Rooted in Place

In his recent book, Rooted in Place, William Falk (Sociology) focuses on the African Americans who remained in the historically black impoverished counties of the South that were the source of Great Migration North. Using ethnographic methods, Falk takes up basic questions about the lives of those who remained. What is life like for those who stayed in a place that many outsiders would see as grim, depressed, economically marginal, and where racial prejudice continues to place them at a disadvantage? Falk studied one extended family in the Georgia-South Carolina low country. He argues that an interconnection between race and place in the area helps explain African Americans' loyalty to the place. Blacks historically enjoyed a numerical majority as well as deep cultural roots and longstanding webs of social connections that, Falk argues, more than outweighed the racism they faced and the economic disadvantages they suffered.