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Matthew C. Whitaker, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America, Journal of American History, Volume 93, Issue 2, September 2006, Page 570, https://doi.org/10.2307/4486335
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Over twenty million black and white Americans migrated out of the American South between 1900 and 1960, marching northward and westward in two parallel, yet distinct migrations that forever altered the political, cultural, religious, and socioeconomic fabric of the United States. The historian James N. Gregory analyzes and contextualizes those symbiotic migrations in his illuminating and timely (not to mention conceptually original) new book, The Southern Diaspora.
Gregory argues that the “southern diaspora” changed America by transforming American religion (by spreading Baptist and Pentecostal churches and reinvigorating both the black and white versions of evangelical Protestantism); American popular culture (especially in music, including blues, gospel, jazz, rhythm and blues, country, and hillbilly); racial hierarchies (by aiding black migrants in the great cities of the North and West develop institutions and political practices that enabled the modern civil rights movement and pockets of black political power to emerge); American conservatism (by contributing to new forms of white working-class and suburban politics); and the nature of American regions (by fueling the reconstructions that turned the South into an economic and political source of power and by collapsing the huge cultural differences between the South and the rest of the United States).
