The Great Migration
By 1910, white control of southern rural America, enforced by Jim Crow laws, made life for African Americans in the South intolerable. Hoping to find more freedom and better economic opportunity elsewhere, many African Americans moved with family and friends to the cities, especially border and northern cities. This mass movement became known as the First Great Migration (Thompson Fullilove, 2016, p. 23; Tolnay, 2003, p. 210). Sociologist Stewart Tolnay wrote of the tremendous impact of the Great Migration:
As the Great Migration proceeded, the South suffered substantial losses of its native-born black population, with over 2.5 million southern-born blacks living outside of the region by 1950 and over 4 million by 1980… Thus, in purely demographic terms, the Great Migration produced a dramatic geographic redistribution of the African American population. (p. 210)
As a border city, Baltimore experienced an influx of African Americans during this period. Their presence was not welcomed by everyone.
When faced with the growing number of African Americans entering the city, Baltimore’s Mayor J. Barry Mahool stated that “Blacks should be quarantined in isolated slums in order to reduce the incidence of civil disturbance, to prevent the spread of communicable disease into nearby white neighborhoods, and to protect property values among the White majority” (Rothstein, 2015, p. 205). Such a view revealed that while slavery may have been legally outlawed, the racialized hierarchy behind it had not been. And so, in 1910 when an African American Yale law school graduate purchased a home in a white neighborhood, the city government responded by creating the first race-based residential segregation ordinance in the United States. In 1917 the U.S. Supreme Court found Baltimore’s 1910 ordinance unconstitutional, not because the ordinance discriminated against Black people, but because it limited the freedom of white owners to sell to whom they wished.
Residential Segregation
Baltimore’s mayor circumvented the Supreme Court by requiring city building inspectors and health department investigators to issue code violations to homeowners who rented or sold to Blacks home buyers in white neighborhoods. In the early 1920s, Mayor Mahool formed the Committee on Segregation and appointed the city solicitor to be its chair. The Committee took over coordination of the building inspectors and health investigators to ensure segregation was enforced. They even coordinated with the city’s real estate board and community organizations, warning them “not to violate the city’s color line” (Rothstein, 2015, p. 206).
Not long after the formation of the Committee on Segregation, Baltimore neighborhood associations formed the “Allied Civic and Protective Association.” This association pushed neighborhoods to create restrictive covenants that banned sale to African Americans. Should anyone break such a covenant and sell to an African American family, the association would join with the Committee on Segregation and ask the courts to evict the African American family citing the illegality of their purchase (Rothstein, 2015, p. 206).
Baltimore’s systemic segregation forced Black families into what clinical psychiatrist and urban health researcher Mindy Thompson Fullilove (2016) called “newcomer neighborhoods…close to mills and factories. They were eccentric places, built at hazard, bisected with alleys and overhung by pollution…filth, crime, and poverty” (p. 24). While some immigrant populations could begin building their American dream in these places and then move out, African Americans could not. Historian W. Edward Orser (1994) noted that “For [B]lacks, the newcomer neighborhoods were the beginning and the end of their options for housing” (p. 24).
During this same period, Baltimore was undergoing a number of municipal reforms aimed at improving life across the city. Public health advocates began arguing for more sustained efforts to fight tuberculosis and small pox. Projects, such as public sanitation, educational visits to communities, the establishment of charity organizations and community hospitals were enacted to varying degrees. However, hidden beneath these “progressive” reforms were carefully constructed efforts to solidify Baltimore’s segregation into the legal and physical landscapes of the city. Law professor Garrett Power (1982), in writing about Baltimore’s urban reform, noted that “[f]ledgling public health efforts had made no discernable impact on the [B]lack communities - the Negro death rate from both smallpox and tuberculosis was twice that of the white average” (p. 293). By avoiding Black neighborhoods, public health officials ensured these neighborhoods would continue to decline economically and remain ghettos that none but those who had no other housing options would be forced to live in.
A charitable organization from one of the wealthier white districts in Baltimore issued a study of the housing situation in Baltimore. While some of their findings encouraged the city to require more of tenement landlords, they laid the blame for much of the urban challenges at the feet of the African American inhabitants. Their report restated deeply embedded views of African Americans as inferior, as irresponsible, lazy, and immoral. The report stated
This is not a study of social conditions, but it is impossible to observe these gregarious, light-hearted, shiftless, irresponsible alley dwellers without wondering to what extent their failings are a result of their surroundings, and to what extent the inhabitants, in turn, react for evil upon their environment. The “low standards and absence of ideals” among Negroes was “held to some degree accountable for the squalor and wretchedness” which characterized the alley neighborhoods. (Power, 1982, p. 297)
While Baltimore’s municipal reforms offered benefits to whites, they left Black families with few options for housing, financial growth, or educational opportunity. A segregated Baltimore continued the racist practices of the previous century under the guise of “progressive reform.”
Political SEgregation
Baltimore’s racial inequality was not limited to residential segregation. The city government, which had maintained some Black representation since 1890, began to shift in favor of white residents. Historian Andor Skotnes (2013) found that
A unicameral City Council replaced the old bicameral body, and the number of election districts was reduced from seventeen to six, thereby weakening the influence of neighborhood-based forces. The African American community in particular suffered from this redistricting, which diluted its voting power and undermined its ability to elect Black City Council members, as it had done since 1890. (p. 19)
Even though the Black population in Baltimore surged during the First Great Migration—in 1930, African Americans made up 17.7 percent of the 804,874 city residents—they were denied equal representation in their government, a right guaranteed to all U.S. citizens (regardless of color) under the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. Bill of Rights (Skotnes, 2013, pp. 11-13).
As a result of residential segregation and reduced political opportunity, Skotnes (2013) noted that “Blacks had separate and inferior schools, cinemas, concert halls, restaurants, recreational facilities, and health-care services. Many department stores were segregated, and in those that were not, Blacks were often barred from trying on clothes” (p. 30). The results were debilitating – especially to those who had risked much to relocate their families hoping for better employment and social opportunity. Their experience demonstrated the power of the existing racialized structure in American society that continued regardless of the legal advancements that had been made.
Eugenics
At the turn of the twentieth century, debates regarding urban health, social advancement, and the creation of a stronger society dominated white academic literature. With the increasing acceptance of Darwinism and “survival of the fittest,” scientists began exploring genetics as a pathway to creating a better society. What emerged from this pursuit was the “pseudoscience” of eugenics. Leading scientists, philanthropists, and religious leaders fell under the influence of eugenics arguments, embracing the assertion that “regardless of context, immigrants, persons of color, and the socially unfit were what their heredity made them” (Seldon, 2005, pp. 202-203).
As education scholar Steven Seldon noted “Under the broad promise that eugenics would lead to the ‘self direction of human evolution,’ its supporters used biological metaphors to shape social policies regarding immigration restriction, the segregation of those judged socially unfit, and state-sanctioned sterilization” (Seldon, 2005, p. 201). This “new science” rested on old racialized ideologies that continued to assert the superiority of the white race. If God had not cursed the Black race, thereby making them inferior, then science would prove that their hereditary make-up was the reason for their inferiority.
The rise of social policies based on eugenics added to the dire situation for people of color during the early and mid-twentieth century. Eugenics applied the crudest practices of animal husbandry to human genetic selection. In commenting on the wide impact of eugenics theory on American life, journalist Antero Pietila (2010) wrote that “[e]ugenicists advocated selective breeding. Birth control, castration, forced sterilization, and in extreme cases, euthanasia, were among the methods discussed and practiced for weeding out the “unfit”” (p. 42). Eugenicists in the United States “opposed ‘racial mixing’ because it destroyed the racial purity of whites” (Feagin, 2014. p. 78). Pietila (2010) found that
Baltimore eagerly embraced eugenics. Dr. William Welch, the famous first dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine [and first dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health], and Dr. Lewellys F. Barker, the chief physician at Johns Hopkins Hospital, directed eugenics research at the Cold Spring laboratory…under Alexander Graham Bell. (p. 44)
Eugenicists combined their pseudoscience with biased studies on the differences between the human races’ physical attributes to (re)conclude falsely that African Americans were inferior to whites. In 1916 New York lawyer Madison Grant published The Passing of the Great Race. In this book, he developed a ranked list of races with the Anglo-Saxons at the top and Black persons at the bottom. He went so far as to articulate a history of the world that argued the “rising and falling civilizations [were] based on the ‘amount of Nordic [Anglo-Saxon] blood in each nation” (Kendi, 2017, p. 310).
Psychologists also embraced eugenics theories and used them to inform standardized intelligence tests (IQ tests). Despite receiving criticism from some scholars, the majority of psychologists embraced eugenics and the intelligence testing protocols based upon it. One of the leading authors of the IQ test, Lewis Terman, argued that his test would demonstrate “enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture” (Kendi, 2017, p. 311). White politicians and policy makers now had a “science” to support their racist agendas at a time when those ranked lowest on the eugenics scales had very little social power or legal protection.
The Great Depression
The Great Depression began in 1929, and the resulting financial crash caused the American economy to crumble. As with all economic downturns, those closest to subsistence living suffer the most, leaving African Americans disproportionately effected. Feagin (2014) found that “By 1932, half of [B]lack workers in cities were unemployed. Extreme hunger or starvation was often their lot” (p. 58). In Baltimore, it was much the same: “Blacks suffered from devastatingly high rates of poverty, crime, and disease; low life expectancy; and high rates of infant mortality and illegitimacy… [and] relatively few could afford to own homes” (Skotnes, 2013, p. 31; Greenberg 2009). By cutting African Americans off from the economy, even a depressed and struggling one, whites created the fulfillment of their eugenics arguments that Black people were lazy, sickly, and immoral.
As Black people faced the devastation of the Depression, a national movement, the “Buy Where You Can Work” movement began to attract local supporters. A man known in African American circles as the Prophet Kiowa Costonie (also known as “the new Messiah”) arrived in Baltimore in 1933 and began to generate support to resist anti-Black practices. As historian Skotnes (1994) noted
Indeed, within a few months of his first appearance in Baltimore, Costonie initiated a racial advancement campaign to force white-owned stores in the African-American community to hire African-American workers. Between September 1933 and June 1934, this campaign, the “Buy Where You Can Work Movement,” mobilized large sections of Baltimore's Black community to direct action for the first time. (p. 735)
“Buy Where You Can Work” campaigns occurred in over 35 cities across the United States. As they gained attention, they created a wider movement that brought together Black activists from many different organizations. In many ways, the “Buy Where You Can Work” campaign created the momentum and social organizations that later came to fruition during the 1950s and 1960s in the Civil Rights movement (Skotnes, 1994, p. 736). Baltimore remained a critical city in the midst of this building campaign.