Black Americans are leaving their homes to start their own all-Black communities

It’s their escape, they said, from the everyday racism that feels like a part of life in the United States.

The final push to make the move came this summer after seeing images of Black Americans like Jacob Blake in Wisconsin and Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia being gunned down by white police officers and white neighbors, many of them said.

Renee Walters and Ashley Scott started the campaign to buy Freedom after Walters saw a viral post about buying a town “for the price of a New York apartment.”.

The Browns are one of many black families from across the country that came to see Freedom for themselves during an event that was held over the Labor Day Weekend.

Historian Kendra Taira Field, an associate professor of history at Tufts University in Massachusetts, underlines that Black Americans have tried to set up their own communities like Freedom before.

She said these all-Black communities sprung up at times when Black Americans were lynched and hung from trees in their neighborhoods.

Field said that Black Americans often decide to segregate themselves because, for them, it feels safer to only be surrounded by their own people.

“Then when that fell through, and Oklahoma ended up looking a lot like Mississippi in terms of its Jim Crow laws, they were participating in a ‘Back to Africa’ movement,” she said.

I’m starting to see Black people with loving unity,” McCrorey said.

For the first time in his life, McCrorey said he is not afraid of the police.

Even the music he listens to in Ghana is different than in the states, he said.

Here we're not hearing that on everything,” McCrorey said.

For those who are settling in Freedom, Georgia, it’s a new beginning for them, too