Black, Successful and Safe And Gone From Capital

Richard Jones moved here to the suburbs in 1979 to shield his children from the drugs and street crime that were rampant in his southeast Washington neighborhood. Yet 17 years later and now retired as an air traffic controller, Mr. Jones still does volunteer work with poor children in his old neighborhood, and every now and then he yearns to move back into the city.

"I would like to go back," he said, seated at the dining room table of his tidy four-bedroom home. "I think that it's people like me who have to go back. At some point, we need middle-class black people to go back and reclaim the city."

Across the table, his wife, Linda, emphatically shook her head no.

Two decades after the District of Columbia and its black majority won the long-coveted right of limited self-government, significant numbers of the city's black middle class have fled to the suburbs in disillusionment and transplanted ambition, an exodus that is both primary effect and cause of the District's continuing decline.

According to census data, nearly 50,000 blacks moved out of Washington in the 1980's, a net decline of about 11 percent in the city's black population. In the same period, the city's white population increased by nearly 8,000. The District is thus one of the few American cities that have become whiter while growing poorer.

This exodus of Washington's black residents to here in Prince George's County, which borders the District on the east, has transformed a formerly white-majority county with a bitter history of racial segregation into a new emblem of rising black prosperity and political power.

The search for a cure for the nation's capital is now focusing on the middle class -- on keeping those who have stayed, even luring back some who have left. But as they look back at their old and troubled hometown -- now with a population estimated at 554,000, about 65 percent black and about 32 percent white -- some of the people here find themselves torn between the powerful political, economic and emotional pull of the District and a determination to preserve and nurture the lives and the communities they have created here. People like Mr. Jones, who is in his early 50's, may talk about returning, but they are hard to find.