Between 1900 and 1940, some 2 million black Americans left their native South to escape racial oppression and seek opportunities in the North. It was called the Great Migration. Now many blacks are coming back – not only because of Sun Belt opportunities, but also because our region has become a better place.
New laws, generational change, an influx of newcomers and the courage and commitment of native blacks and whites combined to break white supremacy’s grip on our region.
A recent front-page story in the New York Times told of one family that is part of this trend. The headline said “Seeking New Life, New York Blacks Heed South’s Tug.” A photo showed 27-year-old Candace Wilkins, her mother and grandmother, who were planning to move to Charlotte.
Here they will find a black mayor and black police chief, plus a new African-American art museum named for architect Harvey Gantt, Charlotte’s first black mayor. In North Carolina, where a violent white supremacist takeover disfranchised blacks at the beginning of the 20th century, the legislature has acknowledged and apologized for that injustice. Barack Obama carried the state in 2008.
While African-Americans’ percentage of the U.S. population hasn’t changed much over the years – it was about 14 percent at the time of the Civil War and 12.6 percent in 2010 – their location has. Before 1900 some 90 percent of blacks lived in the South; today just over 50 percent do. But demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution notes that since the 1990s, 75 percent of the growth of the U.S. black population has taken place in the South.
The 2010 Census found that since 2000 North Carolina’s population increased 18.5 percent to 9.5 million, and its black population increased 17.9 percent to 2 million – the sixth-largest black population of any state. North Carolina in 2010 was 21.5 percent black, and Charlotte was 35 percent, up from 32.7 percent in 2000. (Among the other largest N.C. cities, Raleigh had 29 percent black population, Greensboro 40, Winston-Salem 34, Durham 38 and Cary 8.)
Isabel Wilkerson examined the Great Migration in her 2010 book, “The Warmth of Other Suns.” The title is from a poem by Richard Wright, who left Mississippi for Chicago in 1927. Wright wrote that he was taking part of the South to “transplant into alien soil.” He wanted to “see if it could grow differently, / If it could drink of new and cool rains, / Bend in strange winds, / Respond to the warmth of other suns, / And, perhaps, to bloom.”
Bloom it did, in so many ways and places that for years one of the South’s most costly exports was black talent.
Wilkerson, commenting on the 2010 Census, told the Associated Press, “African-Americans are acting as other Americans would – searching for better economic opportunity in the Sun Belt. But there is also a special connection. As the South becomes more in line with the rest of the country in social and political equality, many are wanting to connect with their ancestral homeland.”
Martin Luther King Jr. believed “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” As he envisioned, blacks who left the South, or their descendants, may now see their talents bloom in the warmth of the Southern sun.