The Great Migration & the Identity Crisis of Southern White America

Phillips writes that the defining characteristic of a ‘Southerner’ is a feeling of white racial solidarity which casts all other social considerations in the shade; it is the “cardinal test of a Southerner.” When Phillips touches upon the subject of non-slaveholding whites, he emphasizes their zeal for the primacy of white civilization as an end unto itself. He relates two contemporary accounts of non-slaveholders, one a tinner and the other an overseer, to demonstrate this fervor but pointedly devalues their economic attachments to slavery, writing, “Both of them, and a million of their non-slaveholding like, had a still stronger social prompting: the white men’s ways must prevail; the Negroes must be kept innocuous.” Phillips rejects out of hand the sway of overt pecuniary motives against the weight of racial ones and this rejection is so absolute in part because “it is otherwise impossible to account

Before WWI, most black people had been dehumanized, effectively stripping them of the feeling to vote and were bereft from protection from police. “I am in the darkness of the south and I am trying my best to get out,” an inspirational migrant from Alabama wrote to the Chicago Defender. New opportunities for the urban part of the North blos-somed when the war reared its ugly head. The American industrial economy grew vigorously, and as existing European immigrants and white women were unable to meet demand, northern businesses leaned to black southerners to fill their place. When the word of higher wages and ameliorated working conditions spread around, northern businesses were met with positive feed-back as black men, in significant numbers came flocking, thus sprouting a social movement out of urban misery. The War, unknowingly, set the par for work for African Americans and the North became a liberating meadow for all those who sought equality and wanted to avoid the ‘racist menace’.

As we already noted – in the 1800s expediency of slavery was disputed. While industrial North almost abandoned bondage, by the early 19th century, slavery was almost exclusively confined to the South, home to more than 90 percent of American blacks (Barney W., p. 61). Agrarian South needed free labor force in order to stimulate economic growth. In particular, whites exploited blacks in textile production. This conditioned the differences in economic and social development of the North and South, and opposing viewpoints on the social structure. “Northerners now saw slavery as a barbaric relic from the past, a barrier to secular and Christian progress that contradicted the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and degraded the free-labor aspirations of Northern society” (Barney W., p. 63).

The progression of people into and within the United States has had an essential impact on the nation, both intentionally and unintentionally. Progressions such as The Great Migration and the Second Great Migration are examples of movements that impacted the United States greatly. During these movements, African Americans migrated to flee racism and prejudice in the South, as well as to inquire jobs in industrial cities. They were unable to escape racism, but they were able to infuse their culture into American society. During the twentieth century, economic and political problems led to movements such as The Great Migration and The Second Great Migration which impacted the United States significantly.

Beginning after World War II, another major force – the mechanization of agriculture – also contributed to the northward migration.

In the article “The Central Theme of Southern Slavery” Ulrich B. Phillips asserts that among several other motives that served as a drive for white Southerners to support slavery, the predominant one was their desire to preserve white supremacy in the South. He claims that all of the states in the US are similar except for the opinion about slavery. Phillips emphasizes that the idea of slavery in the South was important and perceived by southerners as heritage and a tradition. He also claims that the institution wasn’t merely economic, but also a system of social order. In addition, the white southerners saw abolition as a major threat to their economic freedom. According to Phillips, some Southerners saw deportation of african-american citizens as another solution to the slavery crisis in the United States. However,

The south losing economic profit was not the only worrisome thing on the rich southern aristocrat’s mind, they also feared their political, and social influences being ripped away from them. The manifest destiny of the 19th century allowed European settlers the ability to expand their territory across North America believing it was their destiny to conquest all things on the north America continent. The liberation of African American from slavery went against the manifest destiny since the destiny focused on European settlers enforcing their political and social authority over others. Comparatively, the south dreaded the rise of free African Americans since the rise would shatter the racial hierarchy put in place by white supremacist of America.

In doing so, Rodrique presents a body of work that displays how a specific region can aid in freedmen’s ability to gain an advantage in the free labor system. This specific focus on Reconstruction brings light the variables which effected the lives of the individuals living in the region, as well as varying connotations that come with Reconstruction itself. Without this study, the South’s story after the American Civil War is

Migration in  the  United States, the exodus  of more  than  six million black Americans out

Between the time period of 1840 and 1860, slavery played an influential and pivotal role in the development of a new southern lifestyle. In the struggle for dominance in America, slavery was the South’s stronghold and the underlying cause in much of their motives for many of the economic instigations along with the affirmative political actions. By dominating the everyday southerner’s life, slavery also dominated the economic and political aspects of life during the height of the slavery period. By the 1840’s the Southern economy had become almost entirely slave and and agriculturally dependent. Without the dependence of slaves in the south, a person was to remain landless, poverty stricken or struggling to sustain life through the means

Some of the pull factors that attracted blacks to leave the south were the chance to earn a better education, increasing amount of jobs, the right to vote, black owned companies, and the opportunity for a better economic welfare. These push and pull served as the major factor in blacks migrating from the south to the north. Blacks felt that the north had a better opportunity for them to achieve greatness and was the cause for blacks to look search for the identity of the “New Negro.”

The decline of slavery in the upper South in the early 19th century can be identified as a profound change which would contribute to the eventual division of the nation. After 1830, the pattern of regional slavery in the South experienced great variations, such that the upper South gradually declined ties with slavery while the lower South distinctively became identified with it. This profound change was brought on by a shift in utilizing free labor rather than slavery to drive economic production in the upper South (Goldfield et. al, p. 285). The climate and geography in states of the upper South overtime proved less

During the mass immigration era of America, an abundant number of people traveled to the urban industrial society of the United States in aspiration to seek job opportunities and better lives than the ones they left behind. These groups included the Poles, Italians, Chinese, Mexicans, Japanese, East European Jews, and the African- Americans. However, one of these groups mentioned was distinctly different from the rest: the African-Americans. They were already American citizens, who migrated to the northern American cities to free themselves from segregation, oppression, and harsh conditions they experienced in the South and obtain equal rights and opportunities. Although the African-Americans'

During the first and second world wars, the United States saw a migration of people from the southern states to the north and west. James Grossman wrote Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration to try to convey the movement not as a straightforward march but rather a much more complex movement of people based on many individual choices. Grossman writes that the journey to the North “was shaped by a complex interaction between structural forces in the South, the migration experience, structural forces in the North, racial attitudes, and the migrants’ perceptions of each of these. Migrants made important decisions based on those perceptions, and only an analysis of the total context of immigration—North and South—affords an understanding of either those decisions or the policy implications of responses to the movement.” Basing his narrative on the perspective of the migrants, Grossman first describes and analyzes black southern life. In this, he questions the role of labor agents, who were employed by northern industrialists to lure workers to their factories, as a primary cause of the movement. White southerners, who were concerned over the depletion of their labor and not accepting that African Americans can think for themselves, blamed the migration on these labor agents. Past historical accounts tended to accept these contentions at face value, thus exaggerating the role of the labor agent. Grossman argues that they played a secondary, although

Besides the obvious geographic differences between the Northern, Southern and Western regions of the United States, there are distinct political, economic and social development difference. Typically, an individual recognized as coming from the North, South or West will be defined by those attributes associates with these different regions. This paper will highlight those differences and their development with the specific timeframe of colonization to the civil war.