The traditional Black family summer road trip to the rural South fades

Publish date: 2024-08-26

When she was a kid in the 1980s and ’90s, Evita Robinson took an annual summer road trip from Long Island down to Camden, S.C. Robinson and some of her extended-family members piled into two or three cars around 1 a.m., hoping to avoid traffic around the Northern cities. They ate fried chicken out of shoe boxes on the way down. As they crossed into South Carolina, they hit the roadside attraction South of the Border and Robinson knew the 14-hour caravan was almost over.

Robinson’s suburban life up north was very different from her time in the rural South. In Camden, the dirt roads were shades of 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 put on matching T-shirts, took over a local park and reconnected over barbecue.

The family was split between South Carolina and New York because back in 1954, Robinson’s grandmother had migrated from Camden up to New York City, later settling on Long Island. These trips from Long Island down to Camden were about “making sure that the lineage is not lost,” Robinson said.

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

That trip was at once a reunion, a history lesson and a rite of passage. For many Northern- or Western-born kids, this was a rare chance to do several things: see their Southern relatives who did not migrate, understand the segregated society that shaped their family and experience their ancestral landscape, where Black people had gone from enslavement on plantations to sharecropping and other agricultural occupations.

But these trips aren’t as common anymore, said 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 massive exodus of Black people during the Great Migration, so today, there are fewer people there to visit. Over the last few decades, there has been a reverse migration from North back to South, but Black people largely did not return to rural areas. They moved to major metropolitan areas like Atlanta, where jobs were more plentiful.

There’s little data on Black travel patterns, but experts say these habits have shifted in recent years away from the rural Southern family reunion. Instead, Black travelers are seeking new destinations and experiences, said Alana Dillette, who teaches about hospitality and tourism at San Diego State University and is a co-founder of CODE, an organization focused on equity in the tourism industry. Many Black travelers no longer have living relatives in the rural South anyway, she said.

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

She still employs safety strategies that were passed down in her family. “I will not do that drive at night,” she said. She makes sure to leave Charlotte with a full tank of gas and food in the vehicle to avoid stopping in an unfamiliar or potentially hostile area. And she has added her own contemporary precaution: Knowing she will lose reception for about 20 minutes on this drive, she screenshots the directions.

“There’s still a lot of those sundown town remnants,” she said, referring to towns that historically did not tolerate Black people after dark. “It’s one of the few times I go and find out what time the sun is setting.”

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

Her father, William Robinson, made these same trips when he was a child in the 1950s and ’60s. He also experienced culture shock in the rural South. “Chickens were running all over the place,” he said. Some family members used an outhouse, pumped water from a well and cranked their clothes through a wringer.

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

Even so, many Black families had a deep, even warm, connection 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 the whole way home.

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

“People have just died off,” he said, citing one reason Black family trips to the rural South are less common than they once were.

“The whole purpose of going what we call ‘down home’ was about literally a homecoming,” said Rue Mapp, founder and CEO of Outdoor Afro, a nonprofit dedicated to reconnecting Black people with nature. “Especially over the last 60-plus years, home feels more entrenched 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 ’80s, she took summertime road trips with her parents in their Cadillac from California back to Texas and Louisiana.

When they arrived — first in Call, Tex., then in DeRidder, La. — they sat down to barbecue, 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 put on talent shows.

Some Black children went South without their parents, Mapp said. Migrants were working tirelessly in Northern and Western cities, and sending their kids south for the summer was partly a child-care solution. “Black kids didn’t get sent to camp. They were sent down home,” she said.

Mapp said she didn’t experience any racist incidents on these trips, but she heard upsetting stories. “Everybody also has in their consciousness the story of Emmett Till, which was the worst possible outcome of one of these experiences,” she said. Chicago-born Till traveled down to Mississippi in 1955 to visit his relatives, only to be brutally lynched, catalyzing the civil rights movement.

But there is more than pain and peril to these trips, Mapp said. Visiting the rural South gave her “a beautiful rootedness,” she said, and helped her take pride in how far she’s come. “I am the granddaughter of a domestic,” she said. “We have a hard time marking progress when we don’t have a connection to where we’ve come from.”

The old pilgrimage to the rural South may be fading away, but new traditions are emerging, Dillette said. In recent years, it’s become more common for Black travelers to take a DNA test to learn more about their African origins, then plan a trip to the African country from which they’re descended. These travelers generally don’t have known living relatives there, but the trip still connects them to their roots. “We could think of this as a pilgrimage as well, in a different sense,” she said.

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The traditional Black family summer road trip to the rural South fades