Black tech entrepreneurs move to the South, a Great Migration in reverse: “It was important for us to be in a place that’s more diverse than the places that we were,” said one black entrepreneur who moved to Atlanta.
Tristan Walker was a rising star of the tech world with strong connections in Silicon Valley. A graduate of Stanford University’s MBA program, he quickly rose through the ranks by working for companies like FourSquare and Twitter. In 2013, he startedto address the lack of health and beauty products aimed at black consumers. After the company merged with Procter & Gamble in 2018, however, Walker, who remained CEO, decided it was time to move his business and his family.
“It was important for us to be in a place that’s more diverse than the places that we were,” Walker said. In Silicon Valley, black professionals make up just a small fraction of the tech industry. So Walker moved his family to the South, settling in Atlanta — the same region where his ancestors built their families.
His move is an example of how one of the largest migration patterns in U.S. history, called the Great Migration, is now reversing course. In 1900, nearly 90 percent of black Americans lived in the South, according to the Census Bureau. Starting in 1915 and over the next five decades, 6 million of them, desperate to escape Jim Crow laws and segregation, moved north, to states like New York, Illinois and Michigan, to find steady work.
“The need for labor during World War I, the need for people to actually work in some factories … people were actually recruiting African-Americans in the South,” said Jessica Lynn Stewart, an assistant professor of African-American Studies at Emory University.Get a head start on the morning's top stories.
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