Call To Home: African-Americans Reclaim The Rural South

by Carol B. Stack

The long-awaited new book by the author of the bestselling All Our Kin is a poignant saga of a reverse exodus: the return of half a million black Americans to the rural South.There have been many books focusing on the black migration out of the South into Northern cities. But few people are aware that over the past 20 years the trend has been in the other direction, with African-Americans moving back south, to some of the least promising places in all of America—places the Department of Agriculture calls “Persistent Poverty Counties.” Carol Stack brings their stories to life in this captivating book. Interweaving a powerful human story with a larger economic and social analysis of migration, poverty, and the urban underclass, Call to Home offers a rare glimpse of African-American families pulling together and trying to make it in today’s America.

Genres: Nonfiction, Ethnography, History, Anthropology

226 pages, Paperback

First published April 4, 1996

Reviews

[Alina Voinea]

Call to home got me hooked immediatly for a good number of reasons and feelings it stirred. Reading in the middle of August under intense heat waves a documentary book about ethnicity and the rural origins trigerred memories from childhood. I meet the children of the characters of "North and South" series after the 1980`s trilogy of John Jakes exposing a `call to home` in the American Civil War of the XIXth century. Here are the same common people I encountered in my summer holidays to the countryside of Romania. The book wraps the forces of home, push for/ from ownership, pull to the land and need for origins, sense of duty towards authority, family, parents, owners, hierarchy into the reality of African-American migration and fight for survival in a society at war for revenge and profit.
The author, Carol Stack skillfully unravels, in a scene to scene naration, the strugles of regaining the individual, colective and social mutilated dignity in an era of human socio-economical mutation. The care and concern for the reader`s perception of the phenomenon is overwhealming and flattering. The author guides the audience from the small picture to the big picture supporting you through the challenging journey where the history of the self is weaved with the situation of the world. The long and sistematic documentation for the book reflects in the entirety of the round characters rebuilt from their stories and psychological turmoils. You develop a connection with the human behind the character passing from judgement to understanding and finally emphazing with their situation.
Reading the book enriches just as a beautiful journey with completly different and identical complex people with struggles does. You learn something new only to remember yourself in a monochrom emotion.

[Brad McKenna]

This is the most narratively written book on The Great Migration I've read. While others detail family stories, none of them have painted the picture of settings and family live like this one. It's also the first book I've read that show the migration wasn't one way or even always a complete break from the south.

Fathers go North and send money home or parents that went north and had kids there, send those kids home to be cared for by relatives either for the summer of for good. There were also cases where the kids were born in the south and stay there. It's made me wonder if the nuclear family ever really existed but for a select few straight white people.

This book traces the migration north and back south for a number of families. It's enlightened me about why some went back, because of either more economic opportunity as industry shifted out of the north or because the north wasn't the promised land but rather a land with a different face of racism.

[Meghan Rose]

Literally so beautiful. This is how you dip in and out of other people's voices

[pawsreadrepeat]

As someone who moved South only to return home, I could identify with the stories in this book. Granted our lives couldn't have been more different from the start, it was refreshing to read a book that resonated so strongly with me. From an academic stand point, this book is well-written and well-reserached. It still amazes me the depth of integration Carol was able to achieve with her participants. The level of depth is required and I think is what makes this an excellent book. I recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding migration patterns of the perpetually poor.

[Nate Cooley]

"Call to Home" tells the as yet untold story of the remigration of African Americans to the South. The book is written as an ethnography in a novelistic fashion. The stories told give fantastic insight into the motivation and attitudes compelling these individuals to move back "home". Rather than for economic reasons, Stack posits that it is the nostalgia for home and the love of family that has driven these African Americans back to the South.

[Claudia Reinfelds]

Over the years, as time compounded the mileage that removed migrates from their homeplaces, the image of the South they carried in their hearts could acquire a life of its own, swelling into an obsession, simplifying into a logic, embittering one moment and sweetening the next."

[Katie]

Had the privilege of reading this for a class taught by Professor Stack. Her sincerity and love of ethnography are profound, and it shines through in this work. An enlightening and heartfelt work of nonfiction.