Immigrants, women and youth are reshaping Ga.
Demographic shifts turn longtime red state purple
CLAYTON COUNTY, Ga. – I met Delores Williams in an Asian-owned seafood joint that specializes in Louisiana-style food, complete with Oyster Po Boys, fried fish and crab legs. She ordered wings. Williams is a retired teacher who moved to Clayton County from Brooklyn, New York, 35 years ago. When she arrived, Clayton was still predominantly white, with many families residing in 1960s-style houses and bungalows. The northern part of the county was home to families who worked at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, a booming regional force at the time. The southern end was filled with families who worked at local offices, owned small businesses or commuted to the Ford Assembly Plant just up Interstate 75 in Hapeville. Clayton was also a place proud of its Southern heritage.
It is the fictional setting for parts of Margaret Mitchell’s epic Civil War drama, “Gone with the Wind,” and its plantation, Tara.
If you hang a left at the old train depot turned Clayton County Visitors Center in downtown Jonesboro, you can take a ride through history at the Road to Tara Museum, a place filled with movie costumes and memorabilia, just minutes off one of the county’s main drags, Tara Boulevard.
The county’s history, steeped in Southern lore, stands in stark contrast to its present-day makeup.
Clayton County sent shock waves across Georgia’s political landscape last week when voters here pushed President-elect Joe Biden into the lead in the race against President Donald Trump. That edge could ultimately flip Georgia blue if Biden’s 11,000-vote lead survives a state-ordered recount.
What’s more, the nation’s eyes remain fixated on the Peach State because a pair of Georgia Democrats, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, aim to defeat their Republican counterparts, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, in a special election Jan. 5 that will determine control of the U.S. Senate.
“Clayton is a very different place now than when I moved here,” Williams said as we waited on her order. “It went from mostly white to nearly all Black.”
Williams is a part of that transformation. The influx of African Americans, young people and immigrants has reshaped the political mores of this former swing county over the past 35 years into one that is reliably dark blue and more than 70% Black.
Nearly 5 million Georgians voted in the election, the highest in state history. A lot of credit for that turnout, especially among Black residents and women, can be attributed to Stacey Abrams, the former state representative who lost her gubernatorial campaign in a close race two years ago. Abrams has dedicated enormous energy to voter registration drives across the state, registering about 800,000 new voters, she told NPR last week.
The John Lewis effect
For many Clayton residents, what makes Georgia’s possible flip all the more tantalizing is that it came from the district represented by beloved U.S. Congressman John Lewis.
Lewis, who died in July, famously sparred with Trump and even refused to attend his inauguration, prompting the president to blast Lewis’ 5th Congressional District as decrepit, crime-infested and in disrepair.
But the district Trump described is far from the place where my wife and I bought our first home 22 years ago in a middle-class neighborhood filled with teachers, lawyers, government workers and small-business owners. That description doesn’t match our leafy neighborhood of soaring oaks, hickories and Georgia pines set among colorful azaleas. We started a family here and still own our 40-year-old Cape Cod. We moved away in 2000, first to Michigan, then Ohio and now New Jersey.
I went back to Atlanta over the weekend to talk to neighbors, business owners, community leaders and friends to get a sense for my old community and its shifting politics.
Metro Atlanta is still growing like kudzu, and a lot of its new residents are left-leaning. Most of my white neighbors from those days have since sold their homes and moved out, some headed farther south into less Black counties of Henry, Spalding and Butts, and even down to Forsyth – about 50 miles away.
County wasn’t always this way
In Clayton, I dropped by the Clipper Zone Barbershop in Stockbridge, where Dana Rivers, 49, was giving Christopher Cox a haircut. As at most Black barber shops, politics is a common subject, and at the Clipper Zone there is no shortage of opinions.
Rivers says the president-elect needs to focus on providing jobs and educational resources. He hopes Biden will enact policies to help small businesses, especially those owned by Black men who gave Trump a second look because of his pro-business policies.
“I hope we’ll start to see the ignorance and the bigotry die out,” Rivers said.
Meanwhile, Cox just wants to help Trump pack. Both men said they are glad their region helped rid the country of him. “The young people made a difference,” Cox, 37, said.
It wasn’t always this way.
For most of the time from the 1960s to the 1980s, Clayton County was a swing county. Residents supported Jimmy Carter for president in 1976 with about 65% of the vote, then voted solidly for Ronald Reagan in 1984 with more than 70% of the vote. The last time Clayton was solidly Republican was 1988, when 65% of the votes went to George H.W. Bush over Michael Dukakis.
Around 1992, Clayton County began to swing dependably Democratic. The racial makeup changed dramatically, too.
Today, Clayton is one of the most Democratic counties in the country. It gave Democratic presidential candidates more than 80% of the vote in 2008, 2012, and in 2016. Biden received nearly 85% of the vote this year.
The county’s racial makeup changed because of a booming immigrant population of Hispanics, Asians and Africans who now call it home. In 1980, Clayton was 91% white. It is now nearly 70% Black and about 17% white, 2018 data show. In fact, most of the county’s top leaders are Black – from the school superintendent, police chief and county commission chairman to the chair of the school board.
“We are a county where our story has never been properly told,” said Sonna Singleton Gregory, a member of the county commission, the county’s governing body. “We have strong leadership. We are a place where more and more people want to live and work.” Kelly Okoro agrees.
I caught up with the Nigerian immigrant at her men’s clothing shop along a busy stretch of Georgia State Route 54 in Riverdale. She said she could have opened her store in Atlanta’s Midtown or Buckhead, upscale locations, but chose this spot in an aging shopping center because she felt the area needed a store like hers.
Okoro said she has been helping register voters in Clayton and across metro Atlanta, working with a community group – Women for Progress – spurred by Abrams. Abrams launched Fair Fight 2020, a voter advocacy group, in 2018 after losing the governor’s office by just 55,000 votes. Had she won, she would have made history as the first Black female governor in the U.S.
Demographic shifts in Atlanta
The demographic and political shifts in Clayton also are taking place across metro Atlanta and its booming suburbs. The population in Georgia surged to 10.6 million in 2019 from 7.9 million in 2000, Census records show.
Clayton has a growing population of nearly 300,000 residents, and the city of Atlanta contains more than 500,000 people. Combined, more than 6 million people live in metro Atlanta, making it the ninth-largest such area in the U.S.
Immigrants help fuel the growth and now make up 10% of the state’s total population. Many of them reside in communities throughout metro Atlanta like Chamblee, Doraville, Norcross and Marietta.
And they support Democrats. About 20 miles north of Clayton, you can travel along a 15-mile stretch of roadway northeast of Atlanta and find an international corridor like no other in the country. Buford Highway is home to thousands of immigrants traversing three counties: Fulton, DeKalb and Gwinnett. It is a place where residents from Mexico, Korea, China, Vietnam, Africa, the Caribbean and Peru, among others, have opened hundreds of businesses and live side by side in apartments reclaimed from the region’s white flight of the 1970s.
At Sinaloense Pollos Asados Mexican Restaurant in the Pinetree Plaza in Doraville, the air inside was filled with the sweet smoky smell of meat cooking over an open fire. Outside, three men bantered while tending to two black grills loaded with roasting chickens. Customers, almost all Latinos, waited patiently in line for a chance at the few empty tables. A few doors down, a steady stream of customers filed into the I Luv Pho Vietnamese noodle shop where the I Luv Pho noodle bowl, a combination of meats, was one of the most popular items on the menu on Sunday afternoon. Its customers were of Asian descent.
Like Clayton, the city of Atlanta is undergoing a transformation, but in reverse. Some Black residents are leaving the city because of gentrification. Millennials, however, are coming in droves, attracted to its fast-growing tech sector where behemoths like Facebook, Google and Microsoft are hiring thousands.
Across Midtown Atlanta, dozens of new office towers, apartment buildings, trendy restaurants and boutiques have opened in recent years, catering to the city’s vast number of well-educated residents. They’re graduates of Georgia Tech, Emory University, Georgia State, and Clark Atlanta, Morehouse and Spelman, institutions that comprise part of the Atlanta University Center, the nation’s largest set of historically Black colleges and universities.
Benjamin Gaines, a furniture salesman and registered Democrat, was walking along West Peachtree Street in Midtown Atlanta on Sunday after buying groceries at a Publix supermarket near his apartment. He reflected on the presidential election and how the metro Atlanta region is coloring Georgia’s ruby-red contours blue.
“It’s the influx of people coming in from other areas who have different perspectives,” he said. “Young people, their vote was critical.”
‘We’ll do it again’
Meanwhile, Clayton, the region where I worked as bureau chief for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, marches ahead. New hotels, restaurants and apartments have opened along the GA-138 corridor. Near the airport, the first phase of a 311-acre, $1.5 billion mini-city called Six West recently broke ground. The Clayton school system, which lost its accreditation in 2008 because of school board infighting, has recovered and is now seen as a model for the nation.
Another sign of change: public transportation. The county first rejected Atlanta’s public transportation system (MARTA) in 1971, but city buses were finally welcomed in 2014 and now crisscross Clayton roads. Commuter rail is planned by 2025.
As Clayton County races toward the future, Landry Merkison, Emergency Management director, sees the county where he was raised changing before his eyes. It’s a good thing to see the new faces and the progress, he said. The white flight that took hold in the county has also ushered in more diversity and dynamic new leadership. “Clayton is on the rise,” he said.
Suki Ponce, a Clayton County educator, agrees the changing faces in the county have brought progress. She was waiting in line at the popular Slutty Vegan restaurant in downtown Jonesboro when I approached her. She was eager to talk about her support for Democrats and the importance of the runoff between Warnock and Ossoff. She met both men at the same restaurant a few weeks earlier when rapper and actor Common was there stumping for them.
Once again, she said, Clayton County will be in the spotlight.
“We showed up for them to get them this far,” Ponce said. “We’ll do it again.”