via USA TODAY by Greg Toppo and Paul Overberg
College grads and retirees are leading the return of blacks to the South.
A quiet return could reshape region
As a little girl growing up in New York City, Linda Sharpe Haywood remembers her father being very clear about something: He was never going back to the South. His family told too many stories.
Born in 1929 in Knoxville, Tenn., James Sharpe was one of millions of African Americans who pulled up stakes and moved north, part of what would later come to be called the Great Migration. His family had left Tennessee by the time he was 10. He ended up in Harlem and he eventually found a job as a New York City policeman.
Sharpe and his wife, who ran women's shelter services for the city, raised a family comfortably on a tree-lined street in the Bronx. Linda Sharpe Haywood remembers a prosperous, happy middle-class childhood, complete with a dog and a yard to play in.
"He had no desire to move back to Tennessee," she says. "He wanted to live in a place that was comfortable, that he would feel safe."
But 60 years after he arrived in New York, Sharpe did move back to the South. He retired to Palm Coast, Fla., about an hour and a half north of Orlando on the Atlantic Ocean. Along for the ride were his daughter and son-in-law, by then both retired New York City cops as well.
The family returned to a new, more tempered South as part of what is now being called a reversal of the Great Migration. The quiet return of African-American retirees and young professionals has the potential to reshape the South again over the next few decades, much as the exodus to northern cities reshaped it in the 20th century.
An older couple rest at the end of a workday on a plantation in Tennessee in February 1930. Before the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North, the three states with the largest black populations were Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama.(Photo: AP)
The reversal "began as a trickle in the 1970s, increased in the 1990s, and turned into a virtual evacuation from many northern areas in the first decade of the 2000s," says William Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer who has laid out the reversal in painstaking detail in his new book Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America. The movement, he writes, is driven largely by younger, college-educated African Americans, as well as baby boomers like Sharpe Haywood who are nearing retirement.
"When you leave metropolitan cities like New York, you want to come down to some bedroom community where you don't have to worry about much," she says. For Sharpe Haywood and her family, Palm Coast's biggest selling point is something that isn't there: segregation, formal or informal, among any of its neighborhoods. "You're free to live where you can afford to live," she says.
College grads and retirees are leading the return of blacks to the South.
A quiet return could reshape region
As a little girl growing up in New York City, Linda Sharpe Haywood remembers her father being very clear about something: He was never going back to the South. His family told too many stories.
Born in 1929 in Knoxville, Tenn., James Sharpe was one of millions of African Americans who pulled up stakes and moved north, part of what would later come to be called the Great Migration. His family had left Tennessee by the time he was 10. He ended up in Harlem and he eventually found a job as a New York City policeman.
Sharpe and his wife, who ran women's shelter services for the city, raised a family comfortably on a tree-lined street in the Bronx. Linda Sharpe Haywood remembers a prosperous, happy middle-class childhood, complete with a dog and a yard to play in.
"He had no desire to move back to Tennessee," she says. "He wanted to live in a place that was comfortable, that he would feel safe."
But 60 years after he arrived in New York, Sharpe did move back to the South. He retired to Palm Coast, Fla., about an hour and a half north of Orlando on the Atlantic Ocean. Along for the ride were his daughter and son-in-law, by then both retired New York City cops as well.
The family returned to a new, more tempered South as part of what is now being called a reversal of the Great Migration. The quiet return of African-American retirees and young professionals has the potential to reshape the South again over the next few decades, much as the exodus to northern cities reshaped it in the 20th century.
An older couple rest at the end of a workday on a plantation in Tennessee in February 1930. Before the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North, the three states with the largest black populations were Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama.(Photo: AP)
The reversal "began as a trickle in the 1970s, increased in the 1990s, and turned into a virtual evacuation from many northern areas in the first decade of the 2000s," says William Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer who has laid out the reversal in painstaking detail in his new book Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America. The movement, he writes, is driven largely by younger, college-educated African Americans, as well as baby boomers like Sharpe Haywood who are nearing retirement.
"When you leave metropolitan cities like New York, you want to come down to some bedroom community where you don't have to worry about much," she says. For Sharpe Haywood and her family, Palm Coast's biggest selling point is something that isn't there: segregation, formal or informal, among any of its neighborhoods. "You're free to live where you can afford to live," she says.