♪ ♪ GATES: In 1973, Gladys Knight and The Pips released a now-classic song called "Midnight Train to Georgia."

It's about a man living in Los Angeles whose dreams didn't work out as he planned.

♪ KNIGHT: L.A. ♪ ♪ proved too much for the man.

♪ ♪ BACKGROUND VOCALS: Too much for the man, ♪ ♪ he couldn't make it.

♪ ADAMS: "Midnight Train to Georgia" is talking about somebody becoming disillusioned, disenchanted with the opportunities of the West Coast, and deciding to take the train all the way back home.

♪ KNIGHT: He's leavin'.

♪ ♪ BACKGROUND VOCALS: Leavin'.

♪ ♪ KNIGHT: On that midnight train to Georgia.

♪ GRIFFIN: He's going back home.

Could be L.A. didn't work out, Philly didn't work out, New York didn't work out, Detroit didn't work out.

He's going back home to find something else to go back and settle down.

♪ KNIGHT: I'll be with him.

♪ ♪ BACKGROUND VOCALS: I know you will.

♪ ♪ KNIGHT: On that midnight train to Georgia.

♪ GRIFFIN: And it became this Black Reverse Migration anthem.

♪ KNIGHT: He kept dreaming.

♪ ♪ BACKGROUND VOCALS: Dreaming.

♪ ♪ KNIGHT: Oh, that someday he'd be a star.

♪ PENDERGRASS: Gladys Knight and The Pips, they're really capturing the feeling of this looking at the South and returning before the census analysts have picked up on this return that was about to unfold.

GATES: "Midnight Train to Georgia" was indeed a song speaking to the moment.

After 60 years of almost constant movement out of the South, Black people were starting to return.

The Great Migration was reversing course.

ADAMS: It is the new Great Migration.

What does it mean for African Americans to come southward and think about their kind of historical connection to that place?

Claiming the South as a place they have ownership of and a right to.

ABRAMS: The Reverse Migration can be characterized as cultural reclamation, but I also see it as necessary expansion.

This is our nation.

We deserve to be wherever we want and where we can find ourselves a space to stand and grow, that's where we should be.

GRIFFIN: The South has always had both this sense of a place that is a sight of terror and horror, and yet at the same time it is home.

It is home.

INTERVIEWER: You've talked about the fact that you feel it was probably a mistake for Blacks in the South to migrate north.

EXPERT: I think we should have stayed in the South, uh, having been uprooted from Africa, uh, and then in the South for 200 years, and we had what was really a culture, a African American culture that was in its infancy that was just beginning to emerge and then to uproot that and to try to transplant it to the urban north and to the hard pavements of the cities, I think was a mistake.

(explosions).

(sirens).

GATES: Starting in the middle of the 1960s, American cities became battlegrounds of rebellion.

Violent protests spread across the country like wildfire.

In the long hot summer of 1967 alone, there were more than 150 uprisings.

Incidents of police brutality often sparked the rebellions.

It's spontaneous rioting signaled deeper grievances among Black people.

Their once-thriving urban neighborhoods have become places of stagnation and despair with very few opportunities to get ahead.

HEALY: The North for a long time had been viewed as a promised land, a place where, uh, Black Americans could, uh, escape the discrimination and the economic subjugation that they were facing in the South.

But I think for a large number of Black migrants, it really turned out to be much less than what they had hoped it would be.

ADAMS: One of the kind of tragedies of the African American story in the 20th century is by the time African Americans begin to move in mass to the North is the same time we have de-industrialization happening.

So we have factories moving to suburbs, we have factories moving overseas, we have factories actually moving down south.

SUGRUE: And so what you see over the period in the 1950s and 1960s is growing chronic unemployment.

HEALY: Housing was scarce.

The quality of education was not good.

There were jobs, but many of them were low-paying, quite menial jobs.

Crime was fairly bad in northern cities, especially beginning in the late 1960s.

There had been this old saying for Black Southerners that it was either Baltimore or hell, but eventually, some of them came to realize that the two were the same thing that Baltimore really was hell, or Newark or Detroit or New York City or whichever northern city we're talking about.

GATES: The 1960s of course saw the triumph of the Civil Rights Movement with racial equality seemingly just around the corner, some middle-class Black families began moving to the suburbs and building wealth.

But for those stuck behind in the cities, things seem to be moving in reverse.

FREEMAN: That is a great irony and almost a paradox.

You have the passage of civil rights legislation.

You have Black people achieving elected office in large numbers.

♪ ROSS: I've been cryin'...

THE SUPREMES: Ooh-ooh.

♪ FREEMAN: Popular culture is also becoming influenced by African Americans in unprecedented ways, and yet Black neighborhoods are in worse condition than they ever were.

GATES: The quality of housing in Black neighborhoods had been inadequate since the beginning of the Great Migration, but by the 1960s it had reached a state of crisis.

People were living in homes with broken windows, no heat, and with infestations of rats and roaches.

But it wasn't just unscrupulous landlords or the disappearance of factory jobs, keeping people in this desperate state.

There were even more cynical forces at work.

REPORTER: A lot of people who are trying to stop the so-called White exodus suburbs say that they biggest problem is changing the attitudes of the people.

Do you feel that your attitude could be changed to, to make you want to stay here and live among Blacks?

WOMAN: Well, I, I don't know.

I mean, I'm not, uh, prejudice, um, I just assume, you know, live here, live anywhere else, but I don't want to be the only White family living here, you see what I mean?

SUGRUE: One of the greatest migrations of the 20th century was the migration of Whites from central cities to surrounding suburbs.

This was a migration made possible by massive federal subsidies.

The process was totally closed or almost totally closed to Blacks.

FORNER: It was the federal government that was actually promoting racial segregation and housing through what they called redlining.

The government did not like seeing Black and White people living together.

Black people were denied federal mortgages that they should have been entitled to.

So redlining helps to create an urban landscape that is rigidly segregated.

HEALY: It becomes this sort of, uh, vicious cycle where most Black transplants to the north were stuck living in cities at a time when the tax base was declining and the cities lacked the money to ensure that housing was decent and that the streets were safe.

GATES: Not only were racist government policies making it hard for Black people to live outside the city, they were also making it hard for them to live in the city.

In an effort to address urban decay, many cities began massive construction projects, raising old buildings ostensibly to clear the way for new development.

This was known euphemistically as urban renewal.

FREEMAN: Urban renewal may have had a positive intention; we're going to tear down the slums and, in some cases, it did tear down slum housing.

But the way it went about doing that, it displaced so many people with little concern about the communities that lived there.

JORDAN: African Americans won't be welcomed back in this neighborhood once it's destroyed.

So the idea of urban renewal sounds like you're gonna fix something up so that the people will have a better place to live, but it's being fixed up for a whole new set of people, not the people who are already there.

BALDWIN: Most northern cities now are engaged in something called "urban renewal," which means moving the Negroes out.

Getting it means negro removal.

That is what it means.

And the federal government is a, a, is an accomplice to this fact.

GATES: Many urban renewal projects destroyed traditional Black communities.

Particularly hard hit was Detroit's Black Bottom.

JORDAN: In the lower east side of the city of Detroit was a neighborhood known as Black Bottom.

It was the primary residential neighborhood for African Americans all during the Great Migration, just north of this Black Bottom residential area was a neighborhood known as Paradise Valley, which from the 1920s up until the 1960s, was the entertainment and business district that was primarily owned by African American business people.

SUGRUE: But Paradise Valley, which had been the center of Black business in Detroit since the first Great Migration was almost entirely destroyed for the construction of a major freeway.

Urban renewal gutted the capital of a whole generation of fragile but important Black-owned businesses.

By the 1960s, Detroit was a tinderbox.

There was growing discontent around housing at the city's economy, about the lack of opportunity, about overcrowded schools.

But one of the most important issues that played out in Detroit in that period was the persistence of police harassment and violence targeting African Americans.

GATES: One evening in July 1967, those tensions boiled over.

♪ ♪ SUGRUE: July 23rd.

On a hot summer night, there was a party.

The celebrations went on into the wee hours of the morning and the Detroit police came to break it up.

JORDAN: They raid the place expecting to arrest 15, 20 people like they always get in these kinds of raids, but it's 85 people there.

SUGRUE: Folks began to gather to see what the commotion was and soon took to the streets, breaking windows and lighting fires.

RIOTER: Burn, baby, burn.

(sirens).

SUGRUE: Soon the uprising in Detroit spread passed the Black neighborhood on the west side to cover ultimately close to 100 square miles of the city.

The National Guard was called in.

JORDAN: The National Guard, they're young White men from small towns who've never really seen Black people in real life.

They have military-style weapons, but they're about as trained as Boy Scouts.

You put them in the middle of a rebellion/riot with angry Black people.

They answer it the only way they know how, by shooting them.

(explosions).

(gunshots).

GATES: After five days of unrest... (sirens).

43 people had been killed, more than 1,000 had been injured and over 2,500 buildings had been looted or burned.

SUGRUE: The tragedy of 1967 was the huge number of deaths.

The majority of those, uh, 43 people who died, died at the hands of law enforcement officials.

Detroit was one of the most violent uprisings, uh, in the 20th century.

It was a collective expression of grievance, of frustration, and discontent.

McKISSICK: Violence is going to be with us so long as we have the system and the oppression that we have.

GATES: In the fallout of the urban rebellions of the 1960s, activists demanded new solutions to the problems plaguing inner cities.

One of the most vocal was Floyd McKissick.

HEALY: Floyd McKissick was one of the major civil rights leaders of the 1950s, '60s, and '70s.

He becomes the national chairman and the executive director of the Congress of Racial Equality.

He had been for much of his life and his career an ardent advocate of integration and non-violence.

But as he led corps in the mid and late 1960s, his rhetoric and his approach to civil rights became more militant, more radical.

McKISSICK: I do not believe that nonviolent demonstrations are the answer to the problems of Black people or else these problems would have been solved some time ago.

HEALY: He came to believe that the existing approach wasn't adequate.

That in spite of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, that the condition of life for many Black people simply had not changed.

ADAMS: Floyd McKissick talking about community control and he's saying you see these urban rebellions happening in the mid-1960s.

If we wanna stop that in its track, then African Americans need control of their communities.

HEALY: The federal government obviously recognized the problem that it had with respect to the situation in these large cities in the north.

McKissick was asked to testify before a Senate committee in 1966, and it was during this testimony where McKissick almost in a rather kind of offhanded way, suggests the idea of building new cities.

If the existing cities aren't capable of accommodating all the people who wanna live there, why not build new cities?

McKISSICK: I think it's time and we come right back to the land where we started from and really start building and build an economy.

We can build an economy on this land.

ADAMS: He's from the South, African Americans have this deep ancestral connection to the South.

So he begins to be part of a whole generation of Black power thinkers really who are saying we should turn our sights onto the South as a place to leverage control.

GATES: In 1969, McKissick proposed the first of these new cities.

He would locate it on 5,000 acres in rural North Carolina, his home state and he would call it Soul City.

HEALY: Soul City was envisioned to have 50,000 people within 30 years.

The plan was they start in around 1970, they'd be done by 2000 with most of the construction.

ADAMS: He really imagines it as this multiracial suburban-like community with some of the economic resources as well as the cultural resources we associate with cities.

So he wants to have plays and arts and museums.

HEALY: He wanted to build a multiracial community.

He had no desire to exclude White people, but his main goal was to build something that would exist primarily for Black people.

Much of the land had been at an earlier point in time, uh, slave plantation.

I think for McKissick there was this sort of poetic justice.

McKISSICK: In slavery time, the slaves lived in these quarters.

This is where Soul City will rise into its own.

GATES: To fund such a massive undertaking, McKissick knew that he would need the support of the federal government.

HEALY: And so it quickly dawns on McKissick that he needs allies in the Nixon administration and ultimately, he makes what's a somewhat fateful decision.

McKissick, who is this radical militant Black power leader, agrees to support Richard Nixon and at the same time, the Nixon administration agrees to provide Soul City with the money that it needs to get started.

GATES: After his reelection, Nixon made good on his promise agreeing to award $14 million in loans toward the development of Soul City.

HEALY: There was an attempt to get lots of press coverage for Soul City.

They would create events that would attract media coverage.

RESIDENT: I live here in Soul City; I came from New York.

I was living in a very crowded apartment, a prison in the sky, is what they call the projects, and I came here with my five children and I enjoy tremendously, much better for me economically, physically, and mentally, I love it.

HEALY: You get hundreds of people coming to visit Soul City, largely from the northeast, but sometimes from as far away as Colorado or California.

The problem is there's not much infrastructure there.

At its peak, a few hundred people live in Soul City, most of them working for Floyd McKissick.

About 70 or 80 modest ranch, one-story homes are built.

GATES: Even with Nixon's support, Soul City was a met with fierce resistance.

HEALY: Many Whites couldn't get over the idea that you could have a multiracial integrated community where Black people would make up a significant majority of the population.

There was lots of racist opposition.

Senator Jesse Holmes from North Carolina led a campaign to kill Soul City.

GATES: Eventually the criticism took its toll, in 1979, just as Soul City was building momentum, a government task force pulled the plug.

REPORTER: Soul City was shut down this week, The Department of Housing and Urban Development decided to foreclose on the project which had cost the government over $19 million.

REPORTER: Now that HUD has decided to cut the funds off here, you have any regrets of coming?

RESIDENT: No, I have no regrets.

I consider this, uh, a part of my learning process, and uh, if I had to do it all over again, I'd do it again.

GATES: Soul City failed, but Floyd McKissick had tapped into an idea that began to spread, that perhaps after six decades of migration to the North and West, Black people should start returning to their roots in the South.

♪ ♪ The 1970s was the decade the Great Migration turned around.

After 1975, census records showed there were more Black people moving to the South, than leaving it.

This was driven in part by the construction of interstate highways, the increasing affordability of air conditioning, and most important of all, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

PENDERGRASS: This is where Black Southerners, the people who remained in the South and did not leave are really important to understanding the Black Reverse Migration because they pushed and fought boycotted, picketed in order to open up opportunities.

GRIFFIN: There are people who stayed and faced the violence.

There are people who maintained and built communities and institutions there.

PENDERGRASS: And so those folks really laid a foundation such that African Americans who are now living in the north, living in the west can see the south as an option.

GATES: The other important factor, luring people to the South was the same factor that had driven them out in the first-place jobs.

HEALY: Many Sun Belt cities begin to attract significant investment in the 1970s beyond.

That creates lots of new jobs.

HOBSON: We see banking, we see computers and the Sun Belt boom moves to the American South because of tax incentives and because of a better climate.

PENDERGRASS: By the time you get to the late 20th century, some of the fastest job growth in the country is happening in the south.

And so that's one of the major drivers.

ADAMS: I also think that a big element of what is happening in the new Great Migration as African Americans are returning is they're pulled towards this kind of ancestral connection to the South.

ROBINSON: And that call, that ancestral call, the land, is such a spiritual pull.

It is about this feeling that the city has taken some aspect of your identity and that there's something that can be reclaimed, home even if you never lived there.

GRIFFIN: Many of the migrants when they died did not wanna be buried in the North.

There are family burial grounds in church yards where people of the same last name are buried in those church yards and people, particularly older generations, that's where they want to be buried.

Even for those people who left the South, many of them sent their children every summer because they wanted them to be imbued with the values and the ethic and moral code that they identified with families in the South.

HEALY: I think there was a sense of nostalgia for the place that they had grown up in, which might seem strange given the oppression that they had faced.

But nostalgia is a powerful force, and I think for many people those memories and those early associations had a really strong hold on them.

(laughter).

GATES: To understand the mindset of African Americans who decided to migrate back to the South, I sat down with four people whose families had made that move.

Each of you is a, a participant in the Reverse Migration and each of you moved at different times and for different reasons.

So do you see the Reverse Migration as a kind of reclaiming of the South as the heritage, you know, as the home of Black people and Black culture?

WILTZ: Absolutely, it's about reclaiming the south, reclaiming, you know, this rich history.

I mean we built the south.

GATES: Right.

WILTZ: Why can't we have it?

Why can't it be ours?

BAKER: Yeah, we were told for so long like, we are not welcome here.

Even though like a lot of our roots are here, a lot of our culture is based down here and I feel like everybody trying to come back down here is just reclaiming the fact that yeah, this is a part of our heritage.

BRYANT: I don't think the South has ever truly left us, um, it has been a part of the fabric of our food and a part of the fabric of the way we commune with one another and the way that we worship, um, and so even if we were removed from it at one point, it is just that homecoming or that yearning or that familiar that says, I have a place here and I can make it here.

GATES: Theresa, you came down south earliest.

WILTZ: Yeah.

GATES: Uh, of the four of you, tell me why your family made that move and what that was like for you.

WILTZ: We lived in Staten Island, was very, very White, and then when I went to Atlanta, it's like you just fit into this spectrum.

BRYANT: Mm-Hmm.

WILTZ: A Blackness.

So I wanted, as a kid, as a 12-year-old, I really wanted to come here 'cause it was the '70s and it was Soul Train and "Black is beautiful" and I just wanted to be around Black people and it was like this sense of possibility and you know, if you dream it, you can do it.

GATES: Right.

WILTZ: Kind of thing.

GATES: Just as it had been during the Great Migration, the Black press was also instrumental in encouraging the Reverse Migration to the South.

PENDERGRASS: Black magazines like "Essence," "Ebony," you would sometimes see these articles coming out, listing top cities for Black economic opportunity.

Earl Graves was the editor of "Black Enterprise Magazine" and he really used the pages of that magazine to encourage Black people to move south.

ROBINSON: August, 1971.

There is a special issue that "Ebony" does called "The South Today."

One part of the magazine cover features these folks who are clearly rural country farm workers, and then you have urban folks who have got Afros, they've got dashikis, they are, you know, this is the south today.

So they're really making a statement trying to demystify and debunk some of the stereotypes that urban Northerners have developed about the South to say no there, there's Black power down here, there's Black beauty down here, you know, and there's opportunity here.

GATES: That issue of "Ebony Magazine" featured an entire section devoted to the city that it hailed as the new "Black Mecca."

Atlanta, Georgia.

HOBSON: Atlanta was founded in 1847; it was founded around a train station.

It's always been a migrant city.

OGBAR: A number of forces attract people to Atlanta from the beginning of the 20th century all the way through the end of the 20th century and beyond.

The most significant draw would be the concentration of Black schools there.

You have the highest concentration of Black colleges and universities anywhere in the United States of America, Moorehouse, Clark Atlanta University, Morris Brown College, Spelman.

HOBSON: When you have Black education in the ways in which Atlanta has it's going to promote, a merchant class promotes Black economics.

GATES: In the mid-20th century, much of Black life in Atlanta revolved around one street in particular, Auburn Avenue, affectionately known as "Sweet Auburn."

OGBAR: People were often struck by the energy and the industriousness of Auburn Avenue.

By the 1950s, some people arguing that Auburn Avenue is the richest negro street in the world.

There were insurance companies, a Black bank, Black movie theaters, Black hotel, Black nightclubs, Black restaurants, and what other cities did not have, Black colleges and universities with people who have PhDs, people who are professors and deans and presidents, people who command a lot of influence in the city.

HOBSON: And of course, when you have Black educated folk and you have a Black merchant class and you have a spirited Black community, you also will have Black political empowerment, electoral politics.

REPORTER: This is Atlanta, Georgia, a city that for years has stood for culture and progress.

A few months ago its citizens elected a man they thought could best do the job as mayor of Atlanta.

His name is Maynard Jackson and he's the city's first Black mayor.

GATES: One of the most important figures in Atlanta politics was a man named Maynard Jackson.

Jackson was elected mayor in 1973.

Just as the Reverse Migration was getting underway.

OGBAR: Maynard Jackson Jr. would become perhaps the most consequential mayor in the city of Atlanta's history.

HOBSON: Maynard Jackson understood politics, but he was also a very gifted speaker, he is a student of history.

JACKSON: We are the city that refuses to be divided by forces that do not realize this is a new day.

We are the city that refuses to despair but continues to hope.

ADAMS: Maynard Jackson definitely sees himself as carrying on the torch of civil rights and he's deeply interested in people returning to not just Atlanta but the South more broadly.

He thinks they should be part of making real the kind of promises of the Civil Rights Movement, and he thinks the election of Black officials are a key part of that.

GATES: Jackson became mayor at a time when Black politicians were being elected to office in record numbers, and his administration would quickly become the model for what was possible through truly empowered Black political leadership.

HOBSON: Maynard Jackson was a gifted lawyer, so he knew how to weaponize the policy to work on his behalf, and so he starts making policies that were more inclusive of Black Americans.

OGBAR: When Jackson becomes mayor of the city of Atlanta, which at that point was slightly majority Black, they look at city contracts and over 99% of city contracts went to White firms.

HOBSON: By the time he leaves office, Black contractors were receiving 35% of all city contracts, which meant that every Black entrepreneur from the Caribbean, to the continent, from Chicago, Detroit, New York, they were all descending on Atlanta.

ADAMS: So Atlanta becomes the leading city of the new Great Migration, and it's defined in many ways as this Black Mecca by the Black middle class, by business owners, by corporate leaders.

GATES: One of Maynard Jackson's biggest triumphs as mayor was winning the bid for the 1996 Olympics.

SAMARANCH: The International Olympic Committee has awarded the 1996 Olympic Games to the city of Atlanta.

(cheering).

ADAMS: The Olympics coming to the South is important, especially for the city of Atlanta.

It brings international attention to the city, that seems to be the promise of Martin Luther King, right?

We have this Black political leadership who's gonna be in control, it also brings this kind of cultural flourishing.

GATES: The Olympics turned Atlanta into a world-class destination, but they also exposed a city increasingly divided between the haves and the have-nots.

HOBSON: When Atlanta decides to bid for the Olympic Games, the White business elite draw an invisible circle around the city, and the goal of the games in many ways was to take back the prime real estate downtown.

We see the pushing of low-income, no-income, and Black folk out of the city of Atlanta to the suburbs.

(demonstrators chanting).

BANKS: All the plans are being made uptown, nothing is being done down here for the residents, and what you have in this community is unemployment, no businesses, drugs are rampant.

$210 million is spent to build a stadium as epicenter for sports, but none of that money's been earmarked towards dealing with the ills that are in this community.

It's just, just ridiculous, I mean, does somebody have a conscience?

ADAMS: Atlanta has become this place of Black millionaires, but it's also a place second to only Newark, New Jersey for the number of impoverished people.

So Atlanta's complicated.

It's a tale of two cities.

GATES: One of the strongest critiques of Atlanta's class divide came from artists in the city's burgeoning music scene.

In the 1990s, a new genre of hip-hop was gaining traction in the South.

PENDERGRASS: Artists like Outkast, Goodie Mob, Petey Pablo in North Carolina, you have these artists whose music is clearly identified as Southern, talking about what the South is like and bringing kind of the Southern landscapes, bringing their experiences of Southern identity to the music that they're producing.

HOBSON: When the music, particularly the hip hop, when it starts, it is critical of the Olympification of Atlanta.

And so the music becomes a critique of this kind of rebranding Atlanta for the rest of the American South.

♪ GOODIE MOB: What you really know about ♪ ♪ the dirty South?

♪ ♪ What you really know about the dirty South?

♪ HOBSON: "What you really know about the dirty south?"

That's what that whole conversation is, is about.

It's about folks who are kind of moving in on the American South in places like Atlanta to try to come and take over.

And what they're actually discussing presents us with some serious ideas around this return migration because a lot of what the Southern artists are discussing are these new Midwesterners and these New Yorkers and folks from Connecticut and Chicago, Detroit who come down south and really believe, oh, we're some country-back or hayseeds.

♪ GOODIE MOB: What you really know about the dirty South?

♪ GATES: Southern hip hop artists had their own sound and a unique point of view, but they had a hard time being heard by the wider world of hip hop, which in the 1990s was still dominated by groups based in New York and Los Angeles... TUPAC: Same strategy we used with... ROBINSON: It's like the hugest regional war because in that moment the East Coast and the West Coast are beefing.

And so the newcomers, the Southerners, who these two coasts don't respect because they do not believe that these people have the sophistication, even the literacy to rap, that's like an actual thing that was a discourse like how you know they can't even speak English, how are they making rhymes?

♪ ♪ GATES: One of the most successful acts to emerge from the South was the group Outkast formed by the rappers André 3000 and Big Boi.

HOBSON: When Outkast dropped the album "Southernplayalisticadilla cmuzik" in 1994, and they were talking language that we understood... ♪ OUTKAST: Hootie Hoo.

♪ HOBSON: You know, ain't no thing but a Chicken Wing or Chonkyfire, when they started talking, this was an actual language that we understood.

Outkast made it cool to be country.

ROBINSON: When Outkast comes out, that is sort of a moment where we're saying, no, we're doing definitively Southern music.

We're not gesturing towards any kind of Northeastern, we're now trying to rap like them.

We have our own ways of speaking and we have our own ways of being.

BIG BOI: And so now, you know what I'm saying, we just, you know what I'm saying, trying to put Atlanta out there, you know what I'm saying?

To let people know Atlanta is here and, and they got some real players in this game down here, you know what I'm saying?

GATES: But even as Outkast climbed up the music charts, they still had to contend with a certain amount of disrespect from the broader hip hop community.

This disrespect was on display at the 1995 Source Awards where Outkast surprised everyone by winning best new group.

KID: And the winner is... Ladies helped me out.

(audience shouting).

GROUP: Outkast.

(audience cheering and booing).

KID: Goodie Mob.

HOBSON: There was so much tension between the East Coast and West Coast, and this has a lot to do with Tupac and Biggie, who were both great artists in their own right, but the Black mainstream got brought into it, and you hear the booing.

(audience cheering and booing).

I remember, you know, Big Boi gets on the stage and Big Boi is, he's respectful.

BIG BOI: Goodie Mob in the house, you know what I'm saying?

Wanna say what's up to New York?

You know what I'm saying?

Because we from down South, you know what I'm saying?

Is New York up in this, you know what I'm saying?

Are y'all in here?

You know what I'm saying?

This y'all city... HOBSON: He's just kinda like, you know, hey we understand, we in y'all's city, you know, we wanna give y'all a shout out, we wanna give you praise and whatever, whatnot.

And André wasn't having it.

ANDRÉ 3000: But it's like this though, I'm tired of folks, you know what I'm saying?

Closed-minded folks, you know what I'm saying?

It's like we got a demo tape and don't nobody want to hear it, but it's like this, the South got something to say, that's all I gotta say.

HOBSON: What André is saying is that this is the South got something to say, don't forget where you came from.

This is the heart and soul of the United States.

You cannot understand the praise and blame of this nation without understanding the American South.

It represents the sorted race relations, but also the resiliency of African descendant people.

We see where African descendant people make that be their home and create the kind of Black culture and resistance that moves throughout.

♪ ♪ GATES: By the 1990s, the Reverse Migration had gathered steam, between 1995 and 2000 New York, California, and Illinois lost the most Black residents, while Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida gained the most.

Some have seized upon this movement to suggest that a shift in people could mean a shift in power.

NEWS ANCHOR: The "New York Times" op-ed columnist and author Charles Blow has penned a new book, it's called "The Devil You Know, A Black Power Manifesto."

It's a roadmap for overturning White supremacy, he says.

He has moved to Atlanta, Georgia after living in New York for 25 years, and he's now proposing that other Black Americans up north do the same.

GATES: Journalist Charles Blow is perhaps the greatest champion of the Reverse Migration in the 21st century.

BLOW: To match the scale of the Great Migration, the Reverse Migration needs an adrenaline boost.

GRANT: Charles Blow has this idea that we should be moving to the south so that we can impact politics in those places.

WILLIAMS: His argument is we've pled for so many years for inclusion and equity, but we need to go back where we had this majority and reclaim our homes where we have political power.

DEMONSTRATOR: Your vote matters, your vote matters, your vote matters.

BLOW: The best way for Black people to think about coming to power geographically is a return to the states from which they fled.

The beauty of this proposal is that it does not center White people or White progress.

You can do it on your own.

It asks no permission.

It pleas for no acceptance.

It is numerical, it's math.

Move enough bodies into the right space.

You have enough power to change the policies on your own.

GATES: In some ways, Charles Blow's idea has already come to fruition.

Starting in 2008, the Reverse Migration began to have a dramatic effect on voting patterns.

KING: For many years, Democrats have largely thought of the South as not really in play for them, but in 2008 you have this massive turnout of Democrats.

VOTER: Go Barack!

CROWD: Yes, we can!

OBAMA: Yes, we can!

PENDERGRASS: 2008, North Carolina turns blue and they are a critical state in electing Barack Obama to the presidency.

And Black voters in that state were especially critical to his win.

(crowd cheering).

KING: North Carolina is growing at a much faster rate than the rest of the United States.

And in these metropolitan areas like around Charlotte, there is a large influx of Black and Brown folks, young professionals, and others who are changing the state's political direction.

And there you start to see more chatter, we're saying okay, we have an opening here.

GATES: One politician was tracking these demographic shifts closely.

A rising star in the Georgia House of Representatives named Stacey Abrams.

Stacey Abrams is a political leader, a voting rights activist, and bestselling author.

And although she's a Southerner, Stacey began her life in the north.

ABRAMS: I was born in Wisconsin; I was born in Madison.

My mother was in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin.

My parents are from Mississippi, but they moved in 1972 for my mother to attend school and we moved back to Mississippi in 1976.

GATES: Was there any trepidation that your family had about moving back to Mississippi?

ABRAMS: Both my parents had grown up, not only in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, but during the Civil Rights Movement, they were teenagers, but they were both very involved and I think for both of them, going home was part of their responsibility.

Wisconsin was a place for my mother to get an education that otherwise may have been denied her, but for both of them, coming back to Mississippi was both about coming home, but also about believing that being in the South was part of their responsibility.

GATES: Mm-Hmm.

So that was part of the plan?

ABRAMS: I think so.

I mean, they had a choice and they came back south, plus it was really cold in Wisconsin.

GATES: I was gonna say, yeah.

(laughter).

ABRAMS: The way I describe it, I'm a daughter of the South.

I grew up in Mississippi.

I came of age in Georgia.

GATES: So what does it mean to you to be southern, quote-unquote?

ABRAMS: Being southern is about a connection to family and to history.

It is recognizing that this is the space more than any other place in this country that defined how African Americans were seen.

And it is a place of both struggle and triumph.

GATES: When did you become aware of the phrase and the phenomenon of the Reverse Great Migration ABRAMS: If you lived in Atlanta, you saw our population growing year over year, decade over decade.

And you realize something was happening.

I was in the state legislature and in 2008 there was a presentation about the demographic trends in Georgia and the demographer standing in front of the room basically said, this is what Georgia's going to look like in 10 years and 20 years and 40 years.

And the density of communities of color that we're being attracted to and growing in Georgia were at the fastest clip anyone had seen.

And he said, there is no conceivable way that Georgia is not a majority-minority state by 2030.

GATES: And your hair stood up.

ABRAMS: I thought, huh, that's interesting.

We can get this done.

PENDERGRASS: Stacey Abrams and other voting rights activists and organizers in the south, they really saw the demographics changing.

They saw the growing numbers of newcomers and what that was doing, for instance, in the Atlanta suburbs and other parts of Georgia.

And they really started registering voters, right?

And really working against efforts to suppress the vote of Black residents in that state.

ABRAMS: In Georgia, civil rights has always been an act of will and a battle for our souls.

GATES: In 2017, Abrams felt that Georgia was reaching a tipping point, so she decided to run for governor.

It was a tough race and although she lost, the narrow margin, proved that a seat change was well underway.

GRANT: She didn't get to be the governor, but she makes the right calculation that the demographics have changed, such that this place that we think of as solidly Republican, could be a Democratic stronghold if we activate the right kind of voters.

KING: That lays the foundation for what we see happen in 2020.

BIDEN: Thank you.

Thank you for turning out in record numbers in November elections.

KING: Where not only does Joe Biden win the presidency, two democratic senators in Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff win in the Senate runoffs.

GATES: In the 2020 election, Georgia and metro Atlanta in particular, proved to be pivotal.

OGBAR: The turnout was overwhelming in the Atlanta metro area, thousands of people came out, people were volunteers, there were buses taking people from churches to the polls.

VOTER: It could have rain; it could have snowed.

I would not care.

REPORTER: You're not going anywhere.

I'm not going anywhere.

OGBAR: And when everything was said and done, there were more Black votes cast in Atlanta metro area than any metro area in the United States of America, in that presidential election of 2020.

GATES: What's it been like for all of you to see Georgia and specifically the Black vote in Georgia become so pivotal in national elections?

WILTZ: I wasn't surprised.

I could really see the changes.

So I mean, I could tell it was a demographic story.

BAKER: I feel like because Atlanta has become such a cultural hub.

GATES: Yeah.

BAKER: You know, it's invited all these different less conservative thinkers, a lot of like arts and music and, and just cultural capacity.

DAVIS: In early 2020 when I was looking for a place to, um, you know, to move myself from Detroit and get away from the winters, Atlanta was kind of, of at the top of a very short list.

My wife and I, we did sit and physically kinda look at a map like, where could we realistically live as an interracial couple where she can be comfortable, I can be comf, you know?

GATES: Yeah.

DAVIS: We both can have our experiences.

GATES: Right.

DAVIS: Um, and it not be too, you know, slighted to one side or another.

GATES: That's called divorce prevention.

(laughter).

DAVIS: Yes, yes.

When I saw it go blue, I said, okay, the decsi, it, it just kind of more solidified... GATES: Right.

DAVIS: The decision for me.

BRYANT: So I'm going to bring the levity to this conversation.

GATES: Okay.

BRYANT: Georgia has heat.

(laughter).

DAVIS: Georgia got humidity.

BRYANT: It has some heat and some humidity, so I dunno if all folks are coming down.

BALDWIN: Migrants are returning from the north to the south, shifting and shaping the political imagination in these areas because of a consistent search for freedom that was not achieved in Chicago, that was not achieved in Harlem, but is continually being searched for.

GATES: Is the South the future where our people can finally realize the full potentiality of our citizenship?

ABRAMS: I live in the South; I have planted my life in the South.

It, I, you know, Georgia is my home because I believe that our destiny is possible in the South.

That we can achieve all of these things.

My parents imagined that, my grandparents imagined, that it can be done, and if we can do it in the South, it can be replicated everywhere.

GRANT: Most of us in this country came in through enslavement and ended up in the Deep South.

And so we are going back to a place of our people and the same way as the Great Migration, making an affirmative decision to go back.

ADAMS: I do think there's this beautiful way in which people are coming full circle.

Their families went north, searching for opportunity or education or to escape the worst parts of Jim Crow and now they're returning south in part for some of those same reasons, exercising their freedom of movement to search out new, exciting opportunities, to find a place where they have hope for their own children.

And I think that's one of the things that most fascinates me about the movement.

GATES: One of the lessons of the Reverse Migration is that migrations never really end.

They just change direction.

Like all people, Black people move to build a better life and to find community.

If you were addressing the graduating class in my university, Harvard University, the African American component of the class, about the best place to build your life, to start your career, and build your family, where would you tell 'em to go?

DAVIS: I would even encourage them to go and explore different cities.

And that's even how I landed, you know, I, I looked, I lived in L.A., I was born and raised in Detroit, checked out Asheville, and I'm, I'm here in Atlanta.

GATES: Mm-Hmm.

DAVIS: For now.

GATES: Do you think that the Black community today has more choice about where to live, healthy, happy places to live, to build a family?

GROUP: Absolutely, absolutely.

GATES: Than ever before?

BRYANT: But what I would say is find your community, uplift it, build it.

Really just make your mark wherever you go.

GATES: Over the last century, migration has been a powerful force shaping the ever-changing Black experience in this country.

But increasingly, an historically massive immigration has begun to change the face of Black America.

Since the early 1990s, immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean have been arriving here in record numbers, redefining who and what an African American really is.

This is the next "Great Migration."

(music plays through credits) NARRATOR: For more information about "Great Migrations: A People on the Move" visit pbs.org/greatmigrations.

The DVD version of this program is available online and in stores.

Also available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video (music continues through credits) ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪