For the book I’m currently working on, I have been thinking a lot about the intertwined histories of race and property, power and belonging. And in recent years, suburbs have emerged as a prime battleground for struggles between Black folks and white folks over who has right of way in this country. Cops keep killing Black people in places like Ferguson, Missouri and Atlanta, Georgia, and they redouble their violence when we pour into the streets to demand that they stop. Thick plumes of tear gas turn the familiar parking lots of QuikTrip and Wendy’s into alien landscapes. But the suburban race war does not usually rage at such a fever pitch—it’s almost always simmering.
I’ve known this all my life. In 1972, when I was one year old, I moved with my mom, dad, and younger brother to a metro Atlanta neighborhood caught in the throes of white flight. Separate-but-equal was still a guiding principle of that time, even though this was not the Birmingham, Alabama, of Bull Connor. Instead, white Atlantans (and white folks all over the country) transposed the central values of segregation into the tamer and more palatable language of “personal choice,” “tax revolt,” and “property value.” Trumpeting the ideals of individual liberty and local control of resources and services, white residents abandoned Atlanta to an emergent base of Black electoral power and insulated themselves and their tax dollars in lily-white and highly fortified suburban enclaves. In 1960, Atlanta was 60 percent white, 40 percent Black. By 1980, those numbers had reversed, and then some. By 1990, the percentage of Blacks in Atlanta’s population had reached its peak of just over 67 percent.
My parents purchased a home from a white family in Sun Valley, a calm, cheerfully named subdivision. With so many of us streaming into the neighborhood, the family, which had moved there only a few years before, decided it was time for them to cut what they saw as their losses and light out for new, whiter territory.
My siblings and I, together with the rest of the neighborhood kids, claimed every inch of Sun Valley, organized by a circular street with a steep, straighter one that sliced through it, and the muddy trails behind our houses, as an enchanted terrain. One or two white people may still have lived there, but we could go for days, even weeks, without seeing one. When we, now as adults, run into one another in and around Atlanta, we look back fondly on a childhood we recall as idyllic. There were peach trees to climb and muscadines to pluck directly off the vine. The honeysuckles were abundant: all-you-could-slurp.