Atlanta Suburbs Bloom for Blacks

When she first turned down the road into Sandstone Estates, with its velour-soft swells of lawn, Italianate fountains and circular driveways, Diana Clarkson asked the question that newcomers always ask: Are these really all owned by black people?

Clarkson, 41, had lived in suburbs most of her life. One thing all those communities had in common -- other than good public schools and high-end grocery stores -- was that very few black families lived there. Clarkson’s last home was in Westchester County, N.Y., where the IBM executive with a six-figure salary was frequently mistaken for a nanny.

Here, suddenly, was a land populated almost entirely by people like herself: African American judges, doctors and college professors. It was a place, the first Clarkson had seen, where her son could grow up middle-class without being reminded that he is an outsider.

She was moved. The subdivision of Lionshead, where she bought land, had no history -- much of it was still open red clay -- but she could close her eyes and envision the brick homes and backyard barbecues, and a vibrant network of neighbors who had chosen each other.

Clarkson had enrolled in a kind of social experiment -- one that, 5 1/2 years later, has had mixed results for her.

Over the last decade, affluent, professional African Americans have poured into the Atlanta metropolitan area faster than any other region in the country, and many are settling in predominantly black suburbs, such as Lithonia, in southern DeKalb County.

As they grow, Atlanta’s black suburbs have begun to accumulate both social cachet and political power. Populating freshly built neighborhoods, middle-class blacks can recognize “something really new, really different is going on here,” said Roderick Harrison, a demographer.

“The entire black suburban experience in the north has involved urban pioneers integrating white neighborhoods,” said Harrison, of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington. “Here, you’re moving into territory that’s essentially virgin. You’re there, you come in, you enjoy your new status. This is real arrival. This is living large.”

As black home-buyers venture into Georgia from other parts of the country, they are stalked by memories.

As recently as the 1960s, a prominent black physician bought a home in the Peyton Forest area and white homeowners were so inflamed that Atlanta Mayor Ivan Allen agreed to erect a permanent wooden barrier around the neighborhood, said Andy Ambrose, deputy director of the Atlanta History Center. The Peyton Forest Wall, as it was called, stood about 4 feet tall. It was designed to prevent the entrance of moving vans.

When he takes newcomers to look at houses in southern DeKalb County, real estate attorney Robert Burroughs offers them a powerful counter-narrative.

Usually, he drives them to Hunt Valley Estates in Lithonia, where mansions priced at $500,000 and more sit among tall pines, with iron gates and topiary hedges reminiscent of English manors.

He points out his own home. And then he waits for it to sink in.

“They say, ‘This is a community of all black folks?’ It’s inconceivable to them,” Burroughs said. “They want to pack up and come here, job or no job.”

Most buyers head for “luscious upscale communities,” as one real estate agent describes them, in the towns of Stone Mountain and Lithonia, where spacious houses on large plots of land begin at $200,000. White home-buyers are scarce. Although agents are prohibited by law from telling prospective buyers about the neighborhoods’ racial makeup, customers are free to make assessments, said Carmen Johnson.

“I tell them, ‘Come back on a Saturday and see who’s playing,’ ” said Johnson, who has been selling houses in the Atlanta area since 1990. “It’s not going to be an accident if they buy here.”

For the most part, blacks are buying into the same dream that swept over America’s farmlands after World War II, when whites began flocking to the suburbs from the cities.

Between 1995 and 2000, Atlanta’s metropolitan area took in a larger number of Northern college-educated blacks than any city in America, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. Frey’s study shows that many newcomers end up in the Atlanta suburbs, which are now more than 25% black, compared with a national average of a little less than 9%.

There, the new arrivals are thriving financially. The black college graduates who moved to the Atlanta suburbs have seen remarkably fast income growth, Frey said -- 22.6% between 1995 and 2000, compared with 13.4% in the rest of the country.

At times, the newcomers have displayed political muscle. The voters of southern DeKalb are often credited with voting outspoken liberal Rep. Cynthia A. McKinney -- a five-term incumbent -- out of office in favor of a more mainstream Democrat, a Yale-educated former judge named Denise L. Majette.

The transplants are wealthier and politically more conservative than Atlanta’s old-line black Democrats, said William Boone, a professor of political science at Clark Atlanta University. “The population is different over there,” he said. “It is going to exert itself.”

Newcomers say they slide effortlessly into a vigorous network of black professionals. Alan Peterson, 47, a dentist who moved to Lithonia’s Hunt Valley subdivision in 1997, said that within two weeks of his arrival, people started calling him to offer jobs, although he had one.

He looks back on many years in St. Louis -- its biting winter wind, its impenetrable old-boy network -- without nostalgia.

“People ask me if I have any regrets about leaving St. Louis,” said Peterson. “I tell them I do. The only regret I have is that I probably should have left 17 years earlier.”

To those who study income and migration patterns, the history of all-black suburbs is not encouraging. The county most frequently compared to DeKalb is Prince George’s County, Md., in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Prince George’s has the highest African American median income in the country; DeKalb has the second highest.

Prince George’s offers a story of wasted potential, Harrison said. Once a white, rural county, it became more wealthy and more educated as black families moved in.

But attracting malls and department stores has been a challenge, and -- more importantly -- the county’s public school students routinely rank near the bottom of Maryland’s school systems on standardized tests.

Harrison, a former Prince George’s County resident, said the schools suffered a twofold challenge: Even with blacks earning relatively high incomes, the median income in Prince George’s County stood at $55,000, far below the $72,000 median income for neighboring Montgomery County, which is predominantly white.

Second, blacks had moved into a county where schools were weak to begin with, Harrison said. Faced with the uphill battle of substantially improving the schools, black families in Prince George’s have had “few dramatic successes,” Harrison said.

Another former resident had a blunter explanation: Parents took their children out of public schools, abandoning the system to the “lowest common denominator.”

“They began to behave in ways similar to affluent white people,” said Sam Fulwood III, a newspaper columnist and former Los Angeles Times reporter who scrutinized his suburban experience in his book “Waking From the Dream: My Life in the Black Middle Class.”

“They put their kids in private schools, and in doing so, they were eating their seed corn,” he said. “They were taking away from their property values.”

Atlanta suburbs stand a chance of rewriting that story, Harrison said, but it’s too early to tell. “That’s a question that will be answered in the next 10 or 20 years, and the answer will be critical to issues of black political power,” Harrison said. “If you can’t do it there, it’s very difficult to imagine it being done anywhere else.”

In the time since Clarkson chose Lionshead, 80 handsome homes have risen to line its quiet streets. The Mall at Stonecrest opened in Lithonia three years ago, offering quick access to shops such as Ann Taylor and Victoria’s Secret.

Inside Clarkson’s home, copper-color raw silk drapes hang from her windows, and a 100-inch screen projection TV descends from the ceiling at the push of a button. At night, passing motorists can see a chandelier twinkling in a grand entrance hall.

And at age 10, her son Sam is both cultivated and protected. He studies German and Spanish and plays the double-bass. He shuttles from soccer practice to Cub Scouts, but does not go past the subdivision’s gate without his nanny, a Jamaican woman he calls Miss Yvette.

Although he lives near Stone Mountain, a symbolic rallying point of the Ku Klux Klan, most of what Sam knows about racism he learned on the highway, speeding by cars with Confederate flags.

“I would see this flag with the X and the stars. They told me that means no blacks,” he said. “I guess that means Martin Luther King’s speeches didn’t really influence them.”

Clarkson laughed fondly when this comment was repeated to her. That was the whole point of moving to a place like southern DeKalb.

“My son has been so sheltered. When I look at him, he’s like a kid who grew up on the north side of town,” she said. “I think it’s wonderful. I wish I had grown up that way.”

Lately, though, Clarkson has begun to see problems with the experiment. She still drives to another neighborhood when she wants to eat at a nice restaurant. Most of her neighbors are hard-working two-career families, with little time or energy to spend on neighborhood initiatives such as the Lawn of the Month.

But the main reason is Sam: As he grew, his future began to worry her -- average standardized test scores at the middle school he was likely to attend were at the 40th percentile nationally.

Although Clarkson recalls “naively” criticizing other parents for removing their children from under-performing public schools in other places she has lived, she felt differently when it came to Sam.

“I wanted him to be able to compete,” she said. “Are you going to take a chance with your child’s education?”

Since last September, when he entered fourth grade, Clarkson has been waking her son before dawn to board a bus to North Druid Hills in the older, predominantly white section of DeKalb County, where he attends a magnet school for high achievers.

Waiting outside with him in the freezing dark, she began to wonder about the promised land.

She is planning to move before Sam enters high school.

Although Clarkson is an exception in her community, her conflict speaks volumes about the challenges that face the new black suburbs, said political scientist Boone, who himself lives in a southern DeKalb subdivision. Having received streams of new money, these neighborhoods must now produce the quality of life wealthy Americans expect from the suburbs.

“The romance of having the first black CEO has got to pass away. The romance of having black folks who are very influential has to pass away,” he said. “Once you get beyond the romance -- ‘I’m in a good black community’ -- other questions come to mind.”

In the meantime, new dreamers rush in to DeKalb County.

Two weeks ago, Clarkson’s best friend from junior high school pulled up to the house with all her possessions in a rented truck. Cynthia Odum said Clarkson had been badgering her to move to Atlanta for five years.

“I saw her stagnating. She wasn’t progressing,” Clarkson said. “Here, she could see what the possibilities are.”

Odum decided six months ago to leave San Diego, and quit her job at Federal Express Corp. In Atlanta, she plans to start a business sewing white satin dresses for little girls. She looks forward to buying a home here.

For now, it is a giddy experience. As they drove nearly 2,000 miles across the United States, Odum and her teenage daughter sang aloud to the radio, confident that they were on their way to the center of the universe.

“It’s funny, because when we first drove up, I said, ‘Oh, my God,’ “Odum said. “The first thing I asked her is, ‘All black people live here?’ I said, ‘You’re kidding.’ ”