Edge City

by Joel Garreau

  When young black people come into the region from the outside for their new corporate jobs, they are not necessarily much more aware of every detail of Atlanta’s history than any other recent arrivals. Not being familiar with all the taboos of previous generations about where they “should” or “shouldn’t” live, many make the classic suburban calculations. They look for how much house they can afford, at a commute from their job they find acceptable, in an area with good housing resale values and good schools. Frequently they are helped in this search by the relocation services retained by their national employers, like IBM—which enjoys a particularly high profile among the Atlanta black suburban middle class. The assumption underlying their calculation is that one expensive suburban subdivision is pretty much like another in its racial attitudes, an assumption that generally proves correct.

  And that is precisely the revolution. Those are calculations in which issues of class outweigh issues of race. The result is the rise of the substantial new black middle class in neighborhoods like Smyrna in Cobb County. Cobb County as recently as twenty years ago was serious Klan country. It accommodated the likes of Lester Maddox and convicted church bomber J. B. Stoner.

  And again, this is not just Atlanta. “The latest Census reports reiterated that return migration has not been to the central city. It has been to the outer rim,” notes the Southern Regional Council’s Suitts of the Dixiewide pattern.

  These middle-class locations beat the alternatives. Pat Lottier makes no apologies about this at all. She has vivid memories of what she and her husband left, and a steely determination that her family will never go back to it, ever. “My husband and I have been married twenty-two years. We’ve always lived in what you call Edge Cities. You probably want to know why. We felt the need from the very beginning to live away from the inner city. We wanted to move away from everything the inner city has. We wanted our kids to have the very best, and the best was outside of any major city. Safety. Amenities. The best shopping centers. A house with an acre or more. The freedom to leave your house and check on one door and not all the doors and not all the windows. The best schools—being able to go into the school and say I need to see the teacher and someone saying, ‘Yes, Mrs. Lottier, sit down.’ Inner city doesn’t give you that. And unfortunately I don’t think it ever will. That’s a shame to say. It really is a class issue.”

  The story of the Lottiers’ rise to the Edge City middle class is a classic one. It faithfully portrays many of the striking changes that have swept through America in the last twenty-five years.

  Patricia Lottier was born in 1948, in Kentucky. “A town called Ashland. It’s a little twenty thousand-population place, and that may include a few cows and chickens. My father—eighth-grade education, day work, hourly work, cleaned houses, unskilled labor. Died when I was twelve. My mother, one year college but still not enough to get anything in Ashland, so she was an hourly worker, a cook, worked for the white man.”

  Patricia grew up literally on the wrong side of the tracks. Her family’s address was 3160 Railroad Street. The schools did desegregate quietly in that largely white Ohio River town near the West Virginia line. “The powers-that-be decided how they would handle integration. The few blacks in that town said, ‘Yessir, that’s fine.’ Not a large black population. Probably 5 percent, and I’m guessing, because I doubt if they even counted us except on Election Day, when everybody got two dollars for voting. We were part of that mentality back then. I remember the two dollars. I remember the little men who had the two dollars in their pockets. And I wondered why they were handing out two dollars. My mother explained.

  “Your choices back then, you either were a schoolteacher or a nurse if you wanted to do something with your life. I didn’t want to be a schoolteacher.” Pat Lottier was graduating from high school in 1966. It was right there that the changes in the big world outside Ashland would reach in and change her life. Pat Lottier was not going to get just any run-of-the-mill nursing education. “Johns Hopkins needed more blacks at their nursing school, and they recruited me. Full scholarship. I was a good student. I’d done no traveling before then—you don’t travel if you don’t have any money, do you. But I knew about Johns Hopkins. Hopkins was the leader in heart surgery. I would watch them on TV, some public station, working on someone’s heart. I said, Boy, that’s exciting. I shall be a nurse.” As an aside, she adds of that time, “I can’t be a doctor because that’s just not heard of.”

  It was there in Baltimore she met her husband, George, at a football game at Morgan State, the traditionally black school he attended. George’s great-grandfather in 1894 founded one of America’s historic black newspapers, the Baltimore Afro-American. “So they had prestige,” Pat recalls of George’s family. “They didn’t have money, but they had prestige.”

  Pat and George were married in 1968. Pat received her nursing certificate in 1969. George, who was born in 1944 and had not had a stellar relationship with academe, enlisted in the Army in 1963, and got out in 1966. He spent his hitch in Germany, in the 504th Aviation Battalion, ending up a sergeant running the aircraft-engine motor pool. He remembers the Army as a worthwhile experience. He says the most important thing it taught him was that “the system can work, and you can have an impact on the system”—that the system, if challenged, can respond. George has a curious dyslexia. As he’s telling a white person stories of the worst times he’s ever had, he automatically, reflexively, and apparently unconsciously smiles. He obviously learned a long time ago how to deal with other peoples’ tension.

  George chooses to describe the revelation that you can make the Army change as an “interesting situation.” So after George got out of the service, he became a salesman. “I thought it was a way of finding out what’s going on, how the game is played.” And it was. He soon ended up with Dixie-Marathon, the maker of Dixie Cups, where he worked his way up the ladder to district sales manager, then product manager. The way the corporation worked, if you succeeded at one sales job, you were rewarded with a more lucrative district. That made the Lottiers corporate gypsies. They did indeed end up living in one area after another that today is Edge City territory: Framingham, out on the Massachusetts Turnpike between the Boston area’s two beltways; Lancaster, Pennsylvania, “Amish country,” now in the orbit of King of Prussia; back to Massachusetts, Northborough, at the outer 495 beltway; then to Danbury, Connecticut, working at headquarters in Greenwich, then to north Atlanta, where the corporation had its offices in the Edge City at Perimeter Center.

  George’s memory of all these predominantly white neighborhoods was that, being transients, “we didn’t look at the area and say who lives there. We looked at the area to see how does it look in terms of appearance, what’s the resale value of the house? Is it safe for Pat, because I had to travel? It really was a class issue. I want to resell my house and get a higher value, and if I go to an all-black neighborhood, then it means that we’re limited to who’s going to buy it.”

  The boys came in 1971 and 1972. Meanwhile, Pat observed that she didn’t like changing bedpans. So she decided to go for a degree in public health administration, to get into management. This led to a master’s from Emory, which led to her becoming southeastern operations manager of the home-care division of Baxter International, a national provider of hospital and health supplies.

  But in the 1980s, as the Lottiers approached their forties in Atlanta, they became restive in their respective corporations. A promotion for Pat would have involved yet another relocation—to Chicago or Boston. And neither wanted that. The boys were entering their teens, and Pat saw the Atlanta area as “Utopia—beautiful weather, friendly people, Southern hospitality, good food.”

  So in 1985 George launched his own business. He took his extensive experience with Dixie Cup (“You learn from the masters,” observes his wife) to launch his promotional cup corporation. (“Hardee’s promotes the Moose Cup. Have you seen the Moose Cup?” asks Pat. “That was his design.”)

  Then, mor
e or less coincidentally, the Lottiers ended up lending money to a person who had started up The Atlanta Tribune, aimed at the black entrepreneurial community. “He had the paper located in the inner city,” Pat explains. “And I thought that was crazy. The paper was trying to reach the upscale black consumer. The market that I felt he needed to attract was all over the metro area.” So in 1988 the Lottiers bought out the founder. Patricia quit her job to run the Tribune out of the Lottiers’ Edge City offices just fifteen minutes from their Roswell home and country club membership. Patricia owns 51 percent, George, 49. In two years, Pat has tripled the number of advertising pages. Her demographic study shows the Tribune’s typical reader is thirty-six, a business owner or decision maker with an outfit like AT&T or Xerox, has 2.5 children either in college or soon to go, an American Express card, an upscale car, and a vacation home or higher-than-average travel. Window stickers for the paper read “Sold here: The Atlanta Tribune, the Right Paper at the Right Time.” Pat has allowed herself to think about other cities. The New Orleans Tribune has a nice ring to it, she thinks.

  Yet when I sat down with Stephen Suitts, his reaction to all these Adam Smith market-economics figures was almost wistful.

  Suitts, forty, who is white, has been on the side of the angels in the racial struggles of the South since Selma. His office is in a part of downtown Atlanta to which economic revival has not yet come. He softly jokes about being an old-fashioned liberal—his Southern Regional Council is the oldest interracial organization in the South, dating back to 1919.

  For him, the movement was a moral crusade. It was not about just changing laws or reordering macroeconomics. It was to be measured in the openness of hearts. Martin Luther King, Jr., coined the phrase “the Beloved Community” to describe the original ideal. The standard was not how many riding lawn tractors a black suburbanite might own, but how many minds might be cleared. So for Suitts, all these data about the suburban black middle class were bittersweet. While they obviously represented enormous change at levels that could be quantified and measured in dollars, they did not offer him much of a geography of the soul—evidence of the success of ideas in which he had invested his life. “Brotherhood,” for example.

  On August 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his most famous speech. In it, he said: “I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American Dream … I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

  More than a dozen times during our conversation Suitts picked up the maps of the Atlanta region that I’d brought, marked by brightly colored Census tracts showing affluent black people and where they lived. He’d stare at the numbers, put the maps down, and then, almost involuntarily, pick the maps up and stare at them some more.

  Finally, he said, “Well, it does not surprise me. I have no stake in the past.” Suitts picked up the maps again. Put them down. “The opportunity for somebody to be able to go anywhere, put themselves into a suburban house, and buy themselves riding lawn mowers, cut that grass, and have as much neighborly approval as any white is part of what we wanted integration to mean.

  “But it wasn’t all. It clearly wasn’t all. And essentially the question is whether or not one views the efforts, the civil rights movement, as an attempt to try to establish a new moral ground. I think what we have achieved is where people are not judged by the color of their skins, but by the color of their money. And I’m not sure that’s quite as far as we want to go.”

  Suitts was not the only one less than enthralled by these numbers. Michael Lomax, forty-two, is California-born and -raised, and black. He is a literature professor at Spelman College. He also has a considerable reputation as one of the most thoughtful and articulate lights on the formidable Atlanta black political scene, which embraces Andrew Young, Maynard Jackson, and Julian Bond.

  Lomax is Fulton County commission chairman. Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta proper and the poverty therein, also embraces the fanciest black neighborhoods in the region in Cascade Heights, plus some of the most expensive neighborhoods anywhere in Georgia on the Northside, around Perimeter Center.

  His reaction to the recitation of the numbers of black people moving into Edge City territory is:

  “How does that play to me? That they are not really intimately a part of the social, political, and even economic fabric of the African-American community that is Atlanta. The center of the African-American community in Atlanta is the colleges, the university, the black churches, which are basically in the center of the city.

  “People can live in Alpharetta [north of Perimeter Center] and have no connection with the African-American community at all. I don’t know whether it’s good or bad. It’s reality. For many of them, living in a predominantly white suburban area is the essence of the American Dream.

  “I think it typically leads to isolation. I don’t think you are socially integrated into those communities. If you were, you would be a member of the country club, you would dine socially with these people, you are members of their church. They are the first and second circles around your life. And I don’t think in most cases that is what happens. What happens is that you are tolerated, maybe even, to some lesser extent, accepted. But I don’t believe very often that’s your community.”

  I mention to Lomax that what I’m trying to get at is the extent to which class is now becoming as large a definer of people as race. He does not buy the premise—at all.

  “Believe me, race is the defining issue. Class is a distinguishing and differentiating issue within the race. But race is the issue.”

  I ask him why he thinks that. Lomax reacts with an expression of such incredulity that it says, If you don’t know, there is so much reading you need to do that maybe we should resume this interview in another lifetime. I say, Humor me. Please tell me why you, personally, think race is the defining issue, more than class.

  “Because I believe that race is the most powerful defining characteristic in this society. I think more than gender, more than religion, for Western civilization the color of one’s skin is the primary defining issue.”

  If we do have a huge emerging black population in the white suburbs, I ask, how does that square?

  “Well, you can reside there. The laws tolerate that. I’m not sure you can have a conversation, but if I have a conversation with most black people who work in white corporations—they feel tolerated at best, alienated at worst. They may have economic attachments, but they don’t feel they are part of the company. They don’t hold out the illusion at this stage that they’re going to wind up chairman of the board. There may be economic reasons for them to remain attached. They don’t feel they can have the same material existence if they were to shift into some business enterprise supported only by the African-American community. But I don’t think they feel the same sense of ownership.

  “One thing that is happening that reduces the sense of alienation is that there are large numbers like them who then form another group. One of my roommates from college has lived in Reston, Virginia, for twenty-five years. When he got out there he was the only one. Or one of two. Now there is a larger percentage of African-Americans who live there. So I think what you are seeing is that rather than black and white upper-income people being more closely associated, you are really getting black upper-middle-income people in sufficient numbers selecting at what levels they will interact with the traditional black community. They get their sense of community on Sundays. They come into the inner city to go to church.

  “Race is an inherently ambiguous and pervasive issue in this country, and there is nothing clear about it except that it has a lot of meaning and it resonates throughout people’s lives. In terms of my own mind: I figure if I were to live outside and work outside of the black community, worship
outside the black community, have social interactions outside the community, send my kids to school outside the black community—I would feel completely adrift. For me and for my family—which has the choice of doing anything it wants to do—we choose to have anchors in a traditionally black middle-class community. My daughter goes to a predominantly black public school. She intends to go to a black college—Spelman. She wants that. She was in a white private school; she didn’t like that. She felt socially isolated. She said, I want to go where I am not a minority.”

  If there are now some substantial numbers of black people not making that choice, I ask Lomax, are they kidding themselves?

  “Who am I to say whether they are kidding themselves? The pendulum swings. When I was ready to choose where to go to college, having gone to a good integrated public school in L.A., I was the only person in my class to go south to Morehouse. Today, twenty-five years later, California is probably the third largest feeder of students into Morehouse and Spelman colleges. Why? Because these kids who grew up in privilege, affluence, now want a racial experience. They want a sense of connection. The allure of integration is not proving substantive. Increasingly I think you are going to see African-Americans choosing to live in racially homogeneous environments. That is emotionally and socially a more satisfying experience for them than always going against the grain or being in some other environment. What also happens is when we get there the whites run away anyway. So you’re going to opt for that or you’re going to by default wind up there.”

  What do words like integration and segregation mean in the late twentieth century? I ask Lomax. When I look at affluent suburbs like Hunter’s Hill that are virtually all black, is that segregation?

  “No. Segregation means that there is an imposed restriction—it’s not a choice. When I moved sixteen years ago to the Cascade Road area, it didn’t even dawn on me to think of moving into a white area. I don’t know why. It wasn’t for lack of exposure. I had become a Southerner, I guess. I was a graduate student finishing my Ph.D. It also just happened to be a very nice area, and a lot of my friends were moving there.