WHAT KING SAW BUT AMERICA IGNORED

Uprisings were an effect of damage, not a cause, writes Elizabeth Nix

AFTER the Reverend Martin Luther King jnr was assassinated 50 years ago this week, cities erupted. The uprisings were an expression of the deep sorrow that followed King’s death. But they were also a response to municipal laws and local practices that had created the conditions he challenged.

It wasn’t the urban unrest of the 1960s that caused the decline of city neighbourhoods but decades of unjust local decisions on housing, zoning and labour policies.

In determining the legacy of the uprisings, we should concern ourselves less with those days of violence and more with the urban policies they sought to correct.

The importance of policy in leading to urban decline and rebellion has been clear since the 1960s. King understood it, telling striking sanitation workers in Memphis a month before his assassination, “You are here tonight to demand that Memphis do something about the conditions that our brothers face, as they work day in and day out for the well-being of the total community. You are here to demand that Memphis will see the poor.”

Even the federal government recognised it, explicitly attributing the urban violence of the 1960s to the combined effects of racism and poverty. In a report commissioned in response to disturbances in Detroit, Newark and Watts and published in March 1968, the Kerner Commission stated, “What white Americans have never fully understood — but what the Negro can never forget — is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

Few places illustrate more starkly the way policy contributed to decline than the city of Baltimore. It pioneered ordinances that codified racial segregation, resulting in generations of economic inequality. At the turn of the 20th century, Baltimore’s African American professional community owned imposing Italianate rowhouses along Druid Hill Ave. In 1910, W Ashbie Hawkins, an African American attorney, bought a house on a street one block east and rented it to his African American law partner, a graduate of Yale Law School. The Baltimore Sun reported that white residents of the block deemed the move “a Negro invasion” and lobbied the city council to pass an ordinance unlike any other American city had devised.

The 1910 ordinance stipulated that every block in Baltimore would be deemed black or white according to the percentage of residents of each race who lived there. Potential new residents were not allowed to alter the racial percentages: A black person could not move on to a block that was less than 51 per cent black. A white person could not move on to a block that was less than 51 per cent white. Violators faced a fine of US$100, a year in jail or both. All new residential development would be designated white or black.

Ordinance 610 was subtitled “an ordinance for preserving order, securing property values, and promoting the great interests and insuring the great government of Baltimore City,” but of course it accomplished none of those goals for black residents of Baltimore.

After the Supreme Court deemed similar ordinances unconstitutional in 1917, champions of segregated housing resorted to restrictive covenants to reinforce the segregated patterns that the ordinance had established. These documents, which were attached to real estate deeds, prohibited homeowners from selling to black or Jewish buyers, preventing many black residents from buying homes in Baltimore’s most desirable neighbourhoods. This limited African Americans’ ability to build wealth for themselves and subsequent generations.

Legal until 1948, these restrictions also fostered overcrowding in designated black neighbourhoods. When workers poured into the city during World War II, the old three-storey rowhouses were subdivided into cramped apartments. After the Allied victory, the war industries curtailed production, the beginning of the contraction of this workingclass city’s economic base. Baltimore would lose 100,000 industrial jobs before the end of the century. Unemployed residents of the city’s crowded neighbourhoods created swaths of concentrated poverty.

Ordinance 610 and its legacy most certainly did not “preserve order,” as the disturbances that broke out in these poor areas on April 6, 1968, proved. Baltimore was one of more than 100 cities to experience looting and arson after King’s assassination. Its US$13 million in property damage (calculated in 1968 dollars) was second only to losses in Washington, DC.

The commercial districts that suffered were those that had seen decades of city-sanctioned disinvestment, neighbourhoods in decline by design. Many of the same areas experienced violence in Baltimore’s 2015 uprising. Reporters unfamiliar with the city who toured these neighbourhoods after the recent violence attributed the destruction they saw to the uprising.

But the residents of Baltimore know better. In each case, the unrest did not cause the deterioration of the neighbourhoods. It exacerbated and called attention to it, but decades of local practices that benefited some neighbourhoods while writing off others had already done the damage. The uprisings were an effect, not a cause.

As the 2015 unrest proved, cities ignored the warnings of the Kerner Commission and failed to adjust their behaviour after the 1968 uprisings. Even today, they continue to make decisions that unjustly disadvantage certain members of the population.

Local leaders prioritise Tax Increment Finance agreements for developers to “promote the great interests” of their cities. They place incinerators in certain neighbourhoods and ensure they are downwind of others. These local decisions have long-lasting consequences.

In his 2015 study, Raj Chetty looked at every community in America to determine the chances that a child born into poverty would gain financial security in adulthood. Baltimore appears at the very bottom of his list.

In the 50 years since King’s assassination we have not answered his last charge. We must pressure urban elected officials to remember his words to Memphis: They must “see the poor” and consider the history behind their poverty — all the decades of racially exclusionary laws and systematic disinvestment in neighbourhoods. Only by finally righting those wrongs will we learn the lessons of 1968.

You are here to demand that Memphis will see the poor. Reverend Martin Luther King jnr