Why are Afro-Caribbeans Moving to Atlanta?

“L.A. proved too much for the man,

So he's leavin' the life he's come to know,

He said he's goin' back to find

Ooh, what's left of his world,

The world he left behind

Not so long ago.

He's leaving,

On that midnight train to Georgia,

And he's goin' back

To a simpler place and time.

And I'll be with him

On that midnight train to Georgia,

I'd rather live in his world

Than live without him in mine.”

-“Midnight Train to Georgia” by Gladys Knight and the Pips[1]

The excerpt above, from the song “Midnight Train to Georgia”, reflects my observations about how Atlanta, a city that had little history with mass immigration prior to 1990, became a new (major) destination for Afro-Caribbean immigrants. The song’s “significance lies in the story that it tells and the manner in which it tells it. ‘Midnight Train to Georgia’ heralds the return migration of thousands of African-Americans to the South" (Griffin 1995: 143). I became aware of African Americans “moving back” to the South while reading Carol Stack’s (1996) seminal book Call to Home: African Americans Reclaim the Rural South, which examines the movement of African Americans to the rural South, and the work by Howard Dodson and Sylviane A. Diouf (2004) for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture’s exhibition, In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience, which documents all black migrations to, within, and out of the US over a 400-year span (with an entire section dedicated to “return migration”).[2] African American migration to the South has increased each decade, following its start in the early 1970s. Researchers have referred to this movement as “return” migration, “reverse” migration, or the “New Great Migration” (Frey 2004), since in some cases, migrants are returning to their hometowns or those of their parents or grandparents, who left the South during the Great Migration (1910-1970).[3]

Atlanta has received a significant portion of southern-bound black migrants. During the 1990s, nearly 160,000 blacks moved to Atlanta, which some call “the Harlem of the 1990s” (Dodson and Diouf 2004). The 1990s also marked a surge in migration of Afro-Caribbeans to Atlanta, which experienced a fourfold increase in its Afro-Caribbean population (from 8,342 to 35,308). Once I learned this, I believed that the Afro-Caribbeans were following African Americans to the South, like Gladys Knight followed her lover in the song. For this reason, I began this study with the intention of exploring the relationship/connection between the two southern-bound black migrations to Atlanta, and decidedly titled my dissertation “On the Midnight Train to Georgia: Afro-Caribbeans and the New Great Migration.”

But I was mistaken. Once in the field, I soon realized that the Afro-Caribbeans that I talked to did not relate their movement to Atlanta to return migration or to African Americans’ concentrated movement to Atlanta. Their decisions to migrate to the southern city, though varied, are tied to/shaped by their status as black on the one hand and immigrants on the other—two socially distinct groups in the US (Mederios Kent 2007). Researchers have shown how being both black and immigrant has significantly influenced, in various ways, the Afro-Caribbean experience in the US—adaptation to American life, understandings of race, identification, and residential patterns, among other things.

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[1] Lyrics taken from www.lyricsdepot.com.

[2] See website for Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Presents In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience (http://www.inmotionaame.org/home.cfm).

[3] The Great Migration was the movement of over 6 million African Americans from the South to the North, West, and Midwest between 1910 and 1970, contributing to the development of major black communities in Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, New York (namely Harlem), and Los Angeles, and to almost half of the black population in the US residing outside of the South. It’s debatable whether if black southern-bound migration should be called return migration, since some scholars count “return” differently. In the works of Stewart Tolnay (2004) and William Falk, Larry Hunt, and Matthew Hunt (2004), they count “return” as migrants who return to their home state, not necessarily their hometowns. This would include, for example, a person who grew up in rural Georgia “returning” to Atlanta, which I argue is different than the migrants in Carol Stack’s (1996) work who returned to their hometowns.