America Behind the Color Line

by Henry Louis Gates

  Two weeks ago, I moved into a house I built for myself, and I’m already thinking about selling it. It’s too big for me—8,100 square feet. It’s got five bedrooms, five baths, two half-baths, and five fireplaces. If I decide to sell the house, I’ll put it on the market for $850,000—a steal for 8,100 square feet of new construction in Atlanta. For this neighborhood, $850,000 is at the high end, but it’s an incredible value for the money. Because I built it myself, I was able to save a lot of money and pass on those savings to the new purchaser. The standard building in this area runs about $150 a square foot, and a buyer would be getting this house for about $110 a square foot.

  I designed my house, and it took me two years to build it. But I can give it up because I can go and do it again. I’m in the business. If I were to buy a new house, it would be somewhere around 6,000 square feet with a finished basement. I’d be saving 2,100 square feet compared to the house I’m in now.

  We’re still doing some of the punch-out. It’s a nice house. We did a lot of millwork, which you don’t find in many large homes here in Atlanta. There’s lots of detail—dentil and pilaster moldings on the sides of the doors, and lots of arching. The house has a limestone foyer with granite squares and a dome ceiling, and crystal chandeliers almost twenty-five feet high. You change the lightbulbs with a very tall ladder. There are crystal chandeliers and sconces throughout the house, and it has an overlook where you can stand and see your party arriving and greet them as they come in.

  The breakfast room overlooks the water. Near the kitchen there’s what we call the keeping room—an informal family room—where the family can relax while dinner is being prepared. Above the fireplace in the keeping room is an outlet for a large-screen cable-ready television. The fireplace vents out and not up, so the TV is completely safe. The grand room serves as both a formal dining room and a living room, like the Schultz plans designed for South Florida. The dining room goes where the chandelier is, and then the living room is separated off. But the two rooms are combined, which makes the area a lot more functional.

  The master wing is on its own level and has its own foyer, with a dome ceiling and crystal chandelier. The bathroom in the master wing has mosaic lime-stone tile and a steam shower, with full walk-in double heads. There are three guest suites on the second floor, all with huge walk-in closets and private balconies overlooking the lake. One of the suites is for my granddaughter, who is ten years old. She has the witch’s hat ceiling in her bathroom, the kind of ceiling that comes to a peak. And I built a princess tower for her.

  The basement is finished and is waiting only for the floors to be done and the carpet to be selected. The bar itself is being custom-made and will be here in about six weeks. There’s room for a billiard table next to the wet bar. The basement is the biggest recreation center in the house.

  Then there’s the home theater. Depending on how it is outfitted, it would have three platforms with three rows of captain’s chairs. There’s a place to store all the equipment for watching movies, like a projector and a screen. And over in the corner will be the bar with the popcorn and such.

  The deck is almost eighty feet long, and down below you can enclose the patio to create an outdoor kitchen. The plumbing is already there, and the patio can be fully insulated. We have full sun at the back of the house at all times, which is great for a pool lot.

  The subdivision has three lakes, and about eight residents in my neighborhood have houses on the first lake. My house has the best view of the water— high and unobstructed. Boats that use the lakes cannot be gasoline-powered, only electric-powered. The lake is thirty feet deep in some places and stays clear all the time. It’s fully stocked. My granddaughter pulled out thirteen fish in one hour.

  I don’t have a dock yet for the house. That was going to be the next project, after I got all the landscaping in. We’ve been having a lot of problems with the beavers this year. My lot was full of trees, and even with metal wrapped around the base of the tree, the beavers crawl up the metal and cut the tree off. Bucky Beaver took a thousand dollars’ worth of trees so far this year, just in the last three weeks. We went out and sprayed the remaining trees with a repellent to keep the beavers from gnawing. It gets rid of the beavers without harming them. The last couple of weeks, it’s been so hot that with the beavers taking the trees it’s been hard to get down there and do any landscaping. When it gets a little cooler, we’ll start with the landscaping again, once the beavers go into hibernation.

  I love houses. I do. I build them, and then when I’ve finished them, it’s like, oh, well, I go on to my next project. When I travel, all I do is look at houses. I have the cabdrivers take me to the affluent neighborhoods so I can look at the houses. Everybody asks me, aren’t you tired of real estate when you go on vacation? It’s like, no; houses are my life.

  People looking at houses here sometimes ask me how many black people live in a particular neighborhood. Well, I am not allowed to answer that. Realtors are governed by the Sherman Antitrust Act, and we’re not permitted to give information based on sex, race, or creed. I can’t go in and say that this is a black neighborhood. I can say it’s culturally diverse, but I can’t tell someone that it’s black. If someone comes down from the North and says, I want to live with other black people who were successful, I take them to those neighborhoods. But if they ask me how many black people live there, I cannot tell them. I can tell them to come back on Saturday and watch people washing their cars and mowing their lawns, and see the kids playing out in the yards. See for themselves. I can take people to the neighborhoods that I know to be culturally diverse, but I cannot tell them or name the people that are there. Nor could I say whether I know any white people who live there. I would simply suggest that someone look at who’s driving down the street.

  As Realtors, we can be fined a stiff penalty and sent to prison if we answer any questions related to race, religion, or ethnic background. Women are protected; gays are protected; people with AIDS are protected. If someone asked me, I couldn’t say whether a person living in a particular house had AIDS even if I knew. If I don’t want to sell real estate—if I want to trade in my suits for a striped jumper—I would answer those questions.

  I think the law was designed to keep everything integrated so that white people couldn’t come down and request to be in a white neighborhood and say, if there are any blacks that live in here, I don’t want to live here. So when a white person asks a Realtor, do any blacks live in here, she cannot answer that question. And if a rich white person says, I want an exclusive neighborhood, I tell them there are no exclusive neighborhoods. All neighborhoods here in Atlanta are integrated; by law, people can live wherever they choose to.

  In many urban areas, the black people were left in the inner city when white people moved out to the suburbs years ago. Now it’s the white people who are reclaiming the cities, and black people are moving out to the suburbs. That’s how it is in Atlanta. A lot of the houses in Atlanta are being given away, pretty much. The African Americans who owned them are getting good dollar for them, but they’re coming out to the suburbs and getting a brand-new house. They’re thinking that they’ve made out, when actually the people who are buying those beautiful old homes in town are the ones that are making out. So we’re losing out once again. And the African Americans who are selling those old homes don’t understand it, because all they can see is that they’re going to have a bright new house out in the suburbs. Whereas if they just held on a couple of years more, they could almost make another 100 percent equity on top of the properties.

  At this point, as far as choices are concerned, we all have a choice. We can live anywhere we want to live. And we choose to be with our own. So all that segregation, what was that all about? Because when it comes down to it, most of us choose to be among ourselves anyway. The difference now is that we do it willingly. It’s a willing decision to associate, not mandated by the law.

  I believe Dr. Martin Luther King would be happy to know th
at we have the choice to live in all-black neighborhoods. That’s the difference: we have the choice. Dr. King’s wife still lives in the same house she and Dr. King were living in when he died. She has chosen to remain in their home and in that area. I don’t think Dr. King needed to prove himself by moving to an affluent neighborhood.

  Yes, the Civil Rights Movement was about giving us a choice to live in white neighborhoods, but people can live where they want now. Blacks are no longer legally required to live in all-black neighborhoods, the way they once were. Many African Americans choose to live in the same neighborhood, and white home buyers often choose not to move into those neighborhoods. But they are welcome to move there if they want to. No one is keeping them out. Those who choose to are living in Buckhead, the prime neighborhood of Atlanta, which is less diverse. They don’t wish to live in a black neighborhood because there are fewer amenities, like malls and fine restaurants, though that is changing too.

  The culturally diverse upper-middle-class neighborhoods tend to cluster around DeKalb County, which is just east of Atlanta. We have the city of Lithonia in South DeKalb and Stone Mountain in North DeKalb. When you hear of DeKalb County, people generally know that it is highly culturally diverse.

  Lithonia has the two Sandstone Estates and the Belair Estates. The Sandstone Estates comprise one of the premier subdivisions of DeKalb County. There are write-ups on it all the time. I sold out the subdivision. A house that sold there several years ago for $465,000 would now go for about $700,000 plus. A single female doctor at Emory bought a house in the Sandstone Estates for $600,000. There’s a new house going up, and I’m not sure how much it’s going to run. The Sandstone homes go up to $2 million plus. Most of the owners are of color.

  About two-thirds of the residents in the Sandstone Estates are entrepreneurs, or they work from a computer base in their home. The other third commute to jobs in town. It’s a thirty-five- or forty-minute drive, which is not bad considering other areas in the world where it takes two or three hours to go thirty miles.

  An African-American CNN news anchor lives at Sandstone. We have the recording artists Kelly Price and Montell Jordan. I can’t point to their houses because I do work with a lot of celebrities and their privacy is protected. Their houses are well secured, so people think, okay, they must be someone famous.

  A guy who’s a black golfer owns a very contemporary house in the Sandstone Estates. He even has a putting green down in the basement, with a simulator and a golf screen. He’s a pro golfer and his wife is a computer consultant. They’re a young couple. They probably bought the house for about $800,000, and in the three or four years they’ve been building it, the value has risen to about $2 million. A single black doctor is building a house in a cul-de-sac in Sandstone Estates. Her house is worth about $1.7 million, and it’s a very safe area.

  The only problem they have in the Sandstone Estates is that so many people know which celebrities own all the beautiful million-dollar houses. When friends and family come to town, you want to show off your neighborhood. So during the weekend, it is nothing but constant cars up and down. They’re trying to vote to gate the community to keep people out, because there is no privacy.

  Ten or twelve years ago, we had an all-black neighborhood called Sandstone Shores. It was completely built up with nothing but doctors, builders, and professionals. Then five of those owners, including a CNN executive, bought some land on the back side of Sandstone Shores and developed it into Sandstone Estates. So we had a successful minority neighborhood twelve years ago with all million-dollar homes in it. That was the original Sandstone Shores.

  We can all speculate on whether homes in DeKalb County would sell for more if white people owned them. I think yes, they could command a higher price. But many of the builders are of culturally diverse backgrounds as well. There are forty-eight homes in the Sandstone subdivision. So we have black builders, black real estate agents, and then black people buying the homes. It’s unique, and it works.

  Belair Estates, five miles from Sandstone, is another subdivision with million-dollar homes. Physicians, attorneys, CEOs, bankers, entrepreneurs, all types of people who own their own businesses and live in the Belair Estates are just like people who live in Buckhead, but they happen to have a different skin color. The average price of a Belair home is about $900,000. The homes are sold out even though all the lots are not built on. I just sold a house there for $1 million to a couple that are both dentists.

  There’s a contemporary house in Belair that everybody calls the library, because here in Georgia they’re not used to that type of architecture, and so they don’t understand it. The house is about 6,000 square feet and is on the market for $750,000, again a great value compared to places up North. There’s another house for sale in Belair for $1.5 million that’s about 12,000 square feet. And there’s new construction that’s going to be about 10,000 square feet, and that will sell for $1.4 or $1.6 million.

  Stonecrest Mall is two and a half miles from the Belair Estates. It’s one of the new amenities, because there are so many people moving out to the area and building homes for between $500,000 and $1 million there. They had the mall on the books for ten years, and finally, when all the subdivisions started coming up, they decided it was time to go ahead and put it in because we were demanding it. We had to drive in to Buckhead and other areas and we had nothing to serve our subdivisions. So they considered it and here we are. The mall is less than six months old, and the outparcels across the street from the mall are still being built with freestanding stores like Sam’s Club, Best Buy, Toys “R” Us, and McDonald’s.

  Buckhead is situated in the center of Fulton County. The county is on a strip of land that runs from the southwest to the northeast of the Greater Atlanta area. Buckhead is where the most affluent businesspeople and millionaires live. It’s culturally diverse, though less so than DeKalb County. Most subdivisions in Buckhead start at $1 million and go up to the $12-million-plus price range. The cost of living is much better in Stone Mountain. You don’t have the same amenities there that folks have in Buckhead; you miss out on the fine restaurants and things like that. But you do have shopping and movie theaters. And if you want to go to fine restaurants, they’re only seventeen miles away.

  In the Stone Mountain area, in North DeKalb, houses start at around $150,000, so DeKalb County has something for everybody. In the neighborhood of Stone Mountain that I specialize in, called Smoke Rise, there are a lot of culturally diverse, affluent owners and lots of million-dollar homes. In one part of Smoke Rise there’s an area where diverse buyers are purchasing homes from $500,000 to $1 million plus.

  A house that would go for $3 million in Buckhead would sell in Stone Mountain for between $700,000 and $1 million. It’s approximately seventeen miles from Stone Mountain to downtown Atlanta—about a twenty-minute ride. People want to move out there because of the space and the beauty—even if it means they can’t walk to work or walk around in downtown Atlanta whenever they like.

  There are country clubs and organizations in Greater Atlanta that are not considered to be black courses, but they are majority black. For example, in Stone Mountain, there are many golf courses close by, and when you go on the courses, you see African Americans. That’s where everybody seems to migrate to.

  Stone Mountain was incorporated in 1839. The Confederate generals are carved on the mountainside in Stone Mountain Park, which covers close to six hundred acres. The park used to be Ku Klux Klan headquarters. A new Ku Klux Klan was started in Stone Mountain in 1915. In 1963 Dr. King said, “Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!” He spoke those words to more than 200,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial in his “I Have a Dream” speech. And the irony is that we have come full circle and we now monopolize Stone Mountain. It’s rumored that Stone Mountain’s first African-American mayor, Chuck Burris, lives in the home that was built by the former Grand Dragon of the Georgia Ku Klux Klan. The Klansmen are turning over in their graves. We bought up all the pr
operty and built big houses. Who would have known? Isn’t it ironic how things turned completely around, and now we occupy their area. We ended up winning anyway. It’s amazing.

  DEIRDRE AND JERALD WOLFF

  “Why Not?”

  Three years ago, attorney Deirdre Wolff and her husband, Jerald, bought a house in one of the growing number of affluent, predominantly African-American communities in Atlanta. “It means our children have playmates who look like them,” Deirdre told me. “They have role models who look like them. They are surrounded by traditional families who look like them. In other places, lifestyles are often color-coded. But in Atlanta, African Americans are able to choose the lifestyle they want to live and the color in which they wish to live it.”

  Deirdre Wolff

  Jerald and I lived in West Bloomfield, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, for ten years before we moved to our new Atlanta home in September 2000. When we first saw our home, it was in the framing process. We were blessed that our property value had escalated in West Bloomfield, so we were able to sell our old house for more than the cost of our new home in Atlanta. We were also pleased to find that the price of new construction included features that hadn’t been part of our home purchase in Detroit, such as kitchen and bath wallpaper, a finished garage, and basic landscaping, with a sprinkler system. Property taxes were much higher in West Bloomfield, and property values continue to rise here in Atlanta. All these economic advantages allowed us to finish the basement of our new home, something we had not done in Michigan.

  Michigan is much colder than Atlanta, and although I don’t miss the snow, my fourteen-year-old son, Jerald, missed playing ice hockey during our first winter in the South. Ice hockey rinks are a lot harder to find here. Many schools in the Detroit area have hockey teams. However, football is an adequate substitute, and Jerald has enjoyed playing for his school team in Atlanta. Our younger son, Quincy, who is seven, continued playing baseball and basketball for the community without even pausing to get used to living in Atlanta. Both the community we left and the one we found seem to share equally in the excitement of youth sports programs.