Opinion | Pollution Is Driving Black Americans to the South. It May Not Be Any Better.

The air pollution in Emma Lockridge’s community in Detroit was often so bad, she had to wear a surgical mask inside her house. The smokestacks of nearby refineries and factories filled the sky outside her windows with black particles. “I couldn’t sleep because of those fumes,” she told me last year.

In 2021 she fled Detroit for Memphis (which she soon found had pollution issues of its own), joining the million-plus Black Americans who have migrated to the South in the past three decades.

This phenomenon has been called reverse migration because many Black people are returning to a region their forebears left from the 1910s to the 1970s. Between 2015 and 2020, the top six destination states for Black interstate migrants were in the South, with Georgia, Texas and Florida leading the way.

Since August 2022, I’ve crisscrossed the United States, chatting with dozens of people about this new Great Migration, what’s driving it and how it’s reshaping Southern life. While most of the research and reporting on the causes of the exodus have rightfully focused on factors like taxes and economic mobility, I’ve found that pollution is also contributing to Black Americans’ decision to move South, in a trend that worries me as much as it moves me.

As climate change takes its toll across the South, migrants may face similar pollution issues as well as environmental threats they might not have faced if they hadn’t moved. This situation demands action on the part of elected officials and local leaders who need to cut pollution and shore up these communities to withstand the worsening heat, storms and flooding. It’s the only way to ensure that Black Americans can stay long term in the Southern towns and cities they now call home.

Ms. Lockridge was far from the only person I spoke with who had fled her home at least in part because of pollution and the toll it took on her health. Christopher Currie was born in Gary, Ind., one of the nation’s worst air pollution hot spots, and moved to Detroit shortly after high school. The toll of Detroit’s polluted air was one of the reasons he left the city for the suburbs of Dallas in 2022. He remembered having constant nebulizer breathing treatments for asthma and long stays at the hospital when he was a child. In 2019, Kourtney Randle left St. Louis for Mississippi largely because she feared the long-term impact of urban air pollution on her children’s health. Growing up in a polluted neighborhood, her youngest son at the time, Kahlel, rarely went a day without breathing troubles. “I hated that he was so miserable every day just trying to breathe,” she told me.

The roots of this crisis date back to the first Great Migration, when millions of Black people left the South to escape segregation, indentured servitude and lynching and went north in search of jobs and stable housing. Early on, many of the jobs available to them were dangerous ones in polluting steel mills, factories and shipyards. Government policies, such as redlining, forced them to live near these toxic industries, unable to escape contaminated air, water and soil.

The U.S. government has known for decades that these people might one day be forced to flee industrial pollution, uprooting their lives in search of healthier places to raise their children. A 1981 study commissioned by the Environmental Protection Agency outlined how Americans were already fleeing “from industrialized areas to the relatively less polluted areas of the country.” But policymakers in those regions did little to prepare for the influx while allowing their own pollution problems to fester.

The South has long been one of the most vulnerable parts of the country to extreme weather, and it has gotten worse in recent years. As the effects of global warming have intensified, Southern states have been slow to upgrade and weatherize their power grids and have paid the price — for instance, when hundreds of people died during Texas’ 2021 winter storm blackout. Many of the nation’s recent weather-caused power outages have occurred in the South, and without more preparation and investment, that number will only rise as more people move there and weather grows more extreme.

It’s not just a question of inaction; some of the decisions by the South’s developers and planners have exacerbated the problem. Unchecked growth and destruction of wetlands and other natural systems have put the region more at risk of climate disasters.

Across the region, from Houston to Charlotte, N.C., and Jacksonville, Fla., homes have been built on flood plains, in neighborhoods where concrete has replaced greenery. Dallas, the city with the second most new Black residents nationwide from 2015 to 2020, is struggling to procure enough water to meet growing demand. In Atlanta, where from 2005 to 2014 the number of heavy downpours was 75 percent higher than in the 1950s, the city’s tree canopy loss was almost half an acre a day from 2008 to 2018.

But it is not too late to build a safer, more climate-resilient region. Community leaders are already stepping up. I met some of them during my travels — at storm preparedness tutorials in New Orleans backyards, at community discussions at the Houston Climate Justice Museum and at the community centers turned resilience hubs in Orlando, Fla. But more has to follow.

In Texas, that includes significantly slowing down housing growth in flood plains and, most important, reversing investment in fossil fuel energy sources that contribute to global warming and can fail during hurricanes and winter storms. As Florida invests in building infrastructure to adapt to rising seas, new and old residents told me they also want the state to prioritize conserving undeveloped land, which will help store carbon and buffer neighborhoods from storms and flooding. In North Carolina and Georgia, leaders can reform zoning laws to encourage cities to build walkable neighborhoods with green infrastructure that helps with storm water management and cooling streets.

The potential climate disasters looming over the South in many ways are linked to the pollution that has plagued Black Americans for decades. By finally building cities with everyone in mind instead of at the expense of Black life, we might be able to stop the cycle of Black migration.

Adam Mahoney is the climate and environment reporter at Capital B, a nonprofit news organization reporting for Black communities.

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