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Reviewed by Darrel E. Bigham | Book Review | The Indiana Magazine of History, 105.1 | The History Cooperative
105.1  
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March, 2009
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A Little More Freedom
African Americans Enter the Urban Midwest, 1860–1930

By Jack S. Blocker
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008. Pp. xvii, 330. Illustrations, notes, appendices, index. Clothbound, $49.95; CD, $9.95.)

Jack S. Blocker argues that most African Americans arriving in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio during and after the Civil War settled in "nonmetro-politan" areas but gradually left them for cities. Northern migration, Blocker writes, reflected the "mental maps" that black migrants carried with them—personal images that reflected their interests. Their quality of life in the Midwest depended on local economies, the attitudes and actions of whites, and the conditions within each black community. While violence between 1885 and 1910 shaped migration patterns, population decline in the region's towns was slow and steady. 1
      This book focuses on four of the region's 364 towns containing at least 2,500 residents: Washington Court House and Springfield, Ohio; Spring-field, Illinois; and Muncie, Indiana. It is organized into three parts. The first deals with waves of migration before 1890. Part two (1860–1910) examines conditions that migrants found and how they coped with them. The last section explores (mostly after 1910) "the choices made by migrants before leaving the South as well as those that brought them to some destinations rather than others in the Lower Midwest" (p. 12). . . .
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