From the Black Majority to a White Majority: 1920s South Carolina’s Environmental and Demographic Transformations

• In Event: Staying with the Changes: Displacement, Disaster, and Transformed Landscapes in the United States

Abstract

Sometime between 1920 and 1930, South Carolina shifted from a Black majority to a white majority state. The Great Migration, during which African Americans fled the political, economic, and social brutalities of the Jim Crow South for cities elsewhere in the United States, obviously accounts for this transformation. But how was this demographic change noted in South Carolina, and what were its contributing environmental causes and consequences? How did Black South Carolinians, particularly rural farm workers, experience this change and how did it alter their relationship with their labor on the land? How did the white elite, who exploited Black labor and enforced an authoritarian regime over the state’s remaining African American population, reconceptualize their narratives of white supremacy and environmental control in the wake of this change? In this paper, I will examine interviews, newspaper articles, memoirs, legislative records, and state surveys that answer those questions, with a special focus on the state’s Lowcountry, the coastal region that historically had the highest proportion of African Americans living there, both under slavery and in freedom.

Author

• Caroline Grego, Queens University of Charlotte, History Department