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Published: Fall 2005

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Copyright (c) 2005 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.

Preface

On election night, 2 November 2004, the contest had come down to Ohio, the most embattled of the battleground states, where for weeks the Democrats and Republicans had traded charges of voter suppression and voter fraud and where even on election day federal judges were deciding critical procedural issues. Now the nation watched the vote tallies that gave President George W. Bush a narrow lead over Senator John Kerry and saw again and again television footage of Ohioans waiting in line to vote long after the polls were supposed to have closed. The cameras focused on two different parts of Ohio that seemed locked in a desperate battle for turnout: Cleveland in the north, where the Democrats had their strongest base among African Americans, and the Miami Valley in the southwestern corner of the state, where Republicans counted on white evangelical Protestants to vote for the incumbent president.

Most Americans went to sleep that night wondering if President Bush would hold on to his lead. I ended the night with an additional thought: "I'm going to have to rewrite the preface to my book." Although the television commentators had not known it, the battle for Ohio in 2004 was part of the legacy of the Southern Diaspora. Some of the Cleveland Democrats who stood in the voter lines for hours that day were veterans of the great migration of black southerners out of the South; more were the children and grandchildren of those migrants. Similarly, many of the Butler County and Hamilton County Republicans who stood in equally long lines were linked to the great migration of white southerners. Moreover, the electoral mobilizations of 2004 rested upon cultural and political institutions that had been shaped by these two great southern migrations, from churches to popular music to the urban and suburban racialized political regimes. Even though the Southern Diaspora had effectively ended a quarter of a century before, its effects were still showing up in Ohio and many other northern and western states on election night.

This book is about what may be the most momentous internal population movement of the twentieth century, the relocation of black and white Americans from the farms and towns of the South to the cities and suburbs of the North and the West. In the decades before the South became the Sun Belt, 20 million southerners left the region. In doing so, they changed America. They transformed American religion, spreading Baptist and Pentecostal churches and reinvigorating evangelical Protestantism, both black and white versions. They transformed American popular culture, especially music. The development of blues, jazz, gospel, R&B, and hillbilly and country music all depended on the southern migrants. The Southern Diaspora transformed American racial hierarchies, as black migrants in the great cities of the North and West developed institutions and political practices that enabled the modern civil rights movement. The Southern Diaspora also helped reshape American conservatism, contributing to new forms of white working-class and suburban politics. Indeed, most of the great political realignments of the second half of the twentieth century had something to do with the population movements out of the South. Finally, the Southern Diaspora transformed the nature of American regions, helping with the reconstructions that turned the South into an economic and political powerhouse and collapsing what had been huge cultural differences between that region and the rest of the United States. This book traces these and other ways that the great southern migrations rearranged twentieth-century America.…

Introduction

It started on the very day that the freshman assemblyman arrived in Sacramento to join the California legislature in early January 1965. Still exhilarated from his upset victory, Willie Brown was confident that as the first African American from San Francisco elected to the legislature, he could make a difference. Eager to prove himself, he had almost immediately made a mistake. There was one critical rule in Sacramento, and it was simple: Don't mess with Big Daddy! Big Daddy was the 300-pound speaker of the Assembly, Jesse Unruh. The press called him a "political boss" and claimed he pulled more strings than the governor, Edmund G. "Pat" Brown. In fact, the governor and the speaker mostly worked together. Over the previous six years, they had passed a remarkable package of legislation that had given the state strong civil rights laws; redesigned education, transportation, and water systems; and financed ambitious urban and poverty programs. The governor took most of the credit, though Jesse Unruh, through his ruthless control of the legislature, had done much of the heavy lifting. He did not mind being notorious, although he disliked the Big Daddy label, which had come from Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. What he disliked even more were legislators who did not know their place. He was not going to like Willie Brown.[1]

The Willie Brown-Jesse Unruh contest is one of the best-loved stories of recent California politics. A feud that turned ultimately into a succession story, it began that first day of the 1965 session when Brown refused to support Unruh's reelection to the speakership because Unruh had campaigned for Brown's primary election opponent. Unruh promptly retaliated, and over the next several years the Assembly understood that the very junior Brown and the very powerful Unruh were at war. Less obvious was the fact that a kind of mentorship had been going on almost from the start. Willie Brown was Jesse's star student. Long before Big Daddy quit the legislature, he had come to admire the younger man's ability to play the game of power. Unruh at one point in 1967 offered a compliment. "It's a good thing you're not white," said Jesse. "Why's that?" asked Willie. "Because if you were, you'd own the place."[2]

California journalists retell this story both because it unites two of the state's most flamboyant political personalities and because it confirms one of the central fables of late-twentieth-century America, the great transformation in racial opportunities that has taken place since the 1960s. Willie Brown did go on to "own the place." Elected Speaker of the California Assembly in 1981 with Unruh's help, he served longer (fifteen years) with more ingenuity than any predecessor, including Big Daddy. Without missing a beat, Brown then moved up the political ladder, winning election as San Francisco's mayor in 1996 and holding on to that office through thick and thin until term limits ended his reign in 2003. The fact that Brown managed to outdo his mentor has served to make the story of their relationship all the more interesting. In Willie and Jesse, California finds a comforting tale of racial progress, of the transformation from an old California where only whites like Jesse Unruh held power to a new California that gives power to Willie Brown.

But the Jesse Unruh-Willie Brown succession story has another dimension that few Californians realize and that in some ways complicates the neat dichotomies of old and new, white and black. Jesse Unruh was not part of old California, anymore than Willie Brown was. In fact, neither man was a Californian; neither had grown up there. And their backgrounds were curiously similar. Both were southerners; both were from Texas.

Unruh, whose parents named him after the train robber Jesse James, was the son of north Texas sharecroppers. Brown grew up in east Texas in circumstances that his biographer says may have been marginally more fortunate than Unruh's. Brown's family had a long history in the all-black town of Mineola and owned a nice home, even if money was short by the time he was born in 1934. Willie was raised by his grandmother, aunts, and uncles while his mother lived in Dallas, where she worked as a maid. His father, a waiter, left when Brown was four or five. Unruh was not born into poverty in 1922 but watched his family descend into it as his father lost his job as a bank clerk, then tried sharecropping, managing to eke out only the barest of livings through much of the 1930s. Both Texans benefited from family commitments to education, and each did well in school. After briefly trying college, Unruh in 1941, at age eighteen, decided to hitchhike to Los Angeles, thinking he would work in a defense plant. When the war broke out, he enlisted in the navy, spending the next three years in the lonely Aleutian Islands, making plans for his future. Those plans were fixed on Los Angeles and a college education. When the navy let him go, he took his GI Bill and enrolled at the University of Southern California, finding there his love for politics. Even before he graduated in 1948, he was planning a way into politics.[3]

Willie Brown was entering the segregated high school in Mineola that year. When he graduated three years later, he briefly enrolled in one of the colleges that Texas set aside for African Americans, Prairie View A&M near Houston. But another idea had been brewing: he would go to Stanford. It was an impossible dream, of course. There was no money, and Brown's academic credentials would never pass muster at the elite school, but an uncle lived in San Francisco, and seventeen-year-old Willie Brown figured that was pretty close to Palo Alto. Stanford was on his mind in the summer of 1951 when he boarded the train heading west: "I came out with the intentions of going to Stanford and becoming a math professor."[4]

That these two Texans should cross paths in California in the mid-1960s was not particularly surprising. For more than half a century, Texans and other southerners had been leaving home by the hundreds of thousands, joining in a massive regional diaspora that had changed the face of race and politics and other dimensions of life in many corners of America. California felt the effects along with other western states, but the diaspora had also delivered its millions to the industrial states of the Midwest and Northeast. The numbers were enormous. By the end of the 1960s, so many black southerners and white southerners had left the region that it was as if the entire population of Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas had fled. Close to 11 million former southerners could be counted living outside the South in 1970. And that number is just a snapshot of population movements that over the course of the twentieth century involved millions more. In all, more than 28 million southerners—black and white—moved north or west during the twentieth century.[5]

Aretha Franklin and Merle Haggard should have crossed paths in the late 1960s. The two entertainers stood atop their respective branches of popular music, she the reigning queen of soul, he the king of country music. Like Brown and Unruh, they had more in common than they would have realized. Both were children of the Southern Diaspora. Franklin had grown up in Detroit after her family had moved there from Tennessee; Haggard in Bakersfield, California, after his parents relocated from Oklahoma. Their music continued the symmetry. Aretha recorded "Respect" in 1967, a song that instantly became a ringing anthem of black pride. Almost in answer, Merle Haggard wrote "Workin' Man Blues" and "Okie from Muskogee," anthems of the angry and conservative white working class. Seemingly politically opposite, the two musicians, both part of the diaspora, symbolized some of the sharpest polarizations in American politics and culture by the end of the 1960s.[6]

Billy Graham and C. L. Franklin should also have met. Fellow Baptists, fellow evangelists, fellow southerners who had built great religious enterprises in the North, they understood that they had much in common. As ministers of the gospel, they shared a mission. They would have prayed for their nation to heal its divisions and come together in a spiritual revival that would sweep away the hatreds of race. But even as their prayers might have joined, the meanings behind them would have been different. Graham, the most famous white Protestant leader of his day, a son of North Carolina who from his base in Minnesota had changed the face of evangelical Christianity, making it respectable where it had once seemed backward, preached a Christianity that was nine parts personal salvation. Franklin, a son of Mississippi (and father of Aretha), had been for many years one of the nation's most famous black evangelists. His sermons, recorded at New Bethel Church in Detroit, were known and loved throughout black America. But unlike Graham's, Franklin's preaching was not just about personal salvation; he also called for African Americans to stand together in the fight for rights and justice.[7]

Unlike these other pairs, Albert Murray and Willie Morris did know each other. Indeed, the black writer and the white writer had spent New Year's Day 1967 together in Murray's Harlem apartment, drinking bourbon, talking politics, and thinking about their parallel and nonparallel lives. Morris, the thirty-two-year-old editor of Harper's magazine, was just then completing a memoir, North toward Home, filled with critical memories of Mississippi and of the conflicts that rattled the faith of a liberal white southerner living in New York City. He wanted Murray to write something for the magazine about his own life's journey from rural Alabama to literary Harlem. Murray would eventually take the assignment and turn it into memoir whose syncopated rhythms and perambulating conversations had little in common with North toward Home. But the title, South to a Very Old Place, suggested something of the linked origins of the two books and the intertwined lives of their authors.[8]

This book is about Brown and Unruh, Franklin and Haggard, Graham and another Franklin, Murray and Morris, and the millions of other diaspora southerners and their impact on twentieth-century America. It is the first historical study of the Southern Diaspora in its entirety. Historians have until now fragmented the subject along lines of race and time period. The migration of African Americans out of the South has been studied extensively, especially in its early phase during and after World War I. Less has been written about the more massive sequence of migration that began during World War II, and a comprehensive treatment of the century-long story of black migration does not exist. Studies of white southerners on the move are more limited in number, and most focus on particular segments of that migration. Those who have written about the movement of Appalachians and other southerners into northern cities pay little attention to the so-called Dust Bowl migration to California.[9]

This book assembles and disassembles the various sequences of southern out-migration. African Americans and whites left the South for somewhat different reasons, moved in somewhat separate directions, and interacted on very different terms with the places they settled. In most respects, we need to think in terms of two Great Migrations out of the South. But they were also related. There were certain parallels along with huge differences in what black and white southerners experienced and accomplished in the North and West.

One of the strategies of this book involves the side-by-side comparison of the dual migrations. That stereoscopic view yields a host of new insights about each of the groups and their experiences. The chapters that follow will challenge many of the standard assumptions about the experiences of these former southerners. The image of white southerners struggling through decades of hard living in "hillbilly ghettos" like Chicago's Uptown crumbles as we widen the frame of reference. So do some of the stories that emphasize disappointments and failures among blacks. Comparison of the community building and political activities of the two groups is equally productive. The political accomplishments of African Americans become all the more impressive when set next to the endeavors of the much more numerous white migrants.

There is another reason for integrating these stories. In complicated ways, the fate of white and black southerners outside their home region was often intertwined. That was especially the case in the two decades following World War II when sociology and journalism created powerful arguments that linked the two populations of former southerners. Moreover, certain venues and projects drew upon southern culture in ways that sometimes pulled the two groups of expatriates into relationship. We see this in the postwar transformation of northern Protestantism and the separate but in some ways complementary influence of the evangelical churches that black migrants and white migrants built. Likewise, we see it in the transformation of American popular music—in the country music that the white migrants helped spread as well as the multiple genres that black migrants pioneered. And we see it in the reconstructions of northern politics—the new forms of urban politics and racial liberalism that black migrants forged and the new forms of white working-class conservatism that white migrants helped shape. Even when their lives were separate, the two groups of former southerners were never out of touch.

The book is not just about what the dual streams of former southerners experienced. More centrally, it examines what their comings and goings, their struggles and creations, have meant for the United States over the course of the twentieth century. The Southern Diaspora is one of the missing links in historical understandings of that recent century. As we will see, the great migrations of black and white southerners were instrumental in many of the key domestic transformations that the nation experienced, especially reorganizations of race, religion, and region. Some of the major stories of recent American history look very different when viewed through the lens of the Southern Diaspora.

One story that looks different concerns black struggles for civil rights. It is widely understood that migration to the North was important to the battle for rights and respect, but the geography of black politics has rarely been carefully examined. Here I pay close attention to the ways that African American migrants were able to use the unique political capacities of the great cities where they settled and how that political influence translated into policy changes that transformed racial relations first in the North and West and then also in the South.

The revival and spread of evangelical Protestantism (both black and white versions); the southernization of American popular music through the circulations of jazz, blues, and hillbilly and country music; new forms of black politics and racial liberalism; and new forms of white supremacist and conservative politics were also part of the diaspora effect. Indeed, key political realignments of various kinds pivoted on the two groups of southerners living outside their home region.

The reformulation of regions is another legacy of the dual diaspora. Classical economists see migration as an equilibrium mechanism that over time is supposed to balance labor surpluses and lead to a convergence of standards and wages. This book pursues an argument that bears a superficial resemblance to that theory but undermines its logic. Migration in this analysis contributed to a convergence of many regional forms, not just economic but also political and cultural. Southerners outside the South participated in a sequence of historical transformations that changed the regions where they settled and also changed the South, bringing the racial, religious, and political institutions of each into closer relation. But no equilibrium theory can explain this convergence. These changes prove to be the work of actual people, not abstract economic processes. Southern migrants of both races became agents of change who used the opportunities of geography to alter the cultural and political landscape of the nation and all its regions.

Region is a fluid geographical concept in the American context. States are the subnational spaces recognized in the Constitution and are equipped with clear boundaries and governmental institutions, while regions are spaces of uncertain integrity and confusing borders. That is true even of the South, long the most definite of American regions, thanks to the history of spatialized conflict over slavery and race. "If you look at the whole South long enough," writes sociologist John Shelton Reed, "it goes all indistinct around the edges. If you continue to stare, even the middle can seem to melt and flow away." So scholars fight endlessly about how to bound the South and describe its core meanings and structures. Those struggles have their uses, but not to this study. I will define the South loosely and even inconsistently, recognizing that definitions can change over time and depend upon perspective. Is Florida a Southern state? Some would say "yes" at the start of the twentieth century, "no" after decades of migration from New York and Cuba. Are Baltimore and Washington, D.C., southern cities? The argument here involves not only change over time but racial perspectives. What makes a space seem southern can differ for whites and blacks. For most purposes, I will follow the Census Bureau definition of sixteen states and the District of Columbia (Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia). But at other points, I will reopen the issue of boundaries.[10]

Race is another concept that requires a note of clarification. White and black are never neat categories, even in a place like the South that did so much to inscribe them in law and where until late in the twentieth century low volumes of immigration minimized ethnic and religious diversity within the two dominant racial groups. Although there will be many generalized statements about white southerners and black southerners, more nuanced discussions at certain points will remind us that these are complicated population identities with mutable boundaries. In addition, it is important to note that not all southerners acknowledge either racial label and that southern-born Latinos and Native Americans also left the region during the diaspora period. Their experiences will be distinguished briefly at some points but unfortunately cannot be adequately examined in this study.

The book proceeds thematically rather than chronologically, the usual strategy for a work of history. Each chapter is an essay that addresses a set of particular questions using a stereoscopic method that moves back and forth between the two groups of southerners. Stereoscopes set two similar but different images next to each other, tricking eyes and brain into fusing the images in a way that makes them three-dimensional. Teasing out that third dimension is the goal of this book. Viewed in relation to each other, the black and white Southern Diasporas reveal the subject in entirely new ways.

Chapter 1 is an overview of the migration cycles and the changing economics and demography over the course of the twentieth century. It offers a new method for calculating migration volumes and shows the Southern Diaspora to have been numerically larger than previous scholars have understood. Chapter 2 surveys the public meanings surrounding the two exoduses and highlights the unique role that media institutions and social scientists played in shaping the expectations and interactions of southerners on the move. Chapter 3 answers questions about the economic experience of white and black southerners, dismantling the maladjustment paradigm that has been so prominent in previous scholarship while also showing the critical differences in the opportunity structure facing black and white southern migrants. Chapter 4 examines the communities that African Americans built in the major cities, resurrecting the label "Black Metropolis" and mapping the new and powerful cultural apparatus of those communities. Chapter 5 examines the very different community formations of white southerners who spread out through suburbs and rural areas as well as big cities and struggled with confusing issues of social identity. The whites, too, developed cultural institutions of historical import. Both diaspora country music and a white diaspora literary community would reshape understandings of region and race. Chapter 6 explores the diaspora's impact on American religion as both groups built Baptist and Pentecostal churches and helped revitalize and spread evangelical Protestantism, with important political as well as religious implications for America. Chapter 7 develops the issue of black political influence, demonstrating how important geography was to the initial phases of what ultimately became the civil rights movement. Chapter 8 brings the white migrants into the story of race, class, and regional transformations, exploring contributions to white working-class conservatism on the one hand and to new formulations of white liberalism on the other. Chapter 9 brings the diaspora to a close in the 1970s and 1980s and summarizes some of the major findings of the book.

A short invocation before we begin. This book in its largest sense is a call for new thinking about internal migration, one of the seriously underanalyzed issues of twentieth-century American historiography. While the scholarship of earlier centuries focuses imaginatively on the figure of the Moving American and treats the westward migration of Euro-Americans as a pivotal historical force, historians of the most recent century sideline the subject of internal migration. Migration is treated as an important matter for African American history, but other population movements rarely enter into the calculations of those writing the history of the American twentieth century.[11]

If historians have failed to adequately address the subject, social scientists have not done much better. Migration studies, once a cutting-edge enterprise for sociologists and economists, have been stuck for decades in dead-ends and stale formulations. Most of the work cannot get beyond the question of why migrations happen, the old push-pull conundrum. Huge debates rage between advocates of neoclassical economic theory and dependency theory, both of which contemplate migration as a response to differential economic development. A third formulation, migration systems theory, moves beyond economic conditions, treating migration as a social movement and specifying institutional and social-cultural factors that enable mass relocations, but it too concentrates solely on the causes of migrations while ignoring their effects. All of these perspectives see moving people as subject to history but not as its architects.[12]

An old theory, dating back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, holds some promise. It conceives of migration as a fundamental force of history. The social scientists who crafted it had in mind conquest migrations of the sort that rearranged European and Asian empires in millennia past or that transformed the Americas when Europeans came swarming across the Atlantic. But conquest may not be the only basis through which moving masses can redirect the flow of history. Infiltration can also be powerful. Certain peoples moving into certain places have managed to impart dramatic changes, achieving conquests of a sort without warfare and sometimes without major conflict. Can internal migrations have consequences of this sort? If so, how? Those are the questions animating this book.[13]