Race, class and antisemitism in Baltimore (venue, quality, children)

[barante]

Understanding the complicated political situation in Maryland on the eve of the Civil War is key to understanding today's Baltimore.

Here is the take of Mayor George W. Brown, a kin of Alex. Brown. This is a FREE read.
https://books.google.com/books?id=gl...teenth&f=false

[pwduvall]

Originally Posted by james777

This film should be mandatory viewing for anyone who posts on this forum. The posters here blame all the ills of Baltimore on the landlords. Very few know that Baltimore now has the most strict housing code in the country for dealing with all types of violations. As a matter of fact it is too strict because the Baltimore Housing authority can come to your house, enter, and make any repairs that they deem necessary, without a court order, and with very little or no notice. The cost of the repairs becomes a lien on the property, just like the taxes and the water bill. Many have lost their homes and life savings from liens for work that in many cases was unnecessary.

Housing code violations in Baltimore are like a drunk who has been convicted of multiple DUIs, but is still driving. They only exist because the authorities are not doing their job.

Is the Housing Department coming on to properties that don't have vacancy violations? My impression was that they would only enter occupied properties when there is an immediate safety hazard. I have to say that I'm pretty unsympathetic if the property that you referred to is in either of these situations. Sometimes people who own properties like that are known as slumlords.
If, on the other hand, the city is repairing perfectly nice property and slapping the owner with a lien, I am sympathetic. Perhaps you can give an address of where this happened?

[barante]

How policy built segregation in Baltimore | MSNBC

Never has there been a clearer explanation of how Baltimore became what it is.

[EdwardA]

Originally Posted by barante

How policy built segregation in Baltimore | MSNBC

Never has there been a clearer explanation of how Baltimore became what it is.

Blaming the riots on segregation beginning 100 years ago is simply lame. Certain people will throw up anything to excuse facing up to hard truths.

[Infinite_heights77]

No it's not! You have cognitive dissonance. The hard truths (back by tons of empirical evidence), will always trump your foolish conjecture on how you think the world works, as opposed to how IT ACTUALLY operates. Slavery, legalized Jim Crow, mass murder, rape, resource extraction, public policy and legislative white supremacy, white privilege, euro-centric education are all culprits in this grand delusion. If you want to refer hard truths on how inferior you feel Blacks are to whites in areas of life-sustaining areas. Let's converse on that.

How Racism Doomed Baltimore

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/op...=fb-share&_r=0



The Baltimore riots threw a spotlight on the poverty and isolation of the African-American community where the unrest began last month. The problems were underscored on Friday when the Justice Department, in response to Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s request, started an investigation of the Police Department, which has an egregious history of brutality and misconduct.
Other cities are plagued by the same difficulties, but they have proved especially intractable in Baltimore. A new study from Harvard offers evidence that Baltimore is perhaps the worst large city in the country when measured by a child’s chances of escaping poverty.
The city’s racially segregated, deeply poor neighborhoods cast an especially long shadow over the lives of low-income boys. For example, those who grew up in recent decades in Baltimore earn 28 percent less at age 26 than otherwise similar kids who grew up in an average county in the United States.
Continue reading the main story Related in Opinion

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  Opinion: The Real Problem With America’s Inner CitiesMAY 9, 2015
  
  

As shocking as they are, these facts make perfect sense in the context of the century-long assault that Baltimore’s blacks have endured at the hands of local, state and federal policy makers, all of whom worked to quarantine black residents in ghettos, making it difficult even for people of means to move into integrated areas that offered better jobs, schools and lives for their children. This happened in cities all over the country, but the segregationist impulse in Maryland generally was particularly virulent and well-documented in Baltimore, which is now 63 percent black.
Photo

Baltimore Credit Patrick Semansky/Associated Press A Southern City
Americans might think of Maryland as a Northern state, but it was distinctly Southern in its attitudes toward race. In the first decade of the 20th century, for example, the Legislature approved amendments to the State Constitution to deny the vote to black citizens. Voters rejected these amendments, not out of sympathy for civil rights, but because of suspicion that the political machine would use disenfranchisement to gain a stranglehold over state politics.
The segregationist effort in Baltimore gained momentum in 1910, shortly after a Yale-educated black lawyer bought a house in the well-heeled Mount Royal section of the city. The uproar among whites led to an ordinance that partitioned the city into black blocks and white blocks: No black person could occupy a home on a block where more than half the people were white; no white person could move into a block where more than half the residents were black. In 1910, The New York Times described this as “the most pronounced ‘Jim Crow’ measure on record.”
When the courts overturned the ordinance, the city adopted a strategy, already successful in Chicago, under which building and health department inspectors lodged code violations against owners who ignored the apartheid rule. Civic leaders then imposed restrictive covenants that barred black residents.
‘House Not For Sale’
The Federal Housing Administration, created in 1934 by Congress to promote homeownership by insuring private mortgages, could have staved off housing segregation by enforcing a nondiscrimination policy. Instead, as the historian Kenneth Jackson explained in “Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States,” the agency reflected “the racist tradition of the United States.” It insisted on a rigid, white-black separation in housing. It openly supported racist covenants that largely excluded African-Americans — even the middle class and well-to-do — from the homeownership boom that took place between the 1930s and the 1960s. And it typically denied mortgages to black residents wherever they lived.

Originally Posted by EdwardA

Blaming the riots on segregation beginning 100 years ago is simply lame. Certain people will throw up anything to excuse facing up to hard truths.

[Infinite_heights77]

Things have been very clear for quite sometime, it's just others refuse to listen.

Originally Posted by barante

How policy built segregation in Baltimore | MSNBC

Never has there been a clearer explanation of how Baltimore became what it is.

[Infinite_heights77]

I will always say this, "Baltimore is one big plantation!" Whites worked the massa's plantation as well.

[barante]

Antero Pietila

[barante]

How Baltimore invented neighborhood segregation - Vox

[Hamish Forbes]

Originally Posted by Infinite_heights77

Things have been very clear for quite sometime, it's just others refuse to listen.

Originally Posted by Infinite_heights77

"Baltimore and its people are "weird" --

The town is psychologically schizophrenic....a multiplicity of people and dysfunctional personalities: Southern, northern, midwest, slave, hillbilly, redneck, liberals, ineffective politicians, losers, dis-shelved scientists, highly and overly educated perverts and predators, freaks, gangsters, slumlords, rats (2 legged), bamas and coons..