Edition: U.S. / Global

Blacks Rise as Power in Washington Suburb

Published: July 1, 2001

The ribbon cutting was simple but served to highlight the growing black exodus from the nation's capital toward the suburban frontier.

On this day, the Prince George's County executive, Wayne K. Curry, dedicated a new police precinct in a shopping mall here just a few hundreds yards from the southern edge of Washington, a city that has been steadily losing tens of thousands of blacks as they pursue the suburban dream. In their exodus, they have built a new black majority in this one-time white county.

The latest census figures confirm that Prince George's County's black majority has increased to 63 percent, up 12 points from a decade ago, while Washington has slipped from its historic margin of more than 70 percent black in 1980 to about 60 percent black. That is a drop of 6 points in the 1990's.

Across the county line, in the District of Columbia, the census shift is prompting concern and inspiring opinion articles by city residents about a potential threat to the urban blacks' deep pride in their ''Chocolate City.''

But here in Prince George's, Mr. Curry, the county's first African-American executive, is celebrating the other side of the migration coin as his county grows as a bastion of upwardly mobile blacks.

''We are an anomaly,'' said Mr. Curry, 50, a suburbanite, tried and true, who helped break segregation barriers as a schoolboy in the county's days of a single-digit black minority. He has ridden the rising racial tide to the political crest.

''We are the only large political subdivision in the nation that went from being all white to a black majority where income and education went up and not down,'' he said.

Indeed, the median family income in Prince George's County in 1997 was $63,745, the latest figures available.

''This place exists in defiance of stereotypic notions of what racial transformation means,'' the county executive said.

At the same time, Mr. Curry is pointing to the changing nature of the flow of people from Washington. In the beginning, pioneering families of up-and-coming black government workers came looking for a break from the urban ills of the 1970's and 1980's. But lately there are more poor and low-income arrivals who come with rent vouchers in hand after being displaced from public housing in Washington's own gentrification boom.

''We've got the most complicated hand around the Washington region,'' said Mr. Curry, who noted that his county, with a population of 801,515, had long outdrawn other surrounding suburbs as the destination of choice for African-Americans from Washington. ''We're getting the urban poor and the same pressures about huge school systems with inadequate funding, typically big families, the erosion of physical facilities from crowding. And crime, guns, dope, free care at the hospital.

''We are shouldering a huge share of the burden of homogenizing or integrating these forces around the Washington region,'' said Mr. Curry, who hopes to use the new census as leverage to change federal subsidy policies that he complains unfairly favor cities over suburbs, which have inherited urban problems.

Mr. Curry talks of basic political power shifting from old cities to new suburbs as he serves as chairman of the National Association of Counties' Large Urban County Caucus, a group of the country's 100 most populous suburbs.

At the precinct dedication, Mr. Curry carefully observed that the county enjoyed ''the lowest crime rate in over a decade.'' Beyond such data, however, the reality is that the county is being investigated by the Department of Justice because many middle-class black residents are coming forward to complain of what they say is police brutality.

''People know not to be doing any crime around here,'' said Sheila Brown, a 40-year-old shop worker who lives along the nearby city border. ''I've seen the poor since I was a little girl in the District. I've got to say we give them the best and they just tear it up.''

But Mr. Curry, whose county has a large stock of subsidized housing, low-rent garden apartments that are a magnet for displaced city dwellers, describes far more opportunity than risk presented by the newcomers. He makes a point of complimenting the city in fighting for its own recovery by razing public housing and planning the federally subsidized, mixed-income urban redevelopment that he maintains should be made more available to his county, too.

The relationship between the county and the city was underlined two years ago in a study, ''A Region Divided,'' by the Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Planning, a research group in Washington. It warned that the region was ''starkly divided'' by race, with African-Americans clustered in the eastern, more impoverished sector of Washington and the closer neighborhoods of Prince George's.

The new census confirmed the divide as the county's black population grew by 36 percent in the decade, while its white population decreased by 31 percent. In Washington, with property values rising for a population of 572,059, the number of black residents fell in the decade by 54,000, many of them new suburbanites, while the white population dropped by only 3,500.

The Brookings study found that the wealthier residents of Prince George's tended to live farther east, beyond the Washington Beltway, while the metropolitan region's western half of largely white city neighborhoods and suburban counties ''enjoys most of the fruits of prosperity.''

''Of all the area's jurisdictions, Prince George's County is in the toughest bind,'' the study concluded. ''It must deal with the high costs of social distress in inner-Beltway communities and the high costs of new growth elsewhere in the county.''

In Washington's Eighth Ward, Councilwoman Sandy Allen, like many city residents, calls Prince George's ''the Ninth Ward.'' She rues the poor's exodus to the county as the city razes more of its public housing.

''That does dishearten me that the people who have been here are gone and the city's population is changing,'' said Ms. Allen, whose ward has suffered some of the worst urban ills and also the largest black emigration of the past decade.

''Close to 10,000 left and most went to Prince George's,'' Ms. Allen noted. ''All the things those African-Americans fought for and went through, and now they're not here. This is a city that my great-grandmother walked into from slavery,'' she said, adding that she hoped the city, with its rich African-American history, would never tilt to a white majority.

But in Prince George's County, Mr. Curry maintains that there is more than one kind of African-American history and progress in the making in the region. ''Most places that got to be majority black in the central cities got that way because of disinvestment,'' he said. ''White folks with money and means said, 'I'm getting out of here.'

''Well, we've attracted people of means,'' he said of the county's black middle class. ''But now we have to have policies that don't reconcentrate the very poverty that you're trying to overcome in the city.''

Photo: The black majority of Prince George's County, Md., which includes Charlene Burgess, left, and Sheila Brown, has increased to 63 percent. (Susana Raab for The New York Times)