The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

To end the cycle of oppression sparking protest and then subsiding back into submission, Blow makes his proposition: a reverse mass migration back to the South.

Basing his proposal on the political value of population densities, Blow believes current figures prevent substantive change from occurring. Since the Great Migration attracted millions of Black people away from the South, “from 1910 to 1970, the Black population in the South grew by only 36 percent; the white population swelled to two and a half times its 1910 size,” and currently “44 percent of Black people […] live outside the South,” dispersed across the entire North and West regions (31-32). By sheer population numbers alone, both northern and southern whites “constituted a majority in every state but Hawaii for the last ninety years” (33), codifying racism as policy by their proportion in the ballot box and turning Black voters into political tokens fought over in every election cycle (59).

To empower Black people, Blow focuses his vision on seizing political power by centralizing Black population density in the South. He targets nine states where his plan is most feasible: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware (44).