Antero Pietila
2008-04-02 07:00:00.0
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BALTIMORE -

Although Barack Obama acted out of political necessity, the Easter week timing of his extraordinary race speech inspired congregations of various faiths to study and reflect on his themes. Friday’s 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination ensures that race, in all of its complexities, will stay on the national front burner.

Such attention causes a profound sense of unease among many Americans, who fear increased polarization. I, for one, think the discussion is healthy and long overdue. We need dispassionate public airings of these issues locally and nationally. That is the only way toward a colorblind nation.

The University of Baltimore will lead the way Thursday, when a three-day conference convenes to examine the reasons and legacies of Baltimore’s 1968 riots. The timing is a pure accident. When planning started more than a year ago, nothing indicated that the event, which is open to the public, would deal with headline news.

Whether we want to admit it, race continues to be “An American Dilemma,” as Gunnar Myrdal called it in his 1944 landmark study. He ended the foreword with these prophetic words: “Not since Reconstruction has there been more reason to anticipate fundamental changes in American race relations, changes which will involve a development toward the American ideals.”

Myrdal was prescient. Within a decade, the Supreme Court delivered two far-reaching decisions changing America.

The 1948 Shelley v. Kraemer ruling stopped enforcement of covenants many neighborhoods used to exclude blacks, Jews and other minorities. Such covenants were so common three Supreme Court justices asked to be recused from the case; they lived in neighborhoods in Virginia and the District of Columbia barring minorities. The court convened with a bare quorum.

Baltimore pioneered residential segregation, and several people with local roots sparred before the Supreme Court. Among them was Philip Perlman, a former newspaper editor who had risen to be the U.S. solicitor general; NAACP’s Thurgood Marshall, who felt so wounded by his native city that he seldom had anything good to say about it; and Alger Hiss, an erstwhile Bolton Hill resident, diplomat and Johns Hopkins honorary doctor. They all argued against covenants.

Among those on the opposite side were two other Bolton Hill residents. Thomas F. Cadwalader founded the Legal Aid Bureau in 1911; Carlyle Barton presided over the Johns Hopkins University board of trustees for 17 years. They told the court that Bolton Hill had managed to stay all-white because “attempted violations have been quashed by threatened suits or by injunctions obtained from local equity courts.” They predicted dire consequences if racial covenants were removed.

The Supreme Court’s decision was unanimous. It spurred the white flight leading to the decline of major cities.

Even more momentous was the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Baltimore again made the news. It was the first major city not only to desegregate promptly but on a citywide basis. Emotions flared, but desegregation proceeded without violence.

What kind of place was Baltimore in those days? Luckily for later generations, volunteers from more than 50 civic organizations, in cooperation with governmental anti-bias agencies, were preparing a snapshot of Baltimore’s race relations right at that moment. Published in 1955, “An American City in Transition” continues to be an important, authentic account of conditions in a Jim Crow city on the cusp of unforeseen epochal changes. (See accompanying excerpt.)

The University of Baltimore conference is taking place at a similar defining moment in history. It should be used as a foundation for a continuing examination of things that not only separate us but unite us. Baltimore would be a better city as a result.

Antero Pietila is a Baltimore Examiner columnist. He can be reached at hap5905@hotmail.com.