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---------------- Thanks much for the James Gregory book heads-up. It's not atitle I was familiar with, but I should be. One of Gregory's claims--a widely-circulated claim, generally voiced as an unassailable historical truth--is the following, voiced in the review you've hyperlinked: "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)..." True enough, but not for the reasons most of us assume. According to James Loewen's extraordinary new study, SUNDOWN TOWNS, migrant southern blacks had dispersed widely throughout the midwest in the postbellum years, but after 1890 they were for all practical purposes ethnically cleansed from the small-town midwest, rerouted and displaced--with the help of lynchings, whitecappings, restrictive housing ordinances, and so-called "sundown regulations" that required all blacks to get out of town before sundown. Loewen's book, which is thoroughly researched, clearly and tightly argued, and careful never to make claims that can't be backed up, has forced me to resasses my understandings of southern violence and the origins of the blues. Mississippi, according to Loewen, only had a handful of sundown towns. Indiana and Ohio had several hundred each. Migrant black southerners in the 1910s and 20s who left the south in flight from Jim Crow WANTED to live in many different places, but they were violently corralled, as unwanted and displaced people, into Chicago, Detroit, and other urban centers. Loewen makes this indisputably clear. After reading him, you can't look at the so-called Great Black Migration in quite the same way--as though, for example, the black Mississippians evoked in the opening chapters of Robert Palmer's DEEP BLUES, who settled on particular blocks on Chicago's South Side that corresponded with the Mississippi county they'd come from, had somehow all actually WANTED to end up in Chicago. Chicago was the land of promise at least in part by default: because Indiana, southern Illinois, and Ohio were the land of white violence, prideful self-identified "all-white towns," and a series of "understandings" about residency that had the effect of letting African American migrants know that they were comprehensively unwanted outside midwestern cities. I remember Harriet Ottenheimer shocking the Penn State blues conference attendees in 1999 when she pointed out (with the help of a two-page handout) that not ONE of the extant descriptions of blues from the 1890s--i.e., the very earliest literary and folkloristic renderings of blues--was actually set in the South. They were all set in the midwest: Evansville, Indiana; St. Louis, MO. She cited Handy for Indiana: a young black guitarist singing "Got no more home than a dog." The handout contained 5-7 passages. Loewen's book made me realize that the blues may have evolved in part as a result of itinerant black southern musicians who traveled up the Mississippi and Ohio discovering that escaping from Jim Crow, southern style, had taken them out of the frying pan into an unexpectedly widespread fire. Got no more home than a dog, even up North--except in Chicago, Detroit, and the cities. But don't think you can move from southern country to northern country. You weren't allowed to do that between 1890 and 1930, if you were African American. --Adam
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