Book Examines how settling of Southerners across U.S. shaped us

Aretha Franklin's family left the South in the 1940s. Her father, the Rev. C.L. Franklin, moved north from Memphis, looking for a bigger pulpit for his beautiful sermons. The man Jesse Jackson called "the most imitated soul preacher in history" found a new home at Detroit's New Bethel Baptist Church. Aretha Franklin, who would grow up to become the queen of soul music, saw the gospel and soul greats of the 20th century pass through her front door - Mahalia Jackson, Dinah Washington, Sam Cooke and Lou Rawls.

Like the Franklins, Loretta Lynn's family left the South looking for a better life. Married at age 13, Lynn and her husband left the depressed coal country of Appalachia and migrated to northern Washington state. Her husband worked farming, logging and auto mechanic's jobs, and Lynn took her songs into port cities and timber towns wherever other white Southerners gathered, looking for a tune from home. A wealthy lumberman sent her to Los Angeles to record her first record ("I'm a Honky Tonk Girl"), and Loretta Lynn became the queen of a Southern style of music that today provides the anthems for conservative, working-class America.

These two larger-than-life performers are two of the 28 million Southerners who left the South in the 20th century. Their story is chronicled in a fascinating new book by University of Washington history professor James Gregory, "The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America" (University of North Carolina Press, 446 pp., $19.95). Drawing from newly available census data, Gregory has traced the 20th-century exodus of both black and white Southerners, and the changes they wrought on American politics, music, sports and culture.

Gregory's study of exiled Southerners began back in graduate school at Berkeley. His Ph.D. thesis addressed the "Okie-Arkie" migrations to California during the Depression: It later turned into a 1989 book, "American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California" (Oxford University Press).

One of Gregory's specialties is labor history. After publishing a paper on the "Southernization" of the American working class, he remembers comments from one reader that "there shouldn't be papers just on black Southern migrants or white - someone needs to put these things together."

At that point, Gregory, says, "a light bulb went on. ... We didn't know how to talk about African-American history and white Southern history together."

"There's been a lot of history written on the great black migration - much less on the white migration. ... I started by comparing experiences, but decided that the most important thing I could do was tell how the migrants changed America."

Gregory was aided in his research by a joint project between the Minnesota Population Center and the U.S. Census that has yielded new methods of analyzing census data. Not only could Gregory trace Southern-born emigrants to other states, he also could compare their employment and income patterns, both with each other and with other groups.

He found that an astonishing number of Southerners left home in the 20th century - enough to depopulate the states of Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and Arkansas: close to 8 million black Southerners, nearly 20 million white Southerners and more than 1 million Latinos.

They all left to escape the grinding poverty and stunted opportunities of a South ravaged by the Civil War and Reconstruction and held back by its agricultural economy. Of course, blacks also fled to escape pernicious Jim Crow laws and customs that denied equal access to voting, education and employment, not to mention violence against blacks, from everyday intimidation to lynching.

As they migrated north and west, the lives of blacks and whites diverged.

Blacks moved to the big cities of the North and West, which Gregory collectively dubs "The Black Metropolis." Two out of every three black emigrants lived in one of eight major cities (New York-Newark, Philadelphia-Camden, Chicago-Gary, Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Los Angeles-Long Beach, San Francisco-Oakland). In Chicago, the black city-within-a-city had a population of 300,000.

They found jobs. Though paid wages far below whites, their earning power soared compared with what they would have made back home. And their segregated confinement to specific neighborhoods actually increased their political unity.

They joined large urban churches like the Rev. Franklin's. They supported an activist black press with a national reach - most of the Chicago Defender's 230,000 readers in the 1920s lived outside Chicago, primarily in the South. And Northern blacks embraced jazz, a new form of music that the entire nation would eventually take as its own. "Southern musical styles needed to come north to achieve commercial takeoff," Gregory writes.

Meanwhile, Southern whites flocked to high-paying jobs in the automotive, tire and steel-making industries. In the "golden age" of unionized, high-paying jobs, wages were far better than they would ever have made down south.

Some settled in concentrated neighborhoods - Bakersfield, Calif., the Miami Valley of Ohio - where Southern-white "hillbilly" behavior and stereotypes persisted. But most dispersed to small cities and suburbs, and their influence was dispersed as well. They blended in - "There was not a lot of job or housing discrimination," Gregory says. "The bottom line was that they were white."

Gregory's take on the story of Northern black communities is more upbeat than previous interpretations, which painted blacks in Northern cities as hemmed in by the ghettos and victimized by low wages and dismal prospects. While white emigrants outnumbered blacks two to one, Gregory believes the black Diaspora had a greater impact on American history.

Black leaders "were able to develop political leverage that was quite extraordinary," Gregory says, thanks to their concentration in Northern cities key to Democratic Party politics and presidential aspirations.

They changed federal policy beginning with the creation of the federal Fair Employment Practices Committee in the 1940s. And block by block, they fought to open up city neighborhoods to black home ownership.

Blacks protested degrading racial stereotypes in the Northern press, and the Northern press slowly came around. One breakthrough piece: a 1941 Fortune magazine seven-page spread featuring Seattle artist Jacob Lawrence. Those contacts created a relationship between civil-rights leaders and Northern newspapers that would be forged in blood in the South in the 1960s, when black protesters were attacked for demonstrating, and white newspaper reporters were beaten for covering their story.

The Southern white influence on national politics was more muted, especially compared with the huge number of whites who emigrated. Their political influence has been harder to categorize and more diffuse. Though selected Southerners provided leadership for anti-black groups such as the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, most Southerners did not participate, choosing instead to blend in with the customs of their Northern and Western neighbors.

Some Southern expatriates, the liberal intelligentsia such as writers Robert Penn Warren, Erskine Caldwell, Willie Morris, Truman Capote, James Agee and William Styron, painted anguished portraits of their home ground while in exile in New York and New Haven. These influential writers forced Southerners to search their own consciences on race matters and prepared the ground for Northern participation in the civil-rights movement.

But other Southerners who dispersed north and west eventually helped push the country to the right. The Christian evangelical movement, which began in the South, eventually allied itself with the Republican Party, helping it turn from the party of privilege to the party of the conservative white working class. Country music, which began in the hills of Appalachia, became an anthem for "love-it-or-leave-it" style American patriotism during the Vietnam War. Merle Haggard, a Southerner who moved west to California, began the trend with "Okie from Muskogee," and country-music singers have largely waved the flag ever since.

In the end, the Southern Diaspora ended almost as dramatically as it began. Both white and black outmigration had virtually ceased by the 1980s, as the Southern economy revived and racial progress made the South a more comfortable home for African-Americans.

By the late 1970s, in a what-goes-around-comes-around development, folks started moving back home. More than 200,000 black expatriates and almost 900,000 white expatriates turned toward home in that decade, back to a region transformed by a Sun Belt economic boom and a civil-rights movement that changed the South in ways the early-20th-century exiles could never have hoped, dreamed of or imagined. "The Southern Diaspora contributed to the Southernization of America' and at the same time toThe Americanization of Dixie,'" Gregory writes.

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(c) 2006, The Seattle Times. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.