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Lit Louisiana: Should Black people migrate back to the South? Charles Blow thinks so [1]

['Fatima Shaik', 'More Fatima Shaik', 'Verite News']

Date: 2024-01-17  

Charles Blow is a native son of Louisiana whom you may have seen as a television commentator on cultural and political news or read some of his columns in The New York Times. His streaming documentary now on HBO called “South to Black Power” is based on his latest book, “The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto.” The book is rooted in his experiences growing up in the South combined with his observations about Black political influence on a national scale.

Blow argues that Black people have a clearer path to potentially changing the laws that affect us in the South by becoming majorities in key voting districts. He suggests that a reverse migration needs to take place to increase the ranks of Black voters in those districts, in order to influence state legislation on poverty programs, education, incarceration and more.

My own research shows that Louisiana from 1810 until the 1890 was 50 percent or more “Negro” (as we were referred to in the census), falling to about 47 percent in 1900. Neighboring states in 1900 had Black populations hovering around the same percentage. For example, the Black population in Mississippi was 58.5 percent, South Carolina was 58.4 percent, Georgia was 46.7 percent, Alabama was 45.2 percent and Florida was 43.7 percent.

The numbers of Black people in the South decreased considerably due to The Great Migration north, which took place from the end of the Civil War until the 1970s, according to Isabel Wilkerson in her book “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of the Great Migration.” (By the way, make sure you go to see the movie “Origin,” based on Wilkerson’s life while writing her more recent book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.”)

Embers

A last note about Charles Blow’s writing. A most beautiful memoir is “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2014). Here is an excerpt: “We lived in the rural north Louisiana town of Gibsland, nearly halfway between Shreveport and Monroe and right in the middle of nowhere. The town was named after a slave owner named Gibbs whose plantation it had been. Its only claim to fame was that Bonnie and Clyde had been killed just south of town in 1934. Townspeople still relished the infamy. Gibsland was a place where the line between heroes and villains was not so clearly drawn.”

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