In adopted hometowns, Black Californians face newer, subtler forms of segregation. Old regimes of legal housing and job discrimination have given way to predatory loans, shifting patterns of disinvestment and flare ups of racism or violence in areas that once promised a level playing field, reports fromUC Berkeley,UCLAandsocial services groupshave found.

Now, as Black Lives Matter protests collide with anxiety about COVID-19sdisproportionate Black death tolland anxiety about a comingwave of evictions, at issue is whether these overlapping crises will accelerate Californias Black exodus or force a reckoning both inside and outside major cities.

Wilson had never been to Elk Grove before she moved there in 2002 to start a family. Shed never been called the n-word before she moved there, either.

By 2017, after years of working a day job in sales and doing hair late into the night, her own salon in Old Town Elk Grove was thriving. She went back to L.A. often to dream up business ideas with her sister and make sure her kids werent too far out of the loop on Black culture. But one day, a stylist at Wilsons salon found a note jammed in the door. It was riddled with racial slurs and said to get out soon.

It didnt make me want to leave, Wilson said. It made me want to force them to understand who I am, what Im about, and that I add value to this community just like everybody else.

In 2000, just before Wilson left L.A., California had the countrys second-largest Black population at more than 2.2 million people. But under the surface, a seismic shift was happening in where people lived, the opportunities they chased and the social networks they relied on.

After white flight, Black flight had accelerated in the 1980s. Outer suburbs like Palmdale, Antioch and Elk Grove saw exponential growth.

The state went from a high of 7.7% Black in 1980 to 5.5% Black in 2018, Census data shows, even as it added 15 million residents who were mostly Latino, Asian or multi-racial. Nearly 75,000 Black Californians left the state in 2018, according to a CalMatters analysis of federal estimates, compared to 48,000 Black people who moved in. The three most popular states for Black ex-Californians were Nevada, Texas and Georgia, reflecting both anational reversalof last centurys Great Migration and movement to emergingmiddle class hubsfor Black homeownership, education and entrepreneurship.

The first time Cierra Washington-Griffin left California was in 2010, when she was 23 and fresh off a breakup. Three days on a Greyhound from her hometown of Sacramento to Fort Benning, Georgia, gave her plenty of time to think about starting over.

Within a month, she had a car, a job at a hotel and a two-bedroom duplex that cost $450 a month a rapid shift to financial independence that had seemed impossible back home. She also didnt have to change her voice to sound white like when she applied for work in affluent California suburbs. It was just so much simpler there, said Washington-Griffin, now 33.

Her grandmother was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, and she sees things differently. Barbara Washington followed family from St. Louis to California in the 1970s, at the tail end of the migration that brought hundreds of thousands of Black people to California from the South. Washington settled in Richmond, part of the Bay Areas jobs-rich former war corridor, a center of Black life forged by discriminatory housing practices.

Washington worked as a nurse, and by the time her children were having children in the 80s, the Bay Area seemed too fast. They moved to the cow town of Sacramento, and she never regretted moving to California.

We wanted something different for the kids, Washington said on a recent 100-degree day at a park in Elk Grove, where she moved after the house she rented in Sacramento was sold.

See, thats weird though, said Washington-Griffin, who moved back in last year with plans to leave again but now is unsure. I feel like its better out there, especially for people of color, in the South.

Her grandmother shook her head. I dont think so, she said.

Timing is everything in Californias winner-take-most economy. The longer it takes Black residents to cash in when times are good and the harder theyre hit when things turn bad, the wider the states racial wealth gap grows.

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The Hidden Toll of California's Black Exodus - KQED