(Bloomberg) -- Ask around Confederate Avenue, an hour west of Atlanta, and people will tell you that life is pretty good here.
Jobs are plentiful. Schools are decent. Crime is low. People are pouring into this stretch of Georgia to chase a new Southern version of the American Dream.
And, it turns out, something else too: What just might be the best place to be Black in America. That’s what the numbers say. Based on a wide range of measures, from how much money people make to how long they live, the stubborn gap between Black and White America is now narrower here in Paulding County than just about anywhere else in the country.
But the numbers tell only part of the story. As a polarized nation hurtles toward Election Day, Georgia, the nation’s burgeoning bastion of Black wealth, is once again emerging as a crucible of American politics.
In 2020, Donald Trump lost in Georgia by a mere 12,000 votes. He then went to extraordinary lengths to try to overturn the results. Now, the former president and Kamala Harris, the first woman — and woman of color — to be vice president, are neck and neck in a race that will almost certainly come down again to Georgia and six other battleground states. A September Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll of swing states found Trump and Harris tied in Georgia.
Perhaps nowhere in Georgia are the stakes clearer, or the divide between dry statistics and lived reality sharper, than in the fast-changing exurbs around Atlanta. These communities — areas McKinsey & Co. calls “Goldilocks zones” on the “urban periphery” — are becoming test tubes for the new economics and politics of race in America.
A “New Great Migration” is bringing Black Americans back to the South and remaking the region. The major draws: affordable housing, a moderate climate, and booming industries such as health care and entertainment.
Confederate Avenue runs through the small city of Dallas, seat of Paulding County. Down highway 278 from Dallas, in the quaint little city of Hiram (pronounced “HI-rum”), the postcard Main Street gives way to tidy subdivisions and spacious new homes. One recent morning, cars snaked between orange cones as construction crews did roadwork to accommodate all the new traffic. Signs along the highway advertised new housing developments with names like Sage Woods and Hardy Springs, touting homes for $400,000. “Now Selling,” read one.
The numbers are startling. Since 1990, the county’s population has quadrupled. Between now and 2050, it’s projected to soar 60%. Three decades ago, 4% of Paulding County residents were Black. Today, that figure is 27%.
“The trend that we are seeing in Georgia and in Paulding County really is the reversal of the great migration, which had such a shift on politics in the North,” said Nsé Ufot, a Georgia-based political strategist said of the period decades earlier when Black people from southern states moved to the industrial North. “Their children and grandchildren are moving back to the South, and now you have a critical mass of Black voters, on a different income level.”
Pastor Cord Franklin of the Mt. Olivet Missionary Baptist Church in Rockmart, which stretches into Paulding, said demographics are exerting a powerful force on life here. Over time, his congregation has gotten younger. The area overall keeps getting more diverse. In his Sunday service, the retired Atlanta police officer pointed to tensions between old and new.
“If you’ve been living in Paulding County all your life, you know how things were,” the pastor told the congregants in the maroon pews, referring to how the county is changing amid an influx of new residents. “And now you know how things are.”
While Paulding has voted reliably Republican since the 1980s, the share of ballots cast for the GOP has been declining in recent presidential contests. The percentage of votes for Trump in 2020 was less than it was four years earlier, and below the level of support for Mitt Romney in 2012.
“What you’re seeing in Paulding County is what we’re seeing in other exurban counties,” said Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia state legislator and two-time Democratic nominee for governor. “It’s not instantaneous. It’s incremental. This is demography meeting opportunity.”
Step back, and a broader picture comes into focus. Nationwide, the average Black household earns $53,000 a year, 42% less than the average White household. Here in Paulding County, the difference is 5%. Nationwide, Black homeownership, at 44%, trails White homeownership by nearly 30 percentage points. Here, the difference is 11 points. Black Americans nationwide live an average of 73 years, five years less than White Americans. Here, both live to be about 77.
“Black people who have higher incomes and the financial wherewithal to move, will choose places that may not have the history and social structure that they would like, but have the outcomes they are looking for,” said Duwain Pinder, a partner at McKinsey and co-author of The state of Black residents: The relevance of place to racial equity and outcomes. The report looked at 3,000 US counties and found that just 0.1% of Black Americans, or a total of 39,000 people, reside in such a place.
How race is defined by daily experience in Paulding County — in town halls, in places of worship, in classrooms, on playgrounds — is impossible to capture with data alone. But interviews with residents sketch in the details of a complex and often conflicting portrait.
Nearly everyone interviewed for this story insisted that overt racism wasn’t a big problem in Paulding County. But almost everyone acknowledged that subtle discrimination could be insidious. “I’m not racist, but …” is a common refrain.
Some White residents around Hiram still talk of “good ol’ boys’’ with a shrug. Nearly all of Paulding County’s elected officials are White and Republican.
When Barack Obama was president, the Georgia Peach Oyster Bar, near the Paulding County line, made headlines as far away as London for posting signs with the N-word. (A sign there earlier this year read, “Trump 2020 — F--k Your Feelings.’’)
Only four years ago, more than 3,000 people signed a petition to rename Confederate Avenue in Dallas. The name has stuck anyway. A few years before that, a viral video of local high school cheerleaders using a racial slur caused a stir. And voters here in Georgia’s 14th congressional district have voted — twice — for far-right Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has promoted antisemitic and White supremacist conspiracy theories.
“Paulding County is good for a place to buy homes, but it’s not a good place for Black Americans,” said State Representative Kimberly Alexander, a lifelong area resident. Alexander, a Democrat, was voted into the General Assembly in 2012, becoming the first Black woman to be elected in the county’s 192-year history. Republicans subsequently redrew the district to exclude parts of predominantly White Paulding.
Hiram Mayor Frank Moran said most people tend to get along. “Just like any place else, you’re going to have somebody that is a malcontent,’’ he said.
The tensions offer a glimpse into changing American demographics, and hint at some of the economic, cultural and political changes the future might hold. From 2000 to 2019, the number of eligible voters in Georgia rose by 1.9 million, with Black people accounting for nearly half of that figure, according to Pew Research Center.
Among the recent newcomers to Paulding County is Thurston Renwrick. He and his wife Shyeea moved here with their three children from Marietta, about 40 minutes away. The couple was drawn by the schools, new shopping centers and subdivision amenities like pools with waterslides. Sealing the deal: A five-bedroom, three-bathroom house cost $320,000, about $180,000 less than comparable homes in nearby counties.
Renwrick, who is Black and originally from Philadelphia, said the area’s changing demographics were a pull too. “As we moved in and we started looking around, I’m, like, ‘This is great because when our kids grow up, it’s going to be a melting pot of culture’,’’ he said.
Still, the past is never far away. Just off highway 92 stands a reminder from the dark days of segregation. The two-room Hiram Colored School has been turned into a museum devoted to the history of the county’s Black residents. Original desks, dating from the 1930s to the ’50s, stand in one corner. Worn, tattered books — hand-me-downs from White schools — lie atop desktops and shelves.
Joan Battle, who attended the school and went on to teach locally, today serves as the chief financial officer of the museum’s preservation committee. She said a group of young school children visited recently. When Battle told them about the Hiram Colored School, a little girl raised her hand.
“Well, what color was it?’’ she asked.
--With assistance from Pratish Narayanan.
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