Defining the diaspora: Appalachians in the great migration

Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Volumn 37, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 219-247

  Trent Alexander, J ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33751000212     PISSN: 00221953     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/jinh.2006.37.2.219     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. For early sociological works on Appalachian migrants in the Midwest, see William W. Philliber and Clyde B. McCoy (eds.), The Invisible Minority: Urban Appalachians (Lexingtori, 1981);
2. Philliber, Appalachian Migrants in Urban America: Cultural Conflict or Ethnic Group Formation? (New York, 1981);
3. Kathryn M. Herman and Phillip J. Oberniiller, From Mountain to Metropolis: Appalachian Migrants in American Cities (Westport, 1994).
4. For more recent considerations of this literature, see Chad Berry, Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles (Urbana, 2000);
5. James N. Gregory, "The Southern Diaspora and Urban Dispossessed, "Journal of American History, LXXXII (1995), 111-134.;
6. Obermiller, Thomas E. Wagner, and E. Bruce Tucker (eds.), Appalachian Odyssey: Historical Perspectives on the Great Migration (Westport, 2000).
7. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill, 2005), 82-83.
8. See Gregory, "Southern Diaspora and Urban Dispossessed";
9. Berry, Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles. Two important chapters from
10. Jacqueline Jones, The Dispossessed: America's Underclass from the Civil War to the Present (New York, 1992), fall somewhere between the older and newer literatures, both methodologically arid substantively. Jones looks explicitly at Appalachian migrants, though her discussion of southern white migrants in the Midwest draws on the experiences of whites from across the South. Jones' overall argument makes extensive use of the journalism and scholarly work emphasizing migrant hardship, but ultimately finds that whiteness provided a critical advantage in the northern economy, even for the most unprepared Appalachian migrants. Several of the earlier works on Appalachian out-migration also emphasized the extent to which Appalachian white migrants successfully avoided urban ghetto life.
11. See also John D. Photiadis, Social and Sociopsychological Characteristics of West Virginians in Their Own State and in Cleveland, Ohio (Morgantown, 1970);
12. Harry K. Schwarzweller, James S. Brown, and J. J. Mangalam, Mountain Families in Transition (University Park, 1971).
13. Several studies have estimated the volume of Appalachian out-migration in the midtweritieth century, but none has examined migrants' socioeconomic characteristics. Obermiller arid Steven Howe's work on the period from 1985 to 2000 does consider Appalachians' socioeconomic characteristics, although it does not focus on migration to the North or Midwest or compare the experiences of Appalachian out-migrants with other southern white out-migrants. See Obermiller and Howe, "New Paths and Patterns of Appalachian Migration, 1975-1990," Journal of Appalachian Studies, VII (2001), 331-348;
14. Obermiller and Howe idem, "Moving Mountains: Appalachian Migration Patterns, 1995-2000," Journal of Appalachian Studies ibid., X (2005), 359-371;
15. James S. Brown and George A. Hillary, Jr., "The Great Migration, 1940-1960," in Thomas R. Ford (ed.), The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey (Lexington, 1962), 54-78;
16. McCoy and James S. Brown, "Appalachian Migration to Midwestern Cities," in Philliber and McCoy (eds.), Invisible Minority, 35-78.
17. This article exclusively traces the migrants in the Census Bureau's East North Central division (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin), designated herein as the Midwest. States in the East North Central region were by far the most significant nonsouthern destinations for Appalachian out-migrants, and nearly all studies of southern white migration examine this sub-region as a whole or a particular city within it. A focus on these states allows for a more direct comparison with earlier studies. See, for instance, Berry, Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles',
18. Gregory, "Southern Diaspora and Urban Dispossessed";
19. Jones, Dispossessed;
20. McCoy and Brown, "Appalachian Migration to Midwestern Cities";
21. Borman and Obermiller, From Mountain to Metropolis.
22. See, for instance, Obermiller and Howe, "New Paths and Patterns";
23. Obermiller and Howe Idem, "Moving Mountains."
24. See Steven Ruggles et al., Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 3.0 [Machine-readable database], Minneapolis, Minnesota Population Center [producer and distributor], 2004. The IPUMS files from the censuses of 1950, 1960, and 1970 differ enough from one another that the analyses conducted in this article are not possible in those years. Since the 1950 census asked about place of residence for the year prior (rather than five years prior), it nets many fewer southern migrants in the Midwest. Additionally, the 1950 census asked only a subset of respondents about migration; IPUMS migrant data is available only for a 0.3% national sample in 1950 (compared with 1% in 1940 and 5% in 1980). For both of those reasons, the 1950 TPUMS includes only forty-five midwestern migrants from Appalachia, thirty of whom were adults and eight household heads. This sample is too small for reliable analysis. The 1960 and 1970 IPUMS samples provide no information on prior county (or county group) of residence. Hence, migrants' Appalachian origins in those years is unknown.
25. Gregory uses this definition in his article "Southern Diaspora arid Urban Dispossessed". This definition can be used in the IPUMS files from 1940, 1970, and 1980. The 1950 IPUMS file does not contain sufficient cases for this analysis (see the note directly above for more details). The 1960 IPUMS file does not contain a variable indicating state of residence five years prior to the census.
26. This study is also restricted to migrants who were born in the South. Whether they were born in the Appalachian or the non-Appalachian South may not be certain, but they were certainly not northern-born migrants to the South who were simply returning to their homes in the Midwest.
27. Considerable evidence indicates that rates of return migration arid re-migration to other regions were particularly high among southern whites. See, for instance, Alexander, "They're never here more than a year': Return Migration in the Southern Exodus, 1940-1970, " Journal of Social History, XXXVIII (2005), 653-671.
28. The ARC definition was originally established in Appalachian Regional Development Act, U.S. Congress Public Law 94-188 (Washington, D.C., 1965). For a map and list of counties, see the Appalachian Regional Commission website (http://www.arc.gov).
29. The SAS definition was originally established for the purposes of the essays in Thomas R. Ford (ed.), The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey (Lexington, 1962).
30. The Census Bureau created the State Economic Area concept in 1951 to facilitate the analysis of counties that were economically integrated and had similar characteristics at that time. The County Group concept was developed in the early 19805 during the creation of the 1980 PUMS. More information on both concepts is available via the IPUMS online documentation at http://www.ipums. org.
31. See John Alexander Williams, Appalachia: A History (Chapel Hill, 2002), 309-398.
32. Of the 9.3 million southern-born whites living in Appalachia in 1980, 2.6 million lived in Kentucky or West Virginia. Of the 58,000 southern-born Appalachian whites who moved to the north between 1975 and 1980, 40,000 came from Appalachian Kentucky or West Virginia (IPUMS 1980 5 percent file).
33. For more information about the history of the official poverty measure and the calculation of poverty thresholds, see U.S. Census Bureau, Poverty in the United States, Current Population Reports, Series P-60, No. 210, 1999.
34. Data on the poverty rate of Appalachian sub-groups derives from the 1980 5% IPUMS file. This information is presented in Table 5.
35. The categorizations "suburban" and "rural" draw on the Census Bureau's concept of metropolitan areas. The Census Bureau developed the concept of "metropolitan areas" as a part of the 19.50 census, and they have continued to identify metropolitan areas in the years since. In general, a county is considered to be metropolitan if it contains a population center of 50,000 people or more or if it is adjacent to such a county and has a high degree of economic and social interaction with the county containing the large population center. Persons residing within a metropolitan county but not within the central city are termed "suburban." The terms "nonmetropolitan" and "rural" herein refer interchangeably to people living in counties not designated as metropolitan. The IPUMS project identifies metropolitan areas using consistent criteria for the years 1850 to 2000. For a more complete definition of metropolitan areas, see http://www.ipums.org/usa/hgeographic/metareaa.html. Since samples from 1940 to 2000 are still protected by the Census Bureau's confidentiality restrictions, information on metropolitan status is suppressed for a small proportion of cases (including about 13% of southern whites in the Midwest). This analysis excludes those cases from all calculations that rely on the metropolitan-status variable.
36. Of the 52 million whites who lived in the non-Appalachian South in 1980, 5.2 million lived in poverty. Of the 6.8 million whites who lived in the Southern Appalachian Studies group's definition of southern Appalachia at that time, slightly fewer than 1 million lived in poverty (IPUMS 1980 5% file).
37. Recent southern white migrants to the metropolitan Midwest had a poverty rate of 12% and a median male wage income (for employed men aged twenty-four to fifty-nine) of $15,005. Those in the nonmetropolitan Midwest had a poverty rate of 18% and a median male wage income of $11,005 (TPUMS 1980 5% tile, using the SAS definition of Appalachia).
38. For the purposes of this study, full-time employees are those who worked thirty-five or more hours the previous week and fifty or more weeks the previous year (including paid vacation, paid sick time, and military service). In addition to the models presented in Table 6, versions of both models that included an age-squared variable and an interaction term for metropolitan status, before and after moving to the Midwest, were tested. These variables did not change the direction or significance of any other variables in the equations. Versions of the equations without these variables are presented for ease of interpretation.
39. Although "Appalachian" was not one of the seventeen potential ancestry categories listed on the 2000 census form, 12,000 individuals wrote in their Appalachian ancestry unprompted. The main states for those reporting Appalachian ancestry were Ohio (34%), Indiana (9%), and Michigan (9%). More than 80% of the Ohioans claiming Appalachian ancestry lived in non-Appalachian portions of the state. Kentucky and Tennessee each contributed 6% to the total. West Virginia contributed 2%. Of those claiming Appalachian ancestry, 98% were white (pooled data from the 2000 5% and 1% IPUMS samples [N=756]).