The Great Migration & the Identity Crisis of Southern White America
The Great Migration &
The Identity Crisis of Southern White America
Based on documents from Eric Arnesen’s Black Protest and the Great Migration
The Great Migration of Southern blacks northwards and out of the Southern states created two fundamental crises in the lives of white Southerners, that of economy and that of identity. The inability of the white South to internalize the rapidly changing realities of race relations, and to move beyond the paternalist worldview that it clung to, would compound and then exacerbate a very concrete crisis in the evisceration of the traditional labor supply of the South. Unable and unwilling to recognize and embrace a new sense of identity in relation to African Americans, the white South would suffer the evaporation of the abundant supply of artificially cheap Negro labor upon which the Southern economy was dependent and become forced to confront the racist and inaccurate racial identities they had made the foundation of Southern society and order. The documents collected by Eric Arnesen in Black Protest and the Great Migration bring to light how deeply alarming the Great Migration was in the minds of white Southerners, and how the crisis of identity it precipitated would act as herald and courier to the end of traditional Southern society and the rise of a New South.
The decision of the black Southerner to leave the South constituted a crippling threat to the social and economic order of the entire region. Developed over the decades following the end of the Reconstruction Era and based upon the legacy and ideals of the Antebellum era, the legitimacy of that order depended upon a set of assumptions, held nearly universally by white Southerners, about the nature of the Negro race and upon the racial identity that whites had constructed for themselves around assumptions. Included in Document 1 are several excerpts from white magazines and newspapers that display the white South’s total belief in the myth
The Identity Crisis of Southern White America
Based on documents from Eric Arnesen’s Black Protest and the Great Migration
The Great Migration of Southern blacks northwards and out of the Southern states created two fundamental crises in the lives of white Southerners, that of economy and that of identity. The inability of the white South to internalize the rapidly changing realities of race relations, and to move beyond the paternalist worldview that it clung to, would compound and then exacerbate a very concrete crisis in the evisceration of the traditional labor supply of the South. Unable and unwilling to recognize and embrace a new sense of identity in relation to African Americans, the white South would suffer the evaporation of the abundant supply of artificially cheap Negro labor upon which the Southern economy was dependent and become forced to confront the racist and inaccurate racial identities they had made the foundation of Southern society and order. The documents collected by Eric Arnesen in Black Protest and the Great Migration bring to light how deeply alarming the Great Migration was in the minds of white Southerners, and how the crisis of identity it precipitated would act as herald and courier to the end of traditional Southern society and the rise of a New South.
The decision of the black Southerner to leave the South constituted a crippling threat to the social and economic order of the entire region. Developed over the decades following the end of the Reconstruction Era and based upon the legacy and ideals of the Antebellum era, the legitimacy of that order depended upon a set of assumptions, held nearly universally by white Southerners, about the nature of the Negro race and upon the racial identity that whites had constructed for themselves around assumptions. Included in Document 1 are several excerpts from white magazines and newspapers that display the white South’s total belief in the myth