Baltimore’s Unrest and Social Injustice Hits the Back Page
ANGLO AMERICA, 20 Jul 2015
Daniel Horgan – TRANSCEND Media Service
In 1968 the Baltimore Orioles won the World Series and Frank Robinson was the 3rd African American to player to win the MVP Award. Baseball still had plenty of racism and structural barriers, but at the same time was becoming fully integrated. Society in Baltimore and all across the US could not boast this type of progression.
The year 1968 had also seen the assignation of MLK and it touched off racial unrest in over 100 cities in the country. Baltimore did not escape this unfortunate fate. Nor did it escape that fate in this year when yet another case of American police brutality hit on its doorstep. From MLK to Freddie Gray, we have to wonder what has changed in America (and Baltimore)?
When Peter Angelos, Owner of the Baltimore Orioles was asked about the recent unrest he had this to say. “I agree the principle of peaceful, non-violent protest and the observance of the rule of law is of utmost importance in any society. MLK, Gandhi, Mandela and all great opposition leaders throughout history have always preached this precept. Further, it is critical that in any democracy, investigation must be completed and due process must be honored before any government or police members are judged responsible.
That said, my greater source of personal concern, outrage and sympathy beyond this particular case is focused neither upon one night’s property damage nor upon the acts, but is focused rather upon the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle class and working class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the U.S. to third-world dictatorships like China and others, plunged tens of millions of good, hard-working Americans into economic devastation, and then followed that action around the nation by diminishing every American’s civil rights protections in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state.”
Lawyer and researcher, Richard Rothstein, perhaps gets more to the point. He goes further into this history regarding how and why inner city black ghettos were formed and perpetuated by intentional policies that were indeed driven by racism itself.
He begins this description with the event in Baltimore in 1910, of a black Yale law school graduate who purchased a home in a previously all-white neighborhood. The Baltimore city government reacted by adopting a residential segregation ordinance, restricting African Americans to designated blocks. In 1917 the US Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional Baltimore’s Segregation Policies, but not because blacks couldn’t buy houses, but because it restricted who whites could sell their houses to. Baltimore’s mayor responded by instructing city building inspectors to cite any home owner that was selling to blacks with multiple code violations therefore blocking any sale. Whites got the picture. So did blacks. In 1923 Baltimore’s next mayor formalized and strengthened this practice by forming the Segregation Committee. This deepened the structure and the message that the city’s color lines were not to be crossed in the areas of housing. In 1925 restrictive covenants became the new norm to uphold housing segregation. They were put in place on individual properties and stated that blacks were not to buy these properties. They were legally sanctioned and enforced by the city of Baltimore.
Living within the city limits of Baltimore and wanting to own a home left blacks with the obvious choice but to move out. Problem with that was that the Federal Housing Authority refused to insure mortgages to black families buying in white neighborhoods and even refused federal monies to developers unless they sold to whites only. The FHA even refused to insure mortgages to blacks in black neighborhoods. This became a process known as redlining and government maps were known to have black neighborhoods colored in red.
1970, backed by Vice President Spiro Agnew, HUD Secretary George Romney declared that white suburbs by restricting blacks entrance into them has put a ‘white noose’ around cities like Baltimore and kept ghettos in place. He vowed to withhold suburban Baltimore’s federal funds designated for public infrastructure to Baltimore’s white suburbs that upheld segregated policies in housing. In white suburbs came white power. George Romney was never able to uphold such promises and was eventually forced out as HUD Secretary.
Richard Rothstein describes in a similar article in the Making of Ferguson, that the federal government maintained a policy of segregation in public housing nationwide for decades. In Richard Rothstien’s own words it is described how civil rights groups in Baltimore got justice but also how its effects on segregation were very limited.
“In 1994, civil rights groups sued the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), alleging that HUD had segregated its public housing in Baltimore and then, after it had concentrated the poorest African American families in projects in the poorest neighborhoods, HUD and the city of Baltimore demolished the projects, and purposely relocated the former residents into other segregated black neighborhoods. An eventual settlement required the government to provide vouchers to former public housing residents for apartments in integrated neighborhoods, and supported this provision with counseling and social services to ensure that families’ moves to integrated neighborhoods would have a high likelihood of success. Although the program is generally considered a model, it affects only a small number of families, and has not substantially dismantled Baltimore’s black ghetto.”
The sub prime lending boom was another example of how blacks were the target of such crisis in Baltimore and other places. These loans which we now know had ballooning interest rates and payments that doomed individual home buyers and led to the financial crisis in the 1990’s, found blacks as some of the main victims. In Baltimore, Wells Fargo was sued by the City for targeting blacks for these type of loans. All across the US these law suits are still being dragged out. The main results for blacks who were enjoying the housing boom and got out of the ghettos was that they eventually had to foreclose and many were forced back to the inner cities.
The most telling effect of all these policies and actions on blacks’ economic status can be told directly by Richard Rothstein:
“Nationwide, black family incomes are now about 60 percent of white family incomes, but black household wealth is only about 5 percent of white household wealth. In Baltimore and elsewhere, the distressed condition of African American working- and lower-middle-class families is almost entirely attributable to federal policy that prohibited black families from accumulating housing equity during the suburban boom that moved white families into single-family homes from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s—and thus from bequeathing that wealth to their children and grandchildren, as white suburbanites have done.”
This has had an obvious and devastating effect on African Americans overall economic situation. It also has perpetuated housing segregation and upheld the existence of the inner city black ghetto. Baltimore being only just one example.
So what do we think about when unrest hits the inner city due to some obvious police brutality. It is really about the police? Will more responsible policing solve the underlying conditions and that create and uphold one of America’s most established institutions which is the black ghetto? The simple answer is no. Consider Peter Angelo’s description of the decline in the American economy and the truth that all middle class Americans have had their income reduced slowly but steadily over the past 40 years is it hard to understand where we will find the answers.
The first thing to understand is that although the unrest in Baltimore is off the front page it has not ended. June saw 42 homicides in Baltimore. This was the highest total in any one month in 25 years. The Police Commissioner has been fired, but that won’t solve the cities demographic or economic layout and the oppressed conditions that lie within the city limits of Baltimore. For that we’ll need to figure out how to undo over a hundred years of racially motivated housing policies.
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Daniel Horgan is graduate of the European Center for Peace Studies. He is a former student of Johan Galtung and Dietrich Fischer, and an occasional contributor to Transcend Media Service.
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 20 Jul 2015.
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