Black Migration Headed In New Direction -- From North To South

[Honeykiss1974]

From www.tbwt.com

By Bill Bradberry
TBWT Contributor
Article Dated 4/5/2002


The numbers are in. The great migration of black Americans from the South is over. Large numbers of black Americans are returning to the South.

William H. Frey, in a May 2001 report, documents that "blacks ended the 20th century by returning to the region that they spent most of the century leaving."

Among other things, the report documents that:

The South's black population increased by 3,575,211 in the 1990s, nearly twice the number of blacks the South gained in the 1980s.

The 1990s is the first decade where each of the other major regions registered a net out-migration of blacks.

Florida and Georgia lead all states in black gains. The cities of Orlando and Atlanta show the highest rates of growth. Seven of the 10 fastest-growing counties for blacks are in the suburbs of metropolitan Atlanta.

Frey's report, entitled "Census 2000 Shows Large Black Return to the South, Reinforcing the Region's 'White-Black' Demographic Profile," was compiled at the University of Michigan's Population Studies Center at the Institute For Social Research.

A demographer and Research Scientist at the Center and a Senior Fellow at the Milken Institute in Santa Monica, Calif., he bases his conclusions on U.S. census data from 1960-2000, but anyone who has traveled in either direction over the past few years might have drawn the same conclusion -- it's just that obvious.

The political implications are huge. If they vote the way they did in the November 2000 presidential election, Southern black voters will wield more power than ever before in United States history. The Republicans' Southern strategy will be needing a major overhaul.

The historical reasons why so many headed north were clear. The collapse of the South's cotton economy, the disenfranchisement after the Civil War, the rise of the manufacturing economy of the North, and a misguided perception that Northern whites were less racist that their Southern brothers were reason enough. The rest is, as they say, history.

My father, caught up in the frenzy, headed north too, arriving in Niagara Falls in 1928 with not much more than a smile and an eagerness to get ahead. He often told me that the sharecropping life was brutal, offering no future, no way out of a cycle of poverty and debt.

Shortly after he arrived here, he and a friend opened up a business, the Smith and Bradberry Garage on the back side of Falls Street, where they sold gasoline and oil, fixed flat tires and repaired cars. Dad was quite a mechanic -- he could fix almost anything.

With almost no formal education, he raised a family by keeping his nose to the grindstone, a saying he used all the time but which I did not quite understand then. Now I use it myself as an encouragement to focus on finding solutions.

In fact, I've begun to notice in myself a frightening similarity to some of my dad's characteristics. And that's not a bad thing -- it's just a hard act to follow.

He helped me get a summer job at Carborundum, where he worked for many years. I learned my lesson working as a laborer with a sledgehammer that weighed almost as much as I did -- without an education, I would likely be doomed to the bottom of the financial ladder. I decided to follow his advice and stay in school.

The South we are returning to is a very different place today than it was when our ancestors left it. Gone are the agrarian days on the farm, replaced now by the new corporate culture. Large corporations have moved in and bought out or stolen most of the family farms -- big corporate conglomerates like the biotechnical food and chemical giant Monsanto in Anniston, Ala. There is something ominous about that combination of words.

A St. Louis-based company, Monsanto and its spin-offs Solutia and Pharmacia were handed a verdict last week by a Circuit Court jury finding them liable for damages because they knowingly polluted the "Model City" of the South's water supply and backyard gardens with PCBs -- in some cases at levels 7,000 times the permissible levels -- and then they tried to cover it up.

The jury's verdict was only one among many. A long line of more than 15,000 cases are being prepared by a Montgomery, Ala. law firm.

Solutia, a subsidiary of Monsanto, already agreed in another case to pay $43.7 million to 5,000 Anniston area residents, living where the cancer-causing agents were found. A separate federal trial over PCB contamination in Anniston last year resulted in a $40 million settlement. Local community activist David Baker blames the death of his brother 20 years ago on Monsanto's negligence. His case has not been presented to a jury yet, but he alleges the chemical giant's contamination is also responsible for damage to property as well as the emotional distress of thousands of Anniston residents.

He told reporters that, as a child growing up in the area, the odor from the plant was so foul that people had to stay inside their homes and not eat food from their own gardens because of the pollution.

It was the cover-up that did them in. Like my mom used to say, as she was tearing my skin from my bones with a belt or whatever she could get her hands on, "I'm beating you to within an inch of your life, not because you disobeyed, but because you lied about it."

The cost of cleaning up is too big and too nasty for the local governments to cope with.

Such is the case with my beloved hometown, Niagara Falls. We are faced with the high cost of cleaning up the mess after the big lie but rather than deal with it, folks are just leaving.

Of course, it's not just the black folks who are leaving the North, a lot of whites are leaving too, and not necessarily to the South.

Which brings me to my point.

There is little difference any longer between the North and the South aside from the weather. And even that is changing, probably because of some greenhouse effects caused by the release of certain chemicals into the atmosphere by certain uncaring industries, which is making the climates in the North and the South almost indistinguishable.

We need to put our combined noses to the grindstone and figure out how we are going to work our way out of this mess we are in.

The former head of the Niagara Falls Equal Opportunity Coalition, Bill Bradberry now works as an advocate and writer in Florida. You may email him at mailto:ghana1@bellsouth.net