Doris J. Spencer decided to move to Calvert County because it seemed to have everything. Taxes were low, the countryside was beautiful and every spot on this tiny Southern Maryland peninsula was just minutes from the water.
But she quickly noticed something different from her old home in Alexandria: not many African Americans.
"I spent days traveling around the county when I didn't see a single minority," said Spencer, 65, an African American who moved to Calvert five years ago. "I was in total cultural shock."
It wasn't always like this. 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.
"It's almost like there's a hidden landscape, a hidden geography of the county that many whites don't see," said Kirsti Uunila, the county's historic preservation planner. "People who are moving in, they really don't know where they've come."
So an increasingly vocal black community is stepping up to remind them. This fall, a black church leader spoke up for the first time about church property that he alleges was illegally seized by white county officials about a quarter-century ago. Last summer, Spencer formed a group to lobby for more black teachers and increased affordable housing. Others have set out to restore dilapidated black historical sites.
Although the overall number of blacks in the county has remained constant, they now make up a smaller percentage of Calvert's population as a result of what some demographers have called "the new white flight," an outward migration caused by the increasing urbanization of the inner counties and, for some, a desire to move away from minorities.
