Census has revealed that for the first time in history, the majority of African Americans (along with every major ethnic group in the nation) live in the suburbs. This rate of increase was higher than that of white suburban migration at the time. Between 19, an average of over 100,000 African Americans moved to the suburbs each year. In the years after 1970 when the Great Migration of African Americans to the North began to ebb, the flow of black families into the suburbs, north and south, exploded. We are now in the midst of another transformation.
Since that time, the cultural association between African Americans and city life has led to the term “urban” often being used as a synonym for “black.” Yet by the 1960s and 1970s, the previous decades of vast and rapid urban migration made it impossible to think of cities without reflecting on black America. Before the 20th century, African Americans were considered to be a “rural people.” As late as 1940, at the start of the second wave of the Great Migration, 70% of African Americans still lived in the South, with the majority of those residing in agricultural regions.