July 29, 2019
Ellen McGirt for Fortune
Over the weekend, President Donald Trump launched a now-familiar style of attack on Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings. Racist.
“Rep, Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men & women of Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern Border, when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous. His district is considered the Worst in the USA……” the president tweeted.
It continues: “Cumming District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.” And, “If racist Elijah Cummings would focus more of his energy on helping the good people of his district, and Baltimore itself, perhaps progress could be made in fixing the mess that he has helped to create over many years of incompetent leadership.” And more today: “If the Democrats are going to defend the Radical Left “Squad” and King Elijah’s Baltimore Fail, it will be a long road to 2020.”
CNN anchor and Baltimore native, Victor Blackwell, broke down Trump’s attacks on-air on Saturday’s “CNN Newsroom” program.
“Donald Trump has tweeted more than 43,000 times,” Blackwell said. “He’s insulted thousands of people, many different types of people. But when he tweets about infestation, it’s about black and brown people.” Pausing to collect himself, and with water in his eyes, he said, “You know who did [live there], Mr. President? I did. From the day I was brought home from the hospital to the day I left for college. And a lot of people I care about still do.”
It was a powerful reminder that “diversity” is personal in newsrooms and in public policy.
The Baltimore Sun editorial board also wasted little time responding to the president’s Twitter rant, part political analysis, part Maryland pride. It’s a clapback for the ages:
“[W]e would tell the most dishonest man to ever occupy the Oval Office, the mocker of war heroes, the gleeful grabber of women’s private parts, the serial bankrupter of businesses, the useful idiot of Vladimir Putin and the guy who insisted there are “good people” among murderous neo-Nazis that he’s still not fooling most Americans into believing he’s even slightly competent in his current post. Or that he possesses a scintilla of integrity. Better to have some vermin living in your neighborhood than to be one.”
There are many things at play here, mostly political. Cummings has earned the president’s ire by leading investigations into his administration as chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee. The tweets, and Baltimore’s grim crime statistics, have become partisan talking points. Turns out, Jared Kushner, the presidential son-in-law, owns more than a dozen Baltimore-area apartment complexes in low-income zip codes that have been cited for code violations. Baltimoreans and their supporters are defending their city and killing it in the hashtag game.
My best (and perhaps only) contribution might be a little context. It all starts with Jim Crow.
To have a serious discussion about what’s happening in Baltimore, it’s smart to start with the apartheid-style residential segregation ordinances that the city’s mayor put into place from 1910 to 1913. I’m not being hyperbolic: I’m summing up a 1982 paper published by law professor Garrett Power in the Maryland Law Review. In it, Power explains how a generally progressive administration purposefully segregated a reasonably integrated city—“to promote the general welfare of the city by providing, so far as practicable, for the use of separate blocks by white and colored people for residences, churches and schools.”
That decision helped ensure low-income black residents were isolated in slum-like conditions with substandard services, which eventually became codified in every kind of public policy. It led to, among other things, decades of housing equity failures.
Fast forward to 1995. Thompson v. HUD was a groundbreaking fair housing lawsuit that claimed the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) violated the Fair Housing Act of 1968 by concentrating African-American residents of public housing in the most impoverished and underserved neighborhoods of Baltimore. The suit was triggered by a plan to demolish a dangerous high-rise public housing development, which should have ben an opportunity to introduce affordable housing across the city. Instead, rampant white NIMBYism made sure that replacement units would be relegated to segregated neighborhoods. The suit was filed on behalf of 14,000 African American families living in public housing.
It was 10 years of legal grinding before the team behind the lawsuit earned a victory lap: In January 2005, a federal district court judge found that HUD “failed to achieve significant desegregation” and accused them of treating Baltimore City as “an island reservation for use as a container for all of the poor of a contiguous region.”
Not a long hop between 2005 and today, am I right?
The Thompson summary is an easy read and offers a helpful primer on how housing segregation created two separate and profoundly unequal Baltimores. And this analysis from the Poverty and Race Research Action Council helps put Thompson into a broader context of similar lawsuits around the country.
I recommend reading both before you gear up to fight your political opponents.
I’ll also leave the last policy word to Professor Power who warned 37 years ago that without real system change, Baltimore’s ugly past would persist. The history “cautions us to discount the righteous rhetoric of reform; it reminds us of the racist propensities of democratic rule; and it sets the stage for understanding the development of a covert conspiracy to enforce housing segregation, the vestiges of which persist in Baltimore yet today.”
