It’s no surprise that Rayford and his wife, Hilda, then lit out for the North. Between 1940 and 1970, more than 5 million African-Americans, thrown out of work by mechanical cotton pickers and excluded by Jim Crow, left the old Confederacy - the largest internal ethnic migration in American history. The surprise is that Bennie and Hilda have come home. A NEWSWEEK review of unpublished census data shows that the Rayfords are at the heart of an extraordinary movement: the reverse migration of middle-class African-Americans to the South. Beginning as a trickle in the mid-1970s, it is now up 92 percent over the 1980s rate (chart). If the demographers are right and the pace keeps up past the millennium, a net tide of 2.7 million - more than half of the great post-1940 migration - will have headed South between 1975 and 2010. In part they’re coming to the bustling sun belt for the same reasons everybody else is: better jobs, cheaper real estate, warmer weather, easygoing manners. But, the South being the South, this is no ordinary trend. The blacks who are moving to Dixie are returning to a place where race has always mattered - a lot. And they aren’t finding that the old land of cotton has turned into the promised land: blacks and whites still divide themselves into two worlds, not one. The new arrivals, however, bring with them the capacity to change the country’s fastest-growing region, at least at the margins, with stronger rural communities and even a handful of truly integrated suburbs - overcoming history to make the South home again.
The Rayfords - Bennie, 71, and Hilda, 65 - came back to the Delta partly for the same reason they left. Life in Toledo, Ohio, had become intolerable. Teaching in inner-city public schools had taken a toll on both of them, especially Mrs. Rayford. One week in 1989, a sixth grader was stabbed in the cafeteria. The next, one of her students showed up in the back of the classroom - armed. ““I didn’t even know he had it until another kid yelled out, “Grady has a gun!’ ’’ says Mrs. Rayford.
Preposterous as it would have seemed to them in 1957, the Rayfords returned to the Delta in 1990 - to the distress of old friends in Ohio and the bewilderment of new ones in the Delta. (At their going-away party in the North, their preacher joked, ““Well, the Rayfords say they’re going back to Mississippi - but I don’t think the good Lord would send anybody back down there!’’) Three of their adult children have now joined them in Tchula, 150 miles from Memphis and 80 percent black. In many ways it’s a roots trip that makes sense. Mississippi’s air is fresh; in the Delta, local police forces and county boards have become largely African-American in recent years. The dusty roads that once made Hilda squint on churchgoing Sundays are finally being paved. On another level, the move seems crazy. Holmes County, where the Rayfords live, has one of the lowest per capita incomes in the nation - less than $6,000. The poverty rate in the six-county area: 45.3 percent.
The Rayfords, retired with teaching pensions, have found opportunity in those depressing statistics. Hilda started a reading program for nine senior citizens she’d grown up with who could barely read or count money. Younger people started to show up, too. With funds from a small foundation grant, a house across the road turned into the Rose Bank Learning Center - offering reading, computer classes, GEDs and hot meals. Bennie, who’d chaired Jesse Jackson’s Ohio presidential campaign in 1984, became head of a local health center and vice chair of the state prison-industries board and the Holmes County Republican Party. The late-life party switch reflects Bennie’s impatience with the local black pols who never left the Delta and who, to his thinking, never got enough done.
Most people aren’t as adventurous as the Rayfords. Only a fifth of the black migrants - many fleeing urban poverty for a place where vegetables grow reliably - make their homes out in the country. The foremost sun-belt stop, for blacks and whites, is what neo-Confederate wits call ““occupied Atlanta.’’ It’s outdrawn every metro area in net migration for the last decade, beating Seattle and Tampa at the end of the 1980s and Las Vegas and Phoenix now. White newcomers to the South outnumber blacks by roughly five to one, but don’t usually arrive with any profound sense of generational links. Blacks do: in 1940, 77 percent of African-Americans lived in the old Confederacy. But they’re not coming just for sentimental reasons: they’re moving to places like Atlanta because those cities have a huge market for diverse talent. Even as the courts roll back official affirmative action, the black professional class in Atlanta has never been more powerful.
As a twentysomething from Philadelphia in 1993, Beth Griffin’s only image of the South came from ““Eyes on the Prize’’ footage. Part of her still imagined it to be a land of whites-only restrooms; her deepest trip ““South’’ had been to Washington, D.C. But she decided to just come along for the ride four years ago when a couple of friends said they were moving to Atlanta. She admits she was ““a little apprehensive’’ but wanted to know why so many acquaintances were referring to it as ““black mecca.’’ Then she found that her M.B.A. from Penn State, plus a background in finance at the computer company where she was working, made her highly attractive to a local executive recruiter.
Now Beth, 30, is a principal financial analyst for Coca-Cola USA, working out of world headquarters. Rick Griffin, 38, moved from Philadelphia with his son Ricky the following year, and he and Beth were married in 1995. ““The opportunities for the black man are a lot greater here than in the Northeast,’’ says Rick, a computer-software consultant. Among them: the chance to raise a child in a city with a highly visible number of African-American achievers. In Atlanta, most of the family’s doctors are black; that wouldn’t have been as easy to arrange in Philadelphia. ““There are more of us here in different roles,’’ says Beth, ““and there’s definitely a bigger entrepreneurial spirit.’’ She’s right: one recent study put 30 percent of the country’s black-owned businesses in Georgia, Virginia, the Carolinas and Florida, versus 2 percent in New England.
But Atlanta has its problems. The core municipality, 70 percent African-American, is the ninth poorest in the United States and struggles with a high violent-crime rate. The Griffins choose to live where most newcomers do: they bought a four-bedroom stucco manse in Cobb County, home of Newt Gingrich. Though the sun belt’s ‘burbs are still predominantly white, people like the Griffins could subtly alter the balance. They represent the new migration’s mainstream well - people between 25 and 45, usually middle class or professional. William H. Frey, a University of Michigan demographer, believes America’s best-ever chance for stable and integrated black-white suburbs lies in ““the growing metros of the South Atlantic.’’ Older suburbs in the North, often founded as a safe haven for whites, are more fortified against integration. That’s one reason that, at last count, eight of America’s 10 most segregated cities were old Midwestern industrial centers. (The other two: Buffalo, N.Y., and Newark, N.J.) The Griffins’ born-yesterday neighborhood isn’t monolithically white: 10 percent black, 5 percent Asian and the odd Hispanic.
Other things in the South, though, never seem to change. In Montgomery, Ala., the stone blocks of the capitol building are as lily-white as they were when George Wallace was governor. Even though he’s now an ailing paraplegic who reads his mail in an office down the street, you can still almost hear his defiant 1963 cry in the capitol plaza: ““Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!’’ Montgomery is a trickier place for black newcomers than the Delta or Atlanta: it’s not majority black like the Rayfords’ Tchula, nor does it enjoy the high-speed prosperity of the Griffins’ Atlanta. Instead, it’s a reminder that the New South can have a lot in common with the Old.
When Tonea and Allen Stewart arrived in 1990 to teach at historically black Alabama State University, for instance, getting a loan for the house with a pool on the tony side of town wasn’t as easy as they’d hoped. Had they been white, they suspected, it would have been easier. But they decided to stick it out in Alabama rather than return to California, where they’d both gone to college. With their roots in the Deep South, the Stewarts both thought they had something to give back - despite the lure of living in Santa Barbara, which would have made Tonea’s pursuit of an acting career infinitely easier; today most of her work comes in South-centric dramas (her latest film: ““A Time to Kill’’; her most regular TV series: ““In the Heat of the Night’’).
Midsize cities like Montgomery can also be clubby and closed. ““Even with the black community, I’m an outsider,’’ says Tonea. If she isn’t introduced to a native by a native, she says, she lacks an important credential. On the upside, Montgomery can give you more house on a professor’s salary than southern California and, if you have three children, more peace of mind. ““If your son’s at the nightclub, you know right where he is,’’ says Allen, interim dean of ASU’s graduate school. ““There’s only one.’’ That safety is seductive. The Stewarts’ 17-year-old nephew Husani moved from Oakland, Calif., after a visit last July. ““He’s gotten more attention [at his Montgomery school] than he did in a lifetime there,’’ says Allen.
Every roots trip has a be- ginning and an end - and a meaning. Anthropologist Carol Stack, author of a 1996 book on returnees to the rural Carolinas, argues that this journey home is really ““the chance to start something new, to remake the South in a different image.’’ It will be a deeply American irony if ground once burdened by slavery and exploitation becomes, at the end of the century, the real land of opportunity.
Blacks are moving south in record numbers. A net total of 369,000 between 1990 and 1995 have relocated there at a rate 925 higher than in the 1980s.
