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In the two centuries that Maryland supported the institution of slavery, Maryland's African American population consisted of both slaves and free blacks. By 1860, this border state's free black population was the largest in the nation, and Baltimore had the largest free black population of any city in the nation. At a time when proximity to work and affordable housing were principal determinants of residential location, African Americans—both free and slave—resided in housing scattered throughout the city. In some rural jurisdictions, like nearby Baltimore County, small, isolated communities of free blacks also came into existence. After the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the scattered clusters of African American settlement remained the norm, both in rural areas and in cities. Segregation was more social than spatial. In Baltimore, African Americans competed for jobs with newly arriving European immigrants, and both competed also for residential living space.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, a number of factors combined to produce a greater degree of residential concentration for African Americans, enforced by new mechanisms of segregation. In the 1890s and early 1900s, the African American population in Baltimore grew, fueled largely by migration from rural areas. Overcrowding and poor health conditions in parts of the city led to greater concentration in two districts near the center, a larger one on the west side and a second on the east side. Meanwhile, the turn of the century saw segregation laws being introduced to separate the races in virtually all aspects of life. In Baltimore, residential segregation ordinances were enacted in the 1910s, though their legal basis was overturned in 1917 by the Supreme Court ruling in Buchanan v. Warley (145 US 60 [1917]).

The advent of the electric streetcar opened up new residential districts at the edge of the city, attracting white out-migration to areas generally understood to be off-limits to African American residents. In some new developments such practices were underwritten by the introduction of deed restrictions, which included racial exclusion among the list of measures presumably intended to protect property values. In the 1920s the movement to regulate urban growth led to zoning practices, which through such measures as restricting type of development indirectly contributed to racial exclusion. Moreover, real estate brokers and mortgage lending institutions adopted policies against housing transactions for African Americans in predominantly white neighborhoods. In the first decades of the twentieth century both law and custom sent a clear signal that the walls of residential segregation had been heightened.

During the 1930s the economic crisis of the Great Depression introduced federal involvement in housing for the first time, but the generally progressive New Deal tended to reinforce local segregation practices. The Federal Housing Authority (FHA) underwrote residential housing loans, but favored non-minority neighborhoods, redlining (literally drawing a red line on a housing map) minority areas as poor loan risks. FHA policies also gave priority for loans to new rather than existing housing, a preference that in the post-World War II period served to underwrite dramatic suburban expansion, typically on a whites-only basis. New Deal legislation also led to creation of public housing authorities, like the Housing Authority of Baltimore, established in 1937. Intended to provide new multi-family units to address problems of urban crowding and residential deterioration in older areas of the city, the first public housing projects for low income residents in Baltimore were established on the eve of World War II on a segregated basis. Following the war, substantial population increases and housing shortages led to a new round of larger high rise public housing projects. In deference to white resistance to locations outside the racial ghetto, projects intended for African Americans were placed in areas of existing racial concentration, thereby heightening rigid residential segregation.

The post-World War II years ushered in unprecedented suburban housing expansion, including Maryland's suburban counties of metropolitan Baltimore and Washington. Entrenched segregation policies and practices assured that virtually all would be off-limits to African Americans. Meanwhile, restricted areas of African American residency had grown enormously in population, even as housing opportunities remained severely limited. These factors combined to produce episodes of massive racial change, as African Americans sought to move beyond the confines of the racial ghetto and whites abandoned older neighborhoods for suburbs in the outer city and nearby county areas. In Baltimore (and many other cities), this process often was abetted by "blockbusters," real estate agents who operated outside the mainstream industry to panic whites into selling at low prices, then turned a profit by providing housing to African Americans at marked up prices. The result was to expand the area of African American residency considerably, but high degrees of racial resegregation quickly followed.

Throughout the twentieth century civil rights challenges to segregation mounted, but housing proved to be one of the most difficult obstacles. In 1948 the U.S. Supreme Court declared residential restrictive covenants unenforceable. In the 1960s, in a climate of growing support for civil rights legislation, Maryland passed a limited Open Housing Act in 1967. Though the state's statute was overturned by referendum the following year, the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968 established national standards prohibiting racial discrimination in housing sales, rentals, and loans and banning the practices of blockbusting and steering (directing clients on the basis of race). By the 1970s suburban jurisdictions, which typically had been very resistant to open housing and to measures to provide affordable or public housing, began to receive African American settlers, many of whom were middle-class out-migrants from Baltimore or Washington.

In Baltimore County, substantial African American entry occurred on the northwest side, resulting in a pattern of racial concentration, whether by choice or restriction. Similar patterns of out-migration from the nation=s capital into Prince George's County made it the first majority-black suburban county in the country. In recent decades Montgomery County's affordable housing requirements for new development and Howard County's planned community of Columbia have introduced degrees of social and economic racial diversity in other suburban jurisdictions. Today, housing patterns in Maryland demonstrate more opportunity and choice, and fewer overt mechanisms of discrimination, but patterns of racial separation that often mirror historic patterns of segregation persist.

—W. Edward Orser