Voting for the New South

__"Black Migration to the South Reaches Record Highs in 1990s" by William H. Frey, in Population Today (Feb. 1998), Population Reference Bureau, 1875 Connecticut Ave. N.W., Ste. 520, Washington, D.C. 20009–5728.__

Voting with their feet (in the famous longer a region to be shunned. phrase), African Americans from all parts Between 1990 and 1995, the South had a of the country have now made it unani-net influx of 368,800 blacks, and, for the first mous: the once benighted South is no time in any comparable period, saw net gains of black migrants from the West, as well as from the Northeast and Midwest, reports Frey, a demographer with the University of Michigan’s Population Studies Center.

The historic black exodus from the South between 1910 and the late 1960s began to be reversed in the 1970s, Frey notes, as the result of "industrial downsizing in the North and an improving racial and economic climate in the South." Between 1975 and 1980, and between 1985 and 1990, the South gained black migrants, largely from the Northeast and Midwest, while still losing them to the West. Then, between 1990 and 1995, net black migration from the Northeast and the Midwest rose, and began from the West. California’s dismal economy in the early 1990s and Texas’s economic resurgence explain some of the West-to-South movement.

Most of the recent black migrants to the South are of working age; only seven percent are retirees. About 20 percent of the migrants are college graduates.

"The South’s booming metropolitan areas— Atlanta, Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Miami—are responsible for some, but not all, of the South’s black population gains," Frey says. Of the 10 metropolitan areas in the country that gained the most black residents between 1990 and 1996, seven were in the South, and Atlanta was the national leader, with an increase of 159,830 black residents. Smaller metropolitan areas and rural areas in the South also showed gains.

More than half (53 percent) of the nation’s African Americans now live in the South, Frey notes, and the Census Bureau expects high rates of black migration there to continue.