The Case for a New Great Migration in the US | Charles M. Blow | TED

In the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd,

we saw one of the largest series of protests for racial justice

in American history.

Millions of people, mostly young, a plurality white,

poured into the streets to assert that Black Lives Matter,

and to demand police accountability and racial justice.

Some optimistically thought that this was the beginning

of a racial reckoning.

We painted murals on the streets.

We took down statues.

Members of Congress, draped in kente cloth,

took a knee in the capital's Emancipation Hall.

But just three years later, we are engulfed in a full backlash.

We have seen a raft of bills, in statehouses across the country,

to restrict voting and protests,

as well as bills meant to restrict how race, gender and history

can be discussed in schools.

Wokeness,

a mantra during the Black Lives Matter movement,

was converted into a pejorative, and used against the movement.

This is, unfortunately,

a repeat of the tired and exhausting dance

that America does: when Black people make progress --

some white people feel threatened and respond with force.

This seems to happen in a major way every 50 years or so.

The advances of Reconstruction were followed by Jim Crow.

The advances of the Great Migration,

which was the relocation of millions of African Americans,

primarily from the rural South to cities in the North and West,

was met with the violence of Red Summer.

The advances of the Civil Rights Movement were followed by mass incarceration.

I, for one, am sick of this dance.

Audience: Yes.

(Applause)

I am sick of taking two steps forward and one step back.

Sick of the periods when progressives grow weary

and conservatives grow vicious.

Sick of being told that now is not the moment

for the most ambitious efforts towards actual justice.

I want to sidestep all of that.

I want a plan for equality now,

one that does not require marching and pleading,

one in which Black people can access true American equality

by their own actions.

One that cannot be so easily regressed or reneged upon.

And I just so happen to have such a plan.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

Energizing reverse migration by encouraging even more Black people

to leave cities in the North and West and return to the South.

And I want them to do so, primarily,

to concentrate and increase their political power,

to have greater influence over and access to state power.

(Applause)

States control the lion's share of many of the issues

crucial to Black people:

criminal justice, judicial processes, election administration, education --

that's just to name a few.

And this plan wouldn't create a new condition,

but rather restore a historical condition.

At the end of the Civil War,

three southern states were majority Black --

South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana.

Three others, Alabama, Florida and Georgia,

were within eight percentage points of being majority Black.

Indeed, 90 percent of all Black people at the time in this country

lived in the American South.

Enslavers had flooded the region with captive Black people,

producing, for themselves and the country, staggering wealth.

They never imagined that, one day, those Black people would be free,

let alone that the 14th and 15th Amendments would make them citizens,

and, at least the Black men, voters.

This made Mississippi a center of power during Reconstruction,

because in places like Mississippi, at least for a time,

Black men were the majority of registered voters.

The state sent scores of Black representatives to the statehouse,

and it gave America its first two Black senators.

But, cue the music,

because the backlash dance was about to begin.

Fearing what they called “Black domination,”

white terrorists in the South began a coordinated campaign of violence

and voter suppression.

They clawed back enough power to call constitutional conventions,

during which they wrote white supremacy into the DNA of those states.

That codified oppression became known as "Jim Crow."

So you have chronic racial terror,

a suffocating legal structure,

and a lagging economy in the South.

That came at the same time that northern factories

were recruiting workers.

This push and pull helped to launch the Great Migration.

In the wake of that migration,

only slightly more than half of all Black people in America

remained in the South.

In short,

one of the reasons that Black people lost their majorities

in southern states

was because of terrorism.

And as America and the world have learned all too well,

you can never let terrorists win.

And that is one of the reasons --

(Applause)

That is one of the reasons

that I believe that Black people should return to the South.

If Black people today had their pre-Great Migration percentages

in southern states,

they could again vote to ensure more equitable state-level policies,

and they could put more pressure on the federal government,

because they could control or form the controlling interest

for more Electoral College votes

than California and New York state combined.

And that's important here in America,

because each state has as many electors as they have Members of Congress.

And when you go to vote for president,

you're actually voting for that candidate's slate of electors.

It is those electors who determine the presidency.

Black people could also be decisive

in electing several governors and senators.

Now, in an ideal world,

we wouldn't need to concentrate Black voting power

to achieve equality.

Any composition of voters should provide equality for all people.

But we don't live in that ideal world.

In the world that we occupy,

anti-Black racism is still openly manifest in policy and power,

and candidates who support those policies continue to win

and continue to block progress.

Now, there are multiple challenges and unknowns

that a plan like this could face,

but it has three major things going for it.

First, there is a precedent for it to succeed.

In the April 1972 issue of "Playboy" --

and before you say that, yes,

some people used to read it for the articles.

(Laughter)

It featured a piece by writer Richard Pollak,

entitled "Taking Over Vermont,"

in which Pollak proposed

that the nation's alienated young do just that.

Pollak's article sprang from an obscure 1971 paper

entitled "Jamestown Seventy,"

published at Yale by two law students.

In it, the authors put forth the tantalizing idea

that they called "radical federalism,"

the migration of large numbers of people to a single state,

for the express purpose of effecting a peaceful political takeover of the state

through the elective process.

Indeed, many young people were already moving to Vermont

before these things were written.

But the plan worked.

As writer Yvonne Daley has noted,

"Vermont was transformed,

electing more progressive politicians per capita

in the intervening years than any state,

and enacting legislation that routinely resulted

in Vermont ranking among the most liberal states in the union."

I am proposing that, in the same way that young white liberals

moved en masse to one of the whitest states in the union

with a political intent,

that young Black people move to some of the Blackest states,

with the same political intent.

The second thing that the plan has going for it

is that the reverse migration is already happening.

Reporters have been chronicling this for at least a decade.

I myself am part of the reverse migration,

moving from Brooklyn to Atlanta in 2020.

In fact, Georgia is a nexus of the reverse migration.

Still, the reverse migration is nowhere near as robust and energetic

as its predecessor.

To match the scale of the Great Migration,

the reverse migration needs an adrenaline boost,

and that is exactly what I am trying to provide.

And third, the reverse migration is already paying dividends

in the form of more state-level power.

In 2020, Georgia flipped from red to blue,

for the first time since Bill Clinton won the state in 1992.

(Cheers and applause)

And the voters also elected two Democratic senators,

one Black and one Jewish.

(Cheers and applause)

The coalition of voters that made that possible

was led by Black voters,

who constituted a majority of those voting for Biden,

according to election estimates.

The success of the Democratic Party's gains in Georgia

can in part be attributed to a rise in the Black population in this state.

In the early 1990s, when Bill Clinton won,

Black people were about a quarter of the state's population.

In 2020, they were about a third of the state's population.

Now, in theory, my proposal isn't partisan.

The point is freedom, not party loyalties or party punishments.

But in 2020,

the candidates chosen by the vast majority of Black people won,

making Georgia a model for resurgent Black power in the South,

and for me and the plan that I advanced,

making Georgia proof of concept.

It is one thing to diagram a problem,

to render it in poetry and passion,

to build a case.

It is something of a different order

to propose a plan.

This is the difference between talking or asking,

or pleading and demanding,

and just doing.

As Frederick Douglass once said about escaping slavery,

"I prayed to God to emancipate me.

But it was not until I prayed with my legs that I was emancipated."

I am asking as many Black people in America who are able

to do like Douglass.

To pray with your legs and migrate.

Thank you very much.

(Cheers and applause)