The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America.

• Author: Jacoby, Daniel
• Position: Book review

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. Pp. xiv, 446. $59.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Imagine a century-long regional migration involving at least 28 million individuals in a nation whose population rose from 76 million in 1900 to 282 million in 2000. Imagine further that this migration proceeded from an area whose social foundations differed markedly from those at the migrants' destination. Such an event would be expected not only to disturb the everyday patterns of fife, but perhaps even to transform them. In The Southern Diaspora, James N. Gregory carefully documents the people's movements from the southern to the northern United States, their adjustments to a new environment, and how these phenomena reconstructed the country's social and political landscape. Pulling all this material together in a single volume is a tall order, but one that the author completes artfully while contributing new insight into familiar events.

Unlike Nicholas Lemann's The Promised Land: The Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York: Knopf, 1992), Gregory's study juxtaposes the dual migrations of whites and blacks, as if he were detailing the separation of two isolated forces before they come together in the act of lifting American society from its moorings. His introductory chapters lay out the key theories and data that define the great migration. Gregory then denudes our historical understandings by practically removing the standard emphasis on racial tensions. He focuses instead on specific episodes of accomplishment, cohesion, and discomfort for both whites and blacks as they resettle in the North or return home. Central to his account are cultural achievements in music, literature, radio, and community life that in most other accounts are seen almost exclusively through the prism of race. In Gregory's approach, the history of these peoples is first made alien before it is subsequently reworked into a larger political narrative whose outcomes we already know.

Although Gregory acknowledges the difficulties of dislocation, he refuses to see the migration saga in terms of maladjustment or failure. Whereas others might see the movement north in terms of unfulfilled promise, he focuses on achievements. African Americans clearly encountered damaging economic discrimination, but it did not prevent them from exploiting the...