Black Gen Z Doesn’t Need Another ‘Leave Your Hometown’ Speech
|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
By. Kourtney K Galloway
I have noticed there is a certain kind of ambition that gets handed to young Black folks in smaller Southern cities, almost like it is just the obvious next step: leave. Go somewhere bigger. Find more opportunities. Build your network. Get some experience, make some money, and maybe come back later, once you have something to show for yourself.
I get why people say that. Sometimes leaving really does change everything. Sometimes the city you grew up in just does not have what you need yet. There are better jobs somewhere else, better networks, more money. Sometimes you have to leave just to figure out who you are when you are not surrounded by people who already know your whole story—your family, your school, your mistakes, and the version of you they have already decided is permanent.
I am not against leaving. I just do not think leaving should be the only version of ambition we recognize.
I am 25 years old, and most of my adult life so far has been spent trying to build things in Mississippi. It always sounds a little more impressive when you say it out loud than it feels when you are actually in the middle of it.
Most days, building something here is not glamorous. It looks like sitting at your kitchen table with your laptop open, sending emails to local businesses and hoping someone will sponsor lunch for the kids. It is calling your cousin because she knows somebody who knows somebody who might have a space you can use. It is asking an educator to give up a Saturday, asking an artist to come talk to the children, asking a restaurant if they can donate ten meals, asking a community organization if there is any room for you at all.
Then one person says yes. Then another. And before you know it, the thing you imagined actually exists.
That process has probably shaped how I think about place more than anything else. I have seen for myself that smaller Southern cities are not empty. They are not places where nobody cares and nothing can grow. Some of the most generous people I know have helped me build things here just because they believed children deserved something good. Businesses have fed kids. Educators have shown up. Artists have given their time. People have made introductions.
That matters to me. But I would be lying if I said that was the whole story.
There are days when I look at what I am trying to build and wonder how different it might feel somewhere else. What would it be like if funders already understood the kind of work I was doing? What if I could walk into a room and meet five people working in similar spaces, instead of spending months trying to find them one by one? What if every idea did not have to start with me asking, “Who do I know?”
That is the part that gets lost, I think, when people talk about whether young Black folks should stay home or leave. We make it sound like a personal thing: Do you love your city enough to stay? Are you hungry enough to leave?
But sometimes it is not really about love or hunger at all. Sometimes it is just about whether the infrastructure even exists to support the kind of life you are trying to build.
A young Black person can love home deeply and still get tired of having to build every ladder before they can even climb it. A young founder can love where she is from and still notice that somewhere else, there might be more investors, more mentors, more creative spaces, and people who already speak the language of what she is trying to do.
That does not make her disloyal. It just means she is paying attention.
For Black founders, the access problem is not imaginary. Federal Reserve data released in 2025 showed that Black-owned small businesses seeking financing were less likely than white-owned firms to receive all the funding they requested and were denied at higher rates.¹
That matters because so much of what young people are encouraged to build needs money before it ever makes money. You need deposits, insurance, supplies, a venue, childcare, transportation, marketing, sometimes even payroll. Sometimes you just need enough breathing room to spend three hours working on your idea without also worrying about how you are going to pay your light bill.
So when we tell a 22-year-old Black woman in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, or Arkansas to “just start,” I think we have to ask a second question: start with what?
Because sometimes all she has is her own money, her own relationships, her own labor, and whoever she can convince to believe in her early. That is not the same thing as an ecosystem.
That is where my frustration with the “just leave” advice really starts. We cannot keep telling the most ambitious people to go somewhere that already built what they need every time the infrastructure at home is weak.
Especially because this is not simply a story about Black people trying to escape the South. Researchers have documented Black migration back into Southern states and metropolitan areas, including among younger and college-educated Black adults.² A lot of us want to be here.
The real question is what kind of South we are actually being asked to stay in, not just whether we stay or go.
There is a difference between choosing a city with established networks and choosing a smaller Southern city where opportunities are thinner and every connection feels more personal. There is a difference between staying because you genuinely see a future there and staying because leaving is just not possible right now. There is also a difference between loving home and being expected to sacrifice yourself for it.
I do not want young Black people guilted into staying anywhere, and I do not think anybody owes a city their life just because they were born there. People should leave when they want to leave. Go see things. Go get trained. Go make money. Go meet people. Go fall in love with another city. Go become somebody you could not have become at home.
But I also want us to stop treating staying like it is just for people who were not ambitious enough to get out, because some of us are still trying to build right where we are.
And if cities want that, they have responsibilities too. Real ones.
RELATED: Black, Southern, and Queer
Do not just tell young people to come home. Make it possible to come home. Do not just host panels about entrepreneurship. Give people access to capital. Do not tell artists they are the heartbeat of the city and then ask them to perform for free. Do not tell young founders to network without creating rooms they can actually get into. Do not complain that young professionals keep leaving if the jobs available to them do not pay enough to build a life. And do not wait until somebody becomes successful somewhere else before deciding they were worth listening to here.
That last one sticks with me.
It is strange how hometowns sometimes wait to celebrate people until another city has validated them first. You leave, you build something, someone else notices, and suddenly the place you came from is proud to claim you.
I find myself wondering what might happen if we listened earlier. What if a 22-year-old did not need five years of outside validation before people took her idea seriously? What if young Black people were invited into conversations about what their communities could become before they became success stories somewhere else? What if staying did not mean having to shrink your vision?
That is really all I am asking for. Not a campaign to keep Black Gen Z home. Not a speech about loyalty. Not another person telling us we can succeed anywhere if we work hard enough.
I just want more choices than that.
I want leaving to be a choice. I want staying to be a choice. I want returning to be a choice. And I want the city itself to have to do some work too. Not just the people.
The people who stay should not be praised for surviving without resources they should have had in the first place. The people who leave should not be treated like they abandoned home, either. And the people who come back should not have to rebuild every system from scratch just to be taken seriously.
Black Gen Z does not need another “leave your hometown” speech.
We already know there is a world beyond where we were raised. What we need are hometowns willing to become places we can actually choose. Not just places we end up.
Endnotes
- Federal Reserve Banks, 2025 Small Business Credit Survey: Firms in Focus — Chartbooks by Race and Ethnicity, 2025.
- William H. Frey, “A ‘New Great Migration’ is bringing Black Americans back to the South,” Brookings Institution.
Bio: Kourtney Galloway is a Mississippi-based educator, creative entrepreneur, artist, and founder whose work is rooted in community, storytelling, and creating spaces where young people can feel seen and supported. Through Revamped Creative Agency and her early-learning work, she has built projects that bring together local businesses, artists, educators, and families around ideas that might not otherwise have the infrastructure to exist. Across her creative and community work, she is especially interested in what it means to build a meaningful life in the South without believing you have to leave home in order to become something.