Black Exodus

With essays by Blyden Jackson, Dernoral Davis, Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, Carole Marks, James R. Grossman, and William Cohen and Neil R. McMillen What were the causes that motivated legions of black southerners to immigrate to the North? What was the impact upon the land they left and upon the communities they chose for their new homes? Perhaps no pattern of migration has changed America's socioeconomic structure more than this mass exodus of African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century. Because of this exodus, the South lost not only a huge percentage of its inhabitants to northern cities like Chicago, New York, Detroit, and Philadelphia but also its supply of cheap labor. Fleeing from racial injustice and poverty, southern blacks took their culture north with them and transformed northern urban centers with their churches, social institutions, and ways of life. In Black Exodus eight noted scholars consider the causes that stimulated the migration and examine the far-reaching results.

AcknowledgementsPart One: Exodus History1. "Bent Twigs and Broken Backs": An Introduction2. Of the Black Church and the Making of a Black Public3. Exodus, Race, and the Politics of Nation4. Race, Nation, and the Ideology of Chosenness5. The Nation and Freedom CelebrationsPart Two: Exodus Politics6. The Initial Years of the Black Convention Movement7. Respectability and Race, 1835-18428. "Pharaoh's on Both Sides of the Blood-Red Waters": Henry Highland Garnet and the National Convention of 1843Epilogue: The Tragedy of African American PoliticsNotesIndex Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Using the term "exodus politics" to theorize the valorization of black male leadership in the movement for civil rights, Robert J. Patterson explores the ways in which the political strategies and ideologies of this movement paradoxically undermined the collective enfranchisement of black people. He argues that by narrowly conceptualizing civil rights in only racial terms and relying solely on a male figure, conventional African American leadership, though frequently redemptive, can also erode the very goals of civil rights. The author turns to contemporary African American writers such as Ernest Gaines, Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, and Charles Johnson to show how they challenge the dominant models of civil rights leadership. He draws on a variety of disciplines—including black feminism, civil rights history, cultural studies, and liberation theology—in order to develop a more nuanced formulation of black subjectivity and politics. Patterson's connection of the concept of racial rights to gender and sexual rights allows him to illuminate the literature's promotion of more expansive models. By considering the competing and varied political interests of black communities, these writers reimagine the dominant models in a way that can empower communities to be self-sustaining in the absence of a messianic male leader.

The first major migration to the North of ex-slaves.

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this beautifully written masterwork, the Pulitzer Prize–winnner and bestselling author of Caste chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves. With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties. Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.

"Excavating Exodus examines adaptations of Moses' story in novels, newspapers, and speeches from the antebellum period to the Civil Rights era. By asking how Moses became a touchstone for notions of race loyalty, Excavating Exodus traces how Black intellectuals reinvented the Mosaic model of charismatic male leadership"--

When the North won the Civil War, former slaves rejoiced at the notion of a society in which all people, regardless of color, would enjoy equality. But the reality turned out to be that freedom was just a concept without a means to attain life's basic needs--and the freedpeople remained in circumstances not much different from those of slavery.

Presenting a new perspective on the saga of the enslavement of the Jewish people and their departure from Egypt, this study compares the Jewish experience with that of African-American slaves in the United States, as well as the latter group’s subsequent fight for dignity and equality. This consideration dives deeply into the biblical narrative, using classical and modern commentaries to explore the social, psychological, religious, and philosophical dimensions of the slave experience and mentality. It draws on slave narratives, published letters, eyewitness accounts, and recorded interviews with former slaves, together with historical, sociological, economic, and political analyses of this era. The book explores the five major needs of every long-term victim and journeys through these five stages with the Israelite and the African-American slaves on their historical path toward physical and psychological freedom. This rich, multi-dimensional collage of parallel and contrasting experiences is designed to enrich readers’ understanding of the plight of these two groups.