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Reviews / Comptes Rendus

James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2005)

JAMES GREGORY's new book is ambitious. From a scholarly perspective, its unwieldy subject matter might even approach the "are you crazy?" end of things. Gregory's main goal is to demonstrate the centrality of what he calls the "southern diaspora" — the millions of black and white southerners who left the South for the North and West between the turn of the 20th century and the 1970s — to the broader cultural and political economic currents of American history. This is not a book about the significance of "The South" in US history so much as a book about the importance of "southerners" in the history of the non-southern US. This means he must account for both the distinctive features of the separate "migrations," and their links and complementary elements. Along the way, then, he must also suggest a way to understand the enormous complexity of an era in which domestic issues in the US have taken on global significance. To put it in the terms of part of his subject matter, this is an academic stepping up to the plate. The risk of a-swing-and-a-miss is quite high.

I will refrain from a bad "home run" metaphor, and say rather that I am glad Gregory has this kind of ambition, and is willing to take on a big, messy subject, because this is a really good book that works very well. Part of the reason it is good, certainly, is that Gregory can write: in a conversational tone that somehow manages to be both confident and modest at the same time, he not only gets his main scholarly points across, but he also manages to make the book very enjoyable, sometimes even fun. There are interesting but brief digressions here and there, and he offers more lengthy discussions of southerners' place in the history of popular culture arenas like baseball, boxing, jazz, and country music. He also personalizes some of the history by narrating it through the experience of "case studies" like Lily Tomlin and Aretha Franklin (among others less well known), whose southern-migrant families, it turns out, lived not too far from each other in Detroit. For these reasons alone it will be an excellent book to use in the classroom, either undergraduate or graduate.

But it is not only the writing that is good here. The book also contains innovative scholarship, both methodologically and in its historical argument, and it speaks to our current political condition in a direct and interesting way. Gregory opens the book with a discussion of internal migration data gleaned from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series [IPUMS], a massive census-derived database developed at the University of Minnesota. (Gregory has made his data available online, and has added 24 of the most relevant tables as an appendix to the book.) The IPUMS data shows clearly some dimensions of the migration out of the South that have either been misread or attracted less historical attention than he argues they deserve. To take only a sample of these dimensions, Gregory finds that the southern migration was much more massive than usually thought — close to 30 million people left the region in the period in question. He also finds, complicating the focus on the African American "Great Migration" (which was of course very great, especially proportionally), that twice as many white southerners migrated as blacks. Moreover, he discovers how crucial relatively shortterm "turnover" or return migration was to whites, a factor that is missed by less fine-grained data. This leads him to conclude that "the white diaspora is best understood as a circulation, not as a one-way population transfer," in contrast to the black migration. (16) For those of us who work on the politics of race and class in the West, the book is also very welcome for refocusing some attention on the fact that the migrants, both black and white, did not just head north to cities like Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia, something that most histories, especially those of the African American population movement, seem to forget.

This is not to say that the book is not about cities, but it is not just about the big cities of the east — it has Los Angeles as well as Philadelphia, Oakland as well as Chicago. In fact, this is in many ways primarily a book about cities, a history of the impact of southerners on the culture and politics of urban America. He even makes a compelling case for the resurrection of the idea of the "Black Metropolis." The running analytical metaphor Gregory uses to study this is the stereoscope, which is a lens that gives two-dimensional images a third dimension (it is often used to allow one to see relief in aerial photographs). Gregory certainly follows the histories of black and white southern migrants in their new urban homes as two racially specific phenomena (the two dimensions of the conventional image). But he also argues that by examining them "stereoscopically" — i.e., thinking about them simultaneously, in their interaction — a "third dimension" becomes visible. (192) This third dimension constitutes a richer, and more accurate account of the diversity of meaning of southern-ness in the US.

Some of the best parts of the book cover the realm of "cultural production," which Gregory convincingly argues is the social site at which this third dimension is most apparent. Perhaps best laid out in vivid discussions of white country music, black blues and jazz, and the evangelicalism of black and white churches, he shows how although the strands of the diaspora were often opposed, they were at the same time "never out of touch." (193) Together, they "generated models, images, and ideas that contributed to important reformulations of racial identities and southern identities" during the 20th century. (194)

Gregory also uses this same approach to think about the increasing power of white "working-class" conservatism in the US (while acknowledging that it is not necessarily just working class), and its southern roots. This is the focus of the penultimate chapter, "Re-figuring Conservatism," and here he makes some interesting claims as to the extent to which the US has been "southernized," and conversely to which Dixie has been Americanized. His point is not that either shift has been dominant, but that it is the movements of the participants in the massive southern diaspora that have been one of the principal vectors through which these dynamics have worked.

This chapter, as good as it is, also points to my only real reservation about the book, and that lies in the danger of homogenizing the South. Gregory recognizes, as he says, that "there were, of course, many Souths," (22) but by the end of the book this point is somewhat lost, as "the South" is more frequently mobilized as a definitive regional marker. There is certainly evidence in the book that this homogenization made sense to the migrants, at least within the bounds of the "racial" categories through which the region is normally characterized. But I am not sure that analytically it might not be more useful to decompose these movements into some of the finer threads that Gregory weaves together. His justification for doing so — that the book is about the southerners outside the South, not so much about why they left — is well presented. Nonetheless, it seems to me the historical lessons that are obscured by the compression, such as some consideration of the sources of the wide range of white southern attitudes toward race (and how these mattered outside the South), are sometimes of crucial importance.

Gregory's conclusions — that race, class, institutions, and geography matter — will not surprise anyone. What is enormously important here is his emphasis on the fact that all of these things matter not abstractly or categorically, but rather because they are alive in the movement of real people, across real spaces, and in the ways they changed the real places to which they moved.


Geoff Mann Simon Fraser University

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