Segregation in housing had a tremendous impact on twentieth-century Baltimore, ensuring that some areas would thrive and others would fail. It has proven highly resistant to attack over the years, partly because it can be enforced through informal means and partly because class-based divisions have accentuated, and in some cases displaced, race-based ones.

Through most of the nineteenth century Baltimore's blacks lived in close proximity to whites, although in adjoining alleyways rather than on main streets. Around the turn of the century, as white immigrants began to fill the inner-city wards and wealthy whites moved farther north, blacks began to concentrate in "Old West Baltimore," an area marked by North Avenue on the north, Franklin Street on the south, Madison Avenue on the east, and Fulton Avenue on the west.

Agents of Segregation
Early in the century as "Jim Crow" became ever more repressive, whites erected legal barriers intended to isolate black neighborhoods. Some were ruled illegal, but a 1910 ordinance effectively set apart white and black neighborhoods. Equally influential were racial covenants, legal riders to deeds forbidding homeowners from selling to black (and sometimes Jewish) purchasers. By the 1920s a host of zoning laws limited the spread of low income (which increasingly meant black) housing. On a more informal level, locals?usually youths?practiced intimidation and realtors practiced "steering," to keep black homebuyers from white neighborhoods.

Lending policies were among the most devastating agents of discrimination. Encouraged by institutions such as the Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Authority, Baltimore banks graded neighborhoods by ethnic and racial composition. Black population indicated a "declining" neighborhood and triggered "redlining"?literally the drawing of boundaries on a map within which loans on reasonable terms were denied.

By the 1930s, black Baltimore was alarmingly overcrowded, two to three times as dense as the rest of the city. Redlining and a dearth of well-paying jobs left black Baltimore growing increasingly impoverished. World War II brought to Baltimore a huge influx of black migrants (some 33,000 from 1940 to 1942 alone) that only intensified these problems. Most of the newcomers were forced into already crowded black neighborhoods, and although the war opened some new work to blacks, it was inevitably low-skilled and low-paid. Poverty was a problem, but overcrowding was a crisis. It was only a matter of time before racial barriers broke.

That happened in 1945, along Fulton Avenue, black Baltimore's western boundary. There, realtors began selling to black residents along the "white" side of the street, touching off resistance by local whites. Soon, however, whites began to flee, leaving blocks of homes uninhabited for a time.

There are many explanations for white resistance to neighborhood integration. Baltimoreans of immigrant stock were intent on protecting their own tenuous hold on economic security by appealing to racial privilege. Most recent migrants and native Marylanders were also, of course, steeped in southern segregationism. But whites were also keenly aware that areas that "went black" usually deteriorated rapidly. Had they understood that lending practices and larger economic forces were to blame it would hardly have mattered?working-class Baltimoreans hoped only to protect the value of their homes, by far their largest investment.

In the 1950s a pattern emerged that first had been established along Fulton Avenue. Typically, whites started out opposing black settlement and then fled. During the decade entire sections of the city changed from white to black in just a few years. The process was helped along by unscrupulous real estate agents who practiced what came to be called "blockbusting." First they offered high prices to white sellers and low prices to black buyers to break open a neighborhood. Then, exploiting white fears and black necessity, realtors thereafter bought at ever lower prices and sold at exorbitantly high ones.

Race, Class, and the Endurance of Segregation
Compared to successes elsewhere, civil rights activists found segregated housing surprisingly tough to crack. In 1966 the Baltimore City Council defeated an open housing ordinance and the next year Maryland voters defeated a statewide bill in a referendum, but not until the 1968 Federal Fair Housing Act had superseded it. Legal means of segregating were gone, but less formal practices remained. Steering was easy to detect but hard to prove; covenants had been outlawed in 1948 but "informal agreements" remained. The most insidious means of segregation?intimidation against black homebuyers?still occurs today.

Still, by the 1970s Baltimore's black homeowners and renters could legally live anywhere in the city. Unfortunately, by then the old urban industrial economy had been devastated by deindustrialization. Fair housing laws allowed affluent blacks to follow whites into the suburbs, leaving a deteriorating city segregated from the surrounding counties by class as much as race.

Planners had long considered urban renewal and project housing to be a solution for urban decay. From 1951 to 1971 they displaced more than 25,000 households. About 90 percent of these were black, and many were shunted into ever-larger projects like Murphy Homes and Lafayette Court. It was an experiment that failed. By the time the Federal Fair Housing Act was passed, these and other projects had become as crime ridden and dangerous as the slums they replaced.

But few options remained. Baltimore's low income housing had been decimated by economic decline, and homes in the suburbs were economically out of reach for most urban blacks. And while the late twentieth century brought new investment and revitalization to a few inner-city neighborhoods such as Fells Point, Federal Hill, and the Inner Harbor, homes there were also far beyond the means of working-class Baltimoreans, white or black. In twenty-first-century Baltimore as well as across the country, segregation by class may prove as tough to defeat as segregation by race had been.

Callcott, George H. Maryland and America, 1940 to 1980. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.

Durr, Kenneth D. Behind the Backlash: White Working-Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940-1980. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Neverdon-Morton, Cynthia. "Black Housing Patterns in Baltimore City, 1885-1953,"The Maryland Historian, (Spring/Summer 1985): 25-39.

Orser, W. Edward. Blockbusting in Baltimore: The Edmondson Village Story. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1994.