With ancestry also comes the argument for safety. “Black people choose to gravitate towards neighborhoods and cities that present options for community and life in a rich environment,” Tyson says, “because Black neighborhoods in particular have always been and still are places of refuge.” That was what initially enticed Baker herself to move from New York, where she was born and raised, to Atlanta. “I wanted to be surrounded by other Black people and queer Black people, to find safety in numbers,” she says.
Making a case for reverse migration
For those who view the South as more racist than the North, Baker poses a valid question: “The civil rights movement was born in the South, so how could we think there’s not a very lively resistance movement that’s happening?” In fact, in his latest documentary, South to Black Power, journalist Charles Blow maintains that “giving the reverse migration a boost” is a tool in growing Black power (a movement that he says typically scares white people because they conflate it with the violence of white-power sentiments, when in fact it’s the fight for “Black people to have more of a say over how they are governed”).
Blow underscores that Atlanta has been home to majority Black residents for 50 years, while cities in Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina have been over 30% Black since the end of the Civil War. These southern hubs, he observes, are “bathed in Black power, but it’s just municipal.” He calls on viewers to consider “if this power extended to the state” and invites Black northerners to seriously consider migrating: “There are some things in life that are bigger than you…. Sometimes [your choices] have to be about community success.”
The HBCU-to-homeownership pipeline
In movement, Black folks are vulnerable to losing or lacking, be it their community or their space and quality of life; and, in both cases, home ownership or wealth acquisition remain a pipe dream. To attain that dream means to sacrifice. “The wealth creating effect is predicated upon you leaving your cohesive majority-Black neighborhood and not realizing the wealth creating opportunities of homeownership,” says Chris Tyson, president of the housing nonprofit National Community Stabilization Trust. “Or you can realize the wealth-creating opportunities [by leaving] and lose the neighborhood community—you rarely can have both.”
Davis and Tyson are both working to create attainable housing and sustain existing Black communities. Most recently, Davis’s firm expanded their impact investing to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) due to the institutions’ “large swaths of land in rapidly changing parts of the Southern United States.” He points to Fisk University in Nashville, which he says has been a “huge target of redevelopment.” By focusing on underutilized land, Davis and his team hope to tackle endowment and funding inequalities within HBCUs while also creating pipelines for student homeownership in these southern cities. By supporting Black people in their “management and control of increasing amounts of resources,” Davis hopes to see “a long-term impact in their communities.” After all, he shares, property is at the core of this country’s value systems (systemic beliefs, mind you, whose foundations trace to the initial enslavement of Black people).
Property law politics
Sometimes, loopholes that arise when least expected come in the way of housing-based safety and security. This was the reality for Kim Renee Duhon and Mamie Reels Ellison, two family members featured in Silver Dollar Road, a documentary that follows the story of the Reels family protecting their land against predatory property legalities enforced by North Carolina firm Adams Creek Associates. Once a haven for family reunions and summer barbecues (“our Black country club,” as Ellison shares), the Reels’s acres were stolen based on property law loopholes, even getting to the point where two family members were incarcerated for eight years for refusing to leave their own homes.
