focus on "race-as-color" with a limited palette of black and white. In the early twentieth century, when European immigration was reaching its peak, intellectual leaders on the left and right began to imagine an America whose racial identity would be collapsed into a "white-black dyad" (p. 5). This vision was fulfilled in the years following World War I when European immigration was cut off and African-American migration to the urban North accelerated dramatically. By the 1920s "Nordics" and "Negroes" became the central racial classifications in America. This pervasive bi-racialism fulfilled W.E.B. Du Bois's prediction that the problem of the twentieth century would be "the problem of the color line."

African American Migration to the North: New Evidence for the 1910s

The years between 1910 and 1920 witnessed the first wave of the “Great Migration” of African Americans to the North. This article uses new census data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series project to study self‐selection patterns in African American migration during this important decade. The results indicate that, contrary to contemporary accounts, migration rates rose at least as much among the literate as among the illiterate (and perhaps more), and migration increased more for married African Americans than for the unmarried.

America's First Black Town: Brooklyn, Illinois, 1830-1915

America's First Black Town: Brooklyn Illinois, 1830-1915. By Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Pp. xiv, 276. Index. Cloth, $37.50) Nearly a half-century after Rayford Logan called period from 1877 to 1901 the nadir for African Americans in United States, scholars still grapple with precision of term as a description of era. Jim Crow strictures enacted in North and South were designed to hold African Americans in a position as close to slavery as possible, but at same time fostered community development initiatives. Thus at one end of spectrum, historians have viewed Black history of late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a sort of golden age, of black press, for example, or black women's clubs, black towns, and black business, reflecting Black nationalist impulses of post-emancipation era. Such efforts present African Americans frustrated but not defeated by white supremacy. At other end of spectrum, scholars have described abuses and insults imposed by Jim Crow, absurdities of segregation, and persistence of terrorism. Stepping between these points, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua's commendable book, America's First Black Town: Brooklyn Illinois, 1830-1915, takes study of this period in new directions. Cha-Jua joins Shirley Portwood as one of very few scholars to consider Black life in Illinois outside of Chicago. Here, Cha-Jua examines development of Brooklyn, a small Black town in southern Illinois founded by escaped slaves from St. Louis, just across river. The book argues that the inter-relations of capitalism and racism structured situation of black urban residents, especially in and cities with majority black populations (p. 27) and proposes that paradigm applies to Brooklyn and numerous places where African Americans emerged as dominant political force. In doing so Cha-Jua draws on recent scholarship about culture and politics, migration and proletarianization, and infrapolitics and community dynamics. Given dearth of historical scholarship on black towns, Cha-Jua wisely builds on work of sociologists, economists, and political scientists. To create this fine-grained etymology of a black town, Founded by Change, Sustained by Courage, as town's motto reads, author draws on an impressive array of otherwise ordinary sources- newspapers, court records, manuscript census, deed books, city directories, marriage license records-- giving nuance to Black community life. Brooklyn originally was a freedom village, settled by escaped slaves and freepeople from St. Louis, result of the interaction between racial oppression and protonationalism [that] generated impulse to build black towns (3). Whether or not it was America's first black town, and what defines it as such, is a quibble. In any case, African Americans seized political power as a consequence of three factors: post-Civil War repeal of Black Laws that subsequently granted African Americans political rights; incorporation of village as a town distinct from surrounding municipalities; and migration of African Americans from South to North. They then controlled municipal politics after 1883. With industrialization process well underway in region, however, politics of autonomy yielded to an economics of dependency. For same reason that African Americans were attracted to Brooklyn-because it was a black town-Brooklyn was passed over in industrial development of metro-east region. …