Prince George’s County: Growing, and growing more segregated, census shows

Residential integration is not a goal, particularly for younger black professionals born after the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, said Bart Landry, a sociologist at the University of Maryland who has returned to Prince George’s for an update to his 1987 book, “The New Black Middle Class.” He said many residents find comfort, after spending the day in a predominantly white workplace, in returning to a home where all their neighbors are other African American professionals.

“They’re where they want to be,” Landry said. “They’re not thinking about integration. It’s not on their radar screen. . . . Their goal is to live in a community of like-minded, like-valued people, and these are other middle-class blacks.”

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A Washington Post analysis of census data since 1980 shows a diversifying region as well as an increasing number of black “segregated neighborhoods” — areas comprised of roughly 2,000 households where at least 85 percent of the residents are of the same race or ethnicity.

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Is life getting better or worse? We take a look at how people’s perceptions of change in their area match up with the way things really are.

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Chris Ellis, 24, who grew up in Forestville and Upper Marlboro, was one of only a few black men around when he moved to Staten Island to attend St. John’s University. He was disoriented and sometimes discomfited by the change.

“I never actually had been a minority,” said Ellis, who attends Rutgers Law School in Newark and works in New York City.

Bob Ross, head of the Prince George’s chapter of the NAACP, said the county’s largely black neighborhoods represent a sense of security. He has told his children that they will face harsher realities when they grow up and venture out into the world.

“It has its safeguards,” he said. “You tell your kids, ‘When you leave, you’re not going to be treated the same as you are in Prince George’s County.’ My youngest son, who’s 22, had a rude awakening when he moved to Arizona. He saw people were not as kind as they were here. They looked at him more by his color than the contents of his mind. We’ve still got to prepare our kids to go out to the real world. But here is a safe zone.”

Troy and LaShonda McFarland have traveled around the world with the Air Force, but this year, when they considered where to retire and raise their two young children, they chose Prince George’s County.

The couple said Anne Arundel and Calvert counties were on their initial list of possibilities because they heard about underperforming Prince George’s schools. But they could get more land and a bigger house with more amenities for their money in Prince George’s. Plus, LaShonda McFarland, who is a counselor at Melwood Elementary School in Upper Marlboro, decided that the way to improve the system is to work from inside. She is confident that her children will thrive in the county’s public schools because “it’s all about parent involvement.”

Standing at the front door of their 6,400-square-foot, four-bedroom brick home in Bowie, the couple said that they could not imagine raising their children, TaKaya, 8, and Troy Jr., 6, anywhere else.

“It was important to us to settle where they could see African Americans at their best,” LaShonda McFarland said. “It’s amazing because my daughter can go outside and see a female doctor across the way and that’s what she wants to be when she grows up. It’s like we have our own set of mentors in the neighborhood.”