http://www.findarticles.com/p/articl...4/ai_n14576840
In what demographers are calling a "full scale reversal" of the Great Migration in the early part of the 20th century, blacks are leaving California, New York, Illinois and New Jersey and retracing steps to a place their families once fled -- the South.
This population shift of hundreds of thousands of blacks is nowhere near the millions who left the South from 1910 to 1970. But the flow is sustained and large enough, according to a study released today by the Brookings Institution, that a new map of black America must be drawn.
Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Detroit -- cities blacks once considered the promised land -- are now seeing more blacks moving out than moving in. As part of this shift, the overall black population in Los Angeles County and the Bay Area has dropped for the first time in 70 years.
Between 1990 and 2000, the black population in the San Francisco- Oakland-San Jose area dropped from 537,753 to 513,561, according to census data analyzed in the Brookings study.
The new migratory pattern reflects the ascendancy of Latinos and Asians.
"We came out to California to find gold and many of us found it," said Noella Buchanan, a pastor at the Community African Methodist Episcopal Church in Corona, east of Los Angeles. "But when it's time to retire, there's this desire to go back home. Even the children who grew up in California are feeling the pull. They're heading off to black colleges in Atlanta and North Carolina and staying there.
"Let's face it. Everything is crazy here. The traffic is crazy, the housing prices are crazy. They're finding a slower pace of life in the South. Out here, we're the forgotten minority. Back there, we're the chosen minority."
The migration of blacks out of California, a trend that began more than a decade ago, is growing as more blacks from every socioeconomic class seek a better life in Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, Texas and Tennessee.
California ranked just behind New York as the state experiencing the largest net loss -- 63,180 -- in black migration from 1995 to 2000, the study found. More than half of that loss took place in the Los Angeles-Riverside-Orange counties region. The net loss of black migrants in New York was 165,366; in Illinois, 55,238; and in New Jersey, 34,682.
Although blacks throughout the country are moving to Atlanta; Dallas; Houston; Charlotte, N.C.; Memphis, Tenn.; and Orlando, Fla., blacks in California are also choosing to relocate to a new Western dream: Las Vegas.
"My wife and I live in a house with 3,000 square feet, a nice yard, nice patio, nice pool, nice neighborhood, right next door to a Mormon bishop," said Martin Bauchman, a 75-year-old Las Vegas newcomer.
He left his native Oklahoma in 1950 and moved to South-Central Los Angeles. Two years ago, he pulled up stakes and moved to the boomtown in the desert.
"My back yard is even big enough that I got some tomatoes and peppers and a few carrots," he said chuckling. "I just saw Gladys Knight perform at the Flamingo down the street. It's a pretty good life."
For the better part of a century, California served as a major magnet for black families escaping the despair of the Southern sharecropper system and the recessions of the industrial Midwest and Northeast. And Los Angeles represented the bright star of black life in the West, a center for its literature, entertainment, political power and social progress.
"I think it's a new day. The population shift and trends are far too great for Los Angeles to remain the Western mecca of black political power and culture," said James Johnson, a business demographics professor at the University of North Carolina who wrote one of the first studies of blacks leaving Los Angeles in the 1990s. "Los Angeles will still have a strong black community, but it won't be like it was."
The reverse population flow has two faces. Young blacks are following job or college opportunities and planting roots in the same Southern soil that their parents and grandparents fled more than half a century ago. At the same time, blacks who spent their working lives in California are looking to retire in a new South where Atlanta has emerged as the major black metropolis.
For young and old, the push and pull factors are often the same: cheaper housing, slower pace of life, less traffic, fewer gangs and a longing to return to the South, a region no longer seen as supporting the flagrant racism that helped fuel the Great Migration.
"They are following networks back to the South, but they are also following the job opportunities," said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution who wrote the report, "The New Great Migration: Black Americans Return to the South." Available at: http://www.brookings.edu/urban/pubs/20040524_Frey.pdf> |
0 comments:
Post a Comment