Recalling Deeds Immortal: Florida Monuments to the Civil War
Battat's compelling new book, Ain't Got No Home: America's Great Migrations and the Making of an Interracial Left, challenges this notion, arguing that the migrations were interconnected, pitting the migrants against racism and capitalism as they fled from the one region that epitomized the failure of both. Battat is a lecturer in Harvard's history and literature program, and her account of the ties between the Great Migrations is suitably interdisciplinary. She reads the cultural production of the Depression era to demonstrate that its depiction of the migration showed the ties between black rights and radical left wing politics, if it did not actually create those ties. Battat reads the well known works of John Steinbeck, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright, but also the works of lesserknown authors of the period, popular songs, and the Depression era photographs of Dorothea Lange and others, as well as the works of sociologists studying groups of migrants in a contemporary context, all to demonstrate that our picture of the relationship between black America and the white radical left fundamentally changes when we move beyond those wellknown works. Far from being antithetical, migration narratives during the Great Depression demonstrated a real belief in the possibility of unity between the two groups. Such a demonstration, however, would always include the caveat that the reality of racial conflict was virtually omnipresent, as migration out of the South showed that racism among the working class was not exclusively a southern phenomenon. Into that breach stepped the radical black left. W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Lorraine Hansberry, for example, proved that coupling white radicals and black cultural production could give birth to a powerful new voice against capitalism and the racial inequalities it spawned. By exploring the palpable interracial movement against capitalism among writers of the 1930s and 1940s, Battat counters the dominant historical interpretation of the period, which emphasizes a budding black nationalism that saw itself as antithetical to interracial contact. There were many ways that writers attempted to draw those lines. Battat argues, for example, that they "mobilized the patriotic 'nation of immigrants' trope not only to counter prejudice against minority groups," but also "to advance the rights of workers" (140) That trope compared migration based on financial necessity to immigration for the same purpose, arguing that the country was built on such need based migratory events. In the postwar period, the black and white migration narratives would diverge, with African American literature emphasizing communalism within the race and demonstrating a more conciliatory relationship with the South, whereas white literature focused on cultural pluralism among various ethnic groups that would all qualify as effectively white. Still, Battat presents a compelling interdisciplinary case that the American populist left in the generation before the Cold War was a broader tent than often credited, including both African Americans and women and, thus, fundamentally imprinting the postwar rights movements of both groups. Ain't Got No Home is an account that would benefit scholars and students of black history, labor history, economic history, and intellectual history, but its easy style and strong case make it palatable for a general adult reading audience, as well.