Photograph by Stephanie Eley
In 1972, the journalist Richard Pollak issued a proposal to leftist hippies: They should take over Vermont. “Not by staging a weekend rock festival at Rutland,” he wrote in Playboy magazine, but in “the hard-hat approved American way—by ballot.” Remarkably, Pollak’s proposal worked: Once a Republican stronghold, Vermont ultimately became one of the bluest states in the nation. (In reality, there were many reasons Vermont flipped, but a population blitz from back-to-the-land hippies was certainly one of them.) The ballot box, it seemed, could be a tool for revolution.
Charles M. Blow, a longtime opinion columnist for the New York Times, found Pollak’s idea intriguing. Originally from rural Louisiana, Blow had succeeded by any measure of the word. He had secured a flourishing career at the country’s newspaper of record, sent his children to the finest schools, and was firmly established in New York City’s high society. By moving south to north, he’d followed the route of the Great Migration, when millions of Black Americans fled the poverty and racial violence of the former slave states in the first half of the 20th century, headed for booming “destination cities” in the Northeast and Midwest.
From his view at the top, however, Blow saw a more complicated picture of Black life in America. The Great Migration had created immense opportunity for many who moved north, but it had also been met with vicious backlash. White leaders in Northern cities had turned Black communities into segregated ghettos and largely ignored police officers’ use of violence to subdue their residents. Perhaps most impactfully, that huge demographic shift had diluted the concentration of Black voters, depriving them of a political majority in any state.
By 2020, as the nascent Black Lives Matter movement struggled to translate into genuine legislative reforms—and after his son was held at gunpoint by a police officer on the Yale University campus, where he was a student—Blow had begun considering the example of the hippies in Vermont. What if Black Americans did the same, by retracing their steps back to the South? “I am proposing nothing short of the most audacious power play by Black America in the history of the country,” Blow writes in The Devil You Know, his 2021 book outlining the proposal. “Reversing the Great Migration,” as he puts it, could pave the way to “true and lasting political power in the United States.”
All he had to do was convince people to move.
Photograph by Stephanie Eley
The first convert to Blow’s movement was Blow himself, who moved to Atlanta in 2020. “I made a list of three cities I might move to: New Orleans, Miami, and Atlanta,” he says. “One of my closest friends is here, I visited often, and it is easy to travel from Atlanta to almost anywhere. Atlanta won out.”
After the expensive, cutthroat world of New York, Blow is loving his life in the city that influences everything. He can afford a high-rise apartment in Midtown, where he walks to most things he needs. He likes the slower pace of life, though he misses the international visitors that flock to New York by the millions each year. “I used to be annoyed by tourists,” he says. “Now I understand that they add flavor—as well as large infusions of cash—to a city.”
But Atlanta offers something else unusual for a large American metropolis: a thriving Black middle and upper-middle class. Its status as a “Black mecca” may be overblown—the racial wealth gap in the city is staggering—but metro Atlanta is still a stronghold for Black affluence, home to the most Black-owned businesses in the country, and with a Black homeownership rate of over 50 percent. In 2018, Forbes named Atlanta the best city in the country for Black economic prosperity. “Black wealth is so common here that it almost feels unremarkable,” Blow says. “That’s remarkable.”
And in a city that is about 47 percent Black and a metro area about 36 percent Black, that thriving is often simply more visible than in other large cities. “Welcome to the Armstrong Manor!” Blow’s friend Janean Courtney Armstrong says as she welcomes him into her home in a scene from South to Black Power, a Max documentary he created in 2023 about his proposed reverse Great Migration. Armstrong is Blow’s close friend from Grambling State University in Louisiana, originally from California and Arkansas and now a successful investment firm executive. In the film, she and Blow pour drinks on the back patio of the spacious dream home she’s recently built in a leafy, majority-Black exurb south of Atlanta. “I just felt safe here,” she tells Blow. “I didn’t feel that in California, or even in Washington, DC . . . The South makes me feel safe—even with the history.”
Photograph courtesy of HBO
Demographic and cultural dominance not only confer a sense of comfort; they also deliver real political power. Georgia has emerged as a battleground state in recent years, largely thanks to its growing non-White population: Pew Research Center found that the increase in eligible Black voters alone has driven nearly half the growth in Georgia’s voting population since 2000. The increased power of Black voters helped deliver Georgia to Democrats in the most recent presidential and Senate contests, and brought Stacey Abrams tantalizingly close to winning the 2018 governor’s race. Inspire just a few thousand more Black Americans to move to Georgia, Blow suggests, and they could tilt the state for good. Do the same across the Southeast, and you’ve turned the entire electoral map on its head.
“Forty-four percent of Black people in America now live outside the South,” he writes in his book. “If just half of them moved back south and were strategically arrayed, it would be enough to make Black people the largest racial group in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, a contiguous band of Black power that would . . . exponentially increase Black political influence.”
The goal, Blow stresses, is not simply to flip Southern states from red to blue. Black Americans overwhelmingly vote Democratic, but their broad distribution across the states means they’re rarely the decisive constituency, even in places where they’ve helped elect Black officials. Consolidating Black voting power would force elected officials from both parties to take their concerns seriously—especially when it comes to addressing racial disparities that the country has continuously failed to solve. “Not one of these states under white people’s control has erased white supremacy,” Blow writes. “Is it outlandish for Black people to seek to do what their white countrymen have failed or refused to do?”
As in the case of Vermont, Blow’s proposal already has the wind at its back: Huge numbers of Black Americans, many of them young and well educated, are moving south. These new migrants are generally relocating to metro areas like Charlotte and Houston, which beckon with good jobs, lower taxes, and relatively affordable housing, especially compared with the Northern cities that once drew Black Americans out of the South. Atlanta, as usual, leads the charge: A recent analysis by the Brookings Institution found that the city’s Black population began to outstrip Chicago’s in 2010, and now dwarfs it by 40 percent. A reverse migration is well underway.
Blow, then, sees himself as a champion of the journey, as 20th-century writers like Robert Sengstacke Abbott did for the Great Migration. “I am a newspaperman,” Blow writes. “I bear witness.” In his view, the greener pastures offered by the original migration did not achieve racial equality; perhaps a second can move the country closer to its best self. If racism still exists everywhere, he argues, in New York as much as Atlanta, “Wouldn’t you rather have some real political power to address that racism? And a yard!”
This article appears in our November 2024 issue.
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