In recent
years sociologists and demographers have noted increased internal migration of
native-born black Americans who relocate from northern to southern
destinations; and increased black migration to Atlanta is part of this trend. Black
migration to the South has increased each decade since the early 1970s, when
the economic boom that attracted African Americans from the South to the cities
of North, Midwest, and West ended (Dodson and Diouf 2004; Population Reference
Bureau 2000).[1] By 1970, the number of African Americans
moving to the South surpassed the number migrating out. A report by the
Population Reference Bureau (2000) stated that “by the 1990s, the South was
experiencing a net increase in black migrants from all other regions.” New
black communities have been emerging all over the South due to the mass
migration of African Americans to the region (Morehouse 2009). Researchers have
referred to the migration as “return migration” or the “New Great Migration,”
since in some cases, migrants were returning to the hometowns of their parents
or grandparents who left the South during the Great Migration of the early
1900s and the Second Great Migration of the World War II-era (Dodson and Diouf
2004; Frey 2004; Morehouse 2009). However, this flow may be misnamed, for many
of these internal migrants have no roots in the communities where they settle
(Dodson and Diouf 2004; Falk, Hunt, and Hunt 2004).
Studies of the
return migration offer a variety of reasons for the movement of African
Americans to the South. Howard Dodson and Sylviane A. Diouf (2004) report that
return migration was initially generated by familial reasons, such as having to
care for a sick or elderly relative or wanting to be closer to family, but as
the migration grew, it became largely influenced by economic and nonfamily-related
social reasons. The deindustrialization of northern cities in the 1970s, coupled
with the South’s growing job
market and its improved racial climate, has attracted hundreds of thousands of
African Americans to the region. Dodson and Diouf (2004) assert that some
migrants were also moving to the South to escape the crime and the worsening
conditions of the urban North, and that some were moving to the region to
retire in a place with a better quality of life than they had experienced in
the North[2]. Anthropologist Carol Stack (1996)
argues that the migrants are drawn by a “call to home” from the South, which
holds a definitive place in the history and collective memory of African
Americans, as a place where their roots run deep. Atlanta,
in particular, has received a significant portion of the return migrants.
Atlanta has
long been known as a center of black wealth,
higher education, political power, culture, and entrepreneurship in the US
(Dodson and Diouf 2004; Leung 2003; Whitaker 2002). The Atlanta University Center,
consisting of four highly accredited schools (Morehouse College, Morehouse
School of Medicine, Spelman College, and Clark Atlanta University), is the
largest consortium of African American higher education in the world. The 1973
election of the city’s first black mayor, Maynard H. Jackson Jr., ushered in a
new era in city politics; since then, African Americans have had significant
power over the city’s government, shifting power from Atlanta’s white elite to
its growing black middle class. Nearly 160,000 black Americans moved to Atlanta
between 1990 and 1999, leading some to refer to the city as “the Harlem of the 1990s”
(Dodson and Diouf 2004) or the “New Black Mecca” (Leung 2003; Whitaker 2002).
Research on black migration to the South has
mostly followed a “return home” model that assumes the migrants have southern
roots, solidifying the perception that this migration is a “return migration”
(Dodson and Diouf 2004; Frey 2004; Morehouse 2009; Stack 1996). However, this
model ignores that many of the “return” migrants have never lived in the South
before they moved there, or have no familial ties to the region. By using the
return home model, scholars overlook the intra-racial ethnic diversity of black
migration to the South. Afro-Caribbeans are among the southern-bound black
migrants that do not fit the return home model; yet, they are most likely
included in the research data of “return” migrants to the South. It is a
mistaken assumption rooted in methodology, since the census numbers most
researchers look at for “race,” not ancestry, makes it hard to distinguish
southern-origin African Americans from others.
[1]
World War II and the availability of jobs in
factories and plants in the cities of the Midwest, the North, and the West
heavily generated the economic boom (Dodson and Diouf 2004).
[2]
Frey (1999) finds that states that received a
large number of migrants during the Great Migrations to the North are among the
top donor states in the return migration to the South.
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