Washington ? A strong economy and vastly improved race relations are luring record numbers of black Americans to the South, a region that many deserted early in the 20th century.

More than 680,000 blacks 5 and older moved to the South from another region between 1995 and 2000, outnumbering the 333,000 who moved away by a better than 2-to-1 margin, according to a Census Bureau report released Thursday.

The report found no other region of the country had an increase in black migration, a reverse of the trend seen in the first half of the century, when many blacks left the South for the industrial Northeast and Midwest.

“Many blacks left not only because of economic opportunities but because of the political and social constraints of segregation,” said Charles Ross, historian and interim director of the African-American studies program at the University of Mississippi. “Those things have changed dramatically in the South.”

Migration from the South rose through the early decades of the 20th century, as tens of thousands of blacks left to escape segregationist Jim Crow laws and a poor economy. That led to a rise in black populations in Northeastern and Midwestern cities, where blacks came for jobs in steel mills, automobile factories and other industrial plants.

That movement north slowed as job opportunities dwindled and racial tensions rose in northern cities in the 1960s and 1970s, Ross said.

A return of blacks to the South was first documented by the Census Bureau between 1975 and 1980, when 100,000 more blacks moved in than moved out. The trend continued between 1985 and 1990, when there was a net increase of 200,000; the net increase was nearly 347,000 between 1995 and 2000.

Blacks who move to the South tend to be more educated than those who never left the region. Migrants to the South also tend to be slightly older than those who left the region, indicating some may have returned after leaving earlier in their lives, the Census Bureau said.

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