The air pollution in Emma Lockridge’s community in Detroit was often so bad, she had to wear a surgical mask inside her house. The smokestacks of nearby refineries and factories filled the sky outside her windows with black particles. In 2021 she fled Detroit for Memphis (which she soon found had pollution issues of its own), joining the million-plus Black Americans who have migrated to the South in the past three decades. This phenomenon has been called reverse migration because many Black people are returning to a region their forebears left from the 1910s to the 1970s. Between 2015 and 2020, the top six destination states for Black interstate migrants were in the South, with Georgia, Texas and Florida leading the way.

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Persons: Emma Organizations: Black Locations: Emma Lockridge’s, Detroit, Memphis, Georgia , Texas, Florida