“If You Really Want to Do Important Work, This Is Where You Need to Be”: Black Return Migration to the South in the Post–Civil Rights Era

Beginning in 1970, Black Americans began relocating to the American South in unprecedented numbers. By 2017, this movement encompassed 4.6 million Black and biracial people. While the story of the Great Migration has a robust historiography, this contemporary counterpart remains a vastly understudied topic within the historical discipline. As part of a larger project about the impetus for and implications of the return migration, this paper looks specifically at those migrants who not only relocated to the American South but who chose to address the region’s ongoing racial disparities while there. By developing their own non-profit organizations, public history initiatives, and revitalization projects, these migrants are focused on repairing and rectifying the harm caused by the region’s history of Black oppression and disenfranchisement.

Using oral history interviews as well as traditional archival sources, this paper explores three case studies of racial justice projects started by return migrants to the rural South: Konda Mason, who transformed a former Louisiana plantation into an organic farm and Black co-op; Cassie Turnipseed, who founded a non-profit organization aimed at memorializing Mississippi’s Black agricultural workers; and Alvin Jackson, who returned to rural Georgia to preserve his former Black school and turn it into a community center. Rather than being deterred by the region’s violent history of systemic racism, these migrants instead found inspiration in the perseverance of their ancestors and derived meaning from being in those same spaces, leading them to continue the fight for racial equality in their own ways. By looking at their migration stories, the inspiration for their projects, and the impacts of these initiatives, we can better understand the relationship between Black Americans and the South and what this relationship can mean for the ongoing long Black freedom struggle in the United States.