Black Migration in a Country of Migrants

People moving from one place to another in search of a different life, better opportunities, and more freedom is one of the oldest phenomena around. Immigration is a specific form of migration. And in this country, we so often frame it as a threat that it can be easy to forget. The Great Migration is evidence that Black Americans know all too well what it means to feel the need to leave for unknown lands in the hopes of flourishing.

In this moving, the hopes of Black people have often been thwarted, but not abandoned. This, unfortunately, is the case for many migrants of color. And so it got me wondering about those efforts to find solid places. Where do Black people take up space in this country? How have we moved and where have we moved? I decided to look into this with some data.

The Great Migration

When I watched the movie Sinners set in Greenville, MS, it opened up a world that was foreign, yet strangely familiar. I’ve never been to Mississippi, yet I felt a kinship with the people, the music, the language, and the traditions. Hell, college classmates on the east coast all thought that I had a southern accent. That’s because my family, like so many other Chicago Black families, has roots in that state and other parts of the south. 

My grandmother, along with her brothers and sister, migrated up from a small town in the Mississippi delta as a young woman in the 60’s, trying to put down roots and start a different, better life. So strange that individuals just trying to make the best decisions for their own lives, can make up a movement. 

They were part of the last wave of the Great Migration. An event between 1910 and 1970 in which nearly six million Black people left the South, escaping racial violence and oppression. Or just in search of better opportunities. There were some key places that attracted these migrants, and Chicago was one of them.

In 1910 about 90% of the Black population lived in the South. By 1970, that had dropped to ~53%! Knowing the history that triggered this mass exodus, I wanted to get an idea of the migration patterns since that era. What do they say about the workings of this country, or the resilience of a people? I observed data from 1970 to 2023 to understand where are Black folks now, and how we have been moving in the last fifty years.

Where We Were – The Blackest Places in the US

At the end of the Great Migration, a little more than half of the Black population still lived in the south. And the majority of counties you could find in the country that were majority black were also in the South. This statistic captures the question: if I show up in a particular county, how Black is it going to feel? Out of all the people I encounter, how many of them will be black?

The map below shows a time lapse of the percent of population that is black per county. We see that the south and northeast dominate the map of highly black-populated counties; some even reaching upwards of 70% black. There are pockets of highly black-populated counties in the midwest in places like Chicago, Detroit, and St. Louis. We also see a few pockets in the west, but western counties mostly have low percentages of black population. You can hover on the map to get information such as total population, black population and black population percent for each county.

Black Migration: How We Have Moved

From the map above, we see some very specific trends in where Black folks tend to cluster in the US. In the table below, we can see how black populations were dispersed across the US in 1970 vs. 2020. The south, and particularly the southeast, has been and continues to be where a major percentage reside. The northeast and the midwest each held about 20% of black residents in the country in 1970. By 2020, both had lost two and three percent of the population respectively. Whereas the southwest (places like Texas) and the west (states such as Arizona and Nevada) saw gains in the share of the black population.

Regionally, we don’t see any major changes. Perhaps an indication that the issues that caused many Black Americans to flee the South became neutralized and/or on par with any of the challenges that they would face elsewhere in the country. However when we look at the state level, we see more clearly the movement of the numbers over the years.

Gains and Losses

Below we see that IL, DC (we count DC as a state here for ease), and WV are the only states that have had a net loss over a decadal period since 1980. That, combined with the fact that the share of US black population has decreased by 4% in the east north central part of the midwest over the last fifty years, shows that black populations are not flourishing in places like Illinois. In line with this decline in once-vibrant Black enclaves, it’s also interesting to note DC’s consistent decline over the years. It has been renown as the “Chocolate City”, a majority-black metropolis full of Black pride. On the other hand, places like Texas, Florida, and Georgia have had pretty consistent growth over the decades.

A Note About These Numbers

It is important to note, there are factors that affect the increase and decrease of Black population other than movement. We must consider normal population increase. Also, the advent of Black immigrants who in turn get counted as Black in the census data. These are things that would need to be disaggregated from and accounted for in our data in order to get a clearer picture about the movement of Black Americans with roots in American slavery.

Also, when we talk about percent changes to the Black population of a particular area, we must consider the growth and contraction of the larger population of the area (a state or county for example). Immigration and migration of other peoples can affect these percentages as well. These are things that perhaps I’ll address in another story.

Reverse Great Migration?

Some years ago, I heard reference to the possibility of a “reverse great migration”. The thought was that, disillusioned by the promises unfulfilled by the American North, later generations of Black people were returning to the South in droves. Lured by lower costs of living, comparable racial dynamics, and perhaps a simpler way of life, these people were leaving the cities that had been the landing points for those fleeing the south. The data may already allude to this, with southern states dominating the charts in terms of population growth. Below, we see a focus on the changes in the Black population over time in some of the key Great Migration cities.

Washington DC and Detroit are the only cities presented here that have a lower black population in 2020 than they did in 1970, indicating a real loss in presence of Black folks in these cities. However we see a steadily increasing black population in cities like St. Louis and Milwaukee, and tumultuous yet clearly downtrending waves in places like Chicago, Los Angeles, and Oakland. This may not indicate a reverse great migration, but definitely a trend of Black folks moving, presumably for better opportunities, just as their forebears did. You can hover on the map for details.

Migration: Moving Away, Moving On

Black folks migrated north and west for the promise of opportunity and to escape the racial violence of the South. We overwhelmingly built lives rooted in urbanism. We toiled, we built, we endured. And our needs changed. Our hopes changed. Our sense of opportunity changed. And so we moved again and again as needed. Perhaps we are not in a wave of a reverse Great Migration. Only time has the luxury of assigning such grand labels. Nevertheless we cannot deny the steady stream of Black Americans leaving the places on which our hopes once hinged.

This is not an easy thing. No one should downplay what it means to pick up your life and move elsewhere, whether that be across state borders or country borders. Overwhelmingly, people want to stay where they have always been. When they do, they can wrap themselves in the comfort of the kinship, the music, the language, and the traditions of that place. The same things that I felt by simply watching a movie.

But we are human. We long for better, if not for ourselves, then for our family. That is what I remind myself when I think of changes to a city like Chicago and the neighborhood I grew up in. That is what I remind myself when I think about the discourse around immigrants coming to this nation. Most of this country is composed of immigrants. But my family and I, as a Black Americans with roots in American slavery, are not immigrants. That does not, however, stop me from empathizing with the migrant experience. The need to move on. My family did it, and so have many others. And I think we’d all do well to remember that.

Sources

National Cancer Institute U.S. County Population Estimates – SEER Population Data https://seer.cancer.gov/popdata/

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns (2010)