1910: 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).
Baltimore Tries Drastic Plan Of Race Segregation, from December 25, 1910
Source: Sunday Magazine
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.”