Chapter 20 Further Reading: The Great Migration Out — Why Millions Left the Mountains

Obermiller, Phillip J., and Thomas E. Wagner. African American Miners and Migrants: The Eastern Kentucky Social Club. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. A detailed study of how Black Appalachian migrants maintained connections between their coalfield communities of origin and their urban destinations. Wagner and Obermiller document the social clubs and kinship networks that linked eastern Kentucky to the industrial cities, providing essential context for understanding both the Appalachian and African American dimensions of coalfield out-migration.

Obermiller, Phillip J., Thomas E. Wagner, and E. Bruce Tucker, eds. Appalachian Odyssey: Historical Perspectives on the Great Migration. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000. The most comprehensive scholarly treatment of the Appalachian out-migration, bringing together historians, sociologists, and demographers to analyze the causes, patterns, and consequences of the mass movement from the mountains to the cities. Essential reading for understanding the scope of the migration and its lasting effects on both the sending and receiving communities.

Berry, Chad. Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Berry examines the experiences of southern white migrants (including Appalachians) in the industrial cities of the Midwest, documenting the cultural dislocation, discrimination, and community-building that characterized their urban lives. Particularly strong on the cultural dimensions of migration — the music, the food, the religious practices that migrants carried with them and adapted to urban settings.

Arnow, Harriette Simpson. The Dollmaker. New York: Macmillan, 1954. A novel, not a scholarly work, but one of the most powerful literary treatments of the Appalachian migration experience ever written. Arnow's story of Gertie Nevels, a Kentucky mountain woman who follows her husband to a wartime housing project in Detroit, captures the cultural dislocation, economic exploitation, and emotional devastation of the migration with a specificity and compassion that no academic study has matched. A masterpiece that belongs on the shelf of anyone studying Appalachian history.

Maloney, Michael E., and Phillip J. Obermiller, eds. Appalachia: Social Context Past and Present. 5th ed. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 2007. A widely used textbook that includes substantial coverage of the Appalachian migration, urban Appalachian communities, and the institutional responses to the challenges faced by transplanted mountain families. The sections on the Urban Appalachian Council, educational disparities, and discrimination are particularly relevant to this chapter.

Eller, Ronald D. Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008. Eller's study of postwar Appalachia provides essential context for the out-migration, documenting the economic collapse that drove people from the mountains and the political responses (including the War on Poverty) that attempted, with limited success, to reverse the decline. The sections on mechanization, depopulation, and the political economy of decline are directly relevant to this chapter.

Gitlin, Todd, and Nanci Hollander. Uptown: Poor Whites in Chicago. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. A documentary study of the poor white Appalachian community in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood during the late 1960s, written by two participants in the community organizing efforts described in this chapter. The book captures the poverty, the political awakening, and the radical organizing (including the Young Patriots and the Rainbow Coalition) that made Uptown a unique site of cross-racial solidarity. A primary source and a work of advocacy journalism.

Sonenshein, Raphael J. "The Rainbow Coalition in Chicago." Chapter in The City in Black and White. Edited by Wendell E. Pritchett and Robert J. Norrell. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. A scholarly analysis of the original Rainbow Coalition — the alliance between the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, and the Young Patriots Organization in late-1960s Chicago. This chapter provides the political and organizational context for the cross-racial alliance described in Case Study 2 and challenges assumptions about the impossibility of solidarity among poor Americans across racial lines.

Votaw, Albert N. "The Hillbillies Invade Chicago." Harper's Magazine, February 1958. The primary source discussed in the exercises — an article from a major national magazine that characterizes Appalachian migrants as a social problem and displays, with remarkable transparency, the prejudices that urban America directed at mountain people. Best read as a document of anti-Appalachian discrimination rather than as reliable reportage about the migrants themselves.

Caudill, Harry M. Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area. Boston: Little, Brown, 1963. Caudill's passionate, polemical account of eastern Kentucky's decline was published just as the out-migration was reaching its peak. His chapters on depopulation, mechanization, and the failure of public policy to address the structural causes of Appalachian poverty provide an insider's view of the crisis that drove the migration. Read alongside the scholarly sources for both its insights and its limitations.

Yoakam, Dwight. Various recordings, particularly Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc. (1986) and Hillbilly Deluxe (1987). Reprise Records. Yoakam grew up in Columbus, Ohio, as the child of Kentucky migrants and channeled the Appalachian migration experience into some of the sharpest, most emotionally precise country music of the late twentieth century. His song "Readin', Rightin', Route 23" is a distillation of the themes of this chapter. Music is a primary source, and Yoakam's music is one of the best primary sources we have for the emotional texture of the Appalachian migration.

Documentary: Stranger with a Camera. Directed by Elizabeth Barret. Appalshop, 2000. While focused on a specific 1967 incident (the killing of a Canadian filmmaker by a Letcher County, Kentucky man), this documentary by Appalshop provides essential visual context for the economic collapse, depopulation, and cultural dislocation that drove the out-migration. The film also raises critical questions about how Appalachian communities are represented by outsiders — a theme that connects this chapter to the broader narrative of stereotype construction.

Brown, James S., and George A. Hillery Jr. "The Great Migration, 1940-1960." In The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey, edited by Thomas R. Ford. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1962. An early scholarly study of Appalachian out-migration published while the migration was still in progress. Brown and Hillery's demographic analysis of who was leaving, where they were going, and what communities they were leaving behind remains a foundational reference for understanding the scale and patterns of the migration.