Afro-Caribbean Migrants' Knowledge of the South Before Moving to Atlanta- Pt 2

In his book Crosscurrents: West Indian Immigrants and Race, Milton Vickerman (1999) argues that Afro-Caribbeans tend to distinguish generally between the North and the South in the US, ascribing positive characteristics to the latter and the opposite to the former. He states that they tend to view the South as being more similar to the Caribbean than the North, knowing the South to have warmer weather, what they perceive as a more easygoing climate, a deeper sense of community, and “traditional values.” Vickerman argues that their positive views of the South may have influenced the large concentration of Afro-Caribbeans in Miami and their growing movement away from their traditional concentration in New York to southern cities like Atlanta.

Though I did not ask them about their prior knowledge of New York—a major destination for Caribbean immigrants for over a century--, I suspect that my respondents—including those who had lived in New York and those who had never lived there (or in the US) before moving to Atlanta—would have been able to list comfortably and quickly a number of things about the major US metro, such as its climate, major attractions (e.g., Statue of Liberty and Times Square), and neighborhoods. Previous research has shown that many Afro-Caribbean immigrants arrive in New York with significant knowledge about the city—especially the Caribbean neighborhoods in the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn and the long-running and widely attended West Indian Carnival on Labor Day—through stories from friends and family who previously migrated there (Kasinitz 1992). Anthropologist Karen Fog Olwig (2001) found that New York was a central location in some Jamaican family networks and served as place for family members living in the Caribbean, Canada, the US, and elsewhere to meet and get to know each other. Migrants are critical in generating and spreading information about a destination by telling stories of their experiences to family and friends and by providing them with the opportunity and incentive to visit and learn about the place firsthand. Because Afro-Caribbean’s migration to, and settlement in, Atlanta is new, and their community there is relatively small (in comparison to the million-plus Afro-Caribbeans in the traditional destination of New York), the information about the southern city is not likely to be as great or as widely known within the Caribbean diaspora as information about destinations that have older and larger Caribbean communities. As I discussed in the preceding chapter, the majority of the Afro-Caribbean migrants in this study were among the first of their family or friends to move to Atlanta and thus didn’t have the availability of an established Caribbean network already there to help them learn about the city or to facilitate their migration process.

For those migrants that arrived in the 1990s, the media played a critical role in generating and perpetuating—especially leading up to the 1996 Summer Olympics—positive and attractive images of Atlanta that counterbalanced the negative images (or lack of images) that many of my respondents said they heard of the city prior to moving there. Several scholars have pointed to the Summer Olympics as a turning point for Atlanta, in terms of economic, structural, and demographic growth, and also as the catalyst for its emergence into an international city. The opportunities that developed in the city for the Olympics greatly attracted Afro-Caribbeans and many migrants from around the US and the world to Atlanta.

Though many of the Afro-Caribbean migrants in this study said they “didn’t know much” about Atlanta before they moved there, they are directly contributing to the information about Atlanta within their own Caribbean social network. A small number of migrants that I spoke to reported knowing a lot about Atlanta before moving there. Those migrants obtained their pre-migration information about Atlanta and the opportunities that it offered through their network connections in city and from visiting the city, sparking their interest in moving there. One such migrant was Dwight, whose story was discussed in Chapter 1. He had visited Atlanta to attend fraternity functions a couple times prior to moving there from New York with his wife in 2007. He also had two network connections in Atlanta—his fraternity brothers, and his wife’s cousin Anthony who moved to the city in 1994 from New York (and who also happened to be his fraternity brother)—that greatly assisted him and his wife with the migration process by providing information about Atlanta, suggesting where in the city he should live, and helping him find a job. Knowing people there prior to moving to Atlanta allowed him to arrive already holding a wealth of knowledge about the city. So, when I asked him what he knew about Atlanta before he moved, he quickly listed a number of things about the southern city; comparing it to New York, he told me that he liked that Atlanta had a slower pace, a lower cost of living, a more open and friendly environment, and a larger selection of large, affordable homes. In contrast, when I asked Dwight’s wife’s cousin Anthony the same question, he replied: “I didn’t know much about Atlanta. It was around the time of the 1996 Olympics and I knew it was an up-and-coming city and that many opportunities were starting to surface.” Dwight and Anthony’s stories demonstrate the important role networks play in helping the migration process and helping new Afro-Caribbeans transition to their new lives in Atlanta, but it also reveals that Afro-Caribbeans were moving to Atlanta regardless of whether they knew a little or a lot about the region.

Afro-Caribbean Migrants' Knowledge of the South Before to Moving to Atlanta - Pt 1

When I asked Afro-Caribbeans in Atlanta what they knew about Atlanta and the South before they moved there, most of them told me that they knew very little or nothing about the region prior to their migration. Though they did recognize that there were differences between the South and the rest of the US, what the migrants did know about the region was generally basic information based on its past history—largely its history up to 1965.

When asked what they knew about the South before moving to Atlanta, they listed, for example, slavery, the Civil Rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr., and the region’s history of violence and discrimination against all peoples of African ancestry. These responses were common among Afro-Caribbeans regardless of when they moved to Atlanta. Judith, a Jamaican-born migrant in her fifties who moved to Atlanta in the early 1980s, told me that before she moved, she knew very little about Atlanta except for what she learned from history books. She stated, “I was a history teacher in the Caribbean. I knew about the Civil War. But I knew very little about [how] southerners lived today. Most of what I knew was from the history books.” Arriving in Atlanta about twenty years later, Karen, a New York-born transplant of Kittian descent in her early thirties who moved to the southern city from Los Angeles in 2002, similarly told me that she had little prior knowledge about the region except for its past history of slavery and racism. She stated: “All I knew was slavery and racism to be honest…I really didn’t know much. I basically came down in faith.”

Interestingly, when I asked about their pre-migration knowledge of Atlanta, most of the Afro-Caribbeans that I interviewed started off their responses with this disclaimer of “I didn’t know much about Atlanta except for” before proceeding to tell me what they did know. Like Karen, Ashley, a transplant in her forties of Jamaican descent who moved to Atlanta from Boston in 2007, started saying she knew little about Atlanta and then proceeded to tell me the few things she did know about the city before moving there. She stated, “I didn’t know a whole lot about Atlanta before moving. I knew it was an up and coming city and there were lot of opportunities for black Americans.” This pattern in the migrants’ responses showed me that my respondents knew more about Atlanta than they realized or admitted (to me or themselves). I thought it was very unlikely that any migrant would move to a place without knowing a few things about their new home, unless the move was involuntary, such as in the case of a minor child moving with family, a refugee being resettled, or military personnel being assigned to a new station, and with further questioning my respondents proved to know significant details about Atlanta before moving there.

Help me take a once in a lifetime trip

Afro-Caribbean Social Networks in Atlanta-Pt 3

While a number of Afro-Caribbean migrants in this study used some form of social network--either an ethnic or race network-- to move to and settle in Atlanta, there were others who migrated without social networks. These migrants tended to have jobs waiting for them upon arrival in Atlanta. Their company either transferred them to an office in Atlanta or they applied for and got a new job in Atlanta prior to their move. A small number of Afro-Caribbean migrants in this study were able to move to Atlanta without networks because they came to the city to attend college or graduate school. The colleges and universities provided, or helped these Afro-Caribbean migrants to find, housing and also provided financial support to help the migration process. Atlanta is home to several top universities, such as Emory University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Georgia State University, and to the world’s largest consortium of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), the Atlanta University Center, which includes Morehouse College, Spelman College, Clark Atlanta University, and Morehouse School of Medicine. A few Afro-Caribbean migrants informed me that many young Caribbean-born migrants directly came to Atlanta specifically to attend one of its colleges and universities and generally stayed in the city after they graduated, instead of returning home to the Caribbean. Atlanta’s HBCUs have played an especially significant role in drawing college-aged Afro-Caribbeans to the city. Of all the schools in Atlanta, Morehouse College (an all-male institution) attracted most of the education-driven Afro-Caribbean migrants in this study. Notably, almost all of these migrants were Trinidadian males and had moved directly to Atlanta from the Caribbean island. Simon, a Trinidadian migrant in his late thirties, explained to me how an athletic scholarship brought him from his island home to Georgia in 1992. He told me that he always dreamed of playing college basketball and was fortunate that after he finished playing in a tournament in Jamaica in 1991, as part of Trinidad’s national basketball team in Jamaica, he started getting calls from colleges and coaches who saw him play. He had several options but decided to attend Georgia Military College, a junior college located in Milledgeville, Georgia (two hours outside of Atlanta), because they offered him a full scholarship. After a year, Simon then transferred to Morehouse College, which offered to accept him and the other Trinidadian basketball players who had emigrated with him to attend Georgia Military College.

I consider Afro-Caribbeans who moved to Atlanta without networks “pioneers” because they were among the first (of their family and friends) to settle in the region, and contributed, by their presence in region, to the creation of new Caribbean networks/communities in Atlanta for other Caribbean migrants whom arrive after them to utilize during their migration process. For these pioneers, their new jobs or schools, and not an established Caribbean community, provided them with spaces to meet people in their new home and to build new Caribbean social networks. “Networks can become self-perpetuating to migration because ‘each act of migration itself creates the social structure needed to sustain it,’ ” (Olwig 2007: 10, quoting Brettell 2000). These migrant pioneers play a key role in the drawing more and more Afro-Caribbeans, from other US cities, the Caribbean, and abroad, to Atlanta.

Atlanta-bound Afro-Caribbean migrants in this study used Caribbean (e.g., family, friends, and/or co-ethnics) and non-Caribbean (e.g., fraternities/sororities) networks in Atlanta to help them find jobs, find places to live, learn about events and businesses in their new home city, meet other co-ethnics in the area, and obtain whatever else they needed to adapt to their new lives in the southern metropolis. While some Afro-Caribbean migrants used networks to facilitate their migration process to Atlanta, there were others that moved to Atlanta without the aid of networks. This was particularly useful for those who did not have ethnic networks in Atlanta prior to their move like Alana. It shows that just because they are Caribbean they can only use immigrant or ethnic networks. It has been very beneficial for those who were able to use both of them at the same time. They are able to use different networks to get things accomplished.

AFRO-CARIBBEAN NETWORKS IN MIGRATION TO ATLANTA - Pt 2

Several Afro-Caribbeans that I spoke to reported using their Caribbean ethnic networks to help them to adapt to life in Atlanta, after choosing on their own to move there. Jennifer, a Jamaican transplant in her late forties who had three children and was married to a West Indian man, came to Atlanta from the Boston area, after she and her husband had visited the city and fell in love with it. While her husband was finishing graduate school in Massachusetts, she moved to Atlanta with her sons in 1999. When I asked her how she figured out where to live in Atlanta, she said that her brother-in-law lived in Stone Mountain (an eastern suburb of Atlanta with a high concentration of Afro-Caribbeans) and she and her sons had to live with him, since her husband didn’t migrate with them. By staying at her brother-in-law’s house, she was able to get to know the Atlanta area and research the best place for her family to live and for her sons (who were school-age at the time) to attend school. She eventually moved to Lawrenceville (located in the mostly white northern suburbs of Atlanta), after learning from her research that it had one of the best school systems in the Atlanta area. For Afro-Caribbean migrants, like Jennifer, having Caribbean networks in Atlanta prior to their move helped ease their transition to their new life in the southern city by providing them with places to stay, helping them find jobs, providing transportation in the car-dependent city, giving them information about the city, and giving them the space and time to learn about and adjust to their new environment.

Interestingly, I found that Caribbean networks were not only social networks that Afro-Caribbean migrants were using in their migration to Atlanta. They were also using race-based (or black) social networks. Several migrants that I interviewed reported being a member of a Black Greek Letter Organization (BGLO) and using their black sorority/fraternity network to move to and settle in Atlanta. There are historically nine Black Greek Letter Organizations (BGLOs): Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, Delta Sigma Theta sorority, Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, Omega Psi Phi fraternity, Phi Beta Sigma fraternity, Zeta Phi Beta sorority, Sigma Gamma Rho sorority, and Iota Phi Theta fraternity. These BGLOs, founded between 1906 and 1963 in response to exclusionary policies of white Greek organizations, have established chapters throughout the US—especially on the campuses of the historically black colleges and universities in the South—and the world and have been a significant part of the collegiate and post-collegiate life of many black Americans for over a century. For Afro-Caribbean migrants who have membership in these black fraternities and sororities, they were able to access this extensive black social network and receive help from either a “frat brother” or “sorority sister” of their local chapter (in the city that they left) who had connections in Atlanta, or from members of an Atlanta chapter. [1] Dwight, a thirty-five year old Kittian migrant who moved from New York with his wife in 2007, and who was a member of Omega Phi Psi Fraternity, described how one of his frat brothers (who was also his Guyanese wife’s cousin) had moved to Atlanta from New York in 1997 and helped him use the fraternity network in Atlanta to find a job. He stated, “In terms of job hunting, [my frat brother] was instrumental for me…once I got down, he put the word out with the fraternity that I was looking for a job. My first job when we got down here was working with a frat brother who was a main partner at a firm down here.” Similarly, Alana, a transplant of Barbadian descent in her mid-thirties, received help from her sorority sister in finding a place to live, when she first moved to Atlanta in 1995. After graduating college in North Carolina, she received a job offer in Atlanta and didn’t have time to look for housing before she moved there. When I asked her how she found housing, she told me that her sorority sister put her in contact with her fiancé who was living in Atlanta and he told her about an apartment complex near his home which happened to be across from her new job. She picked her apartment sight unseen based on the recommendation.

As I discussed in the preceding chapters, people have both a racial and ethnic identity, which are fluid and interchangeable based on the situation (Bashi 2007, 2013). Afro-Caribbeans are both black and Caribbean. Atlanta-bound Afro-Caribbean migrants’ use of black social networks, like those of black sororities and fraternities, does not prevent them from also accessing Caribbean networks. In their move to Atlanta, Afro-Caribbean migrants with access to both Caribbean social networks and black social networks (e.g. black fraternity/sorority networks) are able to use either networks to get their goals accomplished. In the case of Dwight, he used his Caribbean family network to find a place to live and his black fraternity network to find a job in Atlanta. 

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[1] Notable members of BGLOs are civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. (Alpha Phi Alpha), First Lady Michelle Obama (honorary member of Alpha Kappa Alpha), and comedian-actor Bill Cosby (Omega Psi Phi), to name a few.

AFRO-CARIBBEAN NETWORKS IN MIGRATION TO ATLANTA - PT 1

A small number of the Afro-Caribbeans migrants I interviewed told me that they were recruited or invited to move to Atlanta; and, among them, all reported being recruited by a family member with whom they resided after migrating there. Beulah, a sixty-year old Jamaican-born migrant who moved to Atlanta in 1998 after living in Australia for a few years, was invited to move by her daughter who had moved to the city from New York. Similarly, Sheena, a migrant from Montserrat in her early thirties, immigrated directly to Atlanta as a teenager in 1992, after being invited by her sister. When I asked her how she came to live in Atlanta, she replied, “I came to Atlanta when I was 15…My sister and my brother moved here, after going to school at Purdue in Indiana…My sister got an internship in Atlanta and she liked it here. Then my parents bought a house there. I moved to Atlanta and finished high school here.” The willingness of many of the earlier Afro-Caribbean migrants to move to Atlanta without the support of a network in place there supports the idea that there is something distinctive about Atlanta drawing them there. In her study of West Indian nannies in Brooklyn, sociologist Tamara Mose Brown (2011) found that many of the women chose to migrate to New York because they had family already living there and with these connections found it easier to find jobs and to adjust to their new lives in the US. They found it particularly easier to settle in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, because these boroughs have distinct Caribbean neighborhoods, with stores and businesses that are owned by Afro-Caribbeans and sell goods that were also sold in their homelands.

Social networks play a major role in immigrants’ migration and settlement patterns (Ho 1991; Bashi 2007; Olwig 2007). “For many migrants, it is often through those networks that they obtain knowledge about possible migration destinations, the social and economic opportunities that they offer, and the best modes of access to these places” (Olwig 2007: 10). Through networks, migrants exchange economic and social resources needed to survive in their new environments. In the case of Afro-Caribbean migrants in this study, their social networks in their previous home cities and in Atlanta greatly aided their move to the new immigrant destination.

According to sociologist Vilna Bashi (2007), migration is rooted in the decision-making of social networks, which include family, friends, and compatriots. In her book Survival of the Knitted, Bashi (2007) examines immigrant social networks and shows how they function, using the case of Afro-Caribbean immigrants in New York and London. She found many Afro-Caribbean immigrants moved to New York and London because members of their immigrant network were already living there, that first selected, or recruited, them for migration to the destination and then facilitated their moving and resettling process. She describes immigrant networks as consisting of two types of members: those immigrants who have helped another migrant move and adapt to a new environment (“hubs”) and those who have received assistance from another migrant in the migration process (“spokes”). The hub is a central figure in the network because they possess social and economic resources to facilitate the migration process, and choose potential migrants, or spokes, who they believe possess character traits suitable for survival in their new environment. Networks help Caribbean immigrant newcomers to adapt to their new lives and homes, by helping them find jobs, find places to live, gain US residency or evade detection if they are not in the country legally, and other things that they need to settle into their new homes (Bashi 2007).

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.