Another Great Migration? Thanks, But I Still Like Chicago

Ethnic succession, as some sociologists call it, is the American way — or, at least, the Chicago way.

Those of us who have been in town for more than a few years know what it means to see neighborhoods become ports-of-entry for various waves of immigrants who raise families, buy bigger houses and maybe move to the suburbs to make room for the next wave of immigrants.

Or maybe their kids move back into the city as gentrifiers in neighborhoods their parents could no longer afford, as they once might have. Cities are dynamic places.

It’s taken awhile but we are beginning to see more Black city dwellers move on as well, resulting in the so-called reverse migration of Black Chicagoans to the suburbs or other states.

That ironically includes many who moved to the South or, as my late parents called Alabama, “down home,” reversing the Great Migration that attracted some 6 million Black Americans from the South to gain jobs and freedom in the era of Jim Crow segregation.

That development has raised questions among a new generation of Black thinkers: Did we gain that much in the North?

New York Times columnist Charles Blow raises that question in his new book, “The Devil You Know,” in which he calls for a historic do-over. “The initial benefits of the Great Migration have given way, in many ways, to a stinging failure,” he writes, citing the “perpetual oppression” of brutal police, housing discrimination, persistent waves of white nationalism and the lingering sense of political powerlessness Black Americans still face.

“Black people fled the horrors of the racist South for so-called liberal cities of the North and West, trading the devil they knew for the devil they didn’t, only to come to the painful realization that the devil is the devil.”

His solution? Pick up the Black burden, so to speak, and join the reverse migration, says Blow, a Louisiana native who recently moved from New York to Atlanta. As Black populations grow toward the racial majority we used to comprise in some states before the Great Migration, our political clout will grow too.

That’s an intriguing thought by my friend and colleague, but count me out. It is hard enough to organize and win political victories in the short term without trying to plan them a decade or so down the road.

The biggest factor that has energized migrations by Black folks and other folks in my experience has been, simply put, jobs. The economic attraction of jobs and fair wages did more to bring my family and others up North — and we can see similar economic migrations all around the planet.

With that in mind, I think our best approach as Black people and as Americans, as Booker T. Washington famously advised, “cast down your buckets where they are.” Make the most of the resources you have at hand, helped along by the reality that we have more hard-won rights and freedom than our ancestors enjoyed in Washington’s day.

And amid such ethnic disputes and redistricting clashes, take counsel in the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s, observation: We all came here on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)