The 1970's has been recorded as an approximate time
that African Americans began returning "home" to the South. It is
recorded that between 1970-1975 the return South had reached the 100,000
mark. Between 1990-1995 a recorded 300,000 Blacks had return to the
Southern metropolitan areas. It appears that Blacks
are not returning to the rural areas, but recently developed metropolitan
areas like Atlanta, Georgia. Several Southern cities experienced
serious economic development.
". . . The South - especially in
rural areas - historically lagged behind the Northeast and Midwest in
industrialization and income, but recent decades have seen southern economic
growth. As this growth improved personal prospects, fewer people may
have felt it necessary to leave the region, seeking instead newly prosperous
metro destinations in the South. The same economic development
also made the South more attractive for potential migrants from other
regions. . . A major non-economic factor often cited as a reason for the
Black migration turnaround is the turnaround of overt racial discrimination
in the South, following the extension of voting rights to Blacks and the
ending of legally sanctioned segregation. " (http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/rdrr93/rdrr93b.pdf)
Also, many African Americans are attracted
back to the South because of family roots and the resurgence of a booming
Black middle class. The 2000 census reports that in the 1990's many
Blacks returned to the lands that their grandparents and parents left eighty
years earlier.
"Migration patterns of the 1990s indicate a
return to the South of huge numbers of blacks whose parents and grandparents
had left the region in earlier decades. The region is now home to almost 55
percent of the country's blacks, compared with less than one-third of the
U.S. Hispanic population and less than one-fifth of Asian Americans. The
return to the South of blacks, along with the Sunbelt-directed migration of
whites, is reinforcing the South's white-black profile, but in a booming new
economy and with improved race relations." (www.prb.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Pt_articles/April-June_2001/Migration_to_the_South_Brings_U_S_Blacks_Full_Circle.htm)
The growth was reported as: