Region's Fringes Draw a 'New White Flight'

Just like the generation of white residents who left the District starting in the 1950s, many began to leave Prince George's County in the 1970s for Calvert as their old neighborhoods became increasingly black. According to the Census, Prince George's is the largest single source of recent migration to Calvert County.

"There is this kind of hopscotch effect where people keep moving out," said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.

James J. Allman, the county administrator, is one of the many whites who made the two-step move to exurbia. His family left Southeast Washington about 1960, when they felt that the neighborhood had become too dangerous, and settled in Prince George's. Allman said he left for Calvert in 1970 because he wanted more land to raise horses but acknowledged that others made the move to escape the burgeoning black population in Prince George's.

"They aren't going to say it," he said. "But that's a fact."

Spencer worries that many white newcomers want to prevent blacks from following them into the county. She believes that the county hasn't created affordable housing, at least in part because of fears that it will attract black residents. And she detects a not-so-subtle racism when slow-growth advocates criticize zoning policies that might draw traffic from Prince George's County.

"When they talk about 'those people,' I know what is meant, even if they don't quite say it," she said at a recent meeting of the group she founded, Concerned Black Women of Calvert County.

Allman said that the county has no discriminatory policies and that the racial disparity is caused by an income gap between blacks and whites.

"Calvert County is open to anyone who can afford it. Minorities are more than welcome," he said. "The fact is that property values and the job market largely preclude them from moving in." The average home in the county sold for $350,000 last year.

The influx of whites into Calvert also has coincided with the rise of the Republican Party in a county that for decades was a Democratic stronghold. In late 2003, when the local GOP claimed more registered voters than Democrats for the first time in recent history, the party chairman said the success was due to Prince George's politicians whose policies had driven Republicans to Calvert.

The political realignment is illustrated by the five-member Board of County Commissioners, which now has four white Republicans, all of whom were born outside the county. The only native of Calvert County is Wilson H. Parran, a Democrat who is black.

Only 9 percent of the county's teachers are black, according to the school system, proportionately less than the overall presence of black residents. Charlotte Clark, who is black, said the number of black educators in Calvert has fallen since she started teaching there 32 years ago. The school system said it could not provide statistics further back than 1996, when 14 percent of teachers were black.

Kevin Michael, the school system's director of personnel and employee relations, said Calvert has tried to recruit teachers at historically black colleges but said it's difficult to find and attract qualified minority candidates. Spencer said school officials aren't trying hard enough.

Pamela Mackall, 50, a black resident who has lived in the county all her life, said she now has to go outside the county to see movies with mainly black casts and themes because those types of films don't run at the theater in Calvert. When she wanted to see "The Fighting Temptations" -- a recent film starring Cuba Gooding Jr. and Beyonce Knowles -- she had to drive to Prince George's. The black music and dance clubs from decades ago are long gone.

"It sometimes feels like there's no place for us here anymore," she said.

The Wallville School, the oldest surviving one-room black school in the county, has deteriorated largely unnoticed over the decades. By 1994, the school looked like an old, gray shack, and a local builder filed a permit to demolish it.

The black community and preservationists have tried over the years to move it to a more prominent location, but it remains at its original spot -- now someone's front lawn -- wrapped in yellow caution tape and propped up by beams.

At the Mount Hope Refuse Collection Site on sleepy Pushaw Station Road in Sunderland, many of the women who come to dump their garbage said they were unaware that the site had any historical significance.

But down past the creaky green trash compactor, among the sassafras trees, Timothy Morsell Sr. crouches and remembers. He sees the rusty steel legs of child-size chairs jutting out of the ground and remembers sitting in them when a rickety school for black children stood here.

He recalls a day a quarter-century ago when he came back to see smoke billowing from the closed-down Mount Hope School. Black residents were told that local officials razed it as a firefighting exercise. Soon a salt dome and recycling bins and the stench of garbage rose on the site.

"They brought a match and a bulldozer and tried to totally erase our history," said Morsell, 51. "Like there was no black folks standing here."

Morsell, chairman of the board of trustees of Mount Hope United Methodist Church in Sunderland, which used to own the land where the school stood, said the property was illegally seized by the county. He claims that white county officials altered deeds to take the land. The county denies the allegations.

Morsell said church members will continue political pressure and consider legal action.

He believes Calvert's black community is as resilient as the old school, which smoldered for two days before it collapsed.

"Something about it just wouldn't burn," he said. "It was solider than the white folks thought."