FBR 97: The Reverse Migration . . .

Buried in this morning's New York Times article about the recent substantial movement of black Americans from cities in the Northeast and Midwest cities to the South is this remarkable little paragraph, referring to the primarily young make-up of the migrating families:

Not everyone was well off. Katherine Curtis, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who specializes in demography and inequality, said blacks who returned to the states where they were born tended to have a higher poverty rate than those who went to other Southern states. One reason could be that they moved back for family, not economic opportunity, she said.

Now, aside from the (fascinatingly determined) fact that the individuals and families moving to their ancestral areas had a higher poverty rate, and there is nothing good about that, I find the return home, after decades, to be a potent and touching human act. It conjures a host of images and sounds of what one might call the dust tracks on the road. This is a simpleton's notion, of course. The walk up the road to the old homestead. It's not Odysseus's return, after all. So why does it take on the quiet aura of a Eudora Welty photo? Why does it hold so much appeal to a non-migrating, non-black?

When I went back to Cleveland last year after almost fifty years, and stood in front of the small house I grew up in, I felt something tremble that hasn't really stopped. The fact that my white neighborhood has become a primarily black one is a wonderful tiny part of this big story. The vastness of the first migration, whose historical treatment is found in such books as The Promised Land by Nicholas Lemann and, more recently, The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, has come a kind of full circle, and ostensibly for the same reason: opportunity. That blacks may have returned to their Southern roots for family (and family memory) is even more powerful. The wisdom in the blood. That the South is becoming a more accommodating region, and that its population incorporates an ever more interracial makeup, as also detailed in the Times, are both beautiful occurrences. Those streets and yards are being recolonized and redeemed. It's nowhere near as simple as that, of course. But I think we can take at least part of this as a very good thing.