Almost exactly 20 years ago, I wrote a ground-breaking story for The Virginian-Pilot about how middle-class suburbs were becoming more integrated than center city neighborhoods. At the time, this was quite surprising, because the suburbs were still identified as being a product, particularly in the south, to resistance to integration as as enclaves of white flight. Something brought the story to mind just now, and I managed to find a copy on my computer. It does not appear to be available online, at least not easily, although it is referenced in several scholarly books. Here’s the story.
THE QUIET INTEGRATION OF SUBURBIA.
Published: July 25, 1993, The Virginian-Pilot
Section: FRONT, page A1
Source: Alex Marshall, Staff writer
© 1993- Landmark Communications Inc.
There are 14 homes on Rip Rap Court. White families live in eight. Black families live in four, a Filipino family in one, and a Native American family in another. Nine families have at least one member in the military.
Racially, Rip Rap looks like the rest of Rock Creek, which looks like many new subdivisions spread across southern Virginia Beach and into Chesapeake. The realities of life there cut against the usual rap on race relations.
“At certain times we think we’re on another planet,” said Jim Marlow, a white man who lives with his family in Rock Creek, off Salem Road in Virginia Beach. “I find it very hard to believe that all the races in this development would suddenly group together by color and start getting angry at each other.”
Integration is booming in new suburban neighborhoods.
In the past, studies showed blacks moving into older suburbs that whites abandoned. But federal housing laws, changing attitudes and an emerging black middle class have shifted housing patterns here and around the country, scholars say.
Blacks and whites are living together in just-built developments with so little fuss it’s scarcely noticed.
“It’s been a quiet revolution that has not achieved the attention it is due,” said Paul T. Schollaert, who until this month was an associate dean at Old Dominion University and has studied integration in this area. Schollaert is now a dean at Illinois State University.
An analysis of the new block-level data made available from the 1990 census shows that Hampton Roads integrated faster than most of the country.
But the cities with the most blacks, Portsmouth and Norfolk, are integrating less rapidly in the neighborhoods and subdivisions than the new sections of Virginia Beach and Chesapeake.
The people who live on integrated cul-de-sacs have largely avoided the conflicts that once plagued mostly white neighborhoods when a black family moved in.
“When we moved in, everybody came over and introduced themselves and said if you need anything just let us know,” said Toni Hurt, a 28-year-old black woman who lives on Rip Rap Court. “We haven’t had any problems.”
The military is the biggest reason for the change. Its payroll provides solid incomes for increasing numbers of African-Americans.
“To say race relations are getting worse or better is too simple,” said Richard D. Alba, a professor of sociology and public policy at the State University of New York at Albany, who has written on black suburbanization. “For the large and perhaps growing number of African-Americans in poverty, who tend to live in the center city, race relations are probably getting worse.
“But for the middle class, barriers are to some extent receding. They are more able to get jobs and reside in good neighborhoods. It’s important to be cautious and not overstate things. Race remains important.”
These new integrated neighborhoods vary from modest townhouses around Hilltop in Virginia Beach to $200,000 homes in sections of Greenbrier in Chesapeake.
The Salem Lakes census area, which includes Rock Creek and several surrounding neighborhoods, has integrated more than any other in Hampton Roads. The homes in Rip Rap Court are 2 to 5 years old, two stories tall, vinyl-sided or brick, and cost from $85,000 to $100,000.
Hurt’s neighbors Jim and Kathy Marlow, who are white, moved to Rock Creek two years ago for the comfortable suburban home and an integrated neighborhood for their 7-year-old.
“I feel very strongly that our daughter Kristine should be exposed to that,” Jim Marlow said, his stockinged feet propped up on a coffee table. “That’s the way it is everywhere else.
“Maybe we take it for granted, but there is a lot of harmony here,” said Marlow. “We don’t bring baked goods to each other, but we go out of our way to say hello to each other.”
Vivian Vine, a black woman, lives a few doors down from the Marlows.
“We didn’t want all white and we didn’t want all black,” said Vine, 32, who has two children. “In the grown-up world, our children are going to be dealing with all kinds of people.”
NEW NEIGHBORHOODS OFFER A FRESH START FOR RACE RELATIONS
New suburban developments tend to be integrated more than older neighborhoods. This trend locally has been developing since 1970 but took off in the past decade.
Both the number of integrated neighborhoods and their extent of integration jumped dramatically in Hampton Roads.
Demographers use a score called the delta value to measure the degree to which black and white families live on the same block. Zero is the most segregated; 100 is totally integrated.
In Hampton Roads, the score jumped from 35 to 44 from 1980 to 1990, according to a study by the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan.
Virginia Beach’s score increased even faster, from 31 to 57, and pulled the whole region’s score up. Norfolk’s score rose from 25 to 35, Portsmouth’s from 17 to 22, and Chesapeake’s from 26 to 30. The 1980 figures comes from a study by Schollaert; The Virginian-Pilot and Ledger-Star analyzed the 1990 census data.
In 1970, all four cities’ levels were between 7 and 13, according to Schollaert. Suffolk was not included in the studies.
Older cities with high black populations and less growth have not integrated as quickly.
Some older neighborhoods in those cities have become more integrated. In Norfolk, neighborhoods such as Lafayette-Winona, River Oaks, Belaire, Colonial Place and Sussex are from 15 percent to 40 percent black. Still, within those neighborhoods, some streets are nearly all-black or all-white.
Chesapeake has seen mixed results. It experienced suburban growth in the 1980s. But its black population is larger than Virginia Beach’s, it has more traditionally black neighborhoods, and, on the average, it is less wealthy.
“A new subdivision hasn’t had a history of one group claiming it as their turf,” said George C. Galster, senior research associate at the Urban Institute in Washington. “There is not the opposition to change that arises in older inner-city neighborhoods.”
AN EXAMPLE OF FINDING SOLUTIONS `WHERE YOU LEAST EXPECT THEM’
The homes and shopping centers built since World War II have often divided races by creating heavily black core cities surrounded by mostly white, wealthier suburbs.
People left old center-city neighborhoods – and forced integration in the schools. “White flight,” it was called. For most of the history of the suburbs, this label has stuck.
But as a black middle class developed, its members sought the same two-story home with the big yard and found it in the just-built subdivision on the edge of town.
“Sometimes solutions come where you least expect them,” Schollaert said. “People writing about race relations in the 1950s wouldn’t have predicted that the military would be a model for racial integration, given all the battles to integrate it. I dare say the same thing myself with the suburbs. We have a tendency to stereotype them as less tolerant and less diverse. But the seeds of racial integration may be out there.”
Past national studies showed an almost opposite pattern, that blacks were moving into older suburbs whites were abandoning.
“Ten years ago, that would have been very surprising,” said Robert Lake, associate professor at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, N.J., and author of a 1981 book on the black middle class called “The New Suburbanites.”
National and local studies show blacks moving to the suburbs faster than whites.
“The black middle class is the most anxious to be middle class,” said Robert Fishman, a professor of history at Rutgers University at Camden, N.J., who writes on the suburbs. “It’s no different from other integrated groups, who left ethnic neighborhoods in the city to join this transethnic suburban class. You see the same phenomena with Jews, Poles, Italians in the post-’45 suburbs blacks were barred from.”
Reynolds Farley, a research scientist at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan, said cities with growing numbers of subdivisions tend to be more integrated. The Hampton Roads metropolitan area of 1.4 million people that runs from Williamsburg to Virginia Beach emerged as one of the most integrated in the country on a neighborhood level.
“There are sometimes very few things that are hopeful in race relations,” Farley said. “But where there has been rapid new construction, segregation has fallen modestly, and in some areas quite substantially.”
The old barriers to integration – like real-estate agents steering blacks away from some neighborhoods – haven’t vanished but have moderated, helped along by federal laws that prohibit discrimination in the real estate industry.
“It’s very difficult, if you’re advertising you’re opening a 200-acre subdivision, to say you don’t have any housing available,” said John Logan, professor of sociology and public administration at State University of New York at Albany.
One aspect of the suburbs that urban planners criticize – less diversity – made it easier for these neighborhoods to integrate peacefully.
In the typical suburb, people are divided by the type of homes they can afford.
If your neighbor is the same age, with kids around the same age and a similar income, you may have a lot in common even if your skin color differs.
“It may be that people get along better in an integrated neighborhood where there is a narrow spectrum of social class available,” Logan said.
MUTUAL ACCEPTANCE MAY BE CHANGING THE ATTITUDES OF BLACK AND WHITE NEIGHBORS ALIKE
When Sandra Hill goes to the grocery store, she still occasionally gets “the look.” Or maybe the clerk will slap the change down on the counter, or deny Hill that smile he handed out to the last person.
It’s nice to come home.
“You don’t notice things like that so much in this neighborhood,” said Hill, a tall black woman in a flowered dress who sat with her husband, Paul, and drank tea out of a Mason jar.
“But when you go out shopping, things come up.”
The Hills live in Logans Mill, a Chesapeake subdivision tucked inside Greenbrier, which has 12,000 residents. The 2,000 blacks are almost evenly dispersed in the smaller subdivisions.
Black residents said racial prejudice, suspicion and distrust still exist. But their white neighbors in the suburbs seem more accepting.
Not everything is perfect. Hill says a neighbor appears to be avoiding her. She can’t help wondering if it has something to do with her color.
“These kind of things are always in your mind if you’re black. Before they get to know you and your accomplishments, they have to get past your color. You sometimes feel you have to prove you’re just a regular, hard-working person.”
Vernell Woods, 31, lives in Brandon, another integrated neighborhood, in the Kempsville section of Virginia Beach. Married with two children, Woods says he suspects the attitudes of a white family who lives next to a black family will be changed.
“Growing up in an integrated neighborhood, they’ll find out that everything their grandfather told them wasn’t true,” Woods said. “That it’s a myth, borne out of fear.”
Woods grew up in Cavalier Manor, a black middle-class neighborhood in Portsmouth. Woods sheepishly acknowledged his own attitudes have changed.
“I used to think all white people treated all black people unfairly,” Woods said.
“Now I just think some white people do.”
FOR HAMPTON ROADS, THE MILITARY COMPLEX IS AN ENGINE OF INTEGRATION
John Schmalz, a white 37-year-old sub mechanic, toasted his flat belly in the sun at Rock Creek pool as his kids swam. Like other people, he could tick off the race of his cul-de-sac.
“I live in court with nine houses,” Schmalz said. “Three of them are black, one is Hispanic. It’s a good mix. The kids all play together.
“And seven of the nine are military. In fact, you have the same mixture out in the housing developments that you do on the ship.”
In the Salem Lakes census area, 37 percent of the working men and 22 percent of working men and women serve in the military. This does not include retirees.
The military, which provides good incomes for African-Americans, is probably the biggest reason Hampton Roads is more integrated than other cities, scholars say.
“The black middle class is very much a government class,” said Fishman of Rutgers University. “So you find these kinds of neighborhoods precisely where government employment is so important.”
On the ships and in the barracks, whites and blacks also learn to work and live together.
“We have lots of evidence that the military is one of the institutions that has dealt most successfully with the problems of race,” said Mark Schneider, professor of political science at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. “So maybe the experience of a well-integrated work environment has helped spread over into a well-integrated living environment.”
The new integrated neighborhoods, Farley said, might be considered a by-product of the Reagan defense buildup in the 1980s, which pumped money into Hampton Roads’ economy and into the pockets of many blacks.
Farley noted that older Northern cities like Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland have integration levels more resembling Southern cities 40 years ago in the era of rigid segregation laws.
PROBLEMS BEYOND RACE: YOU CAN’T TRADE RECIPES WHEN NOBODY IS HOME
On a hot day at Rock Creek pool, scores of children of different colors splash in the blue water.
“My best friends are black,” said Jill, a white 10-year-old whose wet hair dangled around her face. And she listed them – “D’lorah, Trenece, Marcella and Chaundra.”
“Our relations call blacks niggers and stuff,” Jill confided.
“But my mom and dad say just ignore them.”
These neighborhoods are not trouble-free, nor, as Jill’s comments point out, have all racial tensions vanished.
A few black youths by the pool, most of them around 12 years old, told of small racial slights like a neighbor telling one of them “don’t play with my dog, because it’s prejudiced.”
Crime and vandalism occur, and racial tension can make these problems worse.
Mary Orchard, a white resident reclining by the pool, had no problem with the black and Filipino children her four children play with. She does have a problem with the white, black and Filipino gangs that roam through the area around Salem Lakes.
“We can’t get a community watch off the ground,” Orchard said. “No one wants to get involved. But there’s been these shootings.”
Capt. Clyde D. Hathaway of the 4th Precinct said these newer suburban areas still experience growing pains because of their new-found diversity.
Gangs have existed, Hathaway said, but whites can also see 10 Asian boys talking at the convenience store and wrongfully assume it’s a gang. Some poor, mostly black neighborhoods are right next to wealthier, integrated neighborhoods, and that can cause problems.
In Rock Creek, one resident pointed out a house across the street where two years ago five bullets were fired into the door during a drug dispute. Residents in other neighborhoods mentioned shootings and robberies.
Guns, gangs and locked doors are as much a part of suburban neighborhoods as is not caring that the new neighbor next door is black.
Modern lifestyles also strain communities. People, black and white, yearned for days when neighbors were closer and had more time for each other.
“We can long for the good old days, when people looked after each other’s kids, shared recipes and talked over the fence,” said Sandra Hill of Greenbrier. “But nobody’s home. Everybody’s out there working. And the last thing you feel like doing when you come home is looking after someone else’s kid.”
A neighborhood can still “turn black,” say social scientists, once a certain number of blacks live there. That number is difficult to pin down, they say, but is probably rising as whites get more comfortable with blacks.
“It’s difficult to keep a community with a large percentage of blacks from becoming overwhelmingly black,” Schneider said. “But communities with, say, less than 15 percent blacks can keep that racial mix for a long period of time.”
Most of the new integrated suburban areas are 10 percent to 20 percent black, with sometimes 5 percent to 15 percent more of Asians, Hispanics or other minorities.
By comparison, blacks make up 12 percent of the country’s population, 18 percent of the state population, 39 percent of Norfolk, and 14 percent of Virginia Beach. Overall, Hampton Roads is 34 percent minority and 29 percent black.
Of the nation’s households with annual incomes between $35,000 and $75,000, about 9 percent are black. In Virginia, the 97,000 black households that earn between $35,000 and $75,000 a year make up 12 percent of all families in that range.
It’s difficult to pin down why a neighborhood “turns” black. Whether the white residents are leaving because of race, economics or both is hard to generalize.
Lydia Monk, who has lived in a small pocket of Greenbrier since it opened in 1979, has watched her small subdivision change from mostly white to mostly black. Monk is thinking of moving.
She says it’s not the new residents’ skin color that bothers her, but the jobs they hold.
“At first I blended real well because the blacks here were professional,” said Monk, an insurance group manager. “But then came the people on food stamps and that did bother me. But it wasn’t racial, it was a different class of people. When you say there goes the neighborhood, that’s what you mean.”
Inhabitants of these middle-class neighborhoods often have an acutely developed sense of the economic standing of their neighbors.
`It’s a money thing, not a race thing,” said Ricky Williams, 34, a black man who lives in Rock Creek with his wife, Darlene. “It’s not race, it’s economics.”
Description of illustration(s):
Staff color photo by LAWRENCE JACKSON
For children growing up in the Rock Creek neighborhood of Virginia
Beach – part of the most thoroughly integrated census tract in South
Hampton Roads – making friends with neighbors of a different race is
a natural part of life. From left: Kristin Marlow, 7; Roneka Hurt,
5; Kristin Locklear, 9; Megan Greene; Courtney Locklear, 9; Ronald
Hurt, 7. In front: Ronette Hurt, 3.
Staff photos by LAWRENCE JACKSON
Just another late afternoon in summer on Rip Rap Court in Virginia
Beach’s Rock Creek subdivision: Next-door neighbors, from left,
Brenda and Steve Lewis and Kathy Marlow share a laugh. Says Marlow’s
husband, Jim: “Maybe we take it for granted, but there is a lot of
harmony here.”
Black and white children enjoy the Rock Creek pool together. One
scholar calls integration in area suburbs “a quiet revolution that
has not achieved the attention it is due.”
Graphic
Map
THOROUGHLY INTEGRATED NEIGHBORHOODS of South Hampton Roads
By Alex Marshall and Tom Boyer
The 20 most-integrated areas
The 20 least-integrated areas
[For complete graphic please see microfilm]
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© 1993- Virginian-Pilot