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It's hard to make an even comparison between Athens and Ann Arbor just considering the percentages of minorities in each place. Athens is pretty much like any town in the rural South (which until recently was pretty much the South as a whole aside from exceptions like Atlanta and New Orleans). That is, a slave-holding region, then after the Civil War, a Jim Crow region, but the populations despite segregation were largely intermingled so African Americans were always a large proportion of any given place's population. Ann Arbor is pretty much like any rural town/small city in the North. All the major factory jobs were concentrated in the big cities like Chicago or Cleveland or, in this case, Detroit, so when the Great Migration occurred, African-Americans went there instead of places like Ann Arbor. It wasn't so much that Ann Arbor didn't invite blacks, the city just didn't have anything they were interested in.
Ann Arbor is as liberal-progressive as they come and sometimes they fall over themselves to show it off, so given any sort of chance to burnish their multicultural values, they'd gladly do so. Still doesn't change the fact that the town's cost of living is very high which is its own deterrent to lower-class (and by extension lower-class minority) influxes into the city. It's not as steep of a grade as it is between Detroit proper and any of the Grosse Pointes, but it's still there.
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