More Black Women Are Returning South. Staying There Is Getting Harder.

Nicole Crooks spent much of her life running the same calculation in her head: Which kind of racism is survivable — the North’s polite version or the South’s blunt one.

A move to a mostly white suburb outside Albany, New York, as a teenager brought some clarity, but it didn’t come without heartbreak. There she found no Black community to absorb the subtle blows she experienced as a high schooler, like when school administrators blocked her and her best friend Ruthie from starting a Black student association. But there was Ruthie, at least. Until there wasn’t. 

When Ruthie died in her early 20s, Crooks’ years of dislocation hardened into a conclusion: The North offered neither safety nor home.

It was then that she arrived at her current formulation. “I would rather be in a space where I know they don’t like me because I’m Black,” she said, “than a place where I think they do like me, but they’re doing everything in their power to destroy me — and it has everything to do with my race, but they’re so good at hiding it.”

In the early 2000s, Crooks joined the wave of Black Americans who have been leaving the North since the 1970s to return to the South, looking at it as a place where they may finally be able to make a home. Her experience, and those of Black women making similar moves, shows how a new set of political and economic pressures is undermining that promise, fracturing the foundation. The cost of living is climbing, Black political power is harder to secure, and access to quality maternal health care remains uneven. Taken together, these forces are reshaping the possibilities for Black belonging in the contemporary South. 

Since the 1990s, roughly 2 million Black Americans have moved to the South, making it the only region gaining more Black people than it has lost over that time. Disproportionately, many making the journey are Black women and often college-educated. 

They are drawn to the South by family and culture, by historically Black institutions and cheaper housing, and by a sense, as historian Beatrice Adams put it, of being “the newest generation in a series of generations who’ve had to turn to somewhere new for hope after the last place didn’t provide it.” 

But Black folks are arriving in a region where Black economic mobility is among the lowest in the country. In addition, it’s where Black life expectancy lags, climate change is pushing Black communities out, abortion bans and maternal mortality fall heaviest on Black women, and legislatures are moving aggressively to gerrymander away the very political power that was supposed to make the return worthwhile. The question for women like Crooks isn’t simply whether the South feels like home, but whether it is possible to build and keep one there under those conditions.

When she looks back at her life experiences across the U.S., she comes back to the same questions. 

“What good is diversity without connection?” Crooks asked about the North, but “what good is connection without resources?” she asked about the South.

She is not sure if either question has a good answer.

Crooks found herself part of this reverse migration long before it had a name. Born in Johnson City, Tennessee, she moved at 5 with her mother to Amherst, Massachusetts — a small college town that happened, in the late ’70s and early ’80s, to be a gathering point for Black intellectuals. She watched James Baldwin drift through gatherings unbothered and chain-smoking, felt Shirley Chisholm cup her cheeks to tell her she would be “very, very special,” and laughed so hard at Toni Cade Bambara’s stories that her stomach would hurt.

And still, her white neighbors always made clear she was a Black girl in a white town.

When her mother took a job at historically Black Dillard University, they moved to New Orleans. At the New Orleans Free School, where seventh and eighth graders took buses to weekly internships, Crooks felt a “freedom she had never experienced” up North. The city’s Black culture wrapped around her so fully that she still calls it the first place that truly felt like home. But when her mother lost her job after a dispute with Dillard’s president, the abrupt exit taught her an early lesson. Even Black-run institutions in the South are entangled in hierarchies that can eject you just as quickly as any white one.

Then the family moved to the upper New York state suburb. But after Ruthie’s death, the South called again. Her grandmother in Macon, Georgia, invited her to take over the family’s daycare — the first Black-owned childcare center in the city. Crooks went, a mother of two, imagining her boys raised around extended family. Instead, Macon felt suffocating. The conservatism left her stuck, the fantasy of intergenerational support evaporated, and within six months she walked away. It was at this point that she found her way to Florida, almost by accident.

This movement of Black folks is all around us, said Adams, and yet, unlike the first Great Migration, it has largely been ignored because it is less clear. “The first wave exposed ‘Jim Crow North,’” Adams said, and the fact that you can’t “chase freedom” in America.

When Black Americans began moving back South in earnest after the 1970s, one argument for the migration was this: concentrate in a region where you are a demographic majority and you can build durable political power. For a time, it worked — Atlanta; Charlotte, North Carolina; Houston; and Miami elected Black mayors and city councils, and Black voter turnout in the South climbed steadily.

Crooks arrived in Miami believing in that logic. Quickly she learned otherwise. Within a few years, she was pushed out of Miami’s Coconut Grove, a historically Black community, by gentrification and a loss of political power. Now she lives in Overtown, another Black community facing similar struggles.

There, she joined the community oversight board — created to give residents veto power over development — and started showing up to commission meetings, school budget hearings, and neighborhood organizing sessions. She co-founded the Black Butterfly Collective to educate Black women about environmental and climate justice, walked Overtown’s sidewalks monthly with GirlTrek, and helped beat back a stadium proposal that would have displaced residents.

“Wherever you live,” she said, “you have a duty to always be involved in that community.”

“There’s so much erasure going on to get us out of here,” Crooks added. “In the face of all this mess, our places and our people are worth fighting for.”

Then came the counteroffensive. The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais effectively gutted remaining Voting Rights Act protections against racial gerrymandering, giving Republican-controlled Southern legislatures a green light to redraw maps designed to dilute Black voting power before the 2026 midterms. Florida is already moving to follow suit.

Up to 10 majority-Black congressional districts in the South are now at risk. One voting rights coalition has warned that 25 Black members of Congress and 191 Black state legislators could face elimination once the ruling is fully implemented. 

“When it comes to electoral empowerment, this is one of the ways in which this migration’s relationship to political power is less clear than in the Great Migration,” Adams explained. “City-level and federal-level political empowerment isn’t happening in quite as direct a way, and some may argue it is getting worse.” 

The community oversight board Crooks once served on has already been hollowed out. Southern legislatures, she said, are now working to ensure those voters can’t translate their numbers into representation.

A thousand miles north, Stephanie Miller is carrying the same contradictions on different land.

She grew up in Philadelphia, left a white, male-dominated hospitality industry, and in 2016, returned to land her great-great-grandmother purchased nearly a century ago in rural Virginia. 

“I knew there was going to be a time where we would need to be back on the land,” she said. “That was part of the reason why I wanted to get started before we needed each other.”

In 2016, when she started MysticPine Farm, she did not romanticize it. The federal government spent the better part of a century making Black farming nearly impossible by denying loans and foreclosing on land. In 2021, Congress passed $4 billion in debt relief for Black and other minority farmers as partial reparation for that history, but the courts struck it down within months. Now the current administration has gone further, eliminating the federal programs that once provided technical assistance to small Black farms, cutting the federal contracts that bought their produce, and slashing the food assistance that kept their neighbors fed. 

Last fall, those cuts arrived at once. Miller’s federal contracts were gone and her neighbors’ food stamp benefits fell from $80 a month to $12. She had already lost a summer harvest. So she pushed everything into a harvest of collards and old-variety kale — the kinds her grandparents used to grow — hoping to fill holiday bags for families whose pantries had gone thin. “Obviously I didn’t know the specifics, but I knew this was coming,” she said about Black people needing to rely on one another rather than the government. 

Layered on top of that economic hostility is trauma. Her ancestor was lynched in the woods behind the property where she now farms, a reminder that the land she is trying to reclaim has always carried both the possibility of self-determination and the memory of what happens when Black people try to claim it.

Still, she has given her land and herself to the community, turning the farm into what she calls an immersive learning lab with community growing days, youth food workshops, and herb-to-tea demonstrations. 

“I’m growing food here, but I’m also asking the community to come and grow food with me,” she said. But the question her farm poses — whether returning to Southern land and building Black cooperative economies — does not have a clean answer.

There is another layer compounding these moves for women like Crooks and Miller. Since they’ve both returned to the South, the region has become ground zero for both the Black maternal health crisis and the larger attack on reproductive health access. 

Nearly 7 million Black women of reproductive age now live in states that have banned or are likely to ban abortion, the vast majority of them in the South, where Black women are already three times more likely than white women to die from pregnancy-related causes. This is a fact that shadows every choice about whether to stay, to leave, or to bring another generation up there, Adams said. 

“People feel this cultural tie to the South as a place where Black people can see each other prospering economically, politically, and they feel a desire to be part of that, but the most vulnerable people aren’t anywhere close to prospering,” she said, referring to women, LGBTQ+ people, and low-income families. 

But Crooks and Miller are staying in the South because they feel it is worth defending. And that is not to say that the South has proved itself worthy, but because Black people have not yet found anywhere else that feels more like theirs, Crooks said: “We still have to plant ourselves somewhere.”

“Even with the discomfort of existing in this space, I feel like there is this calling us back to ourselves,” she added about the South. “There’s something here in the South — like an ancestral spirit that’s so present.”