#56, July 18, 2004
(historio)Graphical (5)
Group Portrait with Lady
Back in 1992 I learned that a new book of essays edited
by Joe William Trotter, Jr. had just been published in the field that I
had worked on for my dissertation, namely African American migration. I quickly decided that I needed to review this
work, The Great Migration in Historical Perspective,
and do so in as prominent a place as possible.
I dashed off a letter to the editor of Reviews in American History providing him with a sense of my credentials,
such as they were, and he agreed to let me do the job. The reason to write a review for the RAH, as every Americanist knows, is that
one is given a lot more words to play with than in most other journals like
the Journal of Ameircan History and American Historical Review. It turned out that another journal, American Quarterly, which also gave considerable
space to its reviewers, wanted me to write a review of this book, so my
exertions turned out to be somewhat unnecessary – though I was able to go
back to AQ and ask its review
editor if I could write a review of another book instead.
The volume of essays turned out to be a good one, but I
had some reservations about it. As
you will see below, it seemed to me that the book tended to follow the pattern
of most social history works influenced by the work of E. P. Thompson, in
that it tended to essentialize culture, diminish intra-racial divisions,
and attribute too much to the agency of the individual historical actors. Also, like other Thompson inspired pieces, it
seemed to downplay the significance of gender.
This was so, I felt, in spite of the excellent essay contributed
by Darlene Clark Hine, which in some ways only made the problems inherent
in the book that much more stark.
Given these caveats, I came up with a title for the review,
taken from one of my favorite novels by Heinrich Boll, and RAH accepted it. As much as
anything, I think it was the title of the review that grabbed people’s attention
and made the negative reaction the review received so strong. While I never received any criticism directly,
and was praised profusely on a couple of occasions in private, I was informed
that I had angered many with the review. One does not get away with such things. One example of this, I noted, was that when
a book of essays was published not too long ago on African Americans in
Finally, I should note, that the slightly combative
approach that I took in this review, and the response
it invoked stuck with me, and thenceforward I tended towards the polemical in my
historical writing. Honest guv’, I was a
mild mannered geezer before this!
The Author is far from having
insight into all aspects of Leni’s body-, soul-, and love-life, yet everything
– everything – has been done to obtain the kind of information on Leni that is
known to be factual (the informants will even be mentioned by name at the
appropriate junctures), and the following report may be termed accurate with a
probability bordering on certainty.
–
Heinrich Boll, Group Portrait with Lady[1]
Joe William
Trotter, Jr.’s edited volume, The Great
Migration in Historical Perspective (an outgrowth of the Smithsonian
Institute’s “From Field to Factory” exhibition) brought together some examples
of work in African American migration characterized by what the editor
described as the “proletarian approach”(p. 14).[2] This approach placed primary emphasis on the
process by which African Americans became urban-industrial workers, unlike the
“ghetto model”(p. 13), which focused primarily on
racial segregation.[3] The volume’s one exception to this
proletarian model was the final article on women and gender in the migration.
This contribution provided a fitting coda for the earlier pieces, leaving the
reader with the distinct impression that African-American migration history is
moving into some uncharted and exciting territory.
Viewed in light
of some of the pitfalls of earlier syntheses of the “Great Migration,” ably
detailed by the editor, the proletarian essays made a number of important
contributions to our understanding of the subject. Earl Lewis and Joe Trotter,
Jr. confirmed that the migration was not merely northward, but national.
Migrations to Norfolk, Virginia, and other southern towns and cities, as well
as to the coal mines in rural West Virginia, were also important. The
northern-biased literature, as noted previously, had tended to see the southern
town or city as merely a step on the way to the northern city. Such a view had
been disputed in the 1920s, by Monroe Work, a researcher for the Urban League;[4] it has now been laid
to rest by Lewis and Trotter. Shirley
Ann Moore added to this expanded view of the migration by not only describing a
migration to Richmond, California, but also taking the story past World War II,
the customary terminus for most studies of the “Great Migration.” Peter
Gottlieb, in his rethinking of the subject, moved both backwards and forwards
by looking at “the 100-year flow of African Americans out of their native
region”(p. 69). In the process, he focused on discontinuities in patterns of
migration as both the composition of the migration population and the many
reasons given for moving changed.
The authors
also showed that migrants were not powerless in the face of social, economic,
and political pressures – these migrants had “agency”, as Social Historians
like to say. According to Shirley Ann
Moore, they “were not passive victims pushed and pulled in a drama beyond their
control;” they were “active agents in shaping their participation in the urban
industrial workforce”(p. 108). James Grossman built
his analysis around the idea, developed fully in Land of Hope (1989), that the migration
was a “grassroots social movement” fueled by its own leadership and information
networks. Giving migrants agency was a prerequisite for analyses that, as these
essays did, treated them and the institutions they created with the respect
they deserved.
But there may
be pitfalls in concentrating too much attention on the question of agency.
First, agency may need to be differentiated from power. As George Orwell might
tell us, “all people have agency, but some have more than others.” While black
migrants were not passive victims, they clearly did not all have the same
resources available to them; many, as Allen Ballard asserted, might be labeled
“refugees,” or, as Carol Marks described them, “pawns
caught between economic systems.”[5] Furthermore, migrating people did not always
have control over the ways their actions would be viewed and represented by
surrounding ethnic communities (and by interested scholars). The limitations of
the agency model become clear when we recognize that others might describe
African Americans’ “self-transformation” by using terms such as “uppitty” or
“scab” for men and “prostitute” or “emasculating” for
women. Second, the formulation of agency
put forward in these studies of the “Great Migration” may imply that those
African Americans who left southern homes without making preparations, or who
had no choice but to move because the boll weevil had destroyed their crops
(and there were many such among the migrants), were indeed the bearers of a “culture
of poverty.”
Finally, the
authors’ formulation of agency may lead to analyses that devalue class,
ironically so given the volume’s overarching “proletarian” framework and the
editor’s trenchant criticism (elsewhere) of ghettoization models of migration
on the grounds that they were insensitive to class divisions.[6] This is clear in the effort to replace a
push/pull theory explaining migration with one based on human agency.
Downplaying push and pull factors obscures the fact that people who felt they
were forced to leave the land owing to the boll weevil or the threat of
lynching often had a very different social profile from those people who moved
in search of better opportunities.
Based on
Herbert Gutman’s reading of E.P. Thompson, the proletarianization theory
suggests that newly proletarianized workers undergoing their first experience
of industrial conditions and “time-work discipline” fell back on “traditional”
cultural resources, which for migrants meant southern black culture. When
intra-racial divisions are overlooked and migrants are treated as a monolithic
group, however, such culture tends to be reified. Thus it is no surprise that
black churches receive so little attention in this volume: the assumption seems
to prevail that the church meant the same thing to all “black Southerners.” As
such, whether a migrant had belonged to a large African Methodist city church
in the South or a small Baptist rural church is not seen as especially
important, even though churches and fraternal orders had important status, as
well as spiritual and cultural dimensions.
Grossman’s
analysis of the Stockyards Labor Council’s efforts to unionize black workers
was the most glaring example of this subordination of class to race. Migrants were united, he argued, by the
realization that they were all “black Southerners” who saw things “in racial
more than class terms”(p. 85). Many of them joined northern unions at first
and then decided to leave because they came to see that unions were antithetical
to rural cultural ways, being alliances of a “horizontal” rather than a
“vertical” nature(p. 97). The problem with Grossman’s approach was that
alternative theses are not refuted. The
same evidence from which Grossman concluded that unionism needed “to prove its
efficacy as a solution to an essentially racial problem”(p. 85), could have
been used to argue that because unions were no more than ethnic clubs, black
workers realized that they would be unable to respond effectively to class
problems. Ghettoization of African
Americans in the “Black Belt” can be seen as sufficient reason for the failure
of unions to attract black members without needing to turn to black
southerners’ cultural baggage for the answer. Black workers may have joined
unions out of shop-floor solidarity only to find that these organizations were
too tied to communities from which they were excluded. They were therefore left
with a choice of attending meetings close to the workplace and miles from where
they lived, or joining separate locals – neither of which was acceptable.[7]
The authors appeared more eager
to recognize a gender aspect to the migration story, though there seemed a
reluctance to change the narrative itself in response to new findings on
women’s roles both in the migration and African-American communities. In her
pathbreaking article, however, Darlene Clark Hine highlighted some of the
gender-specific motivations for moving (such as the desire for freedom from
sexual exploitation), and showed how many of the connections between urban and
rural areas were sustained by women who were forced to leave children behind in
the South. Hine also began the process of describing the different work
experiences black women faced in the urban Midwest, and delineated some ways in
which women’s migration affected black urban communities and their
institutions. While she did not
explicitly contest some of the gendered assumptions involved in the
proletarianization thesis itself,[8] her article raised
questions about the analytical framework that united the others.
What does
proletarianization mean for women who often moved from service work in the
South to service work in the North? Were
they already proletarianized, and if so were they proletarianized under
slavery? Or, if they were not, did they
experience proletarianization vicariously, when their husbands and brothers
entered the industrial work force? If the latter is the case, then have they
been relegated to the role that they play in immigration histories: mother and
sister (or prostitute)? By portraying
southern black culture in monolithic terms are historians privileging men at
the expense of women?
Finally, is
the term “Great Migration” itself a gendered term – denoting a short period in
African-American migration history when the migration was uncharacteristically
dominated by the movement of men into higher-paid, “male” jobs? If so, then hasn't the proletarianization
model which focuses on this period of male-dominated migration unwittingly
played into the hands of those who would characterize African-American
migration (in contrast to the “great” immigrant migrations) as generally one
reflecting the “race’s” marginal position and susceptibility to pathology –
crime, drugs, illegitimacy, etc.? In
this regard it is interesting that the editor argued that immigration
historians, John Bodnar and Olivier Zunz in particular, painted a “highly
pathological portrait of blacks”(p.149). What I am
suggesting is that by utilizing the same gendered models used by immigration
historians, historians of African-American migration have reinforced the
negative stereotypes for those people who did not make their way to the city
for industrial work, and who did not establish normative nuclear families.
Indeed, one
of the most serious charges that might be made against the proletarianization
school is that while it seemed to be at its most influential, a book like
Nicholas Lemann’s The Promised Land
(1991) could be published and receive so much acclaim. Lemann’s book (as will be discussed later)
revived the Elkins-Moynihan thesis by blaming the legacy of sharecropping for
problems within black communities. Such a thesis was challenged by the
proletarianization theorists, at least for the period 1916 to 1930. One might
ask then, how can such a return to “culture of poverty” theory happen? Part of the answer may be found in Gottlieb’s
article, in which he seemed to pave the way for Lemann’s analysis by arguing
that migration after the Second World War became “a movement of resignation and
despair” and that these later participants were “as much refugees as
migrants”(p. 77). It is indeed true that the participants were different at
different times during this century. The fact is, however, that one kind of
migration, that of men moving into factories, has been elevated to the status
of hope, while other kinds of migration, that of women into domestic work in
particular, has been relegated to the status of despair. The much vaunted
agency has been withheld, and the ways in which “refugees” responded creatively
to their difficult circumstances can be seen only negatively as the legacy of
sharecropping, slavery, or even, at the level of political discourse, race.
Trotter was
correct to point to the need for the emergence of migration studies as a new
subfield in black urban history. Hine has been very convincing, however, in
suggesting that this will have to be done at the expense of the proletarianization
thesis as it is now formulated. We cannot merely “integrate the new findings
[on women and gender] into our larger understanding of black migration...”(p.
147), for the latter has contributed to making the former invisible. As Hine
suggested, once we start looking at the kinds of sources that will give us
access to women's roles in the African-American migration, “we will light
up that inner world so long shrouded behind a veil of neglect, silence, and
stereotype, and will quite likely force a rethinking and rewriting of all
of black urban history”(p. 129).