Reading Isabel Wilkerson's the Warmth of Other Suns, her epic history of the Great Migration, I was struck by the section on how social scientists viewed Southern migrants:
“With few exceptions,” wrote the economist Sadie Mossell of the migration to Philadelphia, “the migrants were untrained, often illiterate, and generally void of culture.” “The inarticulate and resigned masses came to the city,” wrote the preeminent sociologist E. Franklin Frazier of the 1930s migration to Chicago, adding that “the disorganization of Negro life in the city seems at times to be a disease.” In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an official in the U.S. Department of Labor, called the inner cities after the arrival of the southern migrants “a tangle of pathology.” He argued that what had attracted southerners like Ida Mae, George, and Robert was welfare: “the differential in payments between jurisdictions has to encourage some migration toward urban centers in the North,” he wrote, adding his own italics.
There was only one problem with these claims: They were completely inaccurate. All of them. In fact, Wilkerson writes, "in educational attainment, Negro in-migrants to northern cities were equal to or slightly higher than the resident white population.” Moynihan's claim that the migrants represented a "tangle of pathology" wasn't borne out either:
Contrary to popular convention, the migrants were more likely to be married and remain married, less likely to bear children out of wedlock, and less likely to head single-parent households than the black northerners they encountered at their destinations. They were more likely to be employed, and, due to their willingness to work longer hours or more than one job, they actually earned more as a group than their northern black counterparts, despite being relegated to the lowliest positions. “Black men who have been out of the South for five years or more are, in every instance, more likely to be in the labor force than other black men in the North,” wrote Larry Long and Lynne R. Heltman of the Census Bureau in 1975.
It's hard to escape the possibility that the initial evaluations of migrants were based on reductive, superficial assumptions about culture (Wilkerson mentions migrant children being seen as mentally handicapped in school) rather than evidence. This may seem strange, but it shouldn't because it's the sort of glib pseudoscience that emerges to provide explanation for the supposed inferiority of newcomers whenever this kind of transition takes place. European immigrants, Catholics in particular, were subject to a great deal of racist pseudoscience purporting to explain their inherent backwardness.
These days, we constantly hear about undocumented Hispanic immigrants who resist assimilation, don't pay taxes, and raise the crime rate. Nearly all second-generation immigrants are fluent in English, households containing unauthorized immigrants paid billions in taxes last year alone, and immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than the native born.
Newcomers always seem to foster a sense of zero-sum competition among other, more established groups. I suppose the difference for Southern migrants was that they were being treated as strangers in a land that had been theirs for hundreds of years.
