Blacks are moving back to the South by the thousands. This is not supposed to happen, not if you trust the mythology of the mainstream media. How can this be? Affluent black families leaving Chicago to go back home to Mississippi, back to the land of church burnings and redneck sheriffs?

But according to a study by the Population Reference Bureau, this is exactly what is happening. In the first half of the 90’s, the Northeast lost 235,600 black residents, the Midwest lost 106,500, and the West lost 28,700. This reverses a trend that has prevailed since World War I. And the migration back to the South includes professionals and the affluent—a fifth of returning blacks are college graduates.

It would seem the times have changed. The day is long gone when all racial problems could be confined to the South, and a righteous nation could make a pretense of solving them by offering correction and coercion to backward Southerners. It should be obvious to anyone who travels the country today that there is much less racial tension and much more good will between the races throughout most of the South than there is in any big liberal Northern city. And it should not be surprising that blacks feel inclined to return to where nearly all have their roots.

My Southern hometown was the scene of major protests and riots during the civil rights era. Today, things seem peaceful and prosperous. Except in one respect, where things have changed for the worse in a way that hurts white and black Southerners both. Thanks to the criminal irresponsibility of our ruling elite, we now have a huge and growing Hispanic underclass as well as Vietnamese and Iranian gangs. I can remember when the biggest conflict was between the Baptists and the Methodists.