A New Great Migration

With segregation now in New York City, and soon other liberal locations, will Black Americans living in the North and on the West Coast return to their southern roots?

From 1910 to 1970, millions of Black Americans migrated from the South to northern, midwestern, and western industrial cities. The pull factors were more lucrative employment opportunities; the need for industrial workers in factories, mills, and foundries during the First and Second World War gave many Black people employment. Stricter immigration laws prevented further European immigration during the World Wars and interwar period. Internal migration of southern Black workers would fill the capitalists need for labor. Leaving the sharecropper life behind would allow Black families to attain a higher standard of living than their forebears.

The push factors, however, were racist Jim Crow segregation laws, and an ever-present threat to one’s life. Southern lynch mobs – including the domestic terrorist hate group, The Ku Klux Klan – carried out extrajudicial racist killings of thousands of Black people throughout the southern states.

Of course, Black people faced discrimination in their new homes after migrating north. Race riots occurred, most infamously the Chicago Race Riots of 1919, which left over thirty people dead. Still, legal apartheid did not exist in northern and midwestern, and western cities like the Jim Crow South. But White and Black people were largely segregated by unwritten bigoted customs, and racial violence erupted often when “color lines” were crossed. Nevertheless, the situation, while far from ideal, was often consider an improvement once Black families settled north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

And now, fifty-one years after the time in which most historians conclude the massive demographic change known as the Great Migration ended, Black Americans may have a reason to return to the South. A new system of apartheid is sweeping through northern and western cities. A medical caste system, based on vaccine status, greatly impacts Black and Brown people. In New York City, the first city implementing apartheid Covid-19 vaccine policies, up to 60% of Black New Yorkers cannot engage in routine daily activities, like dining at a restaurant, going to the gym, or seeing a concert.

These policies have been implemented ostensibly to benefit public health; however, a little bit of scrutiny quickly dismantles this fallacy. For instance, the Covid-19 vaccines are all experimental, novel technologies with no long-term clinical data. Anyone receiving one of the three shots authorized under Emergency Use unknowingly enters themselves in the third stage of the clinical trial. The vaccine trials are ongoing, and none of the vaccines – the Moderna, Pfizer, or Johnson & Johnson – have been fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Knowing this fact alone should give one “hesitancy.” Furthermore, Black Americans have in the past been used as experimental guinea pigs by the U.S. government, most infamously in the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment – another reason many may be reluctant to take an experimental jab.

In addition, these vaccines do not prevent one from getting infected or infecting others; vaccinated individuals can also spread the virus. Mandating this vaccine so one can eat in a restaurant or attend a concert makes no sense considering this fact.

Like New York, similar vaccine passport policies were announced in San Francisco as well. Other cities, such as Philadelphia – which has not yet declared a vaccine passport system – have allowed private establishments to set their own vaccinated only rules. This new era of segregation will continue to fracture an already dividing nation. Many people of color and others who value freedom of choice with regards to medical interventions now find themselves as second class citizens in several supposedly “progressive” places.

During the past year and a half, migration from blue states to red states occurred in large numbers. Californians have been flocking to Texas for the past two years. Recently, though, tens of thousands have left because of the state’s draconian lockdowns. New Yorkers have sought out greener pastures at significant rates, moving to states with less severe lockdown measures and more open spaces and places. Many ended up in Florida.

Red states were early to lift lockdowns and mask mandates, and once any talk of vaccine passports began, Republican Governors quickly announced executive orders to ban them. These governors cite personal choice and liberty, something many people in more authoritarian blue cities and states desire.

Ironically, some of the cities that held the largest Black Lives Matter protests - such as New York City - have taken the caste system course. Many liberals and those left of liberal remain quiet or supportive of vaccine passports and mandates, which disproportionately impact Black people who do not want the vaccine. Some have postulated absurd excuses for why Black people have not gotten vaccinated in greater numbers: MSNBC ran a segment blaming white supremacist anti-vaxxers for misinforming people of color. For some reason or another, liberals and the liberal corporate media cannot bring themselves to state the truth: Black Americans can think rationally about their health and what is best for their families; they have made an intelligent and informed decision to forgo a medical experiment for the most overhyped respiratory illness of all time.

In the above viral video, crowds descend on a woman while eating at a restaurant for not raising her first in solidarity with BLM. But will the liberals and leftists of various stripes who share the ideology of those in the video clip now eat indoors in NYC while Black Americans are refused entry because of a personal medical choice? Will they remain silent in the face of this neo-apartheid? Will those who call voter ID laws racist allow obviously discriminatory vaccine passports to exist? New York has an anti-scientific policy of institutional discrimination in place. Will it be fought by all?

And if not for a massive coalition of forces rebelling against these unjustifiable vaccine passports in places like New York City and San Francisco, many unvaccinated people and those who are vaccinated but oppose discrimination may just pick up and leave their northern and western cities for the South, as many have been doing since the height of last years lockdowns. Indeed, Black Americans in the North and on the West Coast may find it desirable to return to their southern roots. Perhaps northern Black urbanites will pursue southern cities as a new home, where Black people have long established and rich cultural traditions.

The push factors for this potential exodus is medical apartheid and a lack of access to a myriad of venues – in essence, escaping discrimination and segregation; the pull factors may be economic opportunities free of mandates, and an overall respect for personal medical decisions. If the battles in New York do not begin now, refuge elsewhere might ultimately be considered. Then, the South might thrive unlike ever before, and in the meantime become a beacon of freedom for all lovers of liberty, regardless of color or vaccination status.

Only time will tell.