Blacks Migrating South, Study Finds

Turning around a 50-year exodus, black Americans are flooding south in pursuit of the region’s improving economic and racial climate, a sociologist says. “Black professionals and blue-collar workers, as well as blacks who have retired, are reversing decades of migration from the South by moving to the South’s economically vibrant rural and urban areas,” William H. Frey of the University of Michigan reported in a study based on Census Bureau data. Between 1990 and 1996, the South gained 368,800 black migrants, he found. His analysis appears in the February edition of Population Today magazine.