White Space, Black Hood

by Sheryll Cashin

  By 2015, all planning, engineering, environmental- and health-impact assessments, financing, and political compromise related to the Red Line route had been completed. The state of Maryland had spent $288 million on planning and right-of-way acquisitions. The Maryland General Assembly had approved a gas-tax increase to fund the project, and the state had committed $1.235 billion from its Transportation Trust Fund for its share of construction costs. The federal Department of Transportation had approved a “New Starts” grant of $900 million for the Red Line. It was coming to fruition. Until Larry Hogan, the newly elected Republican governor, canceled the Red Line.

  Hogan forfeited the $900-million federal grant and reallocated all of the state money earmarked for the first phase of Red Line construction—$736 million—to road projects in exurban and rural areas. In Hogan’s imagination, transportation funds were meant for roads and Baltimore’s didn’t even exist. He released his plan for transportation funding reallocations, entitled the Highways, Bridges, and Roads Initiative, with a map that did not include the state’s largest city on it. Like supporters of African colonization for freed slaves in earlier eras, Hogan had willed a fantasy, that the city and its problems could disappear.44

  Anyone paying attention to Hogan’s statements during his 2014 campaign for governor could have predicted this outcome. Hogan, an Anne Arundel County resident and founder of an eponymous commercial real estate business, was an established skeptic of transit rail, which he deemed too expensive, and a believer in highway asphalt. In his first bid for governor, Hogan argued against light rail and strenuously advocated for roads. Rail, no; roads, yes—polar positions that advanced his campaign. Proposed transit projects with large price tags for a majority-Black city (the Red Line) and for affluent Washington suburbs (the Purple Line) provided an easy context for tapping into resentment in outlying areas. Hogan didn’t need a racial dog whistle to draw the contrast. In a debate with opponent Black Democrat Anthony Brown, Hogan all but promised to kill the Red and Purple Lines and put state transportation funds into roads.45

  Once in office, Hogan canceled the Red Line but not the Purple Line, though he did reduce its budget. The light-rail Purple Line, dogged by cost overruns and construction delays, will run, when completed, through Prince George’s and Montgomery Counties in the suburbs of Washington, DC, and connect to the Washington Metro subway system.46 Montgomery County has the highest per-capita income among all counties in the Maryland. Although Hogan did not include the Purple Line on his original list of infrastructure priorities,47 the then-new Trump administration included the transit system on its list of possible projects to support.48 When asked about his commitment to the Purple Line after being elected, Hogan evaded: “Yeah, we’re going to be talking about that during transition.”49

  In contrast, Hogan called the Red Line “a wasteful boondoggle” and defended rescinding it because he “oppose[d] wasteful and irresponsible spending on poorly conceived projects.” The planned 3.4-mile tunnel provoked him the most. He viewed it as a costly indulgence, though running the Red Line under the worst of Baltimore traffic in order to facilitate “rapid” transit was a central feature of a system designed to dramatically reduce commute times.50

  Hogan’s conclusions seemed to be based on political calculation rather considered deliberation. Nonprofit supporters of the Red Line invoked a state statute guaranteeing freedom of information and demanded evidence of the Hogan administration’s written reanalysis of the Red Line. The state’s vacant response suggests there was no such analysis, much less any consideration of the racial impact of rescinding the Red Line.51

  Transit activists concluded that Hogan didn’t care about the effect on Black people or Baltimore generally. It was “a ‘fuck you’ to Baltimore,” activist Richard Chambers told a reporter.52 With Black Democrats who opposed Hogan concentrated in Baltimore, there was no political cost and much potential gain in his decision to cancel transit only for Baltimore. Hogan garnered very high vote margins in Baltimore County and the overwhelming majority of rural areas.53 The fact that the decision to rescind the Red Line came two months after uprisings in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray added to transit advocates’ suspicions of Hogan’s motives.

  Gray, a twenty-five-year old African American man, lived in Gilmor Homes, a large though low-rise public housing complex erected in Sandtown-Winchester in 1942. In 2015, the year Gray died, the complex was a ragged, trash-strewn place engulfed in drugs, drug dealing, and prosaic shootings that would try any soul. Within months of Gray’s death, Baltimore paid women residents of Gilmor Homes a damage settlement because they had been pressured by city maintenance men to perform sex acts in exchange for repairs on their apartments. The women had to live with rodents, mold, risk of electrocution, and no heat if they refused.54

  The same year, Baltimore ranked lowest in the nation on Harvard economist Raj Chetty’s rankings for social mobility of poor children, especially Black boys. Freddie Gray was one of them, a product of concentrated poverty, lead-exposure, a school system that regularly fails its children, and the social codes of Baltimore’s poorest streets. Gray was arrested after running when he locked eyes with a policeman; a switchblade that police found on him provided pretext for taking him into custody, though he didn’t wield it at officers.55 Another urban drama opened.

  Descendant citizens videotaped the arrest. Multiple officers tackled Gray’s small body, though he had stopped running of his own accord.56 Something seemed to snap, the young man who had been running could no longer walk. He roared with pain, and the officers had to lift his limp torso, legs swinging like damaged twigs, into the paddy wagon. The officers did not buckle Gray up for safety and this devalued man’s spinal cord was nearly severed during the ride.57 He died seven days later, the impetus for an uprising, though Baltimore officialdom enhanced conditions for it by canceling buses and the subway at Mondawmin Mall just as high school students were departing school, leaving thousands of stranded and frustrated youth on the streets.58 No one died in the uprising, though 380 properties were damaged and global press made much of a burned CVS drugstore. The city incurred approximately $20 million in costs for police, firefighter, and other assistance and damage to public property.59

  Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and city council president Bernard “Jack” Young both castigated “thugs” for vandalism and looting, as did President Obama, who denounced “the handful of criminals and thugs who tore up the place,” “destroying and undermining opportunities and businesses in their own communities.”60 All three leaders were Black. After being criticized for using the word, Rawlings-Blake and Young retreated.61 Obama spokesman Josh Earnest affirmed that the president did not regret his choice of words.62 Governor Hogan also called protestors “thugs” after meeting with President Obama to discuss the crisis: “He [Obama] supports our actions 100 percent. We talked about the fact that . . . we need to get to the answers and resolve this situation, the concern that everybody has about what exactly happened in the Freddie Gray incident. [But] lawless gangs of thugs roaming the streets, causing damage to property and injuring innocent people, . . . we’re not gonna tolerate that.”63 Freddie Gray, too, was cast as a thug by some on social media, as if he deserved to die because he had a criminal record that included drug offenses.64 Stereotypes filled the vacuum created by historical amnesia and squelched possibilities for nuanced public understanding, for building public support for repair of the conditions that led to revolt.

  Governor Hogan visited Baltimore neighborhoods after the uprising, though he complained about what the state had had to spend in response and all but used the extra cost to further justify canceling the Red Line.65 In a news conference, he claimed, “There’s no place in the state where we invest more money than Baltimore City . . . Last week I just announced $7.3 million extra funding for the city. We just spent $14 million extra money on the riots in Baltimore City a few weeks ago.”66 Black activists and signatories to the Red Line Community Compac
t interpreted his actions as punitive. They filed a civil rights complaint with the US Department of Transportation. Among their many arguments, they had this to say about Hogan’s motivations:

  The Governor’s decision to cancel the Red Line was issued just 60 days after what became known locally as the “uprising,” when Baltimore was still reeling, appeared to many as a gesture of contempt. At the moment when our city most needed courageous leadership and strategic support, what it got instead from the state’s highest authority was a kick in the teeth. The perception among many African Americans in Baltimore is that the Governor values incarceration of black people over their education, and prioritizes highways for white rural and suburban people over investing in access to opportunity for the black and brown people of Baltimore city.67

  Hogan earned this perception with Black Baltimoreans through words and deeds. Upon taking office, he declared that Baltimore was “declining rather than improving” and cut $36 million from its schools budget but approved $30 million to build a youth jail in the city.68 Baltimore public school children froze in winter, heating crises borne of decades of underinvestment in the oldest school buildings in the state and a $3-billion backlog of needed capital improvements.69 Hogan also eliminated or lowered tolls on suburban highways and bridges even as Baltimoreans endured fare increases on buses, rail, and commuter lines.70 He supported expensive road projects of dubious necessity in sparsely populated rural areas while not scheduling road projects for Baltimore.71 Worse, an investigative reporter found that Hogan advanced major transportation and road projects that potentially raised property values for nearby properties owned by his commercial real estate business.72

  The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF) and other civil rights organizations also filed a complaint with the US Department of Transportation, on behalf of Earl Andrews, a Baltimore resident who depended on public transit, and BRIDGE, an interfaith coalition for equity. Like W. Ashbie Hawkins a century before, LDF took up the unequal conditions that Black Americans faced in transportation. Modern civil rights lawyers have a potentially powerful tool. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. Prohibited racial discrimination may be intentional or the result of facially neutral practices that have a “disparate impact” on a racial group. LDF offered statistical and qualitative evidence of disparity created by rescinding the Red Line and reallocating funds.73

  Less than 2 percent of jobs in Baltimore were in the Black neighborhoods with planned Red Line stops. Nearly all residents of distressed places would have to travel elsewhere to get to work, whether in the city or the suburbs. Yet in some of these neighborhoods the majority of residents had no vehicle, as did the carless 44 percent of residents along the planned corridor. They had to ride the bus, and their commutes were withering. About one-fifth to one-quarter of residents at proposed stops were unemployed, compared to a city unemployment average of 14 percent.74 The distressed hoods of East and West Baltimore along the proposed corridor, on average, were 80 percent Black, 30 percent poor, and 65 percent female-headed.75 Single Black mothers with no car, and children that needed to get to and fro, desperately needed reliable public transit.

  While the majority of the population along the Red Line route was African American, of the five most expensive road projects that received reallocated funds under Hogan’s transportation plan, only about 14 percent of the population of adjoining census tracts were Black. In addition to losing the opportunity for nearly halving commute times, Black Baltimoreans lost a grasp at one of more than ten thousand new jobs projected and the potential upsides of transit-oriented development at each station.76 A transportation economist found that whites received a 228 percent net increase in benefits from the reallocation while African Americans lost benefits, at –124 percent.77

  The harm to poor Black communities in Baltimore was even more pronounced. Lost was the opportunity for a new start, a reversal of chronic disinvestment. In particular, the Red Line offered a chance to ameliorate the harms of the Road to Nowhere, on which the Red Line would overlie, offering descendants a ride to opportunity rather than a neighborhood-destroying express route for others.78 Lost, too, was the chance to reduce air pollution for the city with the state’s poorest air quality and highest rates of pediatric asthma.79

  Despite ample evidence and arguments presented in the two civil rights complaints, the Trump administration closed the case without making a finding. In lieu of an investigation of the joined complaints, it said it would conduct a comprehensive review of Maryland’s transportation programs, for compliance with Title VI.80

  The Georgetown Law Civil Rights Clinic filed freedom of information statutory requests to find out what happened with the promised comprehensive review. The Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT) disclosed a trove of documents and emails while the Trump administration delayed, blaming the COVID-19 pandemic. Most telling were email communications between US and Maryland officials in 2018. Federal transportation officials did open a “corrective action” and informed MDOT that it would conduct a comprehensive Title VI analysis of its transportation spending. They rejected MDOT’s initial response, saying it had “simply provided a conclusion that disparate impacts did not exist.” MDOT tried again; in a subsequent email, it claimed no disparate impact violation because “large amounts of both State and federal funded investments in transit and other transportation modes closely correlated with the Census tracts with higher minority population.” In its answer, MDOT did not quantify what these “large amounts” were, for what projects, or which minority communities allegedly benefited, nor did it analyze whether the alleged “large amounts” made up the difference from the cancellation of the Red Line. Despite these deficiencies, the Trump administration accepted MDOT’s answer at face value and closed the corrective action without any explanation of its reasoning.81

  In other words, the Trump and Hogan administrations never gave a considered response to the Title VI petitioners’ core claim: In canceling the Red Line and reallocating its funds to other projects, Hogan and Maryland favored white areas to the detriment of Black citizens. The citizens who toiled for more than a decade planning the Red Line, building trust and a multiracial coalition for renewal, deserved a published response that a federal court might review to determine if the agency’s logic was arbitrary or evaded the demands of Title VI. There was no opportunity for any public accountability.

  Closing the case without findings was also insulting, a message that the civil rights claims of Black Americans don’t warrant a response. In the words of Samuel Jordan, a signatory to the Community Compact and the attendant complaint filed with the US Department of Transportation (DOT), canceling the Red Line amounted to an “aggressive assertion of the status quo” and “the status quo for Black people is always punitive.” Jordan is president of the Baltimore Transit Equity Coalition, formed after Hogan’s cancellation to advocate reinstating the Red Line. They continue to fight for the people of the city who suffer “transit detention,” said Jordan.82

  Two years after rescinding the Red Line, Hogan offered Baltimore a consolation, $135 million for BaltimoreLink, an ostensibly revamped bus system that was hardly a substitute for a $2.9 billion rail system. Hogan claimed the new bus system would be “transformative,” but angry riders complained that commutes worsened as bus lines were eliminated.83 For some, a one-bus commute became a two- or three-bus commute. Earl Andrews, whom LDF represented in his complaint filed with DOT, did not own a car. In his sixties, the African American resident of East Baltimore road buses to church, his job as an accountant at a luxury hotel, and evening seminary classes for a master’s in theology. He told a Washington Post reporter that he had to transfer buses after BaltimoreLink began, adding ten minutes to his already lengthy work commute. A Saturday shopping trip to Arundel Mills Mall took him four hours because the BaltimoreLink bus never came.84<
br />
  Carless residents of Black neighborhoods weren’t the only ones complaining. Among the animated online comments to the Post article were these:

  Richard Gilpin

  7/17/2017 10:41 AM EDT

  BaltimoreLink has reduced residents’ links to jobs and the region’s subway, light-rail and MARC commuter rail lines. One out every three bus routes have been deleted in some areas. For example, with the deletion of bus route 31, there is no direct Inner Harbor bus service from Boston Street and Fleet Street. Truly a disaster—now many of us have returned to driving downtown.

  trejean

  7/16/2017 10:57 AM ED

  . . . communities across the US are investing in rapid transit because people are now demanding it. Cities like Denver, Houston, and others are using rapid transit improvements like Light Rail and Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) to draw people into their cities. . . .

  The bus lines on the busiest lines in Baltimore are very overcrowded. Even with the new Service, it’s standing room only. Sometimes the buses are so crowded they can’t pick up new passengers. If your routes are this popular and you have done all tweaks possible to improve regular bus service, it only makes sense for one to looks at a more robust system to serve passengers.