Emily Lieb is a professor of history at Seattle University and the director of its Poverty Education Center. She is writing a book on public policy and neighborhood change in West Baltimore in the 20th century.

The past isn’t past. William Faulkner said it, and Freddie Gray’s death proves it. For the past 100 years, the people who had the power in Baltimore built a city in which white property was more important than black citizenship—they created a city, you might say, that killed Freddie Gray.

“The coming of violence to Baltimore’s ghetto,” began the American Friends Service Committee’s report on the Baltimore uprising in April 1968, “was no surprise.” Those 1968 riots, sparked by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., were fueled by the abuses and indignities that had set-off riots in other American cities: in Baltimore, just as in Watts and Harlem and Newark and Louisville and Detroit, white children went to better schools than black children, played in cleaner parks and community centers and rarely had to watch as police officers harassed their parents for no good reason.


As they do today, many of Baltimore’s African-Americans lived in overcrowded, run-down apartments in neighborhoods where zoning and housing ordinances were barely enforced, good jobs didn’t exist, white merchants exploited their customers without restraint and the real-estate market bled them of every penny they had. “When one accumulates a list of the complaints of Baltimoreans,” the Quakers concluded, “one tends to wonder why the retaliation was not worse.”

One still tends to wonder.

Police brutality appears to have been the immediate cause of Gray’s death, but the events that lead to his tragic end began long before he was born. In Baltimore, everywhere you look—if you look—you can see the not-so-distant shadow of Jim Crow. Even an abridged tour through the city’s history makes it plain: together, the government and the marketplace robbed black Baltimoreans of everything they had that was worth having.

In Sandtown-Winchester, the West Baltimore neighborhood in which Freddie Gray lived, city officials first segregated and then neglected black people. The city’s banks and real-estate speculators proceeded to profit handsomely from that negligence. What remains of the city’s black communities remains in spite of, and not because of, a political economy that sacrificed them to suit its own ends.

Building the Slums

It was not so long ago, really, that Freddie Gray’s was a livable neighborhood in a livable city. At the turn of the 20th century, its streets were lined with pleasant rowhouses in which middle- and working-class families thrived. Every year, it seemed, the School Board built a new school or two to accommodate the neighborhood’s growing population of children. Brand-new streetcars ferried workers and shoppers to and from downtown for just a nickel. Teams of city workers paved roads and sidewalks, dug sewer lines and picked up the trash.

Just a generation later, by the end of World War I, Sandtown-Winchester was well on its way to becoming a “slum”: dirty and decaying, with hazardous streets and crumbling schools. This transformation started after Baltimore’s black population began to grow, as migrants from the deeper South moved to the city in search of freedom from Jim Crow laws and the racial terrorism that marked daily life in the former Confederacy. Some white West Baltimoreans responded to this migration by running from it; some by fighting for laws they thought would stop it; and some by trying (and succeeding) to profit from it. Together, these three responses helped turn the neighborhood into a ghetto.

In 1888, the residents of the “Annex”—20 square miles of Baltimore County to the west and north of what was then the city line (and just above Sandtown-Winchester)—had voted to join the city proper. It did not take developers long to start building homes there, affordable “daylight rowhouses” with terraced lawns, modern bathrooms and kitchens, and electric lights. In suburban developments like the ones in the Annex, developers could “cover” their properties with deed restrictions, or covenants, that prohibited a property’s occupancy by or sale to black people. These restrictive covenants were not laws, but they were legally enforceable: a person who violated their terms breached a contract and risked forfeiting his property. Most covenants also bound a property’s future owners as well as its present ones—in real-estate terms, they ran with the land—and so guaranteed that segregated suburbs would stay that way for generations.

These new suburbs drew upwardly-mobile white families from the older parts of West Baltimore. Many of the homes those families left behind, in turn, drew upwardly-mobile black families eager to leave the denser, older and more run-down neighborhoods nearer downtown. Some white property owners stayed behind in “Old” West Baltimore because they could not afford to move to the suburbs; others were newcomers, drawn by the same promise of good housing at a good price that had attracted their African-American neighbors. To those white residents, integration was an economic hazard. “To preserve the value of our property,” one explained to the Baltimore Sun, “which has taken some of us a lifetime of hard work to accumulate,” they mobilized “protective associations” to resist what they called the “Negro invasion” of their neighborhood.

Their first target was the schools. Since 1872, when it opened its first schools for “colored” pupils, Baltimore’s had been segregated by law. School Board policy dictated that white schools should be built where white students lived, and then converted into black schools “when the neighborhoods in which such schools were situated became colored neighborhoods.” To black families, this was a promise; to white ones, it was a threat. It was a “self-evident fact,” the Sun said, “that the presence of a negro school, or of any negro institution whatever in a neighborhood where white people reside, will lower the value of their property and that the presence of such a school will be an incentive for negroes to move into the neighborhood and by so doing further lower the value of property and reduce the taxable basis of the city.”

This “self-evident fact” wasn’t a fact at all, but that didn’t stop the protective associations. For the associations, Jim Crow schools were more than schools; they were barricades. Three times in six years, they took the School Board to court to prevent officials from changing white schools to black ones.

Despite these efforts, by 1910 Old West Baltimore had more black residents than any other part of the city. Somehow, segregated schools weren’t making for segregated neighborhoods—and for the white homeowners of West Baltimore, segregation was non-negotiable. They began to lobby the city government for a brand-new kind of Jim Crow law: an ordinance that would make the preservation of all-white neighborhoods in West Baltimore a matter of public policy.

In 1910, the City Council passed a residential-segregation law, the first of its kind in the country. The first version of the law applied only to West Baltimore’s neighborhoods, but the second was more expansive: anywhere in the city, it said, black people couldn’t live on white blocks and white people couldn’t live on black blocks.

The idea was that the ordinance would freeze West Baltimore just as it was: white blocks would stay white, and black blocks would stay black. But what about blocks that had already been integrated? An amendment to the law attacked this problem: these “mixed” blocks would be “allowed to remain so,” it said, “until such a time when [they] shall be wholly inhabited by either whites or negroes. When that becomes the case the block shall come under the provisions of the ordinance.”

Thus the segregation ordinance created a new economy, a thriving racket in the exploitation of prejudice for profit. The original law had treated all-white and majority-white (and all-black and majority-black) blocks the same way, which meant that no one could rent or sell a house to a black family on a white block, period. The amended law made more housing available to African-Americans. It also made mixed blocks a free-for-all, which encouraged a kind of real-estate blackmail, later known as “blockbusting,” in which speculators frightened whites into selling their houses, often for much less than they had paid, by telling them that black neighbors would soon torpedo the value of their properties. Then the speculators rented or sold the same houses at an enormous markup to the black families.

This practice undercut the claim was that black neighbors ruined white property values. Because decent housing for black people was much scarcer than decent housing for white people, integration was a bonanza for the realtors who trafficked in it. A landlord could charge desperate black renters whatever he liked and skimp on maintenance. Consequently, one Baltimorean wrote the Sun in 1916, “we poor people, especially the colored people, are forced to live in houses in all kinds of conditions—houses with bad roofs, foul cellars, bad back yards, fences down, houses that are anything but tenantable—and we pay the highest rent.”

The Supreme Court overturned segregation laws like Baltimore’s in 1917, on the grounds that they infringed on an owner’s right to do with his property what he pleased. By then, though, despite the best efforts of the protective associations to stop it, West Baltimore had changed. The question was, could it be changed back?

Razing the Slums

During the New Deal, federal housing officials began to argue for a more interventionist approach to the private housing market—a market that would (or could) never provide decent housing to low-income people because, as one official put it, “private enterprise cannot be expected to function where there is no prospect of profit.” Thus, reformers in Washington, D.C. began to imagine a new approach. Why not take the market out of the equation and use government money to buy, bulldoze and replace bad housing with better housing?

This plan seemed reasonable enough, and it might even have worked. It’s how Baltimore got the Gilmor Homes, where Freddie Gray grew up. In 1940, the city’s new Housing Authority cleared space for a 600-unit low-rent housing project in the northwest corner of Old West Baltimore. What workers knocked down in Sandtown-Winchester were some of the city’s worst houses; what they built were clean, modern apartments with hot running water in the indoor bathrooms and electric appliances in the kitchens.

There was only one problem. Because it was largely segregationist public policies and private covenants that had made the “slums” in the first place, almost every redevelopment project in the city displaced hundreds of black people from their homes. What’s more, “urban renewal”—the era’s catch-all term for publicly financed clearance and redevelopment projects, from public housing to downtown office buildings to interstate highways—often did not replace the housing it destroyed. This further increased demand and reduced supply, intensifying the market conditions it was supposed to be resolving. The miserable squeeze that resulted was a boon to the people in the business of providing overpriced, under-maintained housing to black people.

The problem was made worse by interstate highway plans that threatened to gut much of black Baltimore during the 1950s and 1960s. Since the New Deal, planners had been mapping roads that they hoped would make downtown more convenient and accessible for the people who lived on the city’s suburban fringe. They also hoped that these roads would improve the city by burying its more pestiferous places under a ribbon of asphalt. Reviving troubled urban neighborhoods was hardly the point; their advocates believed that urban highways could simply clear out the old city and build a new one in its place. (To that end, for instance, in 1961 a team of highway engineers proposed a spur for the erstwhile East-West Expressway that would slice right through the middle of Sandtown-Winchester.) That most of the roads were never built hardly mattered: as Sun reporter James Dilts pointed out, “plans for highways, if they are around long enough, become self-fulfilling prophecies.” Those lines on the expressway maps carried disinvestment and decay wherever they went.

Perversely, the government used that decay to avoid investing in Baltimore’s housing stock. Encouraging developers to build, and people to buy, new houses was a centerpiece of federal housing policy during and after the New Deal. But the federal government wouldn’t underwrite loans in what it called “declining” or “hazardous” neighborhoods. These were defined as places with older and multifamily houses, sidewalks instead of lawns and heterogeneous populations—in other words, cities. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) reserved its lowest ratings for neighborhoods like Sandtown-Winchester, in which the physical scars of disinvestment were already visible upon the landscape and the majority of residents were African-American.

Because of the FHA’s discriminatory standards, it was nearly impossible for black people to buy homes using conventional mortgages. Instead, they were pushed onto an almost comically sub-prime market designed to bilk them of whatever wealth they had. In Baltimore, to buy a house in a neighborhood open to black residency, people borrowed not from banks but “on contract” from the real-estate speculators themselves. FHA mortgages were subject to rules about interest rates and home prices, but speculators were free to charge extortionate rates for the loans they made and extortionate prices for the homes they sold. Buyers were trapped. The contract-selling system more closely resembled highway robbery than home finance.

The FDA’s policy, known as redlining, represented the functional abandonment of black communities by the federal government. It also invested the American taxpayers in the maintenance of segregation.

The Legacy Of Jim Crow

From its beginning of the 20th century, Baltimore’s white citizens acted on assumptions—first about black neighbors, then about black neighborhoods—that their actions then made true. The neighborhood Freddie Gray grew up in still carries scars from those actions.

If Baltimore’s schools hadn’t been crippled by segregation, Gray might never had turned to drug dealing to earn a living. If the economic potential of Baltimore’s black residents hadn’t been retarded for generations, Gray’s neighborhood would be far wealthier and, thus, safer. If the Baltimore ghetto had never been never created, the police would have few reasons to harass its residents.

The specific circumstances that led to Gray’s death obscure the bigger story about the city of Baltimore’s own guilt. For the first half of the 20th century, public policies like segregation and redlining and private practices like speculation and contract selling trapped a growing population of African-Americans on a relative handful of blocks, and they did this not by accident but by design. Bad housing was good business. In Baltimore, white banks and realtors mined black neighborhoods for profit even as planners and policymakers wrung their hands over the disinvestment and decay their own actions had caused.

By the second half of the 20th century, the civic hand-wringing had stopped and the civic hand-washing had begun. After the 1968 riots, as far as the people with the power were concerned, “livability” was off the table: Baltimore’s renaissance depended entirely upon the dollars of tourists and businesspeople who visited the city during the day and went home at night. City officials treated black neighborhoods like Sandtown-Winchester with a kind of neglect that was less benign than eugenic.

All the time, people saw what they wanted to see. They looked at black neighbors and saw “Negro invasion.” They looked at the conditions in segregated black neighborhoods and blamed them on the people who lived there, not the people who didn’t.

Today, neighborhoods like Sandtown-Winchester seem to be suspended in time—in 1968, in 1954, in 1918. In other places, scholars and journalists cheer the return of urban living; in West Baltimore, sometimes, just staying alive is challenge enough. These are the shadows of Jim Crow.