Black Baltimore
By: M.Crenson

I heard about the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education while listening to the car radio from the back seat of my father’s ’49 Studebaker. I was 11 and just finishing the sixth grade at a legally segregated elementary school in Baltimore. I thought that the court’s decision would take effect right away. It was, after all, supreme. I was unaware that the justices would hold the Brown case over for a year so that they could consider arguments about its implementation. The Baltimore Board of School Commissioners, however, acted more quickly than the court. Three days after the announcement of the Brown decision, Board President Walter Sondheim convened the commissioners to consider how they should respond to the ruling. Exactly two weeks later, the board voted unanimously to desegregate the city’s schools when they reopened in September 1954. The decision took about three minutes, and there was no public discussion. A week after that, the board members voted, again unanimously, to approve the desegregation plan that the school superintendent had drawn up at their direction. My expectations about the speed of the integration process turned out to be roughly accurate. In September, I would be attending a racially integrated, citywide junior high school named, ironically, the Robert E. Lee School.

Under the freedom-of-choice plan approved by the school board, the number of black students attending formerly white schools in September was not large. But they were concentrated in a relatively small number of schools, and several black children started with me at Robert E. Lee. We never talked about race. Neither did the teachers. In fact, I never heard anyone discuss the racial integration of our school with the students—no teacher, no principal or vice-principal, no counselor. No one tried to explain to us what was happening or why.

The city at large was almost as quiet as my teachers on the subject of school integration. It was so quiet that one segregationist expressed his puzzlement at the absence of debate in a letter to The Baltimore Sun. “Somewhere in this town of ours,” he wrote, “there must be others with the urge to voice the opinion.” For four and a half months, however, Baltimore did nothing but congratulate itself—quietly. Then, in white, working-class Pigtown, about thirty women picketed the neighborhood elementary school to protest its integration. A much larger crowd—mostly students—gathered at Southern High School. Fistfights broke out, and there were several arrests. But the protests lasted for only three days and affected only about three percent of the school population. In a statement that would later be echoed by public officials in the deeper South to dismiss integrationists, Southern’s principal blamed the segregationist disturbances on “agitators” who had spread false rumors about conditions at his school by telephone. Nineteen civic and religious organizations announced their support for the school board’s decision to desegregate voluntarily. A Superior Court judge threw out a suit challenging the desegregation of the city schools. The city’s police commissioner delivered a televised statement in which he warned that the picketing of schools might constitute a misdemeanor under a state law prohibiting disruption of classes, and that inciting children to boycott their classes was also a crime.

The protests evaporated, and for the time being the debate about school integration in Baltimore was over. Prolonged discussion would have suggested uncertainty and encouraged resistance. Saying as little as possible was the conscious policy of the superintendent of schools. According to a subsequent review of school integration, sponsored by city and state human-relations commissions, the superintendent “and his administrative staff, backed by the Board of School Commissioners, believed firmly that the less said in advance about integration the better, since talking about it would focus attention on presumed problems and create the impression that difficulties were anticipated.” In the schools themselves, integration would be carried out “by ‘doing what comes naturally,’ so that children would look upon it as a natural and normal development and hence nothing over which to become excited or disturbed.”

The silence that I encountered at Robert E. Lee was not just one school’s response to integration. It was not just an accident. It was the intentional response of the school system. The school board’s early and abrupt compliance with the Brown decision had been intended to minimize political conflict on the issue of race and foreclose public discussion of school integration.

School officials might find it convenient to pursue strategies that stifled public conflict about education, but the acquiescence of Baltimoreans in general could not be taken for granted. Thousands of white Southerners had migrated to the city during World War II to work in defense plants, and many whites who were native Baltimoreans shared southerners’ segregationist views. The city, after all, had named one of its public schools after Robert E. Lee. For the most part, however, Baltimoreans made little or no trouble for their leaders. The muffling of racial conflict was not just a matter of elite convenience but widespread political convention.


Racially Reticent City

African Americans have been a majority in Baltimore since the mid-1970s. But it was 1987 before the city elected a black mayor, and race was not an issue in the campaign, because both of the leading candidates were black. Only in 1995 did black representatives become a majority of the city council. They still hold a majority of the seats, but the mayor (as of press time) is once again a white man. If race had been a polarizing issue in city politics, the African-American majority would surely have risen up to claim its share of Baltimore’s government sooner than it did, and held it longer. But racial politics has been unexpectedly muted in Baltimore, a fact that puzzled the only black mayor that the city ever elected. Shortly before leaving office in 1999, Mayor Kurt Schmoke complained that Baltimore was a “city where issues of race continue to be important, but they are issues that no one wants to talk about. It’s almost as though people would like to ignore the fact that race continues to be a significant factor determining the quality of life in the city and the metropolitan area.”

Since Schmoke had been mayor of the city for twelve years, one might well ask what kept him from disrupting the culture of avoidance that has generally prevented the race issue from rising high on Baltimore’s political agenda. Schmoke himself conceded that he tried to avoid making race a subject of city politics. And as Schmoke suggested, Baltimoreans’ capacity to ignore the fact of race is striking. The city is hardly innocent of racial discrimination. It has a history of legally sanctioned segregation, and when it lost the force of law, segregation retained the force of habit. In the aftermath of the Brown decision, whites abandoned public education for the suburbs or private schools. Today the public school population in Baltimore City is eighty-eight percent African American. There are scarcely any stable, integrated neighborhoods.

Nothing about the present circumstances of Baltimore seems to explain why its deep racial divisions do not figure more prominently as political divisions. There is no reason to believe that Baltimoreans are less prone to racial antagonism than the residents of other big cities, but those antagonisms seldom come to roost on the city’s political agenda. Racial animosities have occasionally surfaced in local politics, but they do so only briefly and without much noise. When political candidates try to make racial appeals, they usually do so indirectly and cautiously, as when a black mayoral candidate in 1999 urged African-American residents to “vote for a man who looks like you do.” Mayor Schmoke’s bumper stickers in his 1995 reelection campaign were red, black, and green—the colors of black nationalism. Though he said almost nothing about race in his campaign, whites accused him of playing the race card, and the Baltimore Afro-American took offense at Schmoke’s belated discovery of the race issue. Schmoke himself later expressed regret about the design of the stickers. Baltimoreans have delicate sensibilities when it comes to the politics of color.

I didn’t discover just how delicate until I left the city to go to graduate school in Chicago, where I found that the discussion of race was loud, public, and raw. When I arrived in 1963, black Chicagoans were engaged in a full-scale ground offensive against the school superintendent, Benjamin C. Willis. They charged that he was blocking the racial integration of the schools by installing temporary trailers (“Willis Wagons”) to handle overcrowding at mostly black schools instead of moving the students into available spaces in mostly white schools. Almost every week an intense black activist named Al Raby would lead a protest march into the Loop to tie up rush-hour traffic. I had never seen anything like that in Baltimore. Four years later I moved to Boston. “Southie” had not yet been brought to a boil by court-ordered busing, but you could feel it coming. Baltimoreans harbor prejudices, some of them just as poisonous as the ones I encountered in Boston, but unlike Bostonians, most Baltimoreans don’t insist on telling you about them.

Why are we like this? Why don’t we scream at one another about race like people in other cities? Should we congratulate ourselves for being so non-confrontational? Probably not. The avoidance of race as a subject of public recrimination was invented long before we were around to take credit for it.


Border Town

In 1840, wealthy British social reformer James Silk Buckingham made an extended tour of the United States, which included a month’s stay in Baltimore. He found that Baltimoreans did not defend slavery as residents of New York and other cities did. They tolerated a variety of opinions on matters of race, but also exhibited a marked reticence on the subject. “In all our intercourse with the people of Baltimore,” Buckingham wrote, “and we were continually out in society, we heard less about slaves and slavery than in any other town we had yet visited.”

Polite discussion within Baltimore’s antebellum “society” reflected its position on the margin between North and South. Its merchant class included gentlemen from Southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore, where slavery was an established institutional presence. But during the Revolution, Quaker businessmen had emigrated from Philadelphia, where the British occupation had become an inconvenience to commerce, and they relocated in Baltimore, where their sons and grandsons made fortunes. Others were already here, taking advantage of Baltimore’s rapidly growing economy. Quaker abolitionists and proslavery patricians coexisted in Baltimore’s elite, socializing and doing business with one another. Among Baltimoreans who were “out in society,” there was one subject that could not bear discussion. When issues of race and slavery arose, polite citizens of the city probably changed the subject. That was why Buckingham heard so little talk of slavery, and Baltimoreans have been changing the subject ever since.

Baltimore’s location just below the Mason-Dixon Line has made it a place where white Northerners lived with white Southerners. In the past, the political and cultural differences between the two groups may have been more acutely felt than they are today. As a boy growing up in one of the city’s white neighborhoods, I was expected to declare my loyalty to either the Union or the Confederacy. The distinction occasionally became a cause—or an excuse—for fistfights and rock-throwing. But our elders managed to accommodate such differences without open conflict or public comment. It was the traditional way in which Baltimore’s grown-ups handled the issue of race.

Even the Quaker abolitionists toned down their expressed principles because they had to get along with proslavery business colleagues in a border town. The Quakers joined other emancipationists to form the Maryland Society for the Abolition of Slavery in 1789. But the society had disbanded by 1800, and Baltimore abolitionists’ attempts to revive it in 1807 failed when some of the town’s most prominent Quakers declined to take part. But in 1816, the abolitionists regrouped and formed a Protection Society. Its purpose was not to free the slaves, but to prevent free black people from falling into the hands of slavers. Its members might continue in private to hold to abolitionist principles, but in public at least they adjusted their aims to accommodate the sensibilities of slaveholders.

The complexities of life in a border town only begin to explain why white Baltimoreans tend to tiptoe around the race issue. In his study of race relations in post-Civil War Louisville, for example, historian George C. Wright found little reluctance to talk about race. The city’s ex-Confederate patricians did not hesitate to instruct their ex-slaves about the black place in local society and the kind of conduct needed for black Louis-villians to “succeed.” When a black resident tried to cross the boundaries set by whites, things could get nasty or even violent. But Louisville generally avoided the harshness of race relations further south. It practiced “polite racism.” Baltimore’s racism is not so much polite as passive-aggressive. If whites keep quiet about race, they provide fewer occasions for blacks to talk about it, at least in public. But some of the impediments that deter Baltimore’s African Americans from making a public issue of race probably have little to do with white people.


Nineteenth Century Black Capital

From 1810 to the Civil War, Baltimore was home to the largest concentration of free black people in the United States. In 1860, before Lincoln had freed a single slave, more than ninety percent of the city’s black population was free. Free black people achieved a critical mass in Baltimore at such an early date that they enjoyed a long head start over black communities elsewhere in which to construct their own collective life. Blacks had their own churches, private schools, social clubs, charitable institutions, and fraternal organizations, and eventually they would have their own labor unions, banks, business firms, and newspapers.

The scale and depth of black civic community was a distinct asset in some respects. Black organizations, for example, were the principal source of help for the destitute ex-slaves and the sick and wounded black veterans who poured into the city after the Civil War. But the black community’s organizational density could also be a liability. Organization meant division. The city’s African Americans belonged to different churches, different fraternal organizations, and different political coalitions.

In such a well-organized black community, whose members were divided by religious denomination, policy preferences, and political interest, it was not clear whether anyone could claim to speak for the race as a whole. Black Baltimore’s organizational complexity gave it many constituencies and lots of leaders. Unless they achieved unity, it would be difficult to raise the issue of race in a coherent way. Whites, of course, could have solved that problem. A concerted white campaign of public racism might have unified blacks. In Baltimore, however, whites consistently tried to sidestep frank and public discussion of racial divisions. Instead of responding to white Baltimore, black Baltimore has often responded to racial provocations beyond the city limits—the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, a lynching on the Eastern Shore in 1935, the state legislature’s attempts to suppress the black vote in the early twentieth century, or the recent statewide election campaigns for governor and U.S. Senate.

If Baltimore’s African Americans had arrived in a giant wave of migrants, as they did in many northern cities in the twentieth century, uprooted from home communities and disconnected from one another, they would have had only their race in common. Appeals to race would have been the most promising means to mobilize them as voters. But the well-established and many-stranded connections that tied black Baltimoreans together through churches, fraternal groups, labor organizations, and social clubs allowed their leaders to call them to the polls on the basis of direct or indirect acquaintance, not color. This made it possible for black politicians to form alliances with white politicians, deliver black votes to white candidates, and get government patronage in return. The most notable beneficiary of such arrangements was Jack Pollack, the white political boss who continued to elect white candidates from his district long after it had an African-American majority.

Political alliances with whites made it even more difficult for black politicians to present a united front. In 1971, for example, black candidates would make their first bid for the mayor’s office, following the election of the city’s first black judge, Joseph C. Howard, in 1968. Black Baltimore’s turn seemed within reach, especially after the incumbent mayor, Thomas D’Alesandro III, announced that he would not seek reelection. But the city’s African-American activists were unable to unify behind a single candidate. They divided between George Russell, the city solicitor, and Clarence Mitchell III, a state senator and son of the NAACP’s Washington lobbyist, Clarence Mitchell Jr., nephew of Congressman Parren Mitchell, son and grandson of revered leaders of the city’s NAACP branch. Russell had significant white support. Mitchell had his own political organization and dynastic resources. The two candidates divided the black vote, giving the Democratic nomination and the mayoralty to William Donald Schaefer, who would continue in office until 1987.

If Baltimore had been better able to make a political issue of race and segregation, different people would have been winning its elections, and different people would have been running the city for the last thirty-five years. Would they have made it a different kind of place? Maybe not. Today the cities where people screamed at one another about race seem no better off than we are when it comes to segregation, discrimination, and poverty—and no worse off. But I sometimes wonder whether personal relationships between black people and white people are more guarded in Baltimore than in those other cities. And now that high-rise public housing is gone and mixed-income developments are appearing and succeeding, now that couples and singles are moving into the city from the suburbs and out of town, now that new experimental and charter schools are raising test scores (however slowly), now that both major parties are competing for the black vote, is it possible that we may get a second shot at racial integration? A long shot, perhaps, but one that will not materialize at all unless Baltimore is willing to recognize that patterns of segregation and inequality are collective problems and will not give way to private, “quiet” solutions. We may even be better prepared than other cities to take advantage of our new opportunities. We haven’t really screamed at one another yet. Maybe we can discuss this without shouting.  ¶ 6:27 PM 1 comments