Race in the South

James C. Cobb cites revealing statistics concerning the self-identification of blacks in the South: “In 1964, only 55 percent of southern black respondents expressed ‘warm’ feelings toward southerners, as opposed to nearly 90 percent of the southern white polled. By 1976, however, the proportion of southern blacks who expressed this warmth stood just below 80 percent and only slightly below the percentage of white southerners who felt this way.” By 2001, “the percentage of blacks in the South who identified themselves as southerners was actually slightly higher than that for whites.”

These statistics are less noteworthy than migration statistics: “Although nearly 10 million blacks had left the South between 1910 and 1960, the reversal of this pattern that began in the 1970s continued through the 1980s and accelerated dramatically in the 1990s. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, the number of blacks entering the region exceeded the number leaving by more than 1.2 million. In the 1990s alone, the South’s black population grew by nearly 3.6 million overall, nearly twice the rate of increase for the previous decade.”