Young, Black professionals move in droves down South hoping for success

In a move that people are calling 'reverse migration,' cities like Atlanta are becoming attractive to millennials of color

The turn of the twentieth century saw almost 90 percent of Black people —six million total— migrating North from southern cities across America because of racist laws and limited opportunities. Today, they are headed back South.

Dawn Onley

Mar 2, 2020

Atlanta's Georgia Dome theGrio.com — MINNEAPOLIS, MN - SEPTEMBER 09: The Minneapolis city skyline is a backdrop to the stadium as the Minnesota Vikings defeated the Atlanta Falcons 24-3 at the Metrodome (Photo by Doug Pensinger/Getty Images)

Young, Black professionals like Tristan Walker, a technologist who previously worked for Twitter and FourSquare before starting his own company, Walker & Company, wanted to see more diversity and more people who were like him. Walker & Company was created “to make health and beauty simple for people of color,” according to his website.

“It was important for us to be in a place that’s more diverse than the places that we were,” Walker told NBC News.

Two years ago, his company merged with Procter & Gamble in 2018 and although Walker remained CEO, he thought the timing was ripe to move his family to the ATL like many young Black people are doing.

“I realized, particularly with my having two sons, what kind of world I wanted them to grow up in,” Walker told NBC. “And when I thought about cities in this country that were thriving, Atlanta won and there was no second place.”

Jessica Lynn Stewart, an assistant professor of African-American Studies at Emory University, said southern cities have become more attractive in recent years and that this trend is in part because of lack of economic opportunities and an increase in crime from northern cities, NBC News reported. For example, thousands of Black families have been fleeing Chicago, according to The New York Times.

“The need for labor during World War I, the need for people to actually work in some factories …people were actually recruiting African-Americans in the South,” explained Stewart to NBC News. “You had people who were upwardly mobile saying: We want to go somewhere else. We want to go somewhere where we don’t see the neighborhoods being constantly disinvested in. I think we see a connection between loss of economic opportunity and crime. You see in a lot of these major cities in the Northeast and the Midwest increases in crime. And that can directly be related to the fact that there aren’t a lot of jobs.”

Nicole Chandler, a Walker & Company employee, has also moved to Atlanta, the city where she was raised. Chandler told NBC she never envisioned herself moving back, but she wanted out from California.

“There’s so many innovators in this space that look like me, that are making products for me,” Chandler said. “I’m seeing people that look and move like me, and I think that is very attractive to people, especially coming from Silicon Valley.”

Walker says he’s excited that his sons will get to see successful Black people thriving.

“I was really chasing an opportunity that would help my sons thrive in the future,” he said to NBC News. “It’s been really important for me to show that it is possible to thrive with people who look like you and see other people thriving at the same time in the environment you happen to be in.”