The city of Atlanta, reports the Wall Street Journal, will soon no longer have a black majority of residents — and maybe doesn’t have one right now. This comes almost exactly half a century after Atlanta first had a black majority, a landmark that the municipality reached in the 1970 Census but had probably crossed a few years before.
Atlanta is not the only city to undergo, first, a rapid increase in black population, and, more recently, a sharp decrease in black percentage. There has been a similar phenomenon in Washington, D.C., which became majority-black in the 1950s and was 71 percent black in the 1970 Census. That percentage fell to 51 percent in the 2010 Census and has fallen since. And there’s a similar phenomenon far away, in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood, as noted in the Los Angeles Times.
