Homeward bound: The return migration of southern-born black women, 1940 to 1990

A major demographic trend of the twentieth century has been the dramatic decrease in the percentage of African Americans residing in the South. The Great Migration reduced the percentage of Blacks living in the South from 90 percent at the turn of the century to 53 percent in 1990. However, since at least 1940 there has been a measurable North-to-South counterstream of migrants, and since about 1970 there has been net in-migration of Blacks to the South. This in-migration includes northern-barn Blacks, as well as former migrants returning to the South. Prior research on the Great Migration, and its more recent reversal, has tended to overlook the experiences of Black women. In this study, we use the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series to describe the return migration patterns of southern-born Black women in 1940, 1970, 1980, and 1990. Our analysis has four primary objectives: (a) to provide a broad overview of trends in return migration to the South for Black women during the last 60 years of the twentieth century, (b) to determine the selectivity of female return migrants from the larger population of southern migrants residing in the North, (c) to compare female return migrants with southern-born women who had remained in the South, and (d) to help set an agenda for future research on female return migration. Although the focus throughout the article is on the return migration of African American women, parallel information is presented for Whites to provide a comparative perspective.