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THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN URBAN SEGREGATION
| By Carl H. Nightingale |
State University of New York at Buffalo |
| "Segregation is apparent everywhere," warned Dr. Ernest Lyon to a standing-room only congregation at Baltimore's largely black John Wesley Methodist Episcopal Church on December 4, 1910. Cities divided by race could be found "not only in the United States, but even in Africa, the natural habitat of the black man." Lyon could speak from experience. He had just returned from Liberia, where he had been the U.S. Resident Minister and Consul General since 1903. In his sermon he reported that in the neighboring British colony of Sierra Leone "the whites have vacated the valleys, leaving them to the blacks, while they have escaped to the mountains. This method obtains throughout that vast continent, wherever the Anglo-Saxon and Teuton are found."1 |
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Lyon was speaking of "Hill Station," an all-European residential zone that British authorities developed on a small mountaintop a few miles outside Free-town, Sierra Leone's capital, on a plan borrowed from longstanding practices in India.2 He also may have been alluding to reports of intensifying segregation in South Africa. But his grim picture of an emerging global segregationism clearly contained troubling local significance. "The city fathers of Baltimore," Lyon reminded his audience, "are having under advisement at this time a measure which seeks to deprive free men ... of their right to live and own property anywhere they can." Two weeks later, on December 20, Baltimore Mayor John Barry Mahool signed into law the so-called West Segregation Ordinance, named after its sponsor in City Council Samuel L. West. The measure divided every street in Baltimore into "white blocks" and "colored blocks," based on the "race" of the majority of their inhabitants at the time of the Ordinance's passage. It set a penalty of one hundred dollars and up to a year in the Baltimore City Jail for anyone who moved on to a block set aside for the "opposite race," except black servants who lived in the houses of their white employers.3 |
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The law ran into repeated problems in the courts, forcing the city council, Mayor Mahool, and his successor James H. Preston to pass a total of four versions over the ensuing years—the second in April, 1911; the third a month later; and the fourth in September, 1913. But the mayor's office received enthusiastic letters from all points of the compass requesting copies of the most recent version of the Ordinance—including the mayors of numerous southern cities, New York City's Title and Mortgage Company, Chicago's City Hall, the powerful Chicago Real Estate Board, and even the imperial authorities at Cebu in the U.S.-occupied Philippines.4 Authorities in dozens of U.S. cities from Atlanta to St. Louis to New Orleans passed copycat legislation. In 1913, Baltimore's segregation ordinance helped inspire an unsuccessful campaign to establish South-African style rural segregation in the Southern countryside. Lawyers for the Baltimore chapter of the still-fledgling National Association for the Advancement of Colored People fought the law locally, forcing its most extensive revision in 1913. Then the national office of the NAACP brought a test suit against a similar law in Louisville, Kentucky. Its efforts bore fruit in the Supreme Court's Buchanan vs Warley decision which declared residential segregation by municipal ordinance unconstitutional. Even so, the west Ordinance remained inspirational to racists: urban authorities in still other Southern cities and in Ku-Klux-Klan-dominated Indianapolis passed new versions well into the 1920s and even as late as 1940.5 |
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