Caribbean Atlanta Neighborhoods

Afro-Caribbean migrants have marked their presence in Atlanta by creating Caribbean spaces across the metropolitan area. Unlike their counterparts in New York and Miami, Afro-Caribbeans in Atlanta are forming ethnic cultural spaces in the suburbs rather than in the heart of the city. This fits with the residential patterns of Afro-Caribbeans in this study (as discussed in Chapter Two). The majority of Afro-Caribbean migrants in Atlanta have settled outside the city limits, with the largest concentration in suburban areas east of the city. The settlement of Afro-Caribbeans in the suburbs follows a recent shift in immigrant settlement patterns in the US from major cities to suburbs (Singer, Hardwick, and Brettell 2008b). David, a sixty-year-old Jamaican man who migrated from New York in 1989, explained to me how the Caribbean community has spread out across the Atlanta metro area since the migration began.

“The Caribbean community, 20 or 25 years ago, in the 1990s was centered in DeKalb County, which includes the towns of Stone Mountain and Lithonia. It has now spread out to points north. I work in Kennesaw and there is a vibrant Caribbean community there. There are Caribbean people in Roswell and even further up than that, well into the suburbs. It has gone south Stockbridge. You find a lot of folks living down there. Of course, it goes all the way down to Conyers and Douglasville. The Caribbean community is very spread out now.”

            One of the first and most significant Caribbean spaces to form in the Atlanta area is in the small city of Stone Mountain located east of Atlanta city limits in DeKalb County. Stone Mountain is, according to the Afro-Caribbean migrants in this study, the place where you can find Caribbean people, food, clubs, and businesses in Atlanta. In 2010, the city’s population was 5,802, with blacks making up 69 percent of the residents. West Indian was the second largest ethnic group. West Indians made up 4 percent of the city’s population and are the second largest ethnicity behind English, making up 5 percent of the population, according to the 2010 American Community Survey estimates. For many Afro-Caribbean transplants, Stone Mountain is the heart of Caribbean Atlanta; its plethora of businesses and high concentration of Caribbean residents evoke images of Crown Heights and Flatbush in Brooklyn, two well-known, large Caribbean commercial and residential areas of the New York City borough. Memorial Drive, one of the main streets, is a commercial street filled with Caribbean businesses, including a mall of clubs that are bustling during the weekends, especially during holiday weekends, and carnival weekend.

            The small city was named for the nearby mountain. Located inside Stone Mountain State Park, the mountain has a giant memorial of three Confederate military leaders carved into its side. Stone Mountain was the local home of the Ku Klux Klan, which was revived there after dying out in the 1870s (Wade 1998). This history marks a stark contradiction to what the area has become of late—a black suburb with a growing Caribbean enclave. Very few of the Afro-Caribbean migrants that I interviewed knew about the anti-black history of Stone Mountain. Whenever I asked about Stone Mountain, my respondents only mentioned its Caribbean community. They never mentioned its dark history of racial violence. Their settlement in Stone Mountain is similar to their settlement in New York City, where they have carved out distinct Caribbean enclaves within larger black neighborhoods, except in this case, Afro-Caribbeans in Atlanta are forming residential niches in the black suburbs rather than the black inner city neighborhoods (Tedrow and Crowder 2001). This “pioneer” type of settlement into an area that was previously hostile, and potentially dangerous for blacks, is not surprising, given that research on Caribbean immigrants in New York has shown that they were among the first black people to move into once white areas in the city and helped to racially mix neighborhoods such as Canarsie and Crown Heights (Lobo and Salvo 2000; Crowder and Tedrow 2001; Bashi 2007). By moving to Stone Mountain and forming neighborhoods there, Caribbean immigrants establish themselves as a distinct ethnic community, and still maintain a connection to the larger black community in Atlanta.  

As a distinctly Caribbean neighborhood, Stone Mountain provides Afro-Caribbean migrants in Atlanta a comfortable space where they can connect to their compatriots, purchase Caribbean foods and products, participate in Caribbean cultural organizations, and attend Caribbean clubs. Most Afro-Caribbeans interviewed for this study reported that the presence of Caribbean compatriots, events, and products played a major part in their satisfaction with their new lives in Atlanta. As discussed in the preceding chapters, Afro-Caribbeans were greatly attracted to Atlanta by its image as a black mecca. The presence of a vibrant Caribbean community was seen by many of the migrants as an added bonus to living in Atlanta. Dwight, a Kittian migrant in his mid-thirties who migrated from New York to Atlanta in 2007, explained to me how the existence of Caribbean neighborhoods in Atlanta greatly helped him and his family adapt to their new lives in the southern city. He stated:

The fact that there is a Caribbean community and I can go get some Caribbean food and I can experience some Caribbean music and some Caribbean festivity, that’s definitely good. You know, we like to eat Caribbean food. And, we can cook it but you don’t always feel like cooking. And, it’s good to be able to experience your people and your culture and your music. I’m glad that exists because it definitely makes living here a little easier. I don’t feel like I left that behind. I feel like I can get that here. There are some things I feel that we left behind in New York that we haven’t gotten here, but that’s not one of them.

Although almost all of the Afro-Caribbeans in this study identified Stone Mountain as a Caribbean neighborhood, and the center of the community in Atlanta, I found that only two of my respondents lived there at the time that I interviewed them. Several migrants did live there during their time living in Atlanta, usually staying with a relative soon after they migrated to the area, but they moved to other suburbs that, according to them, had better housing and schools. The small number of migrants to have lived in Stone Mountain is not surprising, since, as I discussed in the preceding chapters, many of the Afro-Caribbean migrants in this study had no networks and/or decided to move to Atlanta even though they had no ties there. The most common reason that respondents gave for not living in Stone Mountain was that they wanted to live in an ethnically diverse neighborhood. Despite spending a lot of time there socially, Kerry, a thirty-nine year old woman of Trinidadian descent who moved to Atlanta from New York in 1994, explained to me that she chose to live in Cobb County instead of Stone Mountain because of the ethnic diversity that living in the county offered her. She said: “When I think of a true melting pot in a county, I find that more in Cobb. In Stone Mountain, not so much. Lithonia, not so much. I think that those areas are heavily populated by one group—us. I don’t see Indians, Caucasians, or Chinese. In Cobb, I see everything.” Like Kerry, other Afro-Caribbean migrants told me that they preferred to live in a diverse area, rather than one dominated by only one group. Research has shown that DeKalb County—the county where Stone Mountain is located—is the most diverse county in the Atlanta metropolitan area and that Cobb County is becoming increasingly diverse as immigrants and African Americans, attracted by their housing and job opportunities, settle there (Hansen 2005; Singer, Hardwick, and Brettell 2008b). I found that the Afro-Caribbeans that I interviewed for this study were especially not interested in living predominantly black or Caribbean neighborhoods. Though they reported being attracted to Atlanta because it was a black city, this did not necessarily mean that they moved so they could live in black only areas. This was especially important to Afro-Caribbeans who migrated to the area from New York. Even if they lived in the Caribbean neighborhoods in New York, they were used to living and working in a diverse environment and wanted to have a similar experience in Atlanta.

The Caribbean spaces that have formed in the suburban areas of Atlanta such as Stone Mountain are important for immigrant newcomers to cushion the resettlement process. These spaces help Afro-Caribbean immigrants to feel more at home. It is a place where all Afro-Caribbeans, not only recent migrants, can live among Caribbean compatriots, find Caribbean food and products, develop social networks, and showcase their culture and their presence as a distinct black ethnic community in Atlanta.