After America’s civil warfare, thousands and thousands of black People left the nation’s southern states. Many have been newly free of slavery. They sought, and infrequently discovered, higher and safer lives, in manufacturing centres resembling Detroit and New York. Generally known as the nation’s “Nice Migration”, this movement of individuals remodeled the tradition and economies of the locations the place migrants arrived. It additionally gave politics in northern cities a permanent push left.
However this was not the one nice migration. Between 1900 and 1940, roughly 5m southern whites left former Accomplice states and neighbouring Oklahoma. In a peer-reviewed research to be printed later this 12 months, Samuel Bazzi, Andreas Ferrara, Martin Fiszbein, Thomas Pearson and Patrick Testa used digitised census data to trace these white migrants’ journeys. They discovered that this group was not simply better in quantity, however, as they unfold their tradition and attitudes, maybe in political affect, too.
White migrants differed from black ones in methods moreover race. Whereas some white migrants have been destitute, they have been on common richer than black migrants, being about as well-to-do as whites already dwelling within the locations the place they arrived. And in contrast to black migrants, who normally went to cities, most of them went to rural areas, usually within the nation’s western states.
The white migrants carried their convictions with them. Surveys carried out within the Sixties present that in contrast with white individuals born within the north, they have been extra usually evangelical Christians, and tended to favour racial segregation and oppose authorities programmes to assist black People. They have been additionally extra more likely to arrange church buildings and to work in newspapers and radio, which helped them share their views with their neighbours.
The consequence was an outsize—and protracted—political impression in these areas, shifting politics proper. In northern counties the arrival of 1 southern white migrant by 1940 led to multiple additional vote for Republican candidates in presidential elections between 2000 and 2020. These results have been small in areas with a modest variety of southern white migrants however politically transformative as soon as the southern-born white inhabitants reached a crucial mass. Their impact on nationwide coverage was magnified additional: a lot of them lived in states which have been politically aggressive or had small populations, the place these additional votes matter extra.
Legislators, in flip, voted extra conservatively on financial and social points. The authors reckon {that a} congressional consultant in 1964 hailing from a district the place southern whites made up their common share (2.9%) of the inhabitants in 1940 was 5 proportion factors extra more likely to vote in opposition to the Civil Rights Act than a consultant from a county with no southern whites. They have been additionally extra more likely to assist Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts—and fewer more likely to vote to certify Joe Biden’s 2021 election victory.
Immediately, People are shifting in the other way: between 2020 and 2022, 9 of the highest ten states by internet inside migration have been within the nation’s south. A number of the individuals now heading there’ll carry a legacy of previous migration with them. The researchers discovered that folks within the north who had a excessive share of southern-born white neighbours have been extra probably to provide their baby a Biblical title.■
Chart supply: “The opposite nice migration: southern whites and the brand new proper”, by S. Bazzi, A. Ferrara, M. Fiszbein, T. Pearson and P. Testa, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2023
