Friday, May 15, 2015

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.

5 comments:

  1. My goodness Brock, what a sad lovely song. It brought tears to my tired old eyes, now I need to go learn it on my old Guild, teach the kids and we'll have a new one in the front porch repertoire.

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  2. People HAD to leave the south to survive! There were no jobs! Even when I was a child in the 1950's if you weren't lucky enough to get a job at one of the nearby military
    bases, didn't have an education that would allow you one of the few and underpaid
    teaching jobs or own a big farm you could barely beat out a living. Black folks and white folks left in droves. I can remember the relatives of the black sharecroppers on
    our farm who would come back home from Detroit City or Philly driving nicer cars than
    most anyone in our town. The only reason we had share croppers was because my father ran a leased service station 16 hours a day 6 days a week by himself to try and
    pay for my grandfathers farm after he bought it from his siblings. One of my uncles went to Newport News Va and worked in the shipyard. Another, the youngest, managed to go to college getting a degree in Agriculture education. He was the first in the family and the only one in that generation to get an education beyond high school. We didn't know it but we were poor! CH

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    Replies
    1. A wonderful report and I can't remember how many times I have heard "We didn't know it but we were poor." What a wonderful attribution to the Southern soul.

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