<p>Clayton County now has the highest percentage of black residents in the metro Atlanta area, according to the most recent Census Bureau figures.</p><p>The bureau's American Community Survey shows that blacks made up 59 percent of Clayton's population last year, an increase of 8 percentage points from 2000.</p><p>DeKalb County, the other majority-black metro Atlanta county, stayed flat at about 54 percent over that three-year period.</p><p>Clayton is the fifth-most populous county in metro Atlanta. Recent estimates put its population at about 259,000.</p><p>Home ownership in Clayton is more affordable than in many other metro areas, because of low taxes and an abundance of inexpensive houses. As a result, the county is attracting plenty of young homeowners. Its median age _ 31 _ is lower than that of Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton or Gwinnett counties.</p><p>"It makes sense that people would be looking to find the best value in metro Atlanta," says Wade Starr, administrative assistant to Clayton County Commission Chairman Crandle Bray and a lifelong county resident.</p><p>In Clayton, blacks also feel that they can "participate in the political process," according to Obie Clayton, chairman of the sociology department at Morehouse College. The County Commission will have two more black members come January, for a total of three, including the new chairman. And seven of the nine school board members next year will be black.</p><p>Bray, who's also chairman of the Atlanta Regional Commission, says some older white residents probably left because Clayton is not as suburban as it used to be. For those people, he says, "the hustle and bustle is just not it anymore."</p><p>Doris Cash, a retired Clayton College & State University finance professor who studied Clayton's demographics for 25 years, says whites "may be seeking their own age groups."</p><p>"Many of the minorities are younger," Cash says. "A neighborhood filled with little kids is not the neighborhood Grandma and Grandpa were expecting to live in."</p><p>Emory Brock, Clayton's economic development director, says that what's happening today is not the white flight he saw 25 years ago when he lived in Riverdale and blacks made up just 5 percent of the county's population.</p><p>At that time, Brock said, one might see painted racial epithets and numerous for-sale signs in a neighborhood just starting to integrate.</p><p>Clayton traditionally has been a steppingstone for families looking to move up, he said. Its small geographic area and central location _ most of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport is in Clayton County _ has always meant a lot of movement in and out of the county.</p>
