Blacks Head Home African Americans Are Leaving The West And Flocking To The South, Where Job Growth And Warm, Friendly Climate Are Replacing Jim Crow Past.

In the early 1950s, De Lois Johnson deserted the Mississippi Delta and lit out for California. Like other black Americans of her generation, Johnson was fed up with Jim Crow and lured west by the promise of good jobs. Now, almost half a century later, the retired San Jose computer analyst is back home.

Johnson, 65, is one of hundreds of thousands of blacks who have headed back to the states of the Old Confederacy in a startling reverse migration.

Most are from the Northeast and Midwest, but an increasing number are from the West, including 103,494 Californians who went to the South from 1990 to 1995, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data conducted by University of Michigan demographer William Frey.

For the first time ever, more blacks are moving to the South from the West than vice versa.

“Call it a snowballing effect, push-and-pull,” Frey said. “Blacks are moving South for its friendlier climate and in effect making it more inviting for other blacks.”

So many are leaving California that the state’s black population stopped growing in the early 1990s, for the first time since before the great black migration out of the South after World War II. During the first half of the 1990s, some 53,495 more blacks left California for the Sun Belt than vice versa.

“Just about everyone who leaves winds up South,” said Rev. Willie Gaines of the Emmanuel Baptist Church, which, with 5,000 members, boasts the largest black congregation in San Jose. At least 60 families from his congregation have left for the South in the past five years, Gaines said.

“I know one young man, an athlete, who took off for Atlanta; a computer programmer who is thinking about Tennessee; and my ex-husband, who worked for IBM, who went to Mississippi,” said Ellen Rollins, a program coordinator for the African American Community Center. “And that’s just off the top of my head.”

Black Americans are heading to the nation’s fastest-growing region for jobs, warm weather, cheap homes and to be close to family and friends.

“It was high time to come home,” said Johnson, who now lives in Newhebron, Miss., a small town 30 miles south of Jackson. “Things are different - better - than when I was growing up.”

Unlike other southbound migrants, black Americans speak of the historical significance of their migration, of being part of a more race-friendly South, of being proud of the booming cities that are becoming black meccas and of finally putting Jim Crow, the system of Southern segregation laws, behind them.

“People are going back to their roots, where Big Mama and Bubba are down the street and where blacks have a history,” said Ron McPherson, the owner of a San Jose insurance agency.

Within the next decade, demographers predict black Americans will transform the South. But not all the black Americans heading South are returnees cashing in on decades of hard work to move to a place where the cost of living is cheaper. Some of those heading to the Sun Belt are new residents, Bay Area black leaders say - yuppies who were born and raised in other parts of the country.

Johnson’s daughter, who was born in San Jose and worked for Hewlett-Packard Co., was so taken by Atlanta’s black culture that she moved there a few years ago. Many of those leaving the San Jose area are college students who attend historically black colleges in the South, like Atlanta’s Spelman College, and then decide to stay. The Tuskegee Alumni Association organizes semiannual trips for students from the Bay Area to historically black colleges in the South, and community leaders say as many as half of the area’s black students go to Southern colleges.

The stream of people heading South also includes young couples with school-age children whom the parents would like raised among more black Americans and taught in schools that place a special emphasis on African-American history.

“They want to give their kids a different cultural slant,” Emmanuel Baptist’s Gaines said.

The strongest magnets for California blacks are so-called New South cities such as Atlanta and Dallas, Frey said. Young California blacks, who tend to be highly educated, are helping to develop a powerful black middle class. The early retirees are reinvigorating the small towns they grew up in.

The black migration out of the South was the largest domestic movement of an ethnic group in history. After World War II, California’s black population grew from almost nothing to about two percent of the total. Now, it’s about 7 percent - or 2.25 million.

Many of the first black Americans who came to Northern California took jobs in the booming shipyards of Oakland and Richmond. Those who came in the 1970s and 1980s tended to be highly skilled and to work in technology-related fields.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that blacks stopped fleeing the region then becoming known as the Sun Belt - or started trickling back from the industrial North and Midwest. The booming West, however, saw little of this reverse migration until the 1990s, when recession crept in.

However, for Frankie Harvey, a Veterans Administration caseworker in Milpitas, who grew up in a highly segregated Texas town, the desire to move back South is less about economics and more about quality of life. She visits relatives in her hometown several times a year and hopes to move back permanently within five years.

“I look and I wonder,” Harvey, 53, said of her visits. “I check to see if people are of the same mold. In some ways they are. They are still laid-back and live life at a slow pace. But there’s a lot more integration and recently - finally - I’m feeling comfortable there.”