What Makes Atlanta a Unique Caribbean Destination? - Pt 2

Atlanta is also a unique Caribbean immigrant destination because of its large African American population and the significant place it holds in black American life. It was the home of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. It contains the largest consortium of black higher education institutions, consisting of the historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) Morehouse College, Morehouse College School of Medicine, Spelman College, Clark Atlanta University, Union Theological Seminary, and Morris Brown College. It is a premier destination for black internal migrants who are returning to their historical and family roots in the southern U.S. This is a reversal of the phenomenon called the Great Migration that saw the movement of African Americans from the South to cities in the North, West, and Midwest between the early 1900s and the 1940s. Research on black southern migration has shown that black return migrants have had a significant impact on the South, especially on its black population (Frey 2004; Dodson and Diouf 2004; Stack 1996). African American migrants have contributed to the growth of the black middle class in many southern cities, having on average higher incomes than the South’s total black population. Return migrants also have higher levels of education than non-migrants: more than 50% of African American migrants are college graduates. This characteristic of return migrants contrasts with the two Great Migrations, from the South to the North, Midwest, and West, which consisted mostly of agricultural workers (Dodson and Diouf 2004). About 500,000 African Americans moved to Atlanta between 1990 and 2000, making it the city with the sixth largest black population in the country (Dodson and Diouf 2004). The high rate of black migration has led many to call Atlanta a black mecca or a modern day Harlem.

Caribbean migration to Atlanta is especially unique because it coincides and interacts with the two larger migrations of African American return migrants and immigrant newcomers from Latin America, Asia, and Africa to the southern metropolis. Few studies have examined the migrations of different black ethnic groups to the same destination—in this case, Atlanta-bound African American, Afro-Caribbean, and black African migrants to Atlanta. Irma Watkins-Owens (1996) studies the interaction of Afro-Caribbean immigrants and southern-origin African American migrants in Harlem, during the first three decades of the 20th century. She argues “their historic encounter produced an interchange of ideas, people, and institutions that made Harlem, black metropolis, the center of the African world” (Watkins-Owens 1996: 175). The interaction of African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, and other black immigrants in Atlanta has important implications for ideas about blackness in the region. Atlanta, and the rest of the South, has a distinct black southern culture steeped in its long African American history, stemming from the arrival of enslaved Africans to the region. The increasing number of Afro-Caribbeans, and other black immigrants, in Atlanta challenges notions of blackness there and pushes for the creation of new image that includes a culturally and socially diverse black Atlanta community. The Atlanta Caribbean Carnival and Caribbean-American Heritage Month events are two examples of recurring events that showcase and celebrate the development of a multi-ethnic black Atlanta. With a culturally and geographically diverse pool of migrants of African ancestry, black migration to Atlanta (i.e. Afro-Caribbean migration, return migration, and migration of other black immigrant newcomers)—truly represents a “New Great Migration” (Frey 2004) to the South that has many implications for social, racial, and political relations in the region and for the development of Atlanta as the new center of black America in the 21^st century, similar to Harlem in the 20^th century. The socioeconomic intersection of Afro-Caribbean migration to Atlanta with other nonwhite migration streams (i.e., African, African American, Asian, and Latin American) is helping to make Atlanta a unique, new Caribbean migrant destination, unlike their traditional destinations, such as New York and Miami, due to the great influence that the large size, and relatively high class status, of its African American population has had on shaping the city.