Special Section: Reverse Migration

Craving jobs and a measure of equal treatment, blacks by the millions fled the South for the industrial cities of the North. The proportion of black Americans living in the South fell from 78% in 1900 to 43% in 1975. Lately, however, lessening racism and rapid economic growth have begun to reverse the trend. Many Northern blacks are apprehensive about the South, and some of those who left retain traumatic memories. But countless blacks are moving to the South, fleeing the Northern cities’ high crime rates, high prices and deteriorating schools. For the most part, the people moving South are middleclass, educated blacks, who are better equipped than poorer blacks to take advantage of the region’s new opportunities. Some of the new migrants gave their views to TIME Correspondent Joseph Boyce:

Tony Westmorland, 61, and his wife Doris, 60, had planned to sell the supermarket and liquor store that, along with some rental properties, netted him $40,000 a year on Chicago’s South Side and retire to Hawaii. Last year, however, they vacationed in the South and were pleasantly surprised by the friendliness of the people, the lower cost of living and the availability of good housing. Says Westmorland, who was raised in Atlanta: “I fell in love with it all over again.” Adds his wife, who had not visited the South since she left Texarkana, Texas, as a child of seven: “I was so impressed with it and liked it so well that I decided this is it.” Next month the Westmorlands will move into a three-bedroom, split-level house in Decatur, Ga.

Westmorland has abandoned all thought of retiring. He is negotiating the lease for a liquor store in a Decatur shopping mall. Says he: “I wondered if they’d be reluctant about doing business with a black man.” But the rental agent “talked to me like any other businessman. The guy was beautiful. He highly respected me. It seemed he went out of his way to make it easy for me.”

Herbert Williams, an eleventh-grade dropout from Little Rock, Ark., schools, went to Chicago in 1946 to seek his fortune. Over the next 28 years, he worked as a bus dispatcher, bus driver and truck driver. But he never felt comfortable living in Chicago. He resented the discrimination that for years barred him from North Side nightclubs. He found the people unfriendly and the pace too fast. Says he: “It is a big rat race, all hustle and bustle.”

Because of an illness in his family, he returned to Little Rock in 1974 and decided to stay when he found that the civil rights movement had transformed life for blacks. Says he: “Now I can go anywhere—to any theater, to any bowling alley, anywhere.” Moreover, Williams, 55, had no trouble finding work. Weekdays he is employed by the city, issuing all tools used for street repairs; weekends he helps a local undertaker. The jobs pay him about $7,000 a year and leave him enough time for fishing, his favorite pastime.

William Dilday, comfortable as personnel manager for Boston TV station WHDH, had no intention of moving —particularly not to a small Deep South city. Says he: “I’m a product of the hustle-bustle megalopolis.” In 1972, however, he could not turn down an offer to become the first black general manager of a U.S. TV station—WLBT in Jackson, Miss.

Now 38, Dilday earns more than $40,000 a year and lives only a 15-minute drive from his office. But while his wife Maxine, 35, and their two daughters relish Jackson’s slow pace, Dilday restlessly misses the Celtics and Boston’s other professional teams and live performances by top jazz groups. Says he: “When I got here, I couldn’t understand why, when something needed to be done, it wasn’t done today. There is not the competition here that there is in the big city.” He complains also that the conservative white caste system that dominates the local economy may be hampering the city’s growth.

Still, Dilday prefers to stay in the South, which he regards as “a mecca for young blacks.” Says he: “If I were offered a comparable position in Chicago, Boston, New York or Atlanta, I’d probably take Atlanta.”

Larry Shaw decided, after his wife died in 1969, that Chicago was no place for a single parent to raise three children. In particular, he says, “I was worried about the schools and the gangs.” He moved to his native Memphis to join Stax Record Co.’s promotion department. He bought a five-bedroom, Tudor-style house in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, and hired a housekeeper. When Stax went bankrupt, Shaw started his own consulting agency, which helps a dozen firms to sell to black consumers. He earns about $40,000 a year.

Shaw, 38, could operate his business out of almost any city, but he decided to stay in Memphis, partly because he thinks race relations in the South are more open and honest than in the North. “In the North, we never knew what the real positions of whites were, or who the enemy was. In the South, I know where they stand, and they know where I stand.” He also finds that Memphis’ medium size “allows for black participation in the city’s economic and social development.” Blacks have not yet broken into the city’s power elite, but Shaw predicts: “The South is going to rise again, and I intend to be part of it.”