Thread by @washingtonpost

African Americans are moving out of the cities that their parents and grandparents fled to during Jim Crow and into the South‘s booming metropolises.

Some are calling it the new Great Migration. wapo.st/33n64O0

The percentage of Black Americans who live in the South has been increasing since 1990, and the biggest gains have been in the region’s large urban areas, according to census data. wapo.st/33n64O0

The Black population of metro Atlanta more than doubled between 1990 and 2020, surpassing 2 million in the most recent census and overtaking Chicago as the second-largest concentration of African Americans in the country after metropolitan New York. wapo.st/33n64O0

Meanwhile, the Black population shrank in a number of Northern and Western cities.

For the second census in a row, Chicago and its suburbs lost Black population, and has decreased by 130,000 since 1990. wapo.st/33n64O0

To understand the reasons behind this new Great Migration, The Post interviewed Black Americans across three Southern states — Georgia, North Carolina and Texas — who had moved to the South in recent decades. wapo.st/33n64O0

When D’Ivoire Johnson decided to leave Minneapolis, it was in hopes of not having her two sons grow up in what’s been called the “Minnesota paradox.” wapo.st/33n64O0

Sherri Lucas-Hall loved her childhood in Chicago.

But despite coming from three generations of hard-working Chicagoans, Lucas-Hall’s family, like much of the South Side, was still mostly fighting to survive, not thriving. wapo.st/33n64O0

Leslie Mac, who is Jamaican, grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn where many of New York’s Caribbean immigrants settled.

Moving to Charlotte was like a homecoming. wapo.st/33n64O0