After nearly 100 years, Great Migration begins reversal

As a little girl growing up in New York City, Linda Sharpe Haywood remembers her father being very clear about something: He was never going back to the South. His family told too many stories.

Born in 1929 in Knoxville, Tenn., James Sharpe was one of millions of African Americans who pulled up stakes and moved north, part of what would later come to be called the Great Migration. His family had left Tennessee by the time he was 10. He ended up in Harlem and he eventually found a job as a New York City policeman.

Sharpe and his wife, who ran women's shelter services for the city, raised a family comfortably on a tree-lined street in the Bronx. Linda Sharpe Haywood remembers a prosperous, happy middle-class childhood, complete with a dog and a yard to play in.

"He had no desire to move back to Tennessee," she says. "He wanted to live in a place that was comfortable, that he would feel safe."

But 60 years after he arrived in New York, Sharpe did move back to the South. He retired to Palm Coast, Fla., about an hour and a half north of Orlando on the Atlantic Ocean. Along for the ride were his daughter and son-in-law, by then both retired New York City cops as well.

The family returned to a new, more tempered South as part of what is now being called a reversal of the Great Migration. The quiet return of African-American retirees and young professionals has the potential to reshape the South again over the next few decades, much as the exodus to northern cities reshaped it in the 20th century.

The reversal "began as a trickle in the 1970s, increased in the 1990s, and turned into a virtual evacuation from many northern areas in the first decade of the 2000s," says William Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer who has laid out the reversal in painstaking detail in his new book Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America. The movement, he writes, is driven largely by younger, college-educated African Americans, as well as baby boomers like Sharpe Haywood who are nearing retirement.

"When you leave metropolitan cities like New York, you want to come down to some bedroom community where you don't have to worry about much," she says. For Sharpe Haywood and her family, Palm Coast's biggest selling point is something that isn't there: segregation, formal or informal, among any of its neighborhoods. "You're free to live where you can afford to live," she says.

The story of the Great Migration begins about 100 years ago, at the beginning of the 20th century. Between 1910 and 1970, an estimated 6 million African Americans left the South. When it was done, it had transformed the USA. At the turn of the century, about nine in 10 African Americans lived in the South, predominantly in rural areas. At the time, the three states with the biggest black populations were Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama. By 1970, New York, Illinois and California had the most African Americans.

They came for jobs in the industrial West, Midwest and Northeast, but they were also seeking refuge from what author Isabel Wilkerson has called the "feudal caste system" of institutional southern racism: restrictive Jim Crow laws, separate public facilities and a dearth of economic opportunities.

In The Warmth of Other Suns, her comprehensive 2010 look at the Great Migration, Wilkerson calls it "the first mass act of independence by a people who were in bondage in this country for far longer than they have been free." The shift, she writes, would transform urban America and "recast the social and political order of every city it touched." It would also force the South "to search its soul" and figure out how to shake off its well-worn patterns of discrimination.

In an interview, Wilkerson says that any migration is a referendum on the place that people are fleeing. But this one was unrivaled by any our country has ever seen, "a major redistribution of a people" that reshaped the USA's demographic map in profound ways.

U.S. Census Bureau statistics suggest that nearly as soon as the Great Migration ended, it began reversing. Between 1965 and 1970, generally considered the migration's tail end, the South lost about 280,000 African-American residents. Just a decade later, between 1975 and 1980, it gained more than 100,000, a trend that has only picked up steam since.

At last count, New York still had the USA's largest African-American population, but the next two states aren't Illinois and California anymore. They're Florida and Texas.

Most of the states that were the biggest Great Migration destinations — New York, Illinois, Michigan and California — are now among the greatest contributors to the new southern migration gains, Frey has found.

Wilkerson, for her part, cautions against comparing the recent movements to the Great Migration, and indeed, Census data show that the percentage of the USA's African-American population in the South has grown just four percentage points, from 53% to 57%, since 1970.

And African Americans aren't just along for the ride with whites searching elsewhere — anywhere — for post-recession economic opportunity. Frey has found, for instance, that from 2005 to 2010, a little more than half of whites who moved from one region to another ended up in the South; meanwhile, more than two-thirds of African Americans moved to the South. For African Americans moving from the Northeast, it was 82%.

In that period, only 6% of blacks moving from the Northeast ended up in the West; meanwhile, 27% of whites leaving the Northeast moved west.

The push out of the South a century ago was the result of "both the economy and the harsh discrimination against blacks," Frey says.

The initial move back to the South in the 1970s and 1980s "had to do to some degree with the economy," he says. "But it was also a push from the North, both in terms of the economy and in terms of racial relations."

Wilkerson says she sees a direct link to the Great Migration when she reads about the response to racially charged police killings in places like Ferguson, Mo., and Staten Island, N.Y. The massive protests that have resulted, she says, are "a plea to the North to stand up for its ideals."

But Frey says recent African-American migration, especially to prosperous Southern states like Texas, Georgia and North Carolina, is less a push than a pull. "It's an economic pull, plus those traditions and that cultural tie," he says. "College-graduate blacks, they can pretty much move anywhere they want to when there's a good economy, and they choose to move to Southern states."

Even for those who have never set foot in the South, Frey and others say, the South is a familiar place. Millions of Great Migration participants left behind aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins. "It will always have the sense of ancestral history," Wilkerson says.

But the new arrivals come with one big difference: Though their ancestors came largely from rural areas, the new migrants are choosing to relocate to Southern cities. "They're moving to prosperous parts of the South, not so much the old South — Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama," Frey says. They're moving to a post-civil-rights-era South "that was unknown to their forebears," he wrote.

Former New Orleans mayor Marc Morial says the new South "is not the South that people left."

For one thing, he says, African Americans have developed a degree of political power that would have been unheard of just a few decades ago. "It's totally different, particularly the big cities," he says.

Morial now heads the National Urban League, formed more than 100 years ago to help black newcomers to the cities find work. He credits the civil rights movement — and key civil rights legislation drafted 50 years ago — with transforming cities like Memphis, Nashville, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and Charlotte into the economic powerhouses they have become.

"The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act started changing the South," he says. "One of the linchpins of this is that but for civil rights, these big Southern cities would not be what they are today."

He recalled recently asking a diverse group of young professionals living in Charlotte to raise their hands if they were born there. Only about one in 10 did. "I says, 'Wow, this is not the Charlotte of 1970 — surely not the Charlotte of 1960.' "

As with Sharpe Haywood and her family, the wave of baby boomer retirements is just beginning. That wave will only grow over the next 20 years or so.

"I think it will be visible," Frey says. Although most baby boomers who retire ultimately stay where they lived during their working lives, more than 4 million non-Southern African Americans will reach retirement age in the next two decades. If the last half of the last decade is any indication, the South will play a huge role in where they retire. Between 2005 and 2010, Frey found, three Southern states — Georgia, Texas and North Carolina — saw the greatest migration gains among African Americans ages 55 and older of any of the 50 states. "They dominated all of the others," he says.

And though they return to a South that looks strikingly different from that of the Jim Crow-era, the new arrivals come with their eyes wide open, Sharpe Haywood says.

She serves as president of the Flagler County, Fla., chapter of the NAACP and spends her retirement fighting over voting rights and voter disenfranchisement, minority hiring policies, hate speech and education — including what she sees as troubling disparities in expulsion and suspension rates for students of color.

"We have issues here," she says. "There are a lot of issues here for people of color."

Asked if she would describe the new South as hospitable to its new African-American arrivals, she pauses. "I don't know that I'd use the word hospitable," she says.

"I think we're being tolerated — not necessarily welcomed."