violet9 writes:
> Places like Greenbelt, Hyattsville, Bladensburg, Colmar Manor, and further south
> in the county like Clinton, Waldorf, La Plata, etc.
violet9, did you bother to read my location? I live in Greenbelt. I lived in Hyattsville for a while. People who live there do not speak with a Southern accent. Incidentally, Riverdale, Bladensburg, and parts of Hyattsville and College Park are becoming heavily Hispanic, so people there don’t even speak in a native American accent, let alone a Southern one. Further south, in Clinton, you will hear this semi-Southern accent occasionally. As for Waldorf and La Plata, they aren’t even in Prince George’s County. They are in Charles County. That’s part of Southern Maryland. Yes, as I said before, you do fairly often hear in Southern Maryland what you think of as an older Maryland accent, which does sound sort of borderline Southern. But, again, that’s only a very small proportion of Maryland.
ruadh writes:
> Only 58%? I would have thought it would be higher by now.
And I predict that it will never get any higher. Indeed, I predict that it will begin decreasing within a decade and Prince George’s County will again be majority white in about 2035. As you may know, Washington reached its highest proportion of black population (more than 70%) in the early 1970’s. That was essentially the end of the “Great Migration” (as it’s sometimes called), which is the movement of blacks from the South to northern cities from about 1930 to about 1975. There are actually now slightly more blacks moving from the South to the North than from the North to the South. The proportion of blacks in most Northern cities increased greatly from 1930 to 1975, and in some cities, like D.C., they became a majority. But by the early 1970’s this movement slowed down. Middle-class blacks began moving out to suburbs, often suburbs which then became majority black themselves. In the D.C. area, this meant blacks moving from D.C. to Prince George’s County. Meanwhile the inner cities started to become more white as whites began gentrifying the innermost neighborhoods. D.C. has dropped from over 70% black to under 60%. I predict that by 2025 it will again become majority white. Prince George’s County, which in about 1950 was thought of as working-class white (who often spoke in semi-Southern accents), has become 58% black. Indeed, the blacks who have moved in are actually slightly more well off than the whites who moved out (often to Southern Maryland), so Prince George’s County is richer than it was in the 1950’s. But now there’s little movement of blacks out of D.C. into Prince George’s County. There is starting to be a movement of whites from Montgomery County to Prince George’s County, since even Silver Spring is too expensive for many people to live in. I predict this will accelerate, and northern Prince George’s County will become nearly well off as Montgomery County. By 2035, the county will again be majority white.