Leaving the Land of Opportunity: Arkansas and the Great Migration

Abstract

BETWEEN 1930 AND 1970, almost fifteen million Americans left their homes and farms to seek new opportunities in other states, one of the largest population movements in American history.1 When popular literature and television documentaries describe this migration, the story usually involves black migrants who ride the Illinois Central out of the Mississippi Delta in a desperate escape from the malevolent effects of the mechanical cotton picker.2 Yet this population movement involved more white migrants than black, and they headed to destinations all over the country. These migrants were searching for better jobs rather than fleeing mechanization. Arkansas's role in the Great Migration has been a closely guarded secret, or just ignored. Perhaps because migrants made a statement about Arkansas that is unsettling, most Arkansas historians have paid little attention to their leaving, though the migration was the largest domestic event of World-War-II-era and postwar Arkansas. C. Calvin Smith's study of Arkansas during World War II focuses on economic hardship and injustice and criticizes the failure of the state government to address these issues. By neglecting to mention migration, he ignores what people themselves did to better their lives. For all its encyclopedic coverage, Michael Dougan's Arkansas Odyssey makes only casual references to migration and twentiethcentury population changes. The textbook Arkansas: A Narrative History, by Jeannie Whayne, Thomas DeBlack, George Sabo, and Morris Arnold, does not even include the terms "migration" or "population" in the index, surely an indication of perceived lack of importance.3 Other historians have treated migration at somewhat greater length. S. Charles Bolton has, in an essay, briefly commented on population losses during World War II and their effect on the state's economic development. In Arkansas in Modern America, Ben Johnson declares, "The state's most dramatic net loss was its people," thereby placing migration more firmly within the framework of Arkansas history. Brooks Blevins's Hill Folks presents a valuable discussion of migration both into and out of the Arkansas Ozarks, showing how population changes shaped the region.4 Yet we still lack a comprehensive treatment of migration's impact on the state as a whole. Migration represents one of the most enduring forces shaping Arkansas history. Pioneers emigrating mostly from Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia settled the state in the first half of the nineteenth century.5 After the Civil War, Arkansas continued to gain population from in-migration. The state government, planters, and railroads encouraged settlement during this period, soliciting people from as far away as China, Germany, and Italy.6 Unfortunately, good land soon ran out, leaving many of the state's rural areas overpopulated in relation to arable soil. The earliest out-migration, beginning in the 1890s, was in part a response to this fundamental problem. Population losses continued in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In the 1920s, Arkansas lost almost 200,000 people, a record high to that point. Migration slowed slightly during the depressed 1930s, but by the 1940s, when the national economy shifted to war production, the migration stream that had previously been a steady leak turned into a torrential flood. Arkansas, in fact, lost population in every decade between 1890 and 1970.7 Still, migration remains one of the most under-researched topics in the state's past. We do not know much at all about these twentieth-century migrants: where they went, why they left, who they were, what kind of work they did, or what impact their departure had on their native state. Indeed, we have overlooked migration's impact on postwar agriculture, politics, and even civil rights. At the height of the migration, observers of the Arkansas scene were alarmed at the state's population losses. In 1940, University of Arkansas rural economist William H. …