Southern migration fuels gains for blacks


ORLANDO — Troy Robinson stood on the first tee at the Eagle Creek Golf Club and said that for him, there's no going back.
"I told the guys in my old golf group in Pittsburgh that I'm not coming back. You can come to visit me," he recalled telling his friends in the western Pennsylvania city, "but I'm not moving back there."

Robinson, the vice president for resource development at the Heart of Florida United Way, is part of the most recent wave of blacks to move into the South — a reverse migration that has fueled some major gains for blacks.

During the 1990s, the South's black population grew by nearly 3.6 million people, more than in any other sector of the country.

A 33-year-old native of Pittsburgh, Robinson relocated his family to Florida in January, 60 years after black sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace Clayton chronicled the massive migration of blacks away from this region in their book, Black Metropolis. And Robinson arrived here 110 years after Booker T. Washington famously beseeched blacks, many of them former slaves, not to abandon the South.

"Cast down your buckets where you are," he said in urging them to stay in the region and accept menial work as a way of building an economic base — and to cultivate friendly relations with Southern whites by not agitating for social equality.

"It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top," Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, said in 1895. His position was largely rejected by the millions of blacks who fled the Jim Crow South during the first half of the 20th century for higher paying jobs and better social conditions.

More than a century later, however, the South has emerged as the leading source of economic opportunity for black businesses and fertile ground for black politicians.

Black entrepreneurs

Forty-six of the 100 largest revenue-earning, black-owned industrial and service companies are located below the Mason-Dixon Line — more than in any other region of the country, according to Black Enterprise magazine. Forty-three of the 100 largest black-owned auto dealerships are also there, as are 14 of the 25 biggest black-owned banks, the magazine reveals this month in its annual report on the nation's top black businesses.

The seeds of this economic success were planted by political leaders such as former Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry and one-time Atlanta mayors Maynard Jackson and Bill Campbell, who led the way in promoting black business development in the region, said James H. Johnson Jr., who heads the Urban Investment Strategies Center at the University of North Carolina. These politicians, he says, were the early beneficiaries of the region's black population growth.

Majority population

Now, in addition to Washington and Atlanta, blacks are a majority of the population and political force in Baltimore, Richmond, Va., Birmingham, Ala., Jackson, Miss., and New Orleans. In six states below the Mason-Dixon Line — Maryland, South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana — blacks are at least a quarter of the population. Twenty-one of the Congressional Black Caucus' 43 members come from below the Mason-Dixon Line. More than half of the nation's 35 million blacks now live in this region of the country.

The southward movement of blacks, Johnson said, started slowly in the 1960s and began to snowball in recent years, driven by two groups. One is made up of blacks who left the region but now are returning to retire or to care for an aging family member. The other one is comprised of younger blacks who have moved to take advantage of employment opportunities in "the new South."

Next year, this population shift and economic growth could help produce another important gain for blacks. Former Maryland congressman Kweisi Mfume and Tennessee Rep. Harold Ford Jr., both Democrats, have already announced their intention to try to become the first blacks elected to a Senate seat from below the Mason-Dixon Line since Reconstruction. And it's expected that another black candidate, Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, a Republican, also will compete for the Maryland Senate seat.

While it wasn't done his way, somewhere in the great beyond, Booker T. Washington has got to be smiling.

DeWayne Wickham writes weekly for USA TODAY.

It is said there is a time and a place.

1895 was not the time.

The South was not the place.

Booker T. Washington finally came to realize, and acknowledge that in that period.

As good as his intent was, Booker T. Washington was the unwitting dupe of Andrew Carnegie, and other tycoons of the Industrial Age.

He was seen as 'raising laborers for The Industrial Age'; a transition corp of labor from The Agricultural Age.

The new migration is good.

The concentration of power, be it economic or political is good for African America.

PEACE

Jim Chester