1910: The Great Migration
The Great Migration saw many Black families leaving the South and Moving North.
Source: Illinois Historical Society
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.