The Transnational Contexts of Early Twentieth-Century American Urban Segregation

The Transnational Contexts of Early Twentieth-Century American Urban Segregation Carl Husemoller Nightingale Journal of Social History, Volume 39, Number 3, Spring 2006, pp. 667-702 (Article) Published by Oxford University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.2006.0008 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/195869 Access provided by University of Washington @ Seattle (12 Sep 2017 23:54 GMT) 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 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 re- minded 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 Ma- hool 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 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 enthusias- tic 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 pow- erful 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 At- lanta to St. Louis to New Orleans passed copycat legislation. In 1913, Balti- more’s segregation ordinance helped inspire an unsuccessful campaign to estab- lish South-African style rural segregation in the Southern countryside. Lawyers for the Baltimore chapter of the still-fledgling National Association for the Ad- vancement of Colored People fought the law locally, forcing its most extensive 668 journal of social history spring 2006 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 This paper takes up the theme in Reverend Lyon’s sermon that Baltimore’s segregation schemes were in some way connected to those in Africa and elsewhere. It is based on the idea that social historians’ techniques of closely- textured research can play a key role in the elaboration of world historical devel- opments. World historians, meanwhile, can advance their own goals by ground- ing what has been largely a theoretical field by digging deeply into local stories. To accomplish this methodological alchemy, I combine archival work into the social and intellectual history of the movement to pass the West Ordinance with a wide-ranging synthetic reading of trends in urban history throughout the West and the expanding world of Western colonialism, especially highlighting trends in India and South Africa. The early twentieth century witnessed a planet-wide proliferation of residen- tially segregated cities designed to uphold racial hierarchies. Colonial regimes like that of the British in Sierra Leone were the biggest builders of these divided cities. The tradition began in the late seventeenth century when the British East India Company officially designated separate walled sections of its capital at Madras, India as “White Town” and “Black Town.” In the nineteenth century the British and then other European imperial powers developed new techniques of urban segregation, laying out separate districts for Europeans and “natives” in literally hundreds of cities, especially in the aftermath of the Great Uprising of 1856 in India, and then again after the Scramble for Africa. The project culminated in the early 20th century, in what Janet Abu Lughod called “apartheid Rabat” in French Morocco and Edwin Lutyens’ capital for the British Raj at New Delhi, which had no less than five separate zones divided by color and rank. Canada, Australia, some places in the Carribean, and even Brazil saw similar segregation schemes during the same period, some successful, others less so.6 But the most long-lasting of all were the locations and townships of South Africa7 and the black ghettos of American cities like Baltimore,8 both of which had earlier precedents, but both of which were firmly and widely institutional- ized in the early twentieth century as well. Baltimore’s West Ordinance was not explicitly modeled on segregationist efforts in cities abroad, nor did its major proponents leave any evidence that they were specifically aware of or in touch with people leading such efforts elsewhere in the world. However, the ideological and political strategies employed by segregationists in Baltimore in 1910 were derived from and helped to augment three overlapping but distinct transnational conversations. The first of these conversations concerned the world geography of the “races”; the second concerned race and urban reform, particularly concerning public health; and the third concerned middle-class control of urban and suburban property markets. The direct participants in these conversations included colonial officials, academics, professionals, and propagandists—and many world-renowned figures could be THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION 669 counted among them. They lived and worked on both sides of the Atlantic and in the far flung colonies, and sometimes traveled across all of these geographic areas. They traded ideas and argued with each other within transnational and pan-imperial institutions which they themselves built, including agencies of imperial government, professional organizations, international conferences, and scholarly journals. Though the three conversations on race, reform, and property were themselves not always centrally focused on urban racial segregation, all three provided essential ideological ammunition for local efforts to create racially separate residential districts in one way or another in cities on virtually every inhabited continent of the earth during this period. Sometimes, most often in European colonies, the transnationally connected experts themselves took personal leadership roles in implementing plans to repli- cate segregated cities in new locations. In Baltimore, the most prominent experts generally held back, and local residential segregationists came from pro- fessions that were, at most, only indirectly involved in the process of creating and diffusing new knowledge on race, urban reform, and property markets. The proponents of the Baltimore segregation ordinances were thus amateurs, but as such they tapped into the conversations of internationally connected experts informally, either by reading their work or absorbing knowledge second hand through conversations with each other and through popular media. National, regional, and local conditions determined which ideas the Baltimore segregationists embraced with greatest vigor—like the idea that “commingled races” were inherently prone to conflict and the idea that blacks brought down de- clining property values—as well as the ones they received somewhat more luke- warmly, such as the equation of blacks with disease. The worldwide diffusion of ideas about racial geography, urban reform, and property markets thus provide the transnational intellectual and institutional contexts in which to formulate comparative insights about the segregation of cities across the world during this period of convergence, when segregation came to places—India, West Africa, South Africa, and the United States among others—that had otherwise starkly differing political, institutional, economic, demographic, and cultural histories. Finally, when read with transnational contexts in mind, the social historical record of the events surrounding the ordinance suggests how innovations cre- ated during the course of segregating US cities had important significance elsewhere in the world. ***** Questions of space have always been critical to the idea of race. Race, after all, came into intellectual prominence as a concept during the late eighteenth century as part of inquiries into the world geography of human difference.

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