The South is home for the majority of Black people in this
country. There was a time during the days of
Jim Crow segregation when millions of Black
people - over 6 million to be exact - left the
South and headed to the North, Midwest and
West. The mass exodus of Black folks between
the 1910s and the 1970s, known as the Great
Migration, was one of the largest movements of people in United
States history. And this
mass migration of melanin across the country
had a profound impact on American life, as
Black people built a presence in cities
throughout America and transformed cultural,
political and public life everywhere.
Why
did they leave? As any refugees would, they
fled economic and political oppression, and a
“feudal caste system.” Black
people were sharecroppers working on the
plantation in a highly exploitative scheme,
living with the threat of Klan violence,
lynching, and all their political rights
stripped by the Jim Crow police state. With
the onset of World War I, manufacturing
jobs grew in
the North, and companies recruited Black labor
in the South to address their labor
shortages.
The
Great Migration was actually two
migrations:
The first stage, which took place between 1910
and 1940, saw two-thirds of people settling in
the large cities of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia,
Pittsburgh, Detroit, Kansas City, Denver,
Louis and Indianapolis. However, the second
wave from the 1940s to the 1970s witnessed
more movement into the cities mentioned above,
with additional locations including the
Western destinations of Los Angeles, San
Francisco and Oakland, California, as well as
Phoenix, Seattle and Portland.
The impact of the Great Migration was decisive, allowing
Black people to build cultural and political
power in the cities they occupied. Consider
Harlem, which became a cultural capital of
Black America. And through the Harlem
Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, the New
York community experienced a cultural,
intellectual, literary, musical, artistic,
fashion and political explosion.
But
the tide turned and the Great Migration
reversed. And Black people are returning home
to the South, with the potential to change the
South once again. And why shouldn’t they
return to the place of their ancestors who
toiled that land, and in many instances lost
that land through theft, intimidation and
violence? The South is a new place now, where
the road to Black power is in full view - just
as it was during Reconstruction, with 2,000
Black elected officials back
in the day before the Klan took it all away.
Otherwise, why would white folks work overtime
in the twenty-first century to steal and
suppress the Black vote?
The exodus North has become the exodus to the South, where
the weather and the grits are better. Harlem
was the cultural capital of Black America a
century ago, but now it’s Atlanta. The cradle
of the civil rights movement is now a capital
of Black culture and economic and political
power. The South may rise again, but this time
we’re doing it our way, painting the old
Confederacy in red, black and green and
bringing the family back in a reverse
migration to honor the ancestors.
