White Space, Black Hood

by Sheryll Cashin

  Blockbusting was the broadly used term for the practice of enticing panic selling by whites by stoking fear of a Black invasion and extracting extraordinary markups from Black buyers. Among the blockbusters who stoked white fear for profit in Baltimore were some Black speculators who also intended to advance the frontier of housing options for Black people. In 1955, two hundred blockbusters descended on Edmondson Village in West Baltimore after a few Blacks arrived. A working-class area of redbrick row houses transitioned from white to Black with the pace of a night following day. Blockbusters divided row houses into rental units to make more profit. Sometimes Black buyers divided their homes and rented space out to others in order to cover steep installment payments. Greed speeded overcrowding and deterioration.17

  Most Blacks lived in West Baltimore, but blockbusters also helped to “Blacken” the east side, where Morgan State is located. A once-small community of southern Black migrants grew as blockbusters manipulated white economic and racial fears. As the east and west wings of the Black Butterfly expanded, shops and services that white Protestant and Jewish communities had enjoyed soon disappeared from what became all-Black neighborhoods.18 As middle-class Blacks moved in, middle-class whites fled to the suburbs, propelled by Federal Housing Administration (FHA)-backed mortgages that were denied to Blacks and federally sponsored interstate highways. The first metropolitan beltway in the country, Interstate 695, sprouted prosperous edge communities in suburban counties. Baltimore’s white population plunged by one-third between 1950 and 1970.19

  By 1968, Baltimore was 46 percent Black. Black Americans were underrepresented on a racially gerrymandered city council; all citywide elected officials were white.20 Baltimore’s Black neighborhoods had suffered from major development decisions made for them by others. An east-west expressway had been planned as early as the 1930s. Over three decades, state highway builders procured and demolished thousands of Black-occupied homes along the Franklin-Mulberry corridor in the Harlem Park neighborhood though the expressway was never built. In the 1940s, descendants in East and West Baltimore formed a “Movement Against Destruction” to resist demolition by the highway builders.

  Harlem Park, the spiritual and cultural center of Black life in the city, was home to historic churches and institutions and striving Black professionals and civil rights activists, including Parren Mitchell. Like W. Ashbie Hawkins, Mitchell was an alumnus of Morgan State, and he wanted to continue his education at the University of Maryland. Mitchell assented when Thurgood Marshall and other lawyers for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF) recruited him to sue. Together, they forced the university to admit Mitchell to its graduate program in sociology, which he completed with honors. Mitchell also seemed to share Hawkins’s belief that Black Americans could represent themselves. In 1970, on his second try, he beat a ten-term incumbent, becoming the first Black elected to Congress from Maryland. His brother, Clarence Mitchell Jr., chief lobbyist for the NAACP for three decades, helped secure federal civil rights laws that propelled the second Reconstruction.

  Harlem Park, economically integrated and proud, declined after the revival of a proposal for an east-west highway in the 1960s. Once the area was targeted for a cut-through, residents ceased investing in their homes and many buildings deteriorated or were abandoned. Despite community protests, highway builders condemned parts of Rosemont, a middle-class Black neighborhood, though the expressway was ultimately canceled.21 Such decisions by road builders and those empowered to shape development devastated Black communities in Baltimore and nationally. Road building provided an opportunity to clear out inner-city “blight,” though that really meant undesired people. The road builders used highways to insulate white communities with concrete, with ramparts of four to eight lanes. Vital Black neighborhoods like Sweet Auburn in Atlanta, also called “the richest Negro street in the world” for its concentration of Black commerce, were intentionally cut in two by freeways.22

  Former US senator Barbara Mikulski famously began her public career opposing an interstate link through Canton and Fells Point. These majority-white neighborhoods were spared any demolition. Black neighborhoods in West Baltimore, at the stub end of a 1.4-mile abandoned “Highway to Nowhere,” were not so fortunate. More than 1,500 residents were permanently displaced from a multiblock swath cleared for the abandoned road, which destroyed 971 homes and 62 businesses. The highway itself was a sunken six-lane ditch with no off-ramps.23

  It was an assault on Blackness. Highways and urban renewal displaced about a tenth of Baltimore’s population. Most of those uprooted were descendants, and the shock of displacement increased instability and abandonment. Those in charge of public housing development added to the misery. The city bulldozed homes for highways or “renewal” and then moved the poor Blacks it had displaced into public or subsidized housing in neighborhoods that mounted the least resistance. This created pockets of intense poverty, social dysfunction, and discontent. After Dr. King was assassinated in 1968, disempowered descendants rioted and set Baltimore on fire. Widespread damage was self-inflicted, but the urban decay associated with Baltimore’s Black neighborhoods predated the riots and traced back to HOLC’s D ratings, the exploitation of blockbusters, and poverty-concentrating development that moved Negroes.24

  “The Road to Nowhere”

  URBAN RENEWAL AND HIGHWAYS AS “NEGRO REMOVAL”

  The University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab mapped the location of urban renewal projects in Baltimore and the nation. Nearly all were in areas previously rated D by HOLC, a cumulative attack on Black neighborhoods. In Baltimore, urban renewal displaced 8,678 families, 74 percent of which were of color, by the 1960s.25 The Highway to Nowhere, running east-west just a few blocks below a renewal project in Harlem Park, added to the neighborhood’s trauma.

  In the wake of the 1968 riots, white flight to suburban Baltimore County continued, as did that county’s virulent opposition to open housing or any development that invited or retained Black residents. The county used federal urban renewal funds and its police and zoning powers to target and remove poor Black settlements in what MIT urban studies scholar Yale Rabin called “expulsive zoning.” It systematically displaced low-income Black families by rezoning Black residential areas for business or industry and sparing nearby white areas. Compensation was rare; most of those displaced were forced to seek housing in Baltimore. Baltimore County razed its four public housing projects by 1954 and adamantly refused to comply with the new Fair Housing Act of 1968. It also left Black hamlets with un-paved streets and scant public investment while adjacent white developments received paved streets and better improvements.26

  Descendants were left behind in a wounded, extremely segregated city much poorer than the surrounding suburbs. After the riots, disinvestment, especially in redlined West Baltimore, continued. Middle- and upper-income African Americans and some of the historic churches they attended scattered, often decamping from Baltimore to segregated Black areas in suburban counties. With deindustrialization, a city once buoyed by the Port of Baltimore, Bethlehem Steel, and manufacturing hemorrhaged more than one hundred thousand factory jobs. The steel mill and a General Motors plant closed, as did others. The port fell from the second- to eleventh-busiest in the nation.27 Gone were the jobs that enabled Baltimoreans without a college degree to “make good money,” as Black folk would say, through work. In the poorest neighborhoods, the drug trade filled the vacuum. Meanwhile, public-policy makers made matters worse.

  Housing policies continued to contain descendants in high-poverty neighborhoods. As a federal court found in Thompson v. US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the federal government concentrated public housing almost exclusively in the city of Baltimore, bypassing surrounding counties. As of 2018, Baltimore had the fifth-highest public housing density but was only twenty-sixth in population among US cities. Despite this history of intentionally concentrating Black poverty, Senator Mikulski led the effort to eliminate funding for HUD
’s Moving to Opportunity program. The demonstration program would have moved fewer than a thousand Baltimore public housing residents to middle-class locales across a multicounty region. Mikulski sided with suburban opponents who were misinformed. Working-class whites in an eastern Maryland suburb that already had its fair share of low-income housing were most vocal, though they weren’t even likely to be impacted.28

  In 1987, Baltimore native Kurt Schmoke became the city’s first elected African American mayor. Like virtually every first Black mayor in an American city, he inherited ghettos created by white supremacy. By then, Baltimore was a majority-Black city. Across the region, stark patterns of light and dark, affluent and poor, advantaged and denied, were entrenched.

  Schmoke, a Rhodes scholar and graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School, gained national attention when he proposed decriminalization as an alternative to the War on Drugs. The drug trade and related epidemics of violence, heroin, and AIDS roiled the city. “How could we improve communities without a war on drugs?” he asked in a Baltimore magazine interview in 2018. “We didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Law enforcement would make a show of the drugs and money they seized, but the problem persisted.” He reasoned, based on his years as a drug-warring prosecutor and careful attention to data, that drug prohibition actually increased crime and violence without reducing addiction. He wanted a conversation about alternatives but was met with national outrage. The country would later catch up to his views.29 During the height of crack and the drug war, it took courage to resist constructed myths and advocate for evidence-based solutions—like a needle-exchange program for addicts, which Schmoke convinced the legislature to support.30 Though he served as mayor for three terms and had some successes, segregation and the ravages of deindustrialization remained.

  Schmoke and developer James Rouse partnered to try to counter these forces. Together, they channeled $130 million in public and private investment into Sandtown-Winchester. The initiative built or renovated more than a thousand affordable homes and launched education and health services. But new homes and well-intentioned services did not enhance residents’ possibilities for finding work, nor did they attract new jobs or businesses to the area. This one-time infusion was not able to counter eight decades of intention in quarantining descendants.31 Schmoke also couldn’t overcome suburban indifference or hostility to the majority-Black city.32 That polarization would contribute to another betrayal of Baltimore in the 2000s.

  THE RED LINE

  Maps tell stories. The city of Baltimore’s health department produced one for a community health assessment; it appears as Map 1.3 in the insert. In its pointillist digital painting, each resident is rendered as one colored dot. Blacks are purple; whites are peach; Asians are blue; Latinx, a difficult-to-discern aqua; mixed-race people, red; and Indigenous people, unfortunately, invisible. The resulting Butterfly, a dense purple, dominates the landscape and the White L, a peachy mixture, persists at the city’s center. Blacks are still a majority, about 63 percent, of the city’s population. Asian, Latinx, and mixed-race residents complicate the picture of persistent segregation. Asians are clustered mainly near whites. Latinx and mixed-race people straddle both majority-Black and majority-white neighborhoods. The city’s health department acknowledged the historic policies that produced segregation and attendant environmental differences that contribute to pronounced health disparities across neighborhoods.33 It did not mention disparities in access to transportation, which loom large in Baltimore.

  In 1965, planners envisioned six rapid-transit lines radiating from downtown Baltimore to the suburban edges.34 Two years later, the Baltimore Regional Planning Council suggested a similar plan including an east-west line through Black neighborhoods.35 Suburbanites opposed these lines; racial fear was the explicit or implied subtext. Anne Arundel County, a very white county south of Baltimore, home to Annapolis, resisted any rail routes. One vocal group in Anne Arundel complained, “The Metro would enable poor, inner-city blacks to travel to the suburbs, steal residents’ TVs and then return to their ghettos in Baltimore.” Light rail garnered the dog-whistling moniker “Loot Rail.”36

  Because of fierce public opposition, a single subway line was laid, a Metro “system” with only one spoke and no wheel. Opened in 1983, it runs fifteen miles northwest from Baltimore to Owings Mill, Maryland. A light rail line was eventually laid that followed the north-south route of the original 1965 plan. Opened in 1992, it runs from northern Baltimore County through downtown Baltimore and south to the Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport. Two affluent white neighborhoods, Ruxton and Riderwood, succeeded in vetoing stops on this line. The light rail route largely served whites in the northern reaches of the city and suburbs who wished to travel south to Baltimore’s tourist-centered Inner Harbor and the retro-style Camden Yards baseball stadium, which also opened in 1992. This route traversed the vertical corridor of the White L and didn’t even connect with the lone subway line.37

  In the absence of a comprehensive transit system, people without cars, particularly low-income descendants concentrated in West Baltimore, were forced to depend on a woefully scattered and maddeningly slow bus system operated by the Maryland Transit Administration, known as MTA. Ramelle McCall told a ProPublica reporter what he endured to escape the odds of living in Sandtown-Winchester. As a teenager in the 1990s, McCall rose at 5 a.m. for the two-hour commute to an arts magnet high school in the county. Later, he attended a commuter college outside the I-695 beltway; he road bus to rail to bus again, sharing the journey ad nauseam with Black domestics heading to work in suburban castles. They waited for buses that scorned published schedules, passed them by when filled, and, once they did board, crawled along clogged routes. This young Black man must have had supernatural strengths. He became an Episcopal priest and returned to minister to a depopulated, mostly Black church in the city’s heart.38

  More recently, an investigative reporter for WBAL-TV Channel 11 tried to ride MTA buses from West Baltimore to a new Amazon fulfillment center in southeast Baltimore seven miles away. Had she driven a car, the commute would have taken twenty-three minutes. She boarded the number twenty-one MTA bus on West Lafayette Avenue, which borders Sandtown-Winchester, at 5:30 a.m. At 6 a.m., she got on the packed number eight bus, headed downtown. A descendant chuckled when she told him where she was going, “Oh my . . . okay, good luck,” he offered. She then boarded the number twenty-six bus and endured fifteen stops before arriving at Amazon. The trip took ninety-five minutes. Had she been an employee trying to make the 7 a.m. shift, she would have been late, underscoring a brutal statistic. Less than one in three Baltimoreans can get to work in under ninety minutes on public transportation. Meanwhile, according to bus riders, in low-wage, high-turnover service jobs, employers regularly fire employees after three tardy arrivals of more than fifteen minutes. They call it a transit dismissal. In the service and shipping industries clustered near BWI Marshall Airport, bus riders often have to walk the last mile of their commute; employer-provided shuttles can be sporadic. With businesses reluctant to invest in West Baltimore, and burgeoning development in the southeastern part of the region, carless descendants in the west were cut off from opportunity.39

  Sorely missing was the long-planned east-west transit route to major employment hubs and other rail lines. For decades suburbanites resisted transit as well as open housing. Plans for a comprehensive rail system remained a paper dream. A movement toward New Urbanist walkable living and a route that didn’t reach much into the suburbs improved the odds for transit in Baltimore. In 2002, Governor Parris Glendening, an advocate of smart growth, supported new planning for what would be called the Red Line. It is an ironic name for a proposed corridor in which the majority of residents are African Americans living in historically redlined neighborhoods.40

  The proposed 14-mile line included a 3.4-mile tunnel that would have allowed the public to glide under congested downtown streets where cars crawled at six to twelve mile
s per hour during peak periods. The planned route ran from suburban Woodlawn just beyond the city’s western edge through struggling West Baltimore to downtown, the Inner Harbor, gentrifying Fells Point and Canton, and struggling East Baltimore, ending at the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. Planned stops included other major employers like the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Social Security Administration in Woodlawn and the downtown central business district, where 160,000 employees converged every weekday. Stops were also planned for Edmondson Village, Rosemont, Harlem Park, and other Black neighborhoods that would finally benefit from rather than be degraded by robust infrastructure development. Planners also proposed stops connecting to Amtrak/MARC train routes and the subway and light rail lines, to create a comprehensive rail system. Baltimore was more than a century overdue for racial healing, and the city was going to be united, at least physically, through transit.

  The planning process also began to repair trust and relations between the city and its Black neighborhoods, and between those neighborhoods and predominantly white ones. Federal, state, and city transportation agencies, a host of organizations and citizens worked together for twelve years to plan for, design, and approve the Red Line. The MTA was inclusive as it tried to build community support. Government actors met repeatedly with citizens and stakeholder organizations. Together, they hammered out a written document that summarized state and city commitments to Baltimoreans. The Red Line Community Compact was a blueprint for ensuring Baltimore residents and businesses participated in construction, the Red Line improved the environment, and citizens had a voice in fostering community-centered development. Dozens of individuals, organizations, and state and local government officials signed this compact.41 West Baltimore communities denuded of commerce were rezoned for mixed uses, anticipating new economic and civic activity around each station. Each proposed station had an advisory committee to help shape their neighborhood’s renewal. Edmondson-Westside High School, for example, was going to train local adults and students to enter jobs in construction, maintenance, and transit operations. One elder advocated for new trees to beautify their station.42 Citizens planted many ideas—the kind of civic roots, if allowed to grow, that social scientists suggest discourages violence in poor neighborhoods.43