From 1910 to 1917, the city of Baltimore engaged in the first American effort to separate black and white neighborhoods by law. Often interpreted as a component of early twentieth-century reform agendas, residential segregation actually had a different genealogy than elite progressive reform. Professional reformers and Baltimore elites presaged a trend in later residential segregation battles by allowing less affluent whites with vested interests in a neighborhood to wage the frontline attacks. At the heart of the struggle was the relationship of class and geography in the spatially unstable modern city. Middle-class whites and blacks both hoped to inscribe status onto Baltimore's residential landscape to secure their social positions and their access to municipal services. They found instead that the single-purpose neighborhoods of the modern city could abruptly change character in a way that the mixed space of preindustrial cities had not, threatening their careful investment in select urban spaces.
W. Ashbie Hawkins, "A Year of Segregation in Baltimore," The Crisis, November 1911, 28; Baltimore City, Maryland, Census of Population, Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910 (National Archives Microfilm Publication T624, roll 556), Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29, National Archives, Washington, DC; Maryland State Archives, "George W. F. McMechen, 1872-1961," From Frederick to Thurgood: Black Baltimore in Transition, 1870-1920, 2001 (http://www.mdarchives.state.md.us/msa/ stagser/s1259/121/6050/html/26170000.html).
2.
"Eight Killed in Fight Riots," New York Times, July 5, 1910, 1; "Race Clashes in Many Cities," Washington Post, July 5, 1910, 1; Garrett Power, "Apartheid Baltimore Style: The Residential Segregation Ordinances of 1910-1913," Maryland Law Review 42 (Winter 1983): 298; Bettye Thomas Collier, "The Baltimore Black Community, 1865-1910" (PhD diss., George Washington University, 1974), 414.
3.
Joseph Arnold , "The Neighborhood and City Hall: The Origin of Neighborhood Associations in Baltimore, 1880-1911," Journal of Urban History6 (November 1979 ): 6, 11-13.
4.
Attempting to create a statute that would withstand legal scrutiny, Baltimore's segregation proponents passed a series of ordinances during the period 1910-1913. Only one ordinance was in effect at any one time, and they all were part of the same campaign and had the same purpose, though the details changed. I therefore refer to both "the ordinance" and "the ordinances," as appropriate.
5.
See C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974, 1955), and Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971); John T. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998). For a dissenting voice, arguing for the continuity of racial politics in the postbellum South, see Howard N. Rabinowitz, "More Than the Woodward Thesis: Assessing The Strange Career of Jim Crow," Journal of American History 75 (December 1988): 842-56.
6.
The most thorough account of tuberculosis initiatives in Baltimore, emphasizing the reformers' conflation of pathology and race, is Samuel Roberts, "Infectious Fear: Tuberculosis, Public Health, and the Logic of Race and Illness in Baltimore, Maryland, 1880-1930" (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2002).
7.
James B.Crooks, Politics and Progress: The Rise of Urban Progressivism in Baltimore, 1895 to 1911 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), 210-11, 213-14.
8.
See, for example, Power, "Apartheid Baltimore Style," 290, 300-1; Sherry H. Olson, Baltimore: The Building of an American City, rev. ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 269-79; Herbert Hovenkamp, "Social Science and Segregation before Brown," Duke Law Journal (1985): 657.
9.
Carl Nightingale offers biographical background on these figures in "The Transnational Contexts of Early Twentieth-Century American Urban Segregation," Journal of Social History 39 (Spring 2006): 670-71. Despite his attention to this handful of prominent Baltimoreans, however, Nightingale acknowledges that the residential segregation ordinances were primarily a grassroots effort (669, 683).
10.
Nightingale includes several other prominent Baltimoreans in his collective biography-mayors Barry Mahool and James Preston and City Solicitor Edgar Allan Poe, all Democrats who lent their voice to the segregationist cause when it came before them in a professional capacity, and William Cabell Bruce, a former state senator and city solicitor and future U.S. senator whose race theories influenced the rhetoric that Marbury and Grasty used but whose role in the campaign otherwise remains unclear from Nightingale's account.
11.
Caroline Bartlett Crane in Addresses Delivered at the First City-Wide Congress of Baltimore, Md., March 8th, 9th and 10th, 1911 (Baltimore: King Bros., 1911), 3-11, 224.
12.
Streets in Baltimore were numbered outward from Charles Street, which divided the city east and west, and Baltimore Street, dividing the city north and south. Each block was assigned one hundred numbers, even though the block usually consisted of fewer then one hundred addresses. Cross streets thus marked the jump to a new hundreds set. Baltimore City Directory (Baltimore: R. L. Polk, 1908), 29.
13.
As in so much of southern American history, the racial scheme here represented was strictly binary. There were no references in the Baltimore ordinances to residents considered neither white nor black.
14.
"A Social Problem in Baltimore," The Nation77 (1903): 497.
15.
Ordinances and Resolutions of the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore Passed at the Annual Session, 1910-1911 (Baltimore: Meyer and Thalmeir Public Printers, 1911), Ordinance 610. A block in Baltimore was defined as the properties along both sides of a thoroughfare, facing the thoroughfare, between two parallel cross streets intersecting the thoroughfare.
16.
Until 1922, Baltimore's city council was divided into a first and second branch. The second branch, in which councilmen represented two wards rather than one, was considered the upper branch. Legislation was initiated in either branch and had to pass both to become law. William G. Lefurgy, "Baltimore's Wards, 1797-1978: A Guide," Maryland Historical Magazine75 (June 1980): 146.
17.
Collier, "Baltimore Black Community," 434, back inside cover vol. II [1910 ward map]. Roughly half the sources on the segregation ordinance refer to Councilman West as George W. West, while the rest refer to him as Samuel L. West. His name was, in fact, Samuel L. West. The introduction of "George" seems to have originated with the 1911 article by black lawyer Ashbie Hawkins, "Year of Segregation." George W. West was the name of a black preacher in the African American neighborhood Druid Hill. It is likely that Hawkins inadvertently substituted the name of another well-known community figure for that of the councilman.
18.
"Council Resumes Work," Baltimore Sun, September 20, 1910.
19.
By way of contrast, segregation laws passed several years later in Roanoke and Portsmouth, Virginia, designated "segregation districts" for the whole city, decreeing some areas all-white and some all-black without regard for existing residence patterns. Gilbert Stephenson, "The Segregation of the White and Negro Races in Cities," South Atlantic Quarterly1 (January 1914): 4.
20.
Joseph Garoznik, "The Racial and Ethnic Make-up of Baltimore Neighborhoods, 1850-1870," Maryland Historical Magazine 71 (Fall 1976): 396-97, 401-2; Paul A. Groves and Edward K. Muller, "The Evolution of Black Residential Areas in Late Nineteenth-Century Cities," Journal of Historical Geography 1 (1975): 175. See also Sam Bass Warner Jr., The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), and Theodore Hershberg, Harold E. Cox, Dale B. Light Jr., and Richard R. Greenfield, "The `Journey-to-Work': An Empirical Investigation of Work, Residence and Transportation, Philadelphia, 1850 and 1880," in Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family and Group Experience in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Theodore Hershberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). Stuart M. Blumin argues that the process of geographical stratification by class had already begun in American cities by the Civil War. The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 163-65.
21.
"Object to Living near Respectable Negroes," (Baltimore) African American Ledger, October 1, 1910; Karen Olson, "Old West Baltimore: Segregation, African-American Culture, and the Struggle for Equality," in The Baltimore Book: New Views of Local History, ed. Elizabeth Fee, Linda Shopers, and Linda Zeidman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 59; Groves and Muller, "Evolution of Black Residential Areas," 182; Hawkins, "Year of Segregation," 27; Olson, Baltimore: The Building of an American City, 276.
22.
"Social Problem in Baltimore," 498; Board of Police Commissioners, "Census of the Population of Baltimore City," November 1910, Mayor Mahool Papers, File 404(1), Baltimore City Archives, Baltimore; "1910 Map of Baltimore City Showing Boundaries of Wards, Legislative and Congressional Districts," in Collier, "Baltimore Black Community," back inside cover; Thirteenth Census of the United States, rolls 556, 557.
23.
Roderick N. Ryon, "Old West Baltimore," Maryland Historical Magazine77 (Spring 1982): 56.
24.
Previous accounts of shifts in black residential patterns in Baltimore vary. Although the same cluster of ideas appears repeatedly, there is no clear consensus on the chronology of removal, the precipitating causes, the number of people involved, and the geographic locations affected. I have constructed my account based on research in the 1910 and 1920 United States census schedules, a local census conducted in November 1910 by the Baltimore Board of Police Commissioners, and the 1908 and 1911 editions of Polk's City Directory, as well critical analysis of the secondary sources.
25.
Margaret Law Callcott, "The Negro in Maryland Politics, 1870-1912" (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 1967), 163, 217.
Hayward Farrar , "See What the Afro Says: The Baltimore Afro-American, 1892-1950" (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1983), 22.
29.
The property was in Brooklyn, not Baltimore, but it suggested another potential problem with the ordinance: what if one was given property on a block of the "wrong" color? "Baltimoreans May Share in Large Fortune " Afro-American Ledger, December 3, 1910.
30.
"Opinion," The Crisis1 (November 1910): 7.
31.
Farrar, The Baltimore Afro-American, 5; Maryland Progressive League, "Helping Others Help Themselves," flyer, n.d., Mahool Papers, File 438; W. Ashbie Hawkins, "Must Fight Segregation Law," Afro-American Ledger, December 24, 1910.
32.
"Object to Living near Respectable Negroes."
33.
Harry S. Cummings , untitled speech (c. 1910- 1913), 6, Harry S. Cummings Papers .
34.
"Colored Men Protest against Passage of West Ordinance," Afro-American Ledger, October 8, 1910; Franklin F. Johnson to J. Barry Mahool, December 12, 1910, Mahool Papers, File 451(1).
35.
Hayward Farrar, "See What the Afro Says," 116. On the idea of African American uplift in the early twentieth century, see Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (New York: Penguin Books, 1986, New York: Doubleday, Page, 1901); W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, in Three Negro Classics (New York: Avon, 1965); E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie: Rise of a New Middle Class (New York: Free Press, 1957); Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
36.
Cummings, untitled speech (c. 1910-1913), 4, 8, Harry S. Cumming Papers.
37.
Douglas Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 127, 193. The Afro-American regularly heralded both Washington and DuBois as leaders of the race. Farrar, "See What the Afro Says," 132-33.
38.
"Deathblow to Class Legislation," Afro-American Ledger (National Edition), March 4, 1911.
39.
"Economic and Civic Relations," Afro-American Ledger, March 4, 1911.
40.
Entry for Milton Dashiell, Thirteenth Census of the United States, roll 557, pt. 3, p. 115, subpg. B, line 1.
41.
"Object to Living near Respectable Negroes."
42.
Baltimore City Directory, 1908, 1911; Social Register, Baltimore (New York : Social Register Association, 1909 ); Thirteenth Census of the United States, rolls 556, 557, 558.
43.
Thirteenth Census of the United States, rolls 556, 557, 558; Baltimore City Directory, 1908, 1911; "Object to Living near Respectable Negroes."
44.
"Segregation in Force," Sun, December 20, 1910.
45.
L. J. Taylor to J. Barry Mahool, December 14, 1910, Mahool Papers, File 451(1); William L. K. Barrett to J. Barry Mahool, January 19, 1911, Mahool Papers, File 406.
46.
Baltimore City Directory, 1908, 1911.
47.
Great-nephew to the author. Nightingale, "Transnational Contexts," 670.
48.
Edgar Allan Poe to J. Barry Mahool, December 17, 1910, Mahool Papers, File 451(1).
49.
"Colored Men Protest against Passage of West Ordinance."
50.
Journal of Proceedings, December 19, 1910.
51.
Afro-American Ledger, December 24, 31, 1910; January 7, 14, 1911.
52.
John M. Hering to J. Barry Mahool, December 10, 1910 , Mahool Papers, File451(1).
53.
Charles S. Otto to J. Barry Mahool, December 12, 1910 , Mahool Papers, File451(1).
54.
Power, "Apartheid Baltimore Style," 303.
55.
"First Blow against the West Ordinance," Afro-American Ledger, December 31, 1910; "More Trouble with Segregation Law," Afro-American Ledger, January 7, 1911; "West Segregation Law Still Causing Trouble among Baltimore's Solons," January 14, 1911. The Ledger naturally had a greater vested interest in covering violations of the ordinance by whites than did the prosegregation Sun.
56.
"West Law Defective," Sun, February 5, 1911 ; Journal of Proceedings, February 27 to May 15, 1911.
57.
The stipulation that no black school or congregation could meet on an all-white block, and vice versa, was added in response to the phenomenal recent growth of black congregations. Doubling and tripling their size in several years, black Methodist Episcopal and Baptist churches bought buildings that had belonged to white congregations, attracting their congregation members to resettle in the surrounding neighborhood. Even one black churchman was too many for Milton Dashiell. When asked whether a black pastor should be allowed to move into a church-owned parsonage on a white block, he replied, "I am only able to say that the colored parson, considered to represent the most enlightened type of the negro race, should have established his home in the midst of his race, and that he should have encouraged others of his race to do likewise." Union Baptist Church Centennial Committee, "Centennial Celebration of the Union Baptist Church, 1852-1952, May 18th through June 8th" (Baltimore: Union Baptist Church, 1952), [6-unpaginated]; Roderick Ryon, "Old West Baltimore," Maryland Historical Magazine 77 (Spring 1982): 59; "The New West Ordinance," Sun, March 15, 1911; "Bethel A.M.E. Church Preparing to Move," Afro-American Ledger, December 31, 1910; Milton Dashiell to A. S. Goldsborough, January 17, 1911, Mahool Papers, File 406.
58.
Ordinances and Resolutions, 1910- 1911, Ordinance692.
59.
Harry T. Geisendaffer to J. Barry Mahool, December 10, 1910, Mahool Papers, File451(1).
60.
Hawkins, "Year of Segregation," 30.
61.
Olson, Baltimore, 277; Groves and Muller, "Evolution of Black Residential Areas," 172.
62.
Joel H. Cutchin to J. Barry Mahool, November 5, 1910, Mahool Papers, File 406.
63.
Roger L. Rice, "Racial Segregation by Law, 1910-1917," Journal of Southern History 34 (May 1968): 181. The cities were Norfolk, Ashland, and Portsmouth, Virginia; Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Greenville, South Carolina; and Atlanta.
64.
Charles S. Johnson, Patterns of Negro Segregation (New York: Harper and Bros., 1943), 7. Johnson's idea was perpetuated by Gunnar Myrdal in An American Dilemma (New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1964, New York: Harper and Row, 1944), 631-32.
65.
On European immigration to southern cities, see David Goldfield, Cotton Fields and Skyscrapers: Southern City and Region, 1607-1980 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1982), 106-8.
66.
"Object to Living near Respectable Negroes"; "Segregation in Force." Within a year, The Crisis would be tracking the development of restrictive covenants in the New York housing market. "Homes," The Crisis , March 1912, 201.
67.
Hale, MakingWhiteness, 130, 135-36.
68.
On the theory of urban spatial experience, see Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991); David Frisby, Cityscapes of Modernity: Critical Explorations (Cambridge, Malden, MA: Polity with Blackwell, 2001).
69.
State of Maryland v. John E. [sic] Gurry, 121 Md. 534 (Criminal Court of Baltimore City, 1913).
70.
"Negro Invasion Feared," Sun, May 12, 1913; "Eutaw Place Threatened by Negro Invasion Now ," Sun, May 15, 1913.
71.
"Negro Invasion Feared"; E. M. Lerp to James H. Preston, August 11, 1913, Mayor Preston Papers, File 21D, Baltimore City Archives, Baltimore.
72.
John W. Pope to James H. Preston, April 26, 1913, Preston Papers, File21D.
73.
Resolution, North Baltimore Improvement Association, May 17, 1913, Preston Papers, File 21D; E. M. Lerp to James H. Preston, August 11, 1913, Preston Papers, File 21D.
74.
Jesse Rosenfeld to James H. Preston, May 17, 1913, Preston Papers, File 21D; Journal of Proceedings of the Second Branch of the [Baltimore] City Council, 1913-14 (Baltimore: Meyer and Thalmeir Public Printers, 1914), April 28, 1913, to September 15, 1913.
75.
C. E. Stonebraker to James H. Preston, May 12, 1913, Preston Papers, File 21D; A. J. Reilly to James H. Preston, June 16, 1913; "A Property Owner and Sufferer," to "Editor of the Sun," August 14, 1913, Preston Papers, File 21D.
76.
A.J. Reilly to James H. Preston, June 16, 1913, Preston Papers , File21D.
77.
Baltimore City Directory, 1911; [Residents of Lafayette Square] to James H. Preston, petition, October 19, 1913, Preston Papers, File 21D.
78.
Thomas W. Jenkins to James H. Preston, August 20, 1913, Preston Papers, File 21D; James H. Preston to Thomas W. Jenkins, August 21, 1913, Preston Papers, File 21D; A. J. Reilly to James H. Preston, June 16, 1913, Preston Papers, File 21D.
79.
P[alestine] S. Henry, "A Poem on Segregation . . . Read before Baltimore M.E. Preachers Meeting Wednesday, June 25, 1913," Preston Papers, File 21D.
80.
State of Maryland v. John H. Gurry, 121 Md. 534, 88 A. 546, 1913 Md. Lexis 76 (Court of Appeals of Maryland, 1913).
81.
Ordinances and Resolutions of the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore Passed at the Annual Session, 1913-1914 (Baltimore: Meyer and Thalmeir, 1914), Ordinance 339; Power, "Apartheid Baltimore Style," 311; Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U.S. 60, 38 S. Ct. 16, 62 L. Ed. 149, 1917 Lexis 1788 (U.S. Supreme Court, 1917); Thomas S. Jackson v. State of Maryland, 132 Md. 311, 103 A. 910, 1918 Md. Lexis 45 (Court of Appeals of Maryland, 1918).
82.
Baltimore City, Maryland Census of Population, Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920 (National Archives Microfilm Publication T625, rolls 661, 663, 664), Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29, National Archives, Washington, DC.
83.
See especially the classic account of the development of the post-World War II ghetto, Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), as well as more recent works by Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), and Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). For a thoughtful account of how religion has in certain places compounded working-class white resistance to residential integration while contributing to elite aloofness, see John McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
84.
The most trenchant assessment of the ramifications of residential segregation at the end of the twentieth century is Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). It is noteworthy that despite the failure of direct residential segregation by law in 1917, the barriers to racial integration subsequently developed in the United States are sufficiently coercive that the condition can once again be dubbed "apartheid."
