| The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America. By James N. Gregory. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xvi, 446 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8078-2983-8. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5651-7.) | |
| Over twenty million black and white Americans migrated out of the American South between 1900 and 1960, marching northward and westward in two parallel, yet distinct migrations that forever altered the political, cultural, religious, and socioeconomic fabric of the United States. The historian James N. Gregory analyzes and contextualizes those symbiotic migrations in his illuminating and timely (not to mention conceptually original) new book, The Southern Diaspora. | 1 |
| Gregory argues that the “southern diaspora” changed America by transforming American religion (by spreading Baptist and Pentecostal churches and reinvigorating both the black and white versions of evangelical Protestantism); American popular culture (especially in music, including blues, gospel, jazz, rhythm and blues, country, and hillbilly); racial hierarchies (by aiding black migrants in the great cities of the North and West develop institutions and political practices that enabled the modern civil rights movement and pockets of black political power to emerge); American conservatism (by contributing to new forms of white working-class and suburban politics); and the nature of American regions (by fueling the reconstructions that turned the South into an economic and political source of power and by collapsing the huge cultural differences between the South and the rest of the United States). | 2 |
| Gregory describes the southern diaspora as an underappreciated locomotive of historical change in the second half of the twentieth century. In the end, Gregory maintains, those migrations made the North and the West more like the South and the South more like the North and West. In charting the travels of southern migrants, Gregory is able to link the histories of distinct people such as the politicians Willie Brown and Jesse Unruh, the singers Aretha Franklin and Loretta Lynn, the religious leaders Billy Graham and C. L. Franklin, the boxer Joe Lewis, and the comedienne Lily Tomlin. He highlights the ways in which the histories of those individuals reflected larger trends in American history that were initiated and sustained by the southern diaspora. | 3 |
| Despite the fact that almost fifteen million white southern migrants left the south, a number that greatly surpassed the total of six and half million blacks who left the region, Gregory argues that this black diaspora had a more significant effect on American history. Blacks moved to the industrial cities of the North, Gregory posits, and that migration helped them achieve what they could not have accomplished if they had remained in the South. The geography of settlement was important. Blacks settled in cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and New York, where they would come to wield substantial political and cultural power. Even though they settled into so-called “ghettos,” black migrants forged tightly knit communities and formidable institutions. Those efforts paved the way for the modern civil rights movement and the nation’s burgeoning interest in multiculturalism. Although The Southern Diaspora does not offer a cavalcade of new information, it is certainly the first American migration study to offer a sustained, well-written exploration of two unique, yet interwoven, migrations that changed the face of American society. | 4 |
| Matthew C. WhitakerArizona State University Tempe, Arizona | |
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