Full Citation

Title: 'They're never here more than a year': Return Migration in the Southern Exodus, 1940-1970

Citation Type: Journal Article

Publication Year: 2005

ISBN:

ISSN:

DOI:

NSFID:

PMCID:

PMID:

Abstract: Over the course of the twentieth century more than ten million people left the southern United States for the North and West. After five decades of consistent large-scale outmigration, the tide slowly began to shift back to the South in the early 1970s. By the end of the decade, for the first time in more than a century, the South actually showed a net in-migration of both blacks and whites.1 The late-twentieth century return migration has emerged as a vibrant area of investigation in its own right, but millions of southern out-migrantsparticularly southern whitesreturned to the South during the Great Migration.2 We know very little about the return movement that took place during the period primarily associated with the southern out-migration, between World War II and 1970.3 Understanding these return migrants reveals not only the precursors to the now-dominant southbound stream, but it also has implications for our understanding of southern migrants in the North. As numerous studies of return migration in other contexts have suggested, return migrants have an impact on the places they leave. A highly transient migrant stream can inhibit the development of migrant community, for instance, and short-term migrants almost always draw at least some sort of antipathy from both long-term settlers and other local residents alike....

User Submitted?: No

Authors: Alexander, J.Trent

Periodical (Full): Journal of Social History

Issue: 3

Volume: 38

Pages: 653-671

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Migration and Immigration, Race and Ethnicity

Countries: