return migration,”• It is true that significant racial segregation still persists in that black peopleand white people tend to live and worship separately, but in fact, manymore whites and blacks share neighborhoods in the South than in the OldEconomic Core.• The South has the nation’s highest concentration of families living below thepoverty line, and most of them are white. On the other hand, mostSoutherners—black, white, or Hispanic—are able to maintain a substantiallybetter standard of living than their parents did.• Many who left the South in the 1950s and 1960s for factory jobs in the OldEconomic Core in the Great Migration have come back to the region becauseof jobs, business opportunities, the lower cost of living, and a milder climate,as well as safer, more spacious, and friendlier neighborhoods than the onesthey left in places such as New York, Illinois, or California.• In the 1990s, 3.5 million people who self-identified as black moved to theSouth from other parts of the United States. Seven of the ten metropolitanareas that gained the most black migrants during the 1990s were in theSouth, principally in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee
and Texas.”