Atlanta has long been known as the nation’s Black mecca, the place African-Americans from the Southeast and around the country come to live and find success.
The metro area has one of the largest black middle classes in America, built upon the success of a generation of black entrepreneurs and boosted more recently by new members from the worlds of professional sports, music and entertainment.
But all is not as well as it could be for black Atlanta. The recession hammered Atlanta’s middle class in general, but it was especially hard on the city’s black population.
“The black middle class took a killing during the recession,” said Albie Clayton, a sociologist and demographer at Clark Atlanta University.
First, the good news. Metro Atlanta’s black middle class is now larger in size than Chicago’s, and ranks third in the nation behind only New York and Washington, according to Karen Beck Pooley, a political scientist and neighborhood planner who teaches at Pennsylvania’s Lehigh University.
It’s also one of the top five cities in America for black-owned businesses.
And the buying power of African-Americans has grown. Georgia ranked fourth among the states with the largest African-American markets in 2015 at $81 billion, trailing New York ($109 billion), Texas ($106 billion), and California ($84 billion), according to a study by The University of Georgia.
A number of factors have helped build and grow Atlanta’s black middle class, says Clayton, who measures the group as households whose members combine to earn more than $100,000 annually. One factor is the city’s highest-in-the nation concentration of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, which include Morehouse College, Spelman College, Clark Atlanta University and Morris Brown College.
Those schools bring top young minds from all over the country, and many stay in Atlanta after they graduate, said Dr. Louis Sullivan, the former president of Morehouse School of Medicine and former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services.
“Because of the Atlanta University Center, I think you’ve had a stream of educated blacks who can successfully compete in the job market, whether as engineers or lawyers or business people or physicians or what have you,” Sullivan said.
That stream of educated young people adds to a base built by a generation of black entrepreneurs that includes Alonzo Herndon, founder of Atlanta Life Insurance, and Herman Russell, founder of the development and construction company, H.J. Russell & Co.
Sullivan said there was a significant black middle class in Atlanta even in the 1940s, when he was in high school, but it grew from a black community that had strong political, economic and social cohesion.
“That’s how Atlanta prospered and became the center for civil rights activities around the country,” Sullivan said.
Today’s Atlanta black middle class also includes a growing number of professional athletes who call the city home, many of whom never played for Atlanta teams. The music and entertainment industries also have contributed to Atlanta’s black middle class, led by hip-hoppers such as Outkast, Usher and Ludacris and movie mogul Tyler Perry.
But housing patterns have hurt black Atlanta’s bottom line, Clayton says. Black families in Atlanta prefer to live in mostly black enclaves such as south DeKalb, south Fulton and Clayton counties. Many blacks now live in Atlanta’s suburbs, where they can get more house for their money, rather than the city.
“This is an interesting city and I’ve been here off and on 35-plus years, and it’s still one of the most segregated places I’ve ever lived,” said Clayton, 62, who’s also lived in Boston, Washington and Omaha, Neb.
It’s voluntary segregation, says Clayton, with many African-Americans wanting to live where they and their children feel comfortable.
“You feel comfortable with the neighborhoods. You feel comfortable about your kids, even though you don’t have the amenities that the other neighborhoods do.”
Sullivan disagrees. He acknowledges that Atlanta has segregated areas, but he said residential segregation is worse in Chicago, Washington and Baltimore.
Sullivan, who lives in Sandy Springs, said the choice of where to live is now more about what a family can afford, rather than black families having to worry about resentment from their white neighbors. And that is very much a positive trend, he said.
“When I came back in ’75 to organize the medical school, I bought a home on the southside of Atlanta on New Hope Road, and lived there from ’75 until ’89 when I went to Washington,” Sullivan said.
When he came back from Washington in ’93, he bought a house in a majority-white area, which was then unincorporated Fulton County and is now Sandy Springs.
“When we moved back from Washington in ’93 and when we moved to our present house, no one paid any attention,” Sullivan said. “There was no visible reaction in terms of resistance or alarm or anything like that. It frankly just seemed to be almost a natural thing.”
Living in a mostly black area is a costly decision for black families, says Clark Atlanta’s Clayton. Whites don’t want to move into a neighborhood that’s more than 40 percent black, he said, so when many black homeowners go to sell their houses, which for many is their largest asset, the pool of potential buyers is restricted to other blacks.
“They’re stuck with selling only to blacks,” he said, “whereas whites have 100 percent of the market, blacks have only the black market to sell to.”
That segregated geography holds down prices, and it means that black homeowners build equity at a slower rate than white homeowners.
The Great Recession made the housing disparity worse, says Clayton, especially among working class and lower middle-class blacks, who were disproportionately affected by foreclosures and evictions.
The loss of equity in their homes also made it harder for middle class African-Americans to borrow against their homes for college loans for their children.
“So then we’ll begin to see a decline in the number of African-American young people able to go to college,” Clayton said.
Atlanta’s black middle class also is suffering from a lesser commitment by its major corporations, said Thomas W. Dortch Jr., CEO of consulting firm TWD Inc., long-time chief of staff to former Sen. Sam Nunn and chairman emeritus of 100 Black Men of America.
Some of that is because of the retirement of executives who were committed to diversity and inclusion, said Dortch, who serves on the Diversity Council of Delta Air Lines Inc.
Of the newer executives at Atlanta companies, he said, “They haven’t been as sensitive to inclusion as you had from the great ones.”
Dortch said Atlanta companies, including those that are black-owned, need to be held accountable.
“They aren’t doing as much as they used to help build that successful black middle class in Atlanta.”
The Great Recession also had an impact on inclusion, said Dortch.
“When there’s an economic downturn, you can’t have a downturn of your commitment,” he said.
The future of Atlanta’s black middle class will be affected by a number of factors, according to Clayton. The city’s renewed emphasis on transportation, boosted by millennials and their distaste for buying cars, will help. So will demographic changes in the city of Atlanta, among them the growth of the LGBT and Jewish communities and the influx of whites intown, which has brought creativity and investment and is changing the city’s politics, he said. And the black population continues to grow.
Clayton is less sure that the Beltline, which has sparked billions of dollars of new investment on the mostly white east side of Atlanta, will have the same impact when it winds its way around the south and west sides to mostly black areas.
“I want to see what it does over here,” he said. “It could be a big help. If people invest around the Beltline, it could be good if they couple that with affordable housing for those people that new development would displace.”
Cities with largest African-American middle class
1 New York
2 Washington
3 Atlanta
4 Chicago, Ill.
Source: Karen Beck Pooley, Lehigh University
Top 10 cities for African Americans
1 Atlanta
2 Raleigh, N.C.
3 Washington
4 Baltimore
5 Charlotte, N.C.
6 Virginia Beach-Norfolk, Va.
7 Orlando, Fla.
8 Miami
9 Richmond, Va.
10 San Antonio, Texas
Source: Forbes
