Civil rights groups are alleging Maryland violated federal discrimination laws when it canceled plans for a long-considered Baltimore transit line that would have benefited predominantly African American neighborhoods.

In a Title VI civil rights complaint filed this week against Maryland, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) charges that the decision by the Republican governor, Larry Hogan, to eliminate the plans for an east-west light rail line in Baltimore – and transfer the state funds slated for it to road projects in largely white suburban and rural parts of the state – discriminates against the city’s black residents.

“Maryland’s cancellation of the Red Line is the latest chapter in a long history of racially discriminatory decisions regarding the allocation of transportation and housing resources in the state,” said the complaint, filed with the US Department of Transportation on behalf of a coalition of civil rights groups and the African American residents of Baltimore.

A transportation economist cited in the complaint found that the switch from a subway line to the new highways initiative would cost African Americans $19m in user benefits by 2030, while white Maryland residents will gain more than $35m in user benefits during that period.

Mickey Martin, a middle-aged African American man waiting for a bus as cars streamed by near the Lexington Market, the city’s hub for public transportation, said he did not know if it was discriminatory or not, because he does not own a car and has no idea how the other half lives.

For his part, Martin, who no longer works, said he spends around 14 hours a week on the city’s buses, making at least two transfers to make it out to Edmundson Ave, one of the areas the new light rail line would have reached.

“It sucks,” said Amy Johnson, who was waiting on the bus to return home from her job at the University of Maryland hospital, of the city’s public transportation.

Baltimore’s bus system functions so poorly that, last week, the city offered a $100k forgivable loan to the online retail giant Amazon, which opened a warehouse in the area, to fund shuttles because the bus system “does not provide access to where the jobs are available now”, a spokesperson for the Baltimore Development Corp told the Baltimore Sun. “From some parts of the city, the commute to some areas where there are jobs can be as long as 90 minutes each way.”

Each day the city’s single existing light rail line is packed with people commuting south towards low-paying jobs at the BWI airport – the line’s final stop.

Proponents of the proposed light rail line, called the Red Line, believed it would similarly allow many of the city’s impoverished African Americans to reach jobs they would not otherwise be able to take.

“The lack of mobility, long commuter times, have critical implications for families in Baltimore,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel for LDF. “We regard the cancellation of the Red Line as a critically important moment that must be addressed and must be engaged.”

The federal government had already promised $900m for the project before Hogan announced in June that his administration would scrap the plan – and forfeit the federal funds.

“I never thought, ever, in my closing year in the US Senate, I would see a letter saying the Baltimore region rejects $900m in federal investment,” Senator Barbara Mikulski said at the time.

A history of transportation discrimination

Though the press conference announcing the complaint put it in the context of the economic and social conditions that caused unrest after the death of Freddie Gray in April, the complaint makes it clear that discriminatory transportation is nothing new in Baltimore.

“Maryland, including the City of Baltimore, has exhibited a preference for its white residents over its African American residents in highway construction decisions since at least the 1930s,” the complaint reads.

In the 1960s, “government officials devised new expressway proposals, all of which planned to use at least a portion of the predominantly African-American Franklin-Mulberry corridor in Baltimore’s Harlem Park neighborhood,” the complaint reads. “As a result, Harlem Park residents stopped investing in their homes, and the neighborhood became filled with deteriorating and abandoned buildings.”

Harlem Park neighbors Sandtown-Winchester, where Freddie Gray grew up and was arrested in, and they are often grouped together in studies.

The city long had strict race-based housing covenants and the practice of blockbusting, where real estate speculators would exploit white fear of black neighbors to get them to sell at artificially low prices, kept the city radically segregated in practice, if not in law, until the present day.

When the light rail system was first proposed in 1965, residents of predominantly white areas surrounding the city, such as Anne Arundel County, objected, complaining that “that the Metro would enable poor, inner-city blacks to travel to the suburbs, steal residents’ TVs and then return to their ghettos in Baltimore”.

Just last year, nearby Carroll County introduced a “Mass Transit Protection Resolution”, intended to keep public transportation riders from Baltimore out.

Many saw it as emblematic that shortly after the governor announced that he would reallocate transportation funds, his administration released a transit map that did not include Baltimore City at all.

“Literally took #Baltimore off the map. Just gone. Lots of #Maryland-ers not apart of infrastructure improvements,” Ben Krimmel tweeted in a typical reaction at the time.

Antero Pietila, the author of Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City, said that the city has always struggled with east-west transportation and that various plans to build highways that cut through the center of the city have “created lots of damage to the urban fabric of the city without solving any of the transportation problems”.

“This case is about the Red Line but it’s also about so much more than just the construction of the Red Line,” Ajmel Quereshi, assistant counsel for LDF, said. “It’s about the 50 years that went into consideration.”

Governor Hogan, who has announced a $135m overhaul of the city’s bus lines as a replacement for the Red Line, said through a spokesperson that the complaint has “zero credibility or legal standing” and characterized it as “nothing more than a press release”.

The Hogan administration rejected the plan partly because of a tunnel – estimated to cost $1bn – that would cut through Baltimore.

Lost opportunity

According to the complaint, the Red Line would not only enable many of the city’s African American residents to reach new jobs, it would bring jobs to them.

“Strong transit connections to West Side neighborhoods would attract economic development, and many areas along the Red Line route were rezoned for mixed-use, transit-oriented development in anticipation of the Line’s construction,” the complaint reads.

The complaint also alleges the loss of up to 10,000 construction jobs, in a city whose unemployment rate is over 7%, two percentage points higher than the rest of the state.

And, unlike many construction jobs, the complaint alleges, these jobs would not all be temporary. “As part of the construction process, training was to be provided to local adults and students at the Edmondson-Westside high school so that they would be qualified for jobs in construction, maintenance, and operations of the transit line,” the complaint states.

But some who agree with the complaint’s allegations of discrimination are not necessarily fans of the light rail as it was planned.

“If you want to see the reality of a light rail system in Baltimore take a train from Hunt Valley to BWI airport and time it. And it will take you about an hour and a half,” said Pietila, a former Baltimore Sun reporter who was born in Finland where he said he has experienced truly convenient public transportation. “When we turn from the light rail to the Red Line as proposed, I wonder how popular it would be. If it isn’t frequent and fast people wouldn’t want to use it.”

At the press conference, the complainants said that while they “certainly would like the Red Line to get reinvigorated”, the issue of taking funds from predominantly African American areas and investing it in predominantly white areas is the larger problem.

“Most of that money can be reinvested in Baltimore where it belongs,” Ifill said.