NATION Paradoxical relationship draws blacks to South

Economic opportunity and growing influence bring blacks back to a region still haunted by its history.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
CARY, Miss. -- It is a lovely time of year, summer.
The cotton stalks standing tall under the wilting heat. The bayou, quiet and still, at Low Water Bridge Road, where so many have been baptized into worshipping a southern God. And the children of the season, with their jump ropes, rusty old bikes and schoolyard games.
Deep along Highway 61, past Clarksdale and Hallandale and Rolling Fort, past the sudden bend, past the white clapboard church and the two brick bridges and just in front of a muddy arm of the Mississippi River, DeBorah Williams opens the door to her home, a rambling two-story Colonial once owned by her father's white boss.
She glosses over the landscape, takes in summer and the memories it offers. It has been only about a year since she moved back to her Mississippi home country from Portland, Ore., only a year since she parted with her immediate family and joined the largest reverse migration in history.
Williams is a symbol of the New South -- born here, haunted by its history, lured from the ZIP code by better opportunities, then pulled back by the region's twisted magnetism. There is irony in the new promise of the South: This is the same place that was built and burdened by slavery, now seen as a center for black prosperity.
Factors in return
The first black migration -- from the early 1900s to 1960, when about 6 million blacks left the South and headed north -- was the largest domestic movement of an ethnic group in history. Williams is among the black people now returning to a region they spent so much of the last century leaving.
This quiet migration of working-class black people, professionals and retirees is driven largely by economics, a relatively recent improvement in race relations, family ties and an inextricable link to the region that is hard for black people to explain, understand or dismiss.
The new Southern "black belt" -- made up of 620 counties -- can be defined in both tangible and intangible ways. The South has more black elected officials than any other region; they include the mayors of Atlanta, Houston, New Orleans and Memphis. Selma, Ala., a city historically cleaved by race and central to the fight against integration, now has its first black mayor and a black-majority city council.
There's more: The South boasts the lowest black unemployment rate of any region in the nation. The two most affluent black counties, Prince George's County, Md., and DeKalb County, Ga., are in the South. Many large corporations have opened shop in the South, offering better-quality jobs and making the region as a whole more prosperous.
Seeds for the reverse migration were planted in the 1980s, but it exploded in the 1990s. Forecasters expect the trend to continue for decades.
A place of extremes
Ask Williams to explore and explain her reasons for coming back to a world where the Civil War and history are so personal, and the answers are many and shifting, a prism held at distinctly different angles. She is not evasive -- she just doesn't allow herself to be bounded by black and white. Williams is much better suited to shades of gray, much like the South and its complex relationship with black people.
Mostly, she is ambivalent. The South is just one of those kinds of places -- full of extremes. It can beguile you and break your heart; it's full of horror stories and golden with opportunities.
"It's one of those kind of places you just love and hate," Williams says.
She loves the people. Hates the past.
Loves the way home feels. Hates the way others feel about it.
Loves the way the moss hangs just so from the trees. Hates the ubiquitous Confederate flag.
Loves the front-porch banter and friendly waves. Hates the dark whispers about race.
The roots of Williams' journey are simple, really. One day about two years ago, she woke up longing for the beauty of Mississippi, its odd history be damned. She called her folks, packed her bags, and on Dec. 1 headed south in the biggest Ryder truck she could find.
Her friends thought she was crazy. Her mother thought she was dying. But Williams says she left Portland not to die, but to live.
"I have been other places, but in the end, the South is all I know. It's where I came from and where I need to be, and it's not the South of my childhood," says Williams, whose voice never rises above a whisper. "Really, I was homesick."
Gains for blacks
So about three decades after the civil rights movement and just a year after Mississippi residents voted to keep the Confederate emblem on their state flag, Williams, 45, returned to a region where the social and racial order, in many ways, has changed. Where they don't say derogatory names to her face. Where black residents feel free to go places that had once been open only to whites. Where the South's certain gentility and politeness now feel inclusive.
The South's black population swelled by 3.5 million in the 1990s -- about twice the gain in the 1980s, and well above the gains in the 1970s, according to the U.S. Census. The black population in the South -- in cities and rural areas -- is growing at twice the rate of any other region in the country, the census shows.
In that way, the South is back -- from the long and ugly shadow of racial discord, from the insidiousness of Jim Crow segregation laws, from a stunted image. Since 1990, every state in the former Confederacy has seen an annual increase in the black population in both metropolitan centers and the rural South, places like Cary, Miss.
Florida -- which lost part of its traditional Southern character with immigration -- and Georgia led all states in black gains, posting 674,000 and 632,000, respectively. Other Southern states that saw 300,000-plus gains include Texas, North Carolina and Maryland. And in metropolitan areas with large black populations (200,000 plus), Orlando, Miami and Tampa were in the top five for black growth. Among smaller metropolitan areas, West Palm Beach ranks No. 4 in black growth.
At the same time, the other major regions -- the Northeast, Midwest and West -- all saw more black people leave than arrive.
"In the end, I think blacks feel there may be some pitfalls and potholes, but this is not the Old South anymore," says demographer William Frey of the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan. "It's not the same."