A Home in Florida Is Worth More Than the White House

No longer seen as a bastion of Ku Klux Klan white hoods, the American South is seen today by blacks as a land of opportunity and a place to live out their years of retirement in the sun. In a decade, Florida, as well as Georgia and Texas, has gained half a million blacks. Hundreds of thousands have also moved to North Carolina, so many that census data shows that 57 percent of blacks live in the South, the highest level in half a century.

The movement is explained by a desire to return to one’s roots, but also serves, as much or more than the election of President Barack Obama, as proof that racism has receded in the country of Uncle Sam. After all, the South is that region of the United States that went to war in 1861 to defend slavery and which, in the hundred years following, did everything to deny the black population its civil rights, even lynching those who wouldn’t submit.

From Marcus Garvey, who tried to gather the descendents of slaves and take them to Africa, to the Black Panthers, who mixed race with revolution, history is full of examples of black disillusionment with the celebrated “American Dream.” There were even those who wanted to create a separate country, uniting Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas, despite the fact that none of these states were even half black.

But there is another strand among blacks, one that always fought for integration. People like Booker T. Washington, who, with an invitation from Theodore Roosevelt, became the first black to dine in the White House. Or Martin Luther King, who led the fight for civil rights and now lends his name to a holiday. Or even Colin Powell, who reached the top of the armed forces and who, if he had wanted to, could have gone further than being Bush Jr.’s Secretary of State. More discreetly, he joined former New York police officers and ex-Detroit auto workers who are now investing their savings in a home for their retirement in Florida, and the executives who are trading the Northwest and the Great Lakes for Georgia and Texas, where the economy is healthier than in the rest of the United States.

In order to flee poverty, discrimination and lynchings, 7 million blacks left the South in the first half of the 20th century, a population shift called the Great Migration. However, in 1900 nine out of every 10 blacks still lived where their parents and grandparents had been slaves. The fact that the South no longer instills fear is notable. Obama, the son of a Kenyan man and a white woman from Kansas, is connected to this black saga only through Michelle, his wife. But, as president, he should be glad that his arrival in the White House is not an oasis in the desert. And, with his eyes on re-election in 2012, he will be rubbing his hands with glee at this return migration to the South. The black vote is his, and winning Florida is normally decisive. In the end, the White House may depend on the homes that many retired blacks are going to buy.