11
Sociologist Gordon Morgan suggests that African Americans left some Ozark counties in the early decades of the twentieth century because they lacked the critical mass necessary to maintain community. This is an aspect of social isolation and at first blush seems reasonable. In
The Mississippi Chinese
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), I myself wrote, “There will come a time of ‘critical mass,’ when a Chinese community in any sense of the word will prove unmaintainable,” and went on to predict a rapid drop in the population of Chinese Americans in the Mississippi Delta. The prediction came true after 1975. But the Chinese case was different: economic and educational upward mobility led to geographic mobility for their children, while at the same time, the end of racial segregation in Mississippi eliminated the peculiar niche for Chinese Americans as a middleman minority, leaving no particular reason for new immigrants to enter the Delta.
To be sure, when the African American population falls below a minimum, it becomes difficult to date or marry another African American or support a black church. Until Missouri’s schools desegregated (well after 1954), fifteen African American children were required before a school district had to provide a “colored school,” and eight of high-school age before it had to provide a high school. In the absence of a school for their children, some parents will certainly move. Morgan’s hypothesis doubtless explains why some African Americans left, especially families with children seeking marriage mates. He believes it explains Huntsville, Arkansas, which had 15 blacks in 1940 and just 1 in 1950, and it may.
Critical mass also helps explain the departure of most of the remaining African Americans from Maryville, Missouri, after the 1931 lynching described in Chapter 7. Most blacks fled immediately, and enrollment at the “colored school” fell from sixteen students to six. Two years later it closed entirely, causing the black population of Nodaway County to decline still further. But the root cause of Nodaway as a sundown county remains the lynching and subsequent threats to the black community, not critical mass. (See Patrick Huber and Gary Kremer, “A Death in the Heartland,” presented at Missouri Conference on History, St. Louis, 3/1994, 10.) Similarly, critical mass theory does not explain why black newcomers no longer entered counties across America after 1890, as they had earlier. If numbers alone could explain why a group leaves an area, then no new group would ever enter unless they could do so en masse.