Book Review

Canada and the United States

The great migration of African Americans to northern cities that began just before World War I was far more important than its magnitude might suggest. To be sure, many more blacks remained in the South than left it. Nonetheless, persistent divisions of race and class in urban areas had their origins in this internal migration that continued into the 1930s. Although scholars have examined the migration's socioeconomic dimensions, less attention has been paid to its religious significance or, most importantly, to the roles played by African-American churches, long acknowledged as the institutional fulcrum of black life.

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Milton C. Sernett's rich and wide-ranging book attempts to fill this conspicuous gap. The bipartite organization of the book reflects his two-fold argument. His first point is that participants experienced the migration as a religious event. While economic variables may have been crucial precipitating factors, Sernett argues that African Americans, caught in a hostile environment and battling the psychological and physical onslaught of white violence, invested the migration with religious meaning. Drawing on a rich history of biblical interpretation, blacks rebelled against southern economic and political conditions in a way that resonated with earlier responses to enslavement: they saw the "exodus" as the latest chapter in an ongoing salvation history. Efforts by white southerners to staunch the flow by detaining or even arresting suspected migrants validated the belief that blacks were still in Egyptian bondage and confirmed that the only appropriate response was a pilgrimage out of the wilderness and into the Promised Land.

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