Georgia 13th District

Many of the great landmarks of the civil-rights movement, and the headquarters of many of its leading organizations, are in the central city of Atlanta. The city’s cohesive and talented African-American community, more than any other, provided the leadership and inspiration for the struggle that transformed the United States. In the 1960s, Atlanta’s blacks were clustered in ghetto neighborhoods on the south and west sides of the city. The north side and the suburbs in every direction were heavily or entirely white. Today, metro Atlanta’s thriving black middle class has moved outward in almost every direction in one of the nation’s fastest-growing metro areas—to southern DeKalb County to the east, to Clayton County directly south of the city, to southwest Fulton County, to eastern and southern Cobb and Douglas counties to the west.

The 13th Congressional District of Georgia is a collection of suburban areas that have attracted Atlanta’s African-American middle class. It is a majority-black district with a nucleus in Clayton County, which is heavily dependent economically on the airport. The biggest change in the 2005 redistricting was the addition of Cobb County. Cobb and Clayton counties each contain about one-third of the district’s population, and the rest is parceled out across DeKalb, Douglas, Fulton, and Henry counties. The district is heavily Democratic.