This book is about Brown and Unruh, Franklin and Haggard, Graham and another Franklin, Murray and Morris, and the millions of other diaspora southerners and their impacts on twentieth century America. It is the first historical study of the southern diaspora in its entirety. Historians have until now fragmented the subject along lines of race and time period. The migration of African Americans out of the South has been studied extensively, especially in its early phase during and after World War I. Less has been written about the more massive sequence of migration that began during World War II and a comprehensive treatment of the century-long story of black migration does not exist. Studies of white southerners on the move are more limited in number and most focus on particular segments of that migration. Those who have written about the movement of Appalachians and other southerners into northern cities pay little attention to the so-called Dust Bowl migration to California and visa versa. [ix]

   This book assembles and disassembles the various sequences of southern outmigration. African Americans and whites left the South for somewhat different reasons, moved in somewhat separate directions, and interacted on very different terms with the places they settled. In most respects we need to think in terms of two Great Migrations out of the South. But they were also related. There were similarities as well as differences in the motivations for leaving the South and certain parallels along with huge differences in what black and white southerners experienced and accomplished in the North and West.

            One of the strategies of this book involves the side-by-side comparison of the dual migrations. That stereoscopic view yields a host of new insights about each of the groups and their experiences. The chapters that follow will challenge many of the standard assumptions about the experiences of these former southerners. The image of white Southerners struggling through decades of hard living in "hillbilly ghettos" like Chicago's Uptown crumbles as we widen the frame of reference. So do some of the stories that emphasize disappointments and failures among blacks. Comparison of the community building and political activities of the two groups is equally productive. The political accomplishments of African Americans become all the more impressive when set next to the endeavors of the much more numerous white migrants.

             There is another reason for integrating these stories. In complicated ways the fate of white and black southerners outside their home region was often intertwined.  Especially that was the case in the two decades following World War II when sociology and journalism created powerful arguments that linked the two populations of former southerners. Moreover certain venues and projects drew upon southern culture in ways that sometimes pulled the two groups of expatriates into relationship. We see this in the postwar transformation of northern Protestantism and the separate but in some ways complementary influence of the evangelical churches that black migrants and white migrants built. Likewise we see it in the transformation of American popular music—in the country music that the white migrants helped spread as well as the multiple genres that black migrants pioneered. And in the reconstructions of northern politics-- the new forms of urban politics and racial liberalism that black migrants forged, and the new forms of white-working-class conservatism that white migrants helped shape. Even when their lives were separate, the two groups of former southerners were never out of touch.

            The book is not just about what the dual streams of former southerners experienced. More centrally it examines what their comings and goings, their struggles and creations, have meant for the United States over the course of the twentieth century. The southern diaspora is one of the missing links in historical understandings that recent century. As we will see, the great migrations of black and white southerners were instrumental in many of the key domestic transformations that the nation experienced, especially  reorganizations of race, religion, and region.  Some of the major stories of recent American history look very different when viewed through the lens of the southern diaspora.

            One story that looks different concerns black struggles for civil rights. It is widely understood that migration to the North was important to the battle for rights and respect, but the geography of black politics has rarely been carefully examined. Here we pay close attention to the ways that African American migrants were able to use the unique political capacities of the great cities where they settled and how that political influence translated into policy changes that transformed racial relations first in the North and West and then also in the South.

            The revival and spread of evangelical Protestantism (both black and white versions), the southernization of American popular music through the circulations of jazz, blues, hillbilly, and country music, new forms of black politics and racial liberalism and new forms of white supremacist and conservative politics were also part of the diaspora effect. Indeed key political realignments of various kinds pivoted on the two groups of southerners living outside their home region.

            The reformulation of regions is another legacy of the dual diaspora. Classical economists see migration as an equilibrium mechanism that over time is supposed to balance labor surpluses and lead to a convergence of standards and wages. This book pursues an argument that bears a superficial resemblance to that theory but undermines its logic. Migration in this analysis contributed to a convergence of many regional forms, not just economic but also political and cultural. Southerners outside the South participated in a sequence of historical transformations that changed the regions where they settled and also changed the South, bringing the racial, religious, and political institutions of each into closer relation. But no equilibrium theory can explain this convergence. These changes prove to be the work of actual people not abstract economic processes. Southern migrants of both races became agents of change, who used the opportunities of geography to alter the cultural and political landscape of the nation and all its regions.

Region is a fluid geographical concept in the American context. States are the sub national spaces recognized in the Constitution and equipped with clear boundaries and governmental institutions, while regions are spaces of uncertain integrity and confusing borders. That is true even of the South, long the most definite of American regions thanks to the history of spatialized conflict over slavery and race. "If you look at the whole South long enough," writes sociologist John Shelton Reed, "it goes all indistinct around the edges. If you continue to stare, even the middle can seem to melt and flow away." So scholars fight endlessly about how to bound the South and describe its core meanings and structures. Those struggles have their uses, but not to this study. We will define the South loosely and even inconsistently, recognizing that definitions can change over time and depend upon perspective. Is Florida a Southern state? Some would say yes at the start of the twentieth century, no after decades of migration from New York and Cuba. Are Baltimore and Washington D.C. southern cities? The argument here involves not only change over time but racial perspectives. What makes a space seem southern can differ for whites and blacks. For most purposes we will follow the Census Bureau definition of sixteen states and the District of Columbia (Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia). But at other points we will reopen the issue of boundaries. [x]

Race is another concept that requires a note of clarification. White and black are never neat categories, even in a place like the South that did so much to inscribe them in law and where until late in the twentieth century low volumes of immigration minimized ethnic and religious diversity within the two dominant racial groups. Although there will be many generalized statements about white southerners and black southerners, more nuanced discussions at certain points will remind us that these are complicated population identities with mutable boundaries. In addition, it is important to note that not all southerners acknowledge either racial label and that southern-born Latinos and Native Americans also left the region during the diaspora period. Their experiences will be distinguished briefly at some points but unfortunately cannot be adequately examined in this study.

            The book proceeds thematically rather than chronologically—the usual strategy for a work of history. Each chapter is an essay that addresses a set of particular questions using a stereoscopic method that moves back and forth between the two groups of southerners. Stereoscopes set two similar but different images next to each other, tricking eyes and brain into fusing the images in a way that makes them three dimensional. Teasing out that third dimension is the goal of this book. Viewed in relation to each other, the black and white southern diasporas reveal the subject in entirely new ways.

Chapter 1 is an overview of the migration cycles and the changing economics and demography over the course of the twentieth century. It offers a new method for calculating migration volumes and shows the southern diaspora to have been numerically larger than previous scholars have understood.

 Chapter 2 surveys the public meanings surrounding the two exoduses and highlights the unique role that media institutions and social scientists played in shaping the expectations and interactions of southerners on the move. 

Chapter 3 answers questions about the economic experience of white and black southerners, dismantling the maladjustment paradigm that has been so prominent in previous scholarship while also showing the critical differences in the opportunity structure facing black and white southern migrants. 

Chapter 4 examines the communities that African Americans built in the major cities, resurrecting the label “Black Metropolis,” and mapping the new and powerful cultural apparatus of those communities. 

Chapter 5 examines the very different community formations of white southerners who spread out through suburbs and rural areas as well as big cities and struggled with confusing issues of social identity. The whites, too, developed cultural institutions of historical import. Both diaspora country music and a white diaspora literary community would reshape understandings of region and race.

 Chapter 6 explores the diaspora’s impact on American religion as both groups built Baptist and Pentecostal churches and helped revitalize and spread evangelical Protestantism, with important political as well as religious implications for America. 

Chapter 7 develops the issue of black political influence, demonstrating how important geography was to the initial phases of what ultimately becomes the civil rights movement. 

Chapter 8 brings the white migrants into the story of race, class, and regional transformations, exploring contributions on the one hand to white-working class conservatism and on the other hand to new formulations of white liberalism. 

Chapter 9 brings the diaspora to a close in the 1970s and 1980s and summarizes some of the major findings of the book.

            A short invocation before we begin. This book in its largest sense is a call for new thinking about internal migration, one of the seriously under analyzed issues of twentieth century American historiography. While the scholarship of earlier centuries focuses imaginatively on the figure of the Moving American and treats the westward migration of Euro-Americans as a pivotal historical force, historians of the most recent century sideline the subject of internal migration. Migration is treated as an important matter for African American history, but other population movements rarely enter into the calculations of those writing the history of the American twentieth century.[xi]

            If historians have failed to adequately address the subject, social scientists have not done much better. Migration studies, once a cutting edge enterprise for sociologists and economists, have been stuck for decades in dead ends and stale formulations. Most of the work cannot get beyond the question of why migrations happen, the old push-pull conundrum. Huge debates rage between advocates of neoclassical economic theory and dependency theory, both of which contemplate migration as a response to differential economic development. A third formulation, migration systems theory (a version of which is sometimes called exodus theory), moves beyond economic conditions, treating migration as a social movement and specifying institutional and social-cultural factors that enable mass relocations, but it too concentrates solely on the causes of migrations while ignoring their effects. All of these perspectives see moving people as subject to history but not its architects.[xii]

An old theory, dating back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, holds some promise. It conceives migration is a fundamental force of history. The social scientists who crafted it had in mind conquest migrations of the sort that rearranged European and Asian empires in millennia past, or that transformed the Americas when Europeans came swarming across the Atlantic.  But conquest may not be the only basis through which moving masses can redirect the flow of history. Infiltration can also be powerful. Certain peoples moving into certain places have managed to impart dramatic changes, achieving conquests of a sort without warfare and sometimes without major conflict. Can internal migrations have consequences of this sort? If so, how? Those are the questions animating this book. [xiii]

        Unlike these other pairs, Albert Murray and Willie Morris did know each other. Indeed the black writer and the white writer had spent New Years day 1967 together in Murray's Harlem apartment, drinking bourbon, talking politics, and thinking about their parallel and unparallel lives. Morris, the 32-year old editor of Harper's Magazine was just then completing a memoir, North Toward Home, filled with critical memories of Mississippi and of the conflicts that rattled the faith of a liberal white southerner living in New York City. He wanted Murray to write something for the magazine about his own life's journey from rural Alabama to literary Harlem. Murray would eventually take the assignment and turn it into memoir whose syncopated rhythms and perambulating conversations had little in common with North Toward Home. But the title, South to a Very Old Place, suggested something of the linked origins of the two books and the intertwined lives of their authors.[viii]