Twenty Million Gone: The Southern Diaspora, 1900—1970

Sometimes there are significant movements in history that go unnoticed because they take place slowly over a long period of time and are marked by no major event. The Southern Diaspora of the 20th century is such a movement. Twelve million white and eight million black people left the Southern States for the Northern and Western States in the first three-quarters of the century, a significant phenomenon by any measure. It has been called one of the greatest voluntary migrations in history.

My focus today is on the white diaspora. It was less obvious and has been less studied than the Southern black migration to the Northern big cities, although it was larger. Out-migration from the South diminished after 1970, and I will not have a lot to say about more recent decades, when the rapid fracturing of American identity has rendered all generalizations questionable. Southerners moved to every part of the U.S., but the white diaspora was concentrated in the industrial Midwest and the Pacific States, including Alaska. From the 1930s to the 1970s, Southern-born people in those areas were around 12 per cent of the population. In 1970 there were more than 100,000 Southerners working in the auto industry in the Great Lakes States.

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