The New White Flight

Amit R. Paley:

A century ago, Calvert was a majority-black outpost of freed slaves who farmed tobacco and harvested oysters. But over the past three decades, tens of thousands of whites have moved in, quadrupling Calvert's population and making it the fastest-growing county in Maryland.

Today, blacks make up 12 percent of the population -- down from 22 percent in 1980. The percentage of white residents has risen from 63 percent in 1970 to 77 percent in 1980, to almost 86 percent today.

The racial shift positions Calvert to rival Frederick County, which is almost 90 percent white, as one of the region's most racially homogeneous jurisdictions.

Most of the Washington region has become increasingly diverse, with Asians, Latinos and other minorities making up two-thirds of the area's recent population growth. But some counties such as Calvert on the region's periphery are experiencing a different trend: They are becoming whiter.

The demographic shift is transforming the map of the Washington region into something like a misshapen pizza, with counties such as Calvert, Anne Arundel and St. Mary's in Maryland and Fauquier and Culpeper in Virginia forming an increasingly white crust around the region's multicolored inner counties. In each of those five majority-white outer counties, the proportion of white residents has increased at least slightly in recent years.

The whitening of Calvert County is affecting the lives of its black residents in ways both large and small, from political change on the Board of County Commissioners to the types of films that play at the only local theater. Some blacks whose families have lived in Calvert for centuries fear that their history is slipping away, that they are becoming invisible.

So basically the black people of Calvert County don't like the fact that people of a different racial background are moving into their neighborhood and changing the character of the area. Isn't this called racism?