White Space, Black Hood

by Sheryll Cashin

  But there were also comments in this vein:

  suburb lifer

  7/17/2017 1:56 PM EDT

  Go away. No one wants any transportation system or station near the suburbs, look at all the crime data, then in a flash your neighborhood becomes the city . . .

  Several commenters also seized on statements in the article from Earl Andrews, who appeared in a picture, riding transit in a khaki business suit, as coiffed and sartorially splendid as George W. F. Mc-Mechen had been in 1910. Andrews, who rides transit by choice, noted that the Red Line would have improved the lives of “disenfranchised people” in the neighborhoods where the 2015 uprising had occurred and that it was “not a good feeling” to see the Purple Line go forward “while our hopes are dashed here.” Negative commenters cast Andrews’s reserved statement of frustration as a Black man asking for a handout for himself and all of Black Baltimore. Andrews also had pro-transit allies and defenders among the commenters, some of whom named the racism they saw in disparate treatment for Baltimore.85

  Earl Andrews

  It was a familiar clash of worldviews, between the dexterous and nondexterous, between people willing to rub shoulders with a rainbow of humanity on buses or rail and those trapped by myths and fear. Among the myths that opponents circulated about the Red Line was Baltimore taking from taxpayers elsewhere in the state. The purveyors of this narrative were oblivious or indifferent to a long history of state and federal government investing in roads and infrastructure in racially exclusionary suburbs, along with mortgage tax deductions and FHA-backed loans not available to Blacks. This state-sanctioned order, borne of supremacy, has not been dismantled and the resulting segregation pits heavily white, Republican-leaning areas against multiracial, Democrat-leaning areas in a zero-sum competition for scarce public resources. Predominantly Black, Latinx, and poor areas fare worst in this competition.

  Maryland spent $2.4 billion (not including ongoing bond interest payments) to build a nineteen-mile outer beltway that connects Washington, DC, suburbs, the same ones that will receive a Purple Line. This “Intercounty Connector” is lightly used, and because its toll revenues are far lower than projected, the rest of the state subsidizes it and other costly road projects it struggles to afford, with an increased gas tax.86 And Governor Hogan, for all his complaints about the cost of the Red Line, supported a $9 billion proposal to relieve traffic congestion on highways by adding more lanes, including express toll lanes that affluent people would be more likely to use. The planned relief was car centric, and tolls would not begin to cover the costs. Completely absent from this vision was investment in rapid rail or buses to reduce traffic by enabling individuals to get out of cars, much less offering transportation relief to carless Marylanders.87

  This architecture of redistribution, overinvesting in predominantly white space and disinvesting in predominantly Black, poor space, also occurs within the city of Baltimore. The spared, intact neighborhoods of Fells Point and Canton became points of downtown revival and upscale development that woos urban professionals. This development or gentrification was stimulated and subsidized by public investment and tax breaks for private developers because of proximity to high-poverty neighborhoods. In other words, an Enterprise Zone, a tax-incentive program designed to stimulate investment in places that private markets would otherwise bypass, was deployed primarily in majority-white areas rather than the poor Black areas that have been on the receiving end of state plunder. Baltimore-based public health researcher Lawrence Brown and legal scholar Audrey McFarlane underscored the dichotomy in their scholarship. The White L, saturated with Enterprise Zones, received hundreds of millions in tax increment financing, a free Charm City Circulator shuttle, new loft apartments, courteous policing, well-resourced public schools, and amenities that delight. The Black Butterfly received more than its fair share of public and subsidized housing, school closures, aggressive policing, and punishment.88 Plainclothes officers preyed on residents in the hood, conducting “jump outs,” ostensibly looking for guns. Anyone could be targeted, but these officers did not answer citizen calls, an approach to policing that is not effective and damages rather than protects the community.89

  It did not matter that five of the last six mayors were Black, that Blacks were a majority on the city council, or that the police chief and chief prosecutor were Black. Segregation perpetuates disparities. Black city leaders never dismantled segregation and would have been stymied if they tried because it would have required sacrifice from majority-white areas that were low-poverty because Black poverty had been concentrated elsewhere. Across the nation, Black leaders who inherited ghettos largely followed the same punitive policies as other places in response to drugs and crime—harsh policing and sentencing.90 Mass incarceration was the result, and neighborhoods like Sandtown-Winchester arguably were harmed rather than improved by this policy. Sandtown-Winchester/Harlem Park is the highest incarceration community in the city; 3 percent of residents of this area are in prison.91 Taxpayers, too, are harmed. Prisons and jails in Baltimore cost almost $300 million a year—annual incarceration of residents of Sandtown-Winchester/Poplar Hill cost $17 million annually.92

  Black neighborhoods continued to draw economic predators. In the 2000s, while the White L got traditional banking and mortgages, residents of the Black Butterfly were targeted for subprime loans with exploding interest rates and exorbitant prepayment penalties. Black middle-class neighborhoods were devastated by the wave of foreclosures, and descendants who lost their homes were forced to move into apartments in high-poverty areas.93

  Racial segregation produced other systemic inequalities that are only beginning to be revealed as Black leaders, like former city councilmember and current mayor Brandon Scott, and the public forced city agencies to undergo a racial equity analysis. The city planning department found that of $670 million in recently budgeted capital projects, white neighborhoods were slated to receive almost twice as much as Black areas of the city.94 Another analysis found Baltimore neighborhoods that are less than half Black receive nearly four times the investment than neighborhoods that are overwhelmingly Black.95

  Lately, a $5.5 billion public-private waterfront development on a south Baltimore peninsula known as Port Covington is emerging. The project was conceived by Under Armour founder and billionaire Kevin Plank and initiated by his real estate company. The formerly industrial 235-acre area will be transformed over two decades into an innovation hub of cybersecurity and biotech firms, gleaming new residences for their workers, and retail and other amenities to serve them. Governor Hogan’s administration designated the project as an Opportunity Zone, marking it as a federal tax shelter for investors. The riches of Port Covington will be well-insulated from the rest of Baltimore by an I-95 border and otherwise surrounded by water. Its developers received $660 million in tax increment financing, far exceeding support given by the fiscally challenged city to other projects, and only a portion of the $1.1 billion of public financing the Port Covington developers intend to secure. In return, the city received promises that 20 percent of the fourteen thousand housing units to be built would be affordable, though it is unclear and doubtful that the people of the Butterfly will benefit much from this new Emerald City.

  This is America and the new American caste. It is not based solely on race or on class. Geography—physical segregation—is the key mechanism for the redistribution of resources from taxpayers toward affluent majority-white areas and away from poor ones. The vicious cycle continues in metropolitan Baltimore and everywhere that ghettos were constructed. Perhaps Baltimore suffers more from hoary, race-tinged division because it had more Black people in 1860, 1910, and 1960 than other places, and government invested mightily in segregation to contain them. And yet the noose that still strangles West Baltimore also constrains the entire region.

  Education, a ladder of social mobility, remains separate and unequal in Baltimore and elsewhere in America. In 2020, Governor Hogan vetoed a bill known as the Blueprint
for Maryland’s Future that would have been a down payment on recommendations from the public Kirwan Commission to transform Maryland public education from mediocre to world-class. According to Maryland’s Department of Legislative Services, Baltimore City Public Schools are underfunded by $342 million annually, causing its children to endure among the highest student-to-teacher ratios in the state. All told, the Kirwan Commission’s proposals, after a ten-year phase-in, were estimated to cost $4 billion annually. Hogan condemned the Kirwan proposals, dubiously claiming the plan would demand $6,000 in taxes from every Maryland family. Then the COVID-19 pandemic gave him a blunt fiscal defense for his veto. In February 2021, Maryland Democratic lawmakers overrode Hogan’s veto and approved a digital-advertising tax to begin funding the Kirwan plan.

  COVID-19 killed Black people proportionate to their numbers in majority-Black Baltimore. Gun homicides also spiked with the pandemic. Headlines about violence, whether a prosaic shooting or a public-school child attacking a teacher, continue in Baltimore. A people disempowered will find ways to rebel and get attention. More of the same, quarantine and punish, results in more of the same. Why should we be surprised when disinvestment and containment produce such outcomes? No other neighborhoods in Baltimore were subjected to the cumulative, blunt-force trauma of decades of racist and flawed public and private action. In a city plagued by segregation and its effects, a chance for a reboot, for a new Red Line that might help heal and unify rather than punish and isolate, was not taken.

  CHAPTER 2

  WHITE SUPREMACY BEGAT “THE GHETTO“

  My great-great-grandmother, Lucinda Bowdre, was a woman of African and possibly other heritage. Born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1819, she may or may not have been enslaved. She became a seamstress and mother to seven children fathered by an Irish American dry goods merchant and slaveowner named John Cashin. In Augusta, apparently, they were a family, though perhaps a clandestine one.

  By 1860, Lucinda was living as a widow on Clifton Street in Philadelphia with a gaggle of children named Cashin. The census taker listed her as head of household and identified the entire family as Black, free inhabitants. They were part of a steady stream of Black Americans who came to the Quaker City, often via the Underground Railroad. In the mid- and late-nineteenth century, Philadelphia had the largest population of Blacks of any northern city. It was the nation’s center of Black intellectual and institutional life.

  Lucinda and her oldest daughter, Virginia, worked as seamstresses out of the home, as was the practice of many Black women in the city. Virginia’s husband, William Dorsey, a scion of a prominent Black family, worked as a waiter in his family’s catering business. The Dorseys were at the very top of a guild of Black caterers who evolved from house servants, butlers, and cooks to masters of the culinary arts. For a while, white elites were content to hire them. Together, Lucinda, Virginia, and William provided for a house full of minors. The neighborhoods below South Street, which had been populated by waves of Irish immigrants a generation before, were becoming the province of many Blacks, fugitive slave and free, who were pouring into the city in search of opportunity. Industrial jobs were reserved mainly for European immigrants. Blacks struggled to make their way, often undertaking the most menial labor.1

  Living on Clifton Street, just below South Street, placed Lucinda and family near the Black community’s institutional heart. Two of her children attended the Institute for Colored Youth, a Quaker school that provided a free classical education for talented Negro children. My great-grandfather, Herschel V. Cashin, was one them, and this exposure began a family tradition of academic striving and political agitation that would reverberate for generations.2

  The institute, which ultimately became Cheyney University of Pennsylvania, was a source of community pride—the only school in the city led by Black administrators and faculty. Its annual oral examinations in Latin, Greek, and mathematics were open to the public, as was the school’s library. It offered a series of public lectures by “colored” greats, including Frederick Douglass. A stone’s throw from the institute was Mother Bethel, the first Black church in the city, founded in 1794, and the progenitor of the nation’s first Black denomination, African Methodist Episcopal. The Christian Recorder newspaper, an abolitionist organ of the AME church, was published blocks away.

  During young Herschel’s years at the institute, the head of the boys’ department was Octavius Valentine Catto, a man of outsized talents and ambitions for his people. He was the main force behind the eleven colored Union regiments that were raised, trained, and sent from the region to fight in the Civil War. He was a leader in the Equal Rights League. Like its civil rights successors in the South a century later, the league protested segregation of Philadelphia’s streetcars and advocated for Black voting rights. Catto and other league militants orchestrated a nonviolent campaign in which men and women blocked streetcars with their bodies and filled them with Christian ministers, sick children, pregnant women, and wounded war veterans. When police and conductors ejected these sympathetic riders from the cars, the ensuing publicity converted many. It took a successful court battle in 1867 to clinch victory. Voting equality for men was supposed to come with ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution. On the first day of the first Philadelphia city election in which Black men exercised their new voting rights, Irish immigrant gangs rioted against Black voters to prevent radical Republicans from taking over city government. A Democratic Party operative shot Octavius Catto in the back and killed him.3

  Lucinda died in 1865, and Virginia and William continued to reside at Clifton Street for a year before moving to Locust Street, nearer the extended Dorsey family and catering business. Virginia and William cared for the younger Cashins and raised six Dorsey children of their own. When their thirty-year marriage collapsed in 1890, Virginia moved into her own abode. She continued to work as a dressmaker, claiming to be a widow for the remainder of her days.4

  In 1896, a young W. E. B. Du Bois set out to document the people and institutions in Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward, the institutional heart where many descendants had landed. In The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois noted about forty thousand Blacks were scattered throughout Philadelphia, although they were often relegated to the worst dwellings by reason of “race prejudice.” The one-quarter of Philadelphia Negroes who lived in the Seventh Ward also resided near whites, although usually in clusters.5

  This was a common pattern of Negro settlement in northern cities in the 1890s. Blacks tended to live among whites, though they might be segregated at the block level. Ghettoization, the extreme concentration of nearly all Negroes into designated quarters, had not yet begun.6

  The Philadelphia Negro was the first comprehensive sociological examination of a Black community in America. Throughout the twentieth century, other African American social scientists built stellar reputations by carefully documenting conditions in Black ghettos, inspired perhaps by Du Bois’s example. Du Bois used the word “slums” to name the pockets of Black poverty he observed in the Seventh Ward. He was unflinching in describing “vicious” criminals, “gamblers,” “prostitutes,” and “thieves” living among the honest, penniless Blacks who landed on the worst, deteriorated blocks. Yet Du Bois sensitively analyzed the environmental conditions that encouraged crime. He took pains to distinguish the small numbers of Blacks that constituted the semipermanent criminal class from the poor Black laborers that formed the “great mass” of the Negro population in the ward.

  According to Du Bois, most Black laborers were good-humored churchgoers. As descendants of slavery, they had limited skills. They were locked out of industrial jobs by racist trade unions and were charged higher rents than whites for the worst accommodations. Du Bois concluded it was the conditions thrust on the Negro, not Negroes themselves, that were the main cause of social problems. Du Bois lamented that even the most educated and qualified Negroes were denied jobs on the grounds of color—a caste system that a fortunate few Blacks evaded when an
individual white employer decided to be fair. As Du Bois presciently predicted in his classic 1903 essay collection The Souls of Black Folk, the problem of the twentieth century would be “the problem of the color line,” although he did not anticipate its looming geographic dimensions.7

  When Du Bois wrote The Souls, the vast majority of American Negroes lived in the South under the stifling institutions and social controls that replaced slavery—Jim Crow, peonage, sharecropping on the masters’ terms, and violence. It was a world where every white male child could demand to be called Mister and every Negro man was a boy, where false accusations of rape sparked lynching pageants and actual rape of Black women could be excused or ignored.8 Between 1900 and 1930, about 1.6 million Blacks moved; this exodus would be called the First Great Migration.

  The great migrants were descendants of slavery. As they left the South to escape oppression and find opportunity, whites in the rest of the country resorted to violence and began a multidecade process of constructing Black ghettos. The ghetto, originated as a place for housing Jews in sixteenth-century Venice, was a phenomenon brutally replicated by Nazis in German-occupied Europe. In the United States, the ghetto became “a space for the intrusive social control of poor blacks.”9

  World War I accelerated migration as labor shortages fueled African American dreams. Everywhere migrants went, they met white resistance, though some places were more violent than others. Cleveland, Ohio, allowed African Americans to live in relative peace and some integration between 1870 and 1900. Once a bastion of abolitionism and a major stop on the Underground Railroad, Cleveland enjoyed a reputation for positive race relations, particularly between its small population of middle-class Blacks and the white neighbors they typically lived among.