Modern Black Migration: Why the South Is Drawing Communities Back and Other Patterns to Watch
Black families and organizations are working to reclaim the land and housing security that’s been taken from them
Click here to read on Architectural Digest
“No other group of Americans has had to act like immigrants in order to be recognized as citizens,” once said the author Isabel Wilkerson. Her name has most recently circulated as it inspired Ava Duvernay’s newly released film, Origin, but this is from a TED talk that she gave in 2017 about the Great Migration, the mass movement of Black folks out of the Jim Crow South in pursuit of purported equality and economic opportunity in the North. From the 1910s to the 1970s, six million Black people migrated from the likes of Georgia and North Carolina to Chicago and New York. But Wilkerson might as well have been talking about the current exodus of Black people from Northern communities back to Southern cities, which is being driven by younger, college-educated Black Americans who, for myriad reasons, are seeking Houston over Harlem. In the words of Brea Baker, freedom fighter and author of Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft and the Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership: “What goes up must come down.” But why?
The initial trigger isn’t surprising: housing. “What we have in America is a stark contrast. If it’s not Whole Foods, it’s a food desert—there’s almost no in-between,” says Tawan Davis, a founding partner and CEO of The Steinbridge Group, the investment firm working to increase Black homeownership across the US. These, of course, are the symbols of gentrification, the result of racialized policies from redlining to land zoning that make way for middle- to upper-class white residents and leave behind historically Black communities. Scattered across the country are predominantly white neighborhoods that, over decades, have swallowed Black legacy residents whole, with interspersed, segregated affordable housing blocks that lack a staple grocery store and limit the mobility of low-income primarily Black and brown people. Below, we look at a number of circumstances that are defining the modern Black migration experience today.
“The Great Return” to the South
Baker argues that what she deems The Great Return has roots in ancestral connection. The author began writing Rooted out of curiosity of her own family’s migrant history. When her grandfather died in 2019, one of his dying wishes was that they not sell the land he owned in North Carolina. “Economically, there was value…. But I understood [him as saying] ‘I feel tied to the state, our ancestry is tied to the state, and I need our family to own a piece of it—to add to it, not detract from it,’” Baker explains. “I think Black people found themselves being like, ‘I grew up on a farm in the South, where everything as far as I could see was ours. I grew what I ate, I knew where my clean water came from, I knew everyone who was near me.’”
This—compounded with the pivot to working remotely from 2020 onward, allowing more young professionals to relocate to more affordable cities—is why Baker believes we’re experiencing a recent boom in Black Southern residents. “We hear a lot about the South being this ugly part of the country, this part that white liberals love to hate,” she continues, “but it’s also a part that Black people never gave up on.”
With ancestry also comes the argument for safety. “Black people choose to gravitate towards neighborhoods and cities that present options for community and life in a rich environment,” Tyson says, “because Black neighborhoods in particular have always been and still are places of refuge.” That was what initially enticed Baker herself to move from New York, where she was born and raised, to Atlanta. “I wanted to be surrounded by other Black people and queer Black people, to find safety in numbers,” she says.
Making a case for reverse migration
For those who view the South as more racist than the North, Baker poses a valid question: “The civil rights movement was born in the South, so how could we think there’s not a very lively resistance movement that’s happening?” In fact, in his latest documentary, South to Black Power, journalist Charles Blow maintains that “giving the reverse migration a boost” is a tool in growing Black power (a movement that he says typically scares white people because they conflate it with the violence of white-power sentiments, when in fact it’s the fight for “Black people to have more of a say over how they are governed”).
Blow underscores that Atlanta has been home to majority Black residents for 50 years, while cities in Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina have been over 30% Black since the end of the Civil War. These southern hubs, he observes, are “bathed in Black power, but it’s just municipal.” He calls on viewers to consider “if this power extended to the state” and invites Black northerners to seriously consider migrating: “There are some things in life that are bigger than you…. Sometimes [your choices] have to be about community success.”
The HBCU-to-homeownership pipeline
In movement, Black folks are vulnerable to losing or lacking, be it their community or their space and quality of life; and, in both cases, home ownership or wealth acquisition remain a pipe dream. To attain that dream means to sacrifice. “The wealth creating effect is predicated upon you leaving your cohesive majority-Black neighborhood and not realizing the wealth creating opportunities of homeownership,” says Chris Tyson, president of the housing nonprofit National Community Stabilization Trust. “Or you can realize the wealth-creating opportunities [by leaving] and lose the neighborhood community—you rarely can have both.”
Davis and Tyson are both working to create attainable housing and sustain existing Black communities. Most recently, Davis’s firm expanded their impact investing to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) due to the institutions’ “large swaths of land in rapidly changing parts of the Southern United States.” He points to Fisk University in Nashville, which he says has been a “huge target of redevelopment.” By focusing on underutilized land, Davis and his team hope to tackle endowment and funding inequalities within HBCUs while also creating pipelines for student homeownership in these southern cities. By supporting Black people in their “management and control of increasing amounts of resources,” Davis hopes to see “a long-term impact in their communities.” After all, he shares, property is at the core of this country’s value systems (systemic beliefs, mind you, whose foundations trace to the initial enslavement of Black people).
Property law politics
Sometimes, loopholes that arise when least expected come in the way of housing-based safety and security. This was the reality for Kim Renee Duhon and Mamie Reels Ellison, two family members featured in Silver Dollar Road, a documentary that follows the story of the Reels family protecting their land against predatory property legalities enforced by North Carolina firm Adams Creek Associates. Once a haven for family reunions and summer barbecues (“our Black country club,” as Ellison shares), the Reels’s acres were stolen based on property law loopholes, even getting to the point where two family members were incarcerated for eight years for refusing to leave their own homes.
Ellison, 64, has been “working on this since middle school,” and is exhausted from back and forths to courthouses, weeks sifting through documents, and the emotional toll of being separated from family. All of this, only to stare at her family property in the hands of a new owner, Thomas Johnson Merrimon Point LLC, who has yet to develop even a square foot. Her niece, Duhon, says that in addition to establishing a land trust, they hope the state will be held accountable for allowing this to happen in the first place. Ellison fears that “if the state and county are not made an example of, they’re going to continue to do this and more people will suffer.”
The shift to the Wild, Wild West
While Black Americans’ net migration to the South far surpasses other regions, Western states like Nevada and Arizona are “among the 10 highest Black in-migration states for each five-year period since 2005,” according to Brookings. While millennials are making the transition to becoming homeowners and moving out of, say, Los Angeles, we’re seeing areas like Maricopa County in Phoenix become the fastest-growing region for Black people outside the Dallas and Houston areas, according to the US Census Bureau data.
While Western migration’s push and pull factors mirror that of the South, destination cities for Black residents like Phoenix have a unique set of challenges for newly arriving residents. Phoenix’s air quality ranks as the fifth worst in the country for ozone pollution, exacerbated by upticks in wildfires since 2020. Due to racist urban planning policies—a phenomenon across the US wherein redlining patterns coincide with higher temperatures and less greenery—the highest percentage of Black residents in Phoenix live alongside the higher concentration of polluting facilities. As reported in an interview with Capital B News, this has forced many Black residents like the poet Rashaad Thomas to choose between “police brutality in Scottsdale and air pollution in South Phoenix.”
Ultimately, whether in the North, South, or West, Black people have been forced to, in Baker’s words, “operate like a displaced and dispossessed people.” As the reverse migration continues, we must ask ourselves how far we have come from 1619. Tyson reminds us to consider the following: “Do we have a critique of the economic and political forces that have created the absence of Black people? Do we recognize that as part of a longer lineage of policy or the absence of policy? Or do we think it’s just some market phenomenon or some kind of set of private choices? That’s the way we’ve always rationalized segregation in the country.”