Wednesday New York Times Reports Northern Blacks Moving Back South

A New York Times front page story today reports that African-Americans are moving back to the American South and reversing a trend of moving North that began a decade or so after the turn of the century.

The story, "For New Life, Blacks in City Head to South," by Dan Bilefsky, illustrates the trend with a tale of three generations of black New Yorkers moving to Atlanta from New York, "seeking to start fresh economically and, in some sense, to reconnect with a bittersweet past."

According to the story, "About 17 percent of the African-Americans who moved to the South from other states in the past decade came from New York, far more than from any other state, according to census data. Of the 44,474 who left New York State in 2009, more than half, or 22,508, went to the South, according to a study conducted by the sociology department of Queens College for The New York Times."

The movement, Bilefsky says, "marks an inversion of the so-called Great Migration, which lasted roughly from World War I to the 1970s and saw African-Americans moving to the industrializing North to escape prejudice and find work."

The Times story was a discussion-piece for southwest Atlanta on social media Wednesday and fodder for debates on radio talk shows on WAOK 1380 AM and online sites such as BET.com.