The Change Mariner

More blacks returning to South, reversing trend

News Leader

A strong economy and vastly improved race relations are luring record numbers of black Americans to the South, a region that many deserted early in the 20th century.
More than 680,000 blacks 5 and older moved to the South from another region between 1995 and 2000, outnumbering the 333,000 who moved away by a better than 2-to-1 margin, according to a Census Bureau report released Thursday

The report found no other region of the country had an increase in black migration, a reverse of the trend seen in the first half of the century, when many blacks left the South for the industrial Northeast and Midwest. Missouri was one of only three Midwestern states that saw more blacks coming in than leaving the state: 39,883 leaving compared with 42,217 coming in.

"Many blacks left not only because of economic opportunities but because of the political and social constraints of segregation," said Charles Ross, interim director of the African-American Studies program at the University of Mississippi. "Those things have changed dramatically in the South."

Posted by Norm M. Wada at November 1, 2003 04:29 PM | TrackBack
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