As the evening wears on, the party kicks into high gear, and they shove the chairs aside to cut a rug. No one seems overly concerned about partying too late on a weeknight: Most of them are retirees, African Americans who moved to this young city of 95,000 midway between Jacksonville and Orlando in search of the good life. All but one of the couples are from New York.
"It's all about quality of life," says Mike Morton, 57, a retired corrections officer from New York who moved here in 2006. "It's like living on a vacation. When I visit New York now, it's culture shock. I don't hear car horns down here. As soon as you get to New York, you're hearing thousands of them."
He and the other revelers are part of a major demographic shift documented in the latest Census: Blacks are moving out of cities in the Northeast and Midwest and into cities and suburbs of the South.
