by Joel Garreau
Both “middle class” and “suburban” can be tricky to define. University of Maryland sociologist Landry is especially leery of describing the black middle class solely in dollar terms. He points out that the combined incomes of a working-class family—a security guard, a domestic, and a teenager working a McDonald’s counter, for example—can easily match the income of, say, a single-earner family headed by a civil engineer. But, he would argue, that does not make the three-earner family middle class. Its chances are about maxed out. The civil engineer, by contrast, has far greater access to such economic opportunities as a mortgage, a line of credit, and continuing advanced education.
Suppose then that a middle-class job is defined as one primarily demanding intelligence and judgment. That basically means a white-collar job. Suppose further that a middle-class family is defined as one marked by that kind of work, plus the realistic expectation of college for the kids, plus an above-average income.
Meanwhile, “suburban” is usually defined for statistical purposes as any place in a metropolitan area outside the central city. That definition is less than ideal in both directions. There are beautiful, affluent, quiet, black and white neighborhoods within the political boundaries of the city of Atlanta that feature trees, lawns, and single-family detached homes. For all practical purposes, they look and function like suburbs even though they are usually counted as urban. Similarly, there are downtrodden neighborhoods in outlying “suburban” jurisdictions that are nothing but extensions of either urban or rural poverty. Suppose, therefore, a neighborhood is functionally suburban, regardless of its location within a metro area, if it is predominantly residential, well off, and marked by single-family homes.
By those standards, at least a quarter, if not a third, of the black families in Atlanta are suburban middle class, according to extensive computer runs performed specifically for this chapter by the national marketing demographic firm Claritas. These complex runs were in turn cross-checked for consistency against federal, state, and local statistics, reviewed by demographers at the Atlanta Regional Commission and geographers at Georgia State University, and verified by interviews on the ground.
And this suburban middle class is not peculiar to Atlanta, the research shows. Other cities with vastly different histories are producing suburban middle-class black families just as reliably. In the North, Detroit had the largest proportion of skilled black craftsmen of any city with major black population in 1940. Today in the Detroit suburbs, the children of auto workers are flourishing as engineers and executives. In the West, there was a historic absence of a hard-core legal system of segregation. “I grew up in California, and I never knew about Jim Crow,” explains Roscoe Dellums, wife of U.S. Representative Ron Dellums of Northern California. “Our parents didn’t talk about such things in front of us. They felt they were preparing the generation that would break through, and we never got the message that we were inferior.” Today Los Angeles, America’s most dynamic urban area, with a population that is less than 15 percent black, has a black mayor. Nationwide, since 1970, the number of black-owned businesses has more than doubled, the number of black managers and administrators has nearly tripled, and the number of black lawyers has increased more than sixfold.
The result is that the black population in America today is divided roughly into thirds. One-third is the largely suburban middle class. (The way Bart Landry defines middle class, the proportion is 46 percent.)
Roughly a third—30 percent of black families—continues to be in poverty. However, only about a third of that third—perhaps 10 percent of the total black population—is swept up in those profoundly depressing problems clustered under the rubric “underclass,” according to most calculations. Estimates by researchers at the Urban Institute indicate that “underclass neighborhoods”—areas where high school dropouts, unemployed men, welfare recipients, and female-headed families are especially numerous—contained a total of 2.5 million people in 1980. That is a dreadful number, but even if that population were all black, which it is not, it would work out to only 9.4 percent of the total black population in America.
Then there is a working class between the two. This class benefited from the sustained tight labor markets of the 1980s. In a report for the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Harvard economist Richard Freeman showed that when the unemployment rate dropped below 4 percent in the cities he studied, the key employment rate for young black men with a high school degree or less improved by a third. To put it another way, in 1983 the unemployment rate in those cities for the members of that group was 41 percent. In 1987, it was 7 percent. Future years in which growth occurs probably will be similar. Fewer young people will be entering the work force in the 1990s than there were during the baby boom.
What’s more, assuming they get an even chance—which is admittedly a large “if”—the children of that in-between black working class are in a better position to move into the middle class today than any minority group that preceded them, Landry maintains. That is because the economy is producing more middle-class white-collar jobs than any other kind.
“If you came in in the 1950s and had an equal chance, you should have middle-class children now,” Landry says. “If they went to school, boom, the jobs available to them should all be middle class. At the turn of the century, or during the Depression, a very small percentage of anybody was middle class.”
The makeup of these classes is not static. Individuals move up and down within them. People who stay in school make it out of housing projects and up the socioeconomic ladder all the time. By the same token, people of any race who have not accumulated wealth are only four or five paychecks away from slipping several notches.
But the idea that in the 1990s most blacks are somehow behind all whites in achievement is just plain wrong. Since the 1960s, black educational attainment has seen one of the steepest growth curves of any population group in American history—including the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Jews. Only 38 percent of young adult blacks had a high school education in 1960. That figure had soared to 55 percent by 1970, 75 percent by 1980, and had reached 83 percent by 1986. The high school dropout rate plummeted.
Between 1984 and 1989, the number of black students taking college Advanced Placement exams almost tripled. Those who received grades high enough to qualify for college credits more than doubled. Of all black kids who had graduated from high school in 1988, 27.1 percent were in college. To put that another way, a higher percentage of young black Americans are in college than there are young Swiss or English people in college. “Perhaps the most untold story of American education in the past few years is the achievement of black students; the hard data are encouraging,” says Gregory R. Anrig, president of the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, which administers the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the Advanced Placement tests, and the Scholastic Aptitude Test.
And this is largely a function of the rise of the black middle class. Among those black kids who took the SATs, the percentage of their parents who had at least an undergraduate degree increased from 17 percent to 25 percent between 1980 and 1989. The percentage of those parents who did not have a high school diploma dropped from 31 percent to 15 percent. Anrig describes the black students who did better on the SATs in the 1980s as “the children of the kids who started to get a better break in the 1960s.” Margaret Simms, an education analyst with the Joint Center, ascribed the higher scores to “increased access to integrated, non-ghetto schools” among black students who have moved into suburban and racially mixed areas or transferred to schools there.
The members of this black middle class are obvious to anyone glancing around himself in a suburban school, a shopping mall, a traffic jam, or a bank queue. (Bank lines are particularly fascinating to watch. They tend to be full of people with money.) The skin of the middle class is coming in a lot of hitherto unusual hues—brown and yellow as well as black.
In fact, the best evidence that the rise of Edge Citie
s is primarily a function of class—not race—is simple. Edge Cities are rising in every North American metropolitan area that is growing—without regard to how many blacks live in that region. The Minneapolis, Denver, Seattle, and Toronto regions all have healthy downtowns and tiny black populations. Yet they are forming Edge Cities just as reliably as are the New York, Atlanta, Washington, and Chicago regions, all of which have highly evolved downtowns and large black populations.
The reason some of these distinctions have gone largely unnoticed is the way statistics are usually reported in the press. The pivot is: “Compared with what?”
In the Atlanta area, accomplishments usually are measured against the pinnacles of economic, educational, and social achievement of the whites who live in the most affluent suburbs of east Cobb, north Fulton, or north De Kalb counties. Which is okay, except that if you compare everything to peaks in which $300,000 houses are “normal,” then by definition everything else—black and white—is going to look like a valley. And it is not uncommon for the black middle class in many, though not all, neighborhoods to lag behind the white middle class in several indices. This new middle class, after all, is young, both historically and in age.
That does not mean that most black people are uneducated or poor or living in slums. And that becomes clear when you measure the success of black people in Edge Cities nationwide against a different standard—the levels of income, education, and housing achieved by most whites nationwide. By the standard of the median white families in America—recognizable in such places as Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Norman, Oklahoma; Heflin, Alabama; and Pawtucket, Rhode Island—the change is striking.
This suburban black middle class demonstrates that averages are not fully representative of the black experience in America anymore, because those averages are lowered by that third of the black population still suffering extreme tribulation. Yet the third of black America that is fairly described as suburban middle class is becoming indistinguishable statistically from whites of the same class—not only in income and education, but in consumer behavior and attitudes toward government.
This has major national political implications. “As the black middle class shares the same frustrations, problems, and desires as the white middle class, party barriers will break down,” says Roger J. Stone, a Republican political consultant who was a senior adviser to the 1988 Jack Kemp presidential campaign. “The party or candidate that offers solutions to jobs, education, traffic, growth, and health care as well as civil rights will be able to attract that vote. Some Republicans already have. Tom Kean in New Jersey, in the [1985] governor’s race, won 62 percent of the black vote. That was both suburban and urban.”
This also has national economic implications. “If black household and income profiles converged to those of all Americans, there would be a near $100 billion increase in personal incomes, about a 3 percent increase in gross national product (roughly equivalent in scale to the total GNP of Switzerland, Belgium, or Sweden), and a consumer market target that stirs the imagination,” reports Rutger’s Sternlieb and his colleague James W. Hughes.
And that is clear even in Dixie—Georgia.
To this day, the layout of Atlanta is shaped by race. “On the Southside, the streets had one name, and on the Northside the continuing streets had another, because white folks didn’t want to live on the same name street as the black folks,” says Stephen Suitts, director of the Southern Regional Council.
As recently as 1962, at the height of white flight, municipal barricades were erected at the Peyton Road Bridge to prevent blacks from even driving through white neighborhoods, much less moving into them. Nonetheless, as whites dumped their houses at fire-sale prices to flee school desegregation, black people were happy enough to buy up some of the most convenient and attractive neighborhoods in Atlanta. To this day, if you take that historic Ponce de Leon-Route 78 divide and extend it east and west out into the suburbs, you still get almost all the predominantly black neighborhoods over on the Southside. And the Edge Cities have all risen on the Northside.
Meanwhile, the booming Edge City counties of Cobb and Gwinnett have refused to allow MARTA rapid rail lines to be built into their jurisdictions, a decision widely viewed as racially motivated.
What has changed, though, in the last twenty-five years is the way middle-class blacks now arrive in the Atlanta suburbs. Today, people—both black and white—with strong commitments to the old downtowns who have lived there all their lives don’t think much about moving out. Instead, the black people fueling Atlanta’s Edge City growth are, like their white neighbors, moving in from outside the region. Under those circumstances, as predicted by William Julius Wilson in his landmark 1978 work, The Declining Significance of Race, class has become a more important predictor of behavior. Black middle-class settlement patterns have changed not just in Atlanta, but all over America, nowhere more dramatically than in the South.
Throughout the middle of this century, millions of blacks with get-up-and-go got up and left Dixie entirely. This became known as the Great Migration—the largest internal population shift in American history, with the exception of the pioneers heading west. In the 1950s alone, one of six Southern blacks left for the greater opportunities of the industrialized North and West. The total black migration from the South was 1.6 million in the 1940s and 1.5 million in the 1950s. In 1900, nine tenths of all blacks lived in the South. Today it is half that.
This was especially a movement of young people. With little save their best clothes and a picnic lunch packed by their families, entire generations boarded buses and trains they nicknamed the “Chicken-Bone Express” from Mississippi to Chicago, or from Alabama to Detroit, or from the Carolinas to Washington, or from Georgia to New York.
This was not a movement just from South to North. It was a movement out of feudalism into the Industrial Revolution. And most important, it was a migration out of rural subsistence into the big cities. It was this tie to the declining old downtowns that worried a lot of people.
But if anything is proved by the numbers above, it is that American blacks have been extraordinarily mobile in the pursuit of a better life. And their efforts have paid off. It was not only the black population that was liberated in 1964. The American economic system was, too. That system has a well-earned reputation as rough-and-tumble. But it also has a stunning track record of transforming illiterate serfs from every mountain and desert on the globe into middle-class suburbanites in three generations or less. And in the 1960s, that system was freed to work on blacks. This unleashed a pent-up, high-velocity gush of black ambition and frustration and drive, featuring countless tales of individual grit, into the heart of an economy that, as it happens, simultaneously was being transformed into one producing mostly white-collar, middle-class jobs.
And now, the news is that young black people, the sons and granddaughters of those who left for the industrial cities of the North, are on the move again. They’re coming back—to Dixie. During the 1980s, the U.S. Census found, the percentage of all African-Americans who live in the South increased for the first time in the twentieth century. And this substantial increase was fueled by better-educated men and women under forty. Noted Larry Long of the Census Bureau, “That’s a profile of people who migrate for job opportunities.”
By contrast, a generation ago, when segregation blocked access to white colleges, in Atlanta the overwhelming magnet for the middle class was the elite black schools on the Westside. This produced a settlement pattern not unlike that of Cambridge, Massachusetts, or any other major college town, only more pronounced. People who originally came for an education stayed because they found it unimaginable to exist in a place less “civilized.” In the wake of civil rights, the black population in southwest Atlanta boomed. Most of the second-, third-, and fourth-generation black “society” families in Atlanta live there to this day. Lillian Lewis, wife of U.S. Representative John Lewis, told me she just didn’t know “anybody” who lived on the Northside. Actually
, she said, she had met Pat Lottier, but she expressed amazement that the Lottiers lived in, and the black Tribune was published on, the Northside.
Yet this synthesis should be no more—or less—astonishing than the move of this generation back to the South. After all, this new generation—the offspring of immigrants, if you will—is coming back to the South today primarily for the white-collar jobs of high technology and the Fortune 500. These corporations, of course, tend to be headquartered in Edge City.
There are four full-blown Edge Cities in the Atlanta area, with three more in the embryonic state. One is the Cumberland Mall-Galleria area. That is where the Perimeter beltway road, Interstate 285, is intersected by Interstate 75, the northwest spoke coming out of the downtown hub. A second is north of downtown around Perimeter Center at 285 and Georgia Route 400, the landmark of which is the skeletal white dome of the tallest building on the Perimeter, at thirty-one stories, locally called the Birdcage Building. Each of these two is bigger than downtown at Five Points. The third is in the Buckhead-Lenox Square Mall area, the most chic of Atlanta’s Edge Cities, with over 150 yuppie restaurants and singles joints, a bookstore that has been built into the circular showroom of a defunct automobile dealership, and a mysterious and intense concentration of Persian rug merchants. The fourth is the midtown area, which boasts most of the region’s arts centers, including the one named after Coca-Cola king Robert W. Woodruff. The three Edge Cities that are emerging are a backshop location around Gwinnett Mall to the northeast, the area around I-85 where that northeast radial crosses the Perimeter, and the area around Atlanta International Airport to the south.