Definition
Southern clubs were the hometown, county, and state social organizations that Great Migration migrants founded in Northern and Western cities — Mississippi Clubs, Alabama Clubs, Sunflower County picnic associations, Florida state societies, and hundreds of smaller hometown groups.
The clubs served as kin substitutes. They organized annual picnics that brought together everyone in the destination city from the same county or town; they ran burial societies that paid to ship a deceased migrant's body home; they distributed information about jobs, housing, and family news from the South. The pattern is not unique to the Great Migration — every large migration produces hometown associations — but the Southern clubs of mid-twentieth-century Chicago, Detroit, Harlem, and Los Angeles were unusually dense and culturally significant.
Why it matters
How it works
A Southern club typically began informally. A handful of migrants from the same county would start meeting at one of their houses on Sunday afternoons. As more migrants from the same origin arrived, the gatherings outgrew the houses and moved to church basements or rented halls. Dues were collected, an annual picnic was scheduled, and a name was chosen — usually the county or state of origin. The first picnic might draw fifty people; by the third decade, the same club's annual picnic might draw several thousand. The picnic became the place where you could meet someone from your home county whom you had not yet met in the city, hear news from home, eat the right food, and dance to the right music.
The clubs ran practical operations alongside the social ones. Burial societies were the most consequential — dying in the North without provision for burial back home was a fate migrants feared, and the clubs collected dues that would pay for the casket, the rail shipment, the funeral home. Mutual aid funds helped with rent, medical bills, and unexpected hardship. Information networks routed news between the destination and the home county faster than the postal service. Newcomer reception picked up arriving migrants at the train station and connected them with lodging and work.
The clubs' cultural function was at least as important as the practical one. They preserved the specific dialect, the specific recipes, the specific church-service style of the home county, even as the destination drew everyone toward a more generic urban Black culture. The second generation often participated in the clubs out of family obligation rather than affinity, and by the third generation many of the clubs had disbanded or become genealogical societies. While they ran, they were one of the most important institutions of migrant life that historians have only recently begun to study seriously.