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The traditional black family summer road trip to the rural south is disappearing

The traditional black family summer road trip to the rural south is disappearing

When she was a child in the 1980s and 1990s, Evita Robinson made an annual summer road trip from Long Island, N.Y., to Camden, S.C. Robinson and several of her extended family members would pile into two or three cars around 1 a.m., hoping to avoid the crowds around the northern cities. They ate fried chicken out of shoeboxes on the way down. As they entered South Carolina, they came across the roadside attraction South of the Border and Robinson knew that the 14-hour caravan was almost over.

Robinson’s life in the suburbs of the North was very different from her time in the rural South. In Camden, the dirt roads were yellow and red. Robinson’s grandfather taught her about gardening as he tended cucumbers, lettuce and tomatoes. The big event was a family reunion, where everyone donned matching T-shirts, took over a local park and reunited for a barbecue.

The family was split between South Carolina and New York because Robinson’s grandmother had migrated from Camden to New York City in 1954 and later settled on Long Island. These trips from Long Island to Camden were meant to “ensure that the lineage was not lost,” Robinson said.

Between the 1910s and the 1970s, approximately 6 million black people fled the South, mostly from rural areas, seeking safety and work, primarily in the urban North and West. During this period, it was common for black migrants to return to the rural South for visits, often in the summer.

The trip was at once a reunion, a history lesson, and a rite of passage. For many children born in the North or West, it was a rare chance to do several things: see their Southern relatives who didn’t migrate, understand the segregated society that shaped their families, and experience their ancestral landscape, where black people had moved from plantation slavery to sharecropping and other agricultural occupations.

But these types of trips are no longer common, says Robinson, the founder of Nomadness Travel Tribe, a leading black travel community since 2011 with more than 36,000 members on Facebook.

That’s partly because the rural South saw a huge exodus of black people during the Great Migration, so there are fewer people to visit now. There has been a reverse migration from North to South in recent decades, but black people have largely not returned to rural areas. They have moved to large metropolitan areas like Atlanta, where jobs are more plentiful.

There is little data on the travel patterns of black people, but experts say these habits have changed in recent years away from the rural family reunion in the South. Instead, black travelers are seeking new destinations and experiences, said Alana Dillette, who teaches hospitality and tourism at San Diego State University and is the co-founder of CODE, an organization that focuses on equality in the tourism industry. Many black travelers don’t have living relatives in the rural South anyway, she said.

Robinson still visits her family in the rural South. But instead of driving the distance, she flies from her home in Newark, N.J., to Charlotte, then rents a car for the hour-and-a-half drive to Camden.

She still uses safety strategies passed down in her family. “I’m not making that drive at night,” she said. She makes sure to leave Charlotte with a full tank of gas and food in the car to avoid having to stop in an unfamiliar or potentially hostile environment. And she’s added her own modern-day precaution: Knowing she’ll be out of cell phone range for about 20 minutes on this drive, she screenshots the directions.

“There’s still a lot of remnants of those sundown towns,” she said, referring to cities that historically didn’t tolerate black people after dark. “It’s one of the few times I go and see what time the sun goes down.”

As a child, she was afraid of certain things about the South, like the silence of the countryside and the cemetery where her relatives were buried. She was horrified when her aunts told her that snakes used to crawl through the floorboards of an old family home. But over time, she developed a “sense of pride” in these Southern elements that shaped her family.

Her father, William Robinson, made similar trips as a child in the 1950s and ’60s. He, too, faced culture shock in the rural South. “There were chickens running around everywhere,” he said. Some family members used an outdoor toilet, pumped water from a well and wrung their clothes through a wringer.

These trips also exposed the elder Robinson to racism in the South. Once, he went fishing with his grandfathers in a nearby creek; they all left to get something to eat, and when they came back, the rock they had been sitting on had “KKK” written on it, he said. There were also bad experiences at gas stations. “Sometimes my dad would come running back to the car, full speed, put the key in the ignition and zoom away, and we were gone without putting any more gas in the car,” he recalled.

Yet many black families had deep, even warm, ties to the rural South. When Robinson’s family drove from Camden back to Long Island, he and his siblings smelled their grandmother’s coconut cake all the way home.

In 1988, Robinson moved to South Carolina for the lower cost of living. He now lives in Camden, where he is a business consultant, executive director of a nonprofit organization, and chairman of the Democratic Party for Kershaw County. He lives in a house his father left behind when he died.

“People just died out,” he said, citing one reason why black family travel to the rural South is less common than it used to be.

“The whole point of going down home, what we call, was literally coming home,” said Rue Mapp, founder and CEO of Outdoor Afro, a nonprofit dedicated to reconnecting Black people with nature. “Especially in the last 60 years, home feels more anchored in other places, not necessarily in the South.”

Mapp’s parents migrated from Texas and Louisiana at the end of World War II, ending up in Oakland. When Mapp was a child in the 1970s and 1980s, she would take summer road trips with her parents in their Cadillac from California back to Texas and Louisiana.

When they arrived — first in Call, Texas, then in DeRidder, Louisiana — they sat down to barbecue, eat cornbread, collard greens, sock it to me cake and 7UP cake. Mapp also spent a lot of time chatting on people’s porches. She explored with her cousins, played games and entered talent shows.

Some black children went south without their parents, Mapp said. Migrants worked tirelessly in northern and western cities, and sending their children south for the summer was partly a solution to child care. “Black children weren’t sent to camp. They were sent home,” she said.

Mapp said she didn’t experience any racist incidents during these trips, but she did hear some shocking stories. “Everybody has the Emmett Till story in their mind, too, which was the worst possible outcome of one of these experiences,” she said. Till, born in Chicago, traveled to Mississippi in 1955 to visit relatives but was brutally lynched, sparking the civil rights movement.

But these journeys are more than just painful and dangerous, Mapp said. Visiting the rural South gave her “a beautiful sense of rootedness,” she said, and helped her take pride in how far she’s come. “I’m the granddaughter of a housekeeper,” she said. “We have a hard time measuring progress if we don’t have a connection to where we came from.”

The old pilgrimage to the rural South may be dying, but new traditions are emerging, Dillette said. In recent years, it has become more common for black travelers to take a DNA test to learn about their African ancestry, then plan a trip to the African country they came from. These travelers typically don’t have living relatives there, but the journey still connects them to their roots. “We could also see this as a pilgrimage, in a different sense,” she said.