Stephen A. Vincent,Southern Seed, Northern Soil: African-American Farm Communities in the Midwest, 1765–1900. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999. xvii + 224pp. $35.00 cloth; $19.95 paper.

Extract

Stephen A. Vincent's Southern Seed, Northern Soil challenges some of the cornerstone views of African-American migration to the North. By examining the migration of African Americans to the rural North in the nineteenth century, Vincent highlights the fact that African-American northern migration did not solely take place in the twentieth century, particularly after the start of World War One, and that all migrants did not move to northern cities. Vincent's welcome book focuses on the migration of free blacks from North Carolina and Virginia to two communities in Indiana in the 1830s—the Beech and Roberts settlements located in Rush and Hamilton counties. Vincent charts the southern precursors to this migration, the building of the Beech and Roberts settlements in Indiana, the success of these communities in the 1850s and 1860s, and then their decline that began in the wake of the Civil War and continued throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. By the turn of the twentieth century, almost all African Americans had left the Beech and Roberts settlements. Concurrently, these two communities began a new form of existence in the living memory of former residents as annual homecoming festivities were begun to celebrate “the neighborhoods' exceptional character and history.” These events, which continued throughout the twentieth century, became the “second phase in the communities' histories,” a phase that Vincent's book is certainly a part (151).