CHARLOTTE, N.C. — With the Democratic National Convention set to start in Charlotte next week, a lot is riding on the shoulders of Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx. Sure, he sounded casual when he said he’s just “playing the role of the host of a large dinner party. I’m going to spend my time greeting as many of the 35,000 guests as I can.” But as a convention speaker, Foxx, a Democrat in his second term, will be more than that. The 41-year-old mayor is representing what has been called the New South, managing expectations about his own future and making the case for a president and friend he supports.
Phyllis Diller: Always funny, and always in control
I’m not sure what younger people make of those long-ago clips from the “Tonight Show” with Diller a court jester in funny clothes waving a cigarette holder and cackling on cue. But watching her back then, you knew that even though she was saying terrible things about her looks, her cooking and her husband, she was really, to use a more modern phrase, “building her brand” — Phyllis Diller Inc. When she died this week at the age of 95, you could read the real story
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Why We’re Moving Back South
Thomas Clark was one of those committed New Yorkers. “For me it was the whole urban dynamic of being in a big city, being in the financial center of the world,” said the former New York state banking official and onetime president and CEO of Carver Federal Savings Bank. Commuting into Manhattan from his White Plains, N.Y., home, the self-described “little guy from Lackawanna, N.Y.,” took advantage of every social and cultural opportunity and “exposure to so many different people.”
Now, Clark is content with a few visits back a year. Drawn by the cost of living, quality of life and the weather, the 67-year-old Clark moved to Charlotte, N.C., when he retired in November 2008. He’s not alone. “Most of the people I’m meeting are from somewhere else,” he said.
Clark is part of what is being called the “reverse migration” of African Americans from the North to the South, a trend that was starkly reflected in the 2010 U.S. Census data. According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, between 2000 and 2009, most of the big metro areas with the largest growth in the African-American population were in the South. “Economic progress, cultural ties and an emerging black middle class have driven greater numbers of blacks to prosperous Southern metropolitan areas like Atlanta, Dallas, Houston and Raleigh,” according to analysis by William Frey, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, with losses in states such as Illinois and Michigan.
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