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 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 At- lanta to St. Louis to New Orleans passed copycat legislation. In 1913, Balti- more’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 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 developments. 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 institutionalized 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 professions 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 declining 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 created during the course of segregating US cities had important significance elsewhere in the world.

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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. In discussions which spanned Europe, the Americas, and the colonies, academics, colonial officials, and propagandists on either side of the slavery question de- bated the merits of separation of the races largely on two geographic scales, the macro-scale of the continent—whether it was suitable for races from one part of the world to live on continents deemed to be “natural habitats” of others— and the micro-scale of intimate relationships—whether it was a good thing for 670 journal of social history spring 2006 people of different races to reproduce and create mixed-race peoples.9 The idea that cities should have separate sections for the races helped resolve some of the ideological problems that arose in these debates. In India during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the British faced critics who felt that An- glo Saxons risked racial degeneration by getting too intimate with Indians and by spending too much time in tropical climates unsuitable for whites. One response was a vast expansion their early modern Black Town/White Town model, including the development of segregated military cantonments for soldiers, separate civil lines for administrators, and hill stations such as cool, foggy Simla, in the foothills of Himalayas, a kind of ersatz English country town where a large segment of the British Raj decamped every summer to escape the heat of Calcutta and even, some imagined, India itself. Similar ideas justified the appro- priation of choice rural land for whites only in South Africa and for the idea that Africans should be kept out of cities altogether, except when rendering specific services to whites.10 In the United States, macro- and micro-segregationist notions lay at the heart of Manifest Destiny, Indian extermination and reservations, black colonization schemes, Chinese and other Asian exclusion measures, and the 1924 Immigra- tion Restriction Act.11 Advocates of slavery, by contrast, had to embrace conti- nental integration, even as they vigorously (if only theoretically) opposed sexual intermixing of races. At their most enthusiastic, they portrayed Africans’ “juxtaposition” with whites in the Southern States as a divine plan to bring an inferior race in contact with the good influences of their racial superiors.12 After emancipation, ideologues like Henry Grady grew less sanguine about the “commin- gling” of the races in a single region, portraying the South’s “negro problem” as a unique historic cross the region had to bear. It was a situation which could only work if blacks were deprived of the vote, thus bringing them under a tutelage to whites that would more closely approximate colonialism elsewhere. For this gloomier vision, Grady drew heavily on new developments in the international scientific conversations on racial geography, particularly the Social Darwinian view of humankind locked in a perpetual struggle between fit and unfit races. He also worried about what he saw as an increase in the sexual assertiveness of black men, and the likelihood that it would provoke the race-instincts of whites to join lynch mobs that would undermine the economic prospects of the region. Only by depriving blacks of political ambition could the region minimize the clash of “race instincts” inevitable between differing races living in close proximity.13 In Baltimore, these arguments were the intellectual common wisdom of the “city fathers” Dr. Lyon alluded to, the group of disfranchisers and segregationists who gathered forces in 1910 to promote the West Ordinance. In addition to Councilman West and Mayors Mahool and Preston, there were five other key players: Milton Dashiell, a lawyer who had a hand in writing every version of the law; Edgar Allen Poe, the City Solicitor (and great-nephew of the famous author) who repeatedly vouched for the constitutionality of the ordinance; William Luke Marbury, another, much more prominent lawyer who tes- tified on behalf of the ordinance from the beginning and who helped Dashiell rewrite it twice during the spring of 1911 after it ran into trouble in the local courts; Charles H. Grasty, editor of the Baltimore News from the 1890s and, as of 1910, owner and editor of the venerable Baltimore Sun, whose progressive edito- THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION 671 rial pages bristled with endorsements for the ordinance throughout the process; and William Cabell Bruce, the prominent Maryland politician and race theorist, who played an important role in the career of most of the other players. In addition, the historical record contains smaller snippets of information about what we might call the grassroots of the segregation ordinance movement: some eighty-five people, including officers of neighborhood associations, letter writers, and signers of petitions. A collective biography of these men and women reveals how international conversations about racial geography and race conflict came to be understood in an American urban context, and in particular how this played out in a border-state city like Baltimore, Maryland—redolent as it was of the influences of region, political party, profession, day-to-day urban existence, and the highly charged politics of a few local neighborhoods.14 Influences from abroad and contemporary world-historical analyses of the geography of the races for the most part entered the discourse on racial conflict in Baltimore through a channel largely unexplored by historians of transnational connections, that of amateur interest. Bruce, Grasty, and Marbury all traveled quite extensively on business in Europe and across North America, but the shar- ing or acquisition of formal expertise does not appear to have been a goal of those trips—as it was in, say, contemporary social reformers’ “sociological tours” to Europe described by Daniel T. Rodgers.15 None of the principal supporters of the West Ordinance left evidence that they visited segregated cities in Asia or Africa, as did the equally cosmopolitan Dr. Lyon. Only Grasty the newspaper- man belonged to a profession that involved extensive international interchange of specialized ideas and knowledge. The lawyers who crafted the Ordinance were thus users and implementers of racial ideas that percolated to them, no doubt through many separate intellectual channels, from transoceanic debates of academics and imperialists. All of the ordinance supporters had personal or political connections with William Cabell Bruce, graduate of the University of Maryland Law School, Bal- timore City Solicitor, State Representative, and later U.S. Senator. His rise as a politician began in 1891 when he elaborated Henry Grady’s arguments for disfranchisement in a pamphlet entitled “The Negro Problem.” Like Grady, Bruce drew freely on Social Darwinism. Something of a racist’s world historical perspective frames his work. His pamphlet begins by comparing Southern whites’ feelings towards blacks with the “inveterate aversion” that kept “the Englishman and the East Indian or the American and the Mongolian sullenly apart even when brought to the closest contiguity in point of space.” The attorney William Luke Marbury was Bruce’s closest friend in law school, and the two shared theoretical and political insights throughout their careers. Marbury, his son tells us in a memoir, often held forth in his formidable Baltimore parlor on the latest racist theories; his tastes ran to the Comte de Gobineau and, later, to Madison Grant. The editorial pages of Charles Grasty’s newspapers are filled with the all the clichés of Social Darwinism and repeatedly draw on the common wisdom about white man’s burden and empire. Indeed, for other middle-class Baltimoreans who joined the crusades for racial segregation ordinances, Grasty’s papers must have been the most widely read analysis of race relations on a global scale.16 On the basis of such ideas, West Ordinance supporters could propound their beliefs on race relations with a sense of certainty and universalistic scientific 672 journal of social history spring 2006 authority. In his report to Mayor Mahool asserting the constitutionality of the Ordinance, for example, City Solicitor Edgar Allen Poe maintained that “it can- not be denied at this late day that one of the greatest problems that confronts the Southern States is the negro problem” and referred readers to “irrefutable facts, well-known conditions, inherent personal characteristics and ineradica- ble traits of character peculiar to the races, close association on a footing of absolute equality is utterly impossible between them, wherever negroes exist in large numbers in a white community, and invariably leads to irritation, friction, disorder, and strife.”17 That said, West Ordinance supporters also elaborated their ideas about race conflict with much more specific reference to their time and place. All of the eight most prominent supporters were born and grew up in the rural south, some, like Bruce and Marbury, on substantial post-bellum plantations. Both Bruce and Marbury left behind nostalgic remembrances of their rural youth and the sup- posedly friendly race relations they experienced on sharecropping plantations.18 Many of the ordinance’s grassroots supporters also seem to have hailed from among the city’s well-known multitudes of dyed-in-the-wool “Southrons.”19 It was clear to all these figures, however, that Baltimore was no plantation. Not only had racial conflict increased since the end of slavery, but efforts to deal with this problem through disfranchisement were frustrated by the urban politics of Baltimore itself.20 Many of the West Ordinance supporters, Marbury, Bruce, and Poe foremost among them, had labored long to deprive blacks of the vote in Maryland, without success. The issue dominated state politics from about 1901 to 1911, but the state legislature three times narrowly voted down disfran- chising amendments. In all of these campaigns, the city of Baltimore played an important role in making things difficult. Unlike other southern cities, Balti- more harbored many Republican—the most loyal of whom, black people, stood to lose their vote—and also a large population of recent immigrants from Eu- rope, who were understandably worried that their franchise would be the next to be written off. Blacks had also organized into a considerable political force, first under the indomitable leadership of Reverend Lyon, then by electing a suc- cession of black city councilors, then by founding a branch office of the Na- tional Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which included among its ranks a fearless star lawyer named W.Ashbee Hawkins. Mak- ing things worse for the disfranchisers, Maryland’s Democratic Party was itself divided over support for the notoriously corrupt Gorman-Rasin machine, which dominated both state and local politics at the turn of the century and which had nakedly sought to use disfranchisement to eliminate the votes of white reformist Democrat detractors as well as blacks. Meanwhile, a Jim Crow rail coach law did squeak through the Maryland legislature in 1904 despite the heroic and nearly successful resistance efforts of Dr. Lyon on the eve of his departure to Liberia. A boycott and a lawsuit by well-to do blacks from Maryland and Washington D.C. later restricted it to intra-state travel only. Other Jim Crow statutes, such as a Baltimore City trolley segregation ordinance, languished into the mid-1910s, with the NAACP and Ashbee Hawkins fighting them every step of the way.21 By 1910, the leaders of Maryland’s disfranchisement movement were lick- ing their wounds, none perhaps more so than William Marbury, who had once sought to parlay his dogged efforts against the Democratic machine, Republi- THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION 673 cans, and negroes into a U.S. Senate seat.22 Then the vagaries of urban racial politics struck again, when NAACP lawyer W. Ashbee Hawkins bought a house in Baltimore’s Northwest Side. Marbury, Dashiell, West, and Poe all lived in this neighborhood, which lay a little over a mile from downtown. It had earlier picked up the nickname “favored fan” because its elegant streets angled away from the city’s north-south grid at forty five degrees, and because it occupied the crest of a hill then called Mount Royal, which once allowed its wealthy residents to occupy the physical as well as the social summit of the city. By 1910, though, Baltimore had expanded dramatically outward from its historic core, pressing up against what had once been a distant suburb. Many of the city’s most prominent residents, including Mahool, Preston, Grasty, and Bruce, had chosen even fancier neighborhoods to live in, such as Mount Vernon, whose housing prices were considered safely beyond the means of the wealthiest blacks, or the more distant suburb of Roland Park, an exclusive development that Grasty had helped finance and that for a while even contained a street named after him.23 Baltimore’s growth reflected, in great part, the expansion of its already relatively substantial black population, which by 1910 numbered around 80,000 and was the country’s second biggest after New Orleans. During the first decades of the century, large numbers of black people had moved into an area adjoining the “favored fan” to the southwest. Most were poor, and they crowded into congested places like Biddle Alley, which emptied into Druid Hill Avenue, the southern boundary of the Northwest Side, a street which had become largely black itself. Others, like the NAACP’s W. Ashbie Hawkins and his law partner George F. McMechen, were well-to-do enough to afford houses in the Northwest Side itself.24 In June 1910, Hawkins bought the house at 1834 McCulloh Street— one of the diagonal spokes of the favored fan—and rented it to McMechen. On July 5th, white residents of the Northwest Side gathered in a mass meeting. They founded the McCulloh Street, Madison Avenue, and Eutaw Place Prop- erty Protective Association (MMEPPA) and were joined in their protest shortly afterward by numerous similar groups, including the Northwest Improvement Association of Baltimore, and the Harlem Improvement Association, based in another white middle-class neighborhood nearby where Hawkins himself had settled.25 Petitions began circulating throughout the neighborhoods for imme- diate help from the city, calling for segregation to stop the “negro invasion” of the Northwest Side. The idea of separating blacks from whites in cities was relatively new in the field of racial geography and race war in the South, and it reflected character- istically urban concerns. Baltimore’s difficult border-state politics were not the only thing that distinguished the city from paternalists’ illusions of Old South plantations and their harmonious racial “juxtaposition.” In the wake of emancipation, the growth of cities all across the South challenged old racial verities. In slave cities, racial separation had been unthinkable—large neighborhoods set aside for blacks would have quickly become organizing grounds for slave revolts which could have overthrown the whole “peculiar institution.” As William Ca- bell Bruce had suggested in his tract “The Negro Problem”, the big threat cities posed to most Old South paternalists even well after emancipation was the distance blacks elected to put between themselves and whites, not the proximity of the races. In the post-emancipation city, though, new problems arose. On 674 journal of social history spring 2006 plantations and in small rural towns, everyone knew everyone and social hierarchies were clear, even when variations in skin color sometimes made race itself ambiguous. In the anonymous spaces of the city, as Grace Elizabeth Hale has argued blacks could challenge their “place” in the racial hierarchy simply by purchasing markers of class, such as elegant clothes or vehicles. Or, if they had light skin, they could elude the radar of “one-drop” rules and pass as white. Also, an ambiguous sexual charge pervaded daily life in cities, as unacquainted blacks and whites apprized each other on sidewalks or jostled each other in trolley cars or the aisles of stores. The threat to whites intensified as some blacks achieved professional positions that technically put them on a par with members of the white urban elite, and even more so when they purchased that most powerful a symbol of social status, a house in an elite neighborhood.26 Jim Crow ordinances segregating rail and trolley cars, theaters, restaurants and other public amenities signaled Southern whites’ final rejection of physical proximity as a method of social control, and their embrace of distance. While white Baltimoreans struggled to implement such laws, they also more firmly closed off access to the social clubs and the professional societies that might have allowed Negro lawyers and doctors to better establish their reputations. They also warily watched the housing market for signs of racial conflict, for vandalism and “near riots” had broken out on previous occasions when blacks had moved into other white, mostly working class, neighborhoods.27 When Hawkins and McMechen, two black lawyers who had helped wrestle disfranchisement to its death, then performed a bold flanking move around Jim Crow strictures and broke the color line around the “favored fan,” the threat to exclusive white privilege was too much to bear. West, Dashiell, Poe, and Marbury in particular must have won- dered at times whether their own biological racial instincts were summoning them to fight back. “It is humiliating and annoying to the white residents of this neighborhood to have them here,” wrote an assembly of white homeowners to Baltimore’s mayor.28 Abstract concepts like inevitable racial conflict clearly achieved a deeply personal meaning to whites whose bastions of prestige were being “invaded.” In the case of white lawyers like West, Poe, Marbury, and especially Dashiell, professional rivalries with their black counterparts palpably inflected the exchanges they traded in print.29 In their public pronouncements, the most prominent supporters of the Or- dinance avoided explicitly raising the specter of interracial sex or the threat of black men raping white women, a theme so widespread in southern politics at the time. No doubt their language of the inherent conflicts of “commingled” races allowed them to maintain their reformist high ground while evoking a more fire-eating, sexualized imagery anyway. Grassroots supporters were also, for the most part, similarly restrained, though one wrote of his concern that the conversion of a previously white school to use for blacks would both encourage the rise in black homeownership in the Northwest Side and create a situation where “large colored boys and girls would come into daily touch with the girls who attended Western High School,” a particularly jealously guarded all-white jewel in the neighborhood’s crown.30 The undertow of racial panic and a sense of impending race war are palpable, though, especially at three key moments. The first occurred on July 4th of 1910 THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION 675 shortly after McMechen moved in, when a great disaster stuck the “white race” in Reno, Nevada. In a prizefight monitored carefully in the Baltimore press, across the U.S., South Africa, and in nervous colonial offices around the world, the black boxer Jack Johnson, defiant public consort of white women and flam- boyant displayer of his wealth and fame, soundly defeated the white champion Jim Jeffries. Riots broke out across the U.S. as whites expressed their humiliation by attacking and lynching blacks indiscriminately, often right in the open in city streets. Baltimore Mayor Mahool, like local officials across the country and elsewhere in the world, immediately took action to stop the showing of newsreels of the fight in the city’s movie houses. The very next day, July 5th, was the day the MMEPPA met for the first time to push for legal action against the “Negro invasion.”31 Then, three years later, during the summer of 1913, Ashbee Hawkins used a test case to convince a Court of Appeals to void the third version of the ordinance on a technical point, and Mayor Preston was unable to assemble city council to return from vacation to pass a new law. Neighborhood associations sent a flood of letters and petitions to Preston’s office ruing Marbury’s incompe- tence and replete with warnings of “invasion,” “lawlessness,” “racial antagonism and animosity, conflict and disorder,” as well as “bitterness and hatred” brought about by “the forced effort to force social equality by mingling the habitations of white and black races.” One letter writer, a woman who ran a novelty shop, asked Preston to “find some way short of wholesale murder to get rid of the invaders.”32 Finally, in 1917 and 1918, as it sunk in that the Buchanan decision made it virtually impossible to craft a new ordinance that would fly in the courts, distraught homeowners once again put pen to paper with their fears, wondering angrily if “the White People [Are] to be Driven out of Baltimore?” and warning that “this city will soon be a second Darkest Africa.” One particularly active woman even fired a letter off to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Joseph McKenna, demanding to know “if the whole country was to be given over to the colored race.”33

***** The idea that the segregation ordinance “Should Bring Peace” between the races helped its supporters both narrowly and on a more exalted level. Most narrowly, racial conflict rhetoric helped segregationists’ legal case. Matters of public order fell under the city’s legitimate use of police power. According to supporters, the race conflicts that threatened to engulf the city were sufficient to justify strong measures on the part of municipal government. Furthermore, they argued, the West Ordinance met the test for constitutional limitations on police powers because bore a “reasonable relation to the exigency leading to its passage.” The specter of racial conflict also allowed City Solicitor Edgar Allen Poe to argue the continuity between legalized residential segregation and anti- miscegenation and Jim Crow statutes, which the Supreme Court had already validated, most famously in Plessy v. Ferguson.34 On a grander note, West Ordinance supporters used arguments from the global conversations on racial geography to give their crusade a sense of statesmanship 676 journal of social history spring 2006 and the high moral ground of moderation. As they had argued in disfranchisement campaigns, the Ordinance did the local work needed to address a problem with a scope much larger than Baltimore and its neighborhoods. Indeed, the law’s supporters could portray themselves as the only sensible players in a world dominated by those on one extreme who wanted to arm blacks with the voting power they needed to escalate racial conflict and extremists on the other side who spoiled for a chance to eliminate Africans on American soil through racial Armageddon or gradual extinction. The means the self-styled reformers chose for their racial crusade, residential segregation, inherently involved the manipulation of urban space. West Ordi- nance supporters were not alone in thinking of urban space as a great problem solver. This was an era when the structure of cities inspired the imagination of hosts of reformist visionaries the world over, people who thought urban spaces could express the greatest aspirations of civilization and who also had growing faith in humans’ capacity to solve millennia-old urban problems. By 1910, numerous groups of well-organized professionals and officials had grown deeply interested in ways that urban space might be altered to end urban vice, corrup- tion, crime, political unrest, and disease. Since they were also deeply tapped into questions about racial matters, and since urban problems could be so easily cou- pled with ideas about the dangers of race conflict, mixing, and degeneration, they often spoke of urban problems in racialized ways.35 In many parts of the world the separation of the races was thus seen as a necessary step in solving urban problems and a fundamental principal of ambitious plans to transform the shape of cities. Baltimore became a center of this racialized urban reformist sentiment, and the city’s public health reformers, who specialized in the prevention of tuberculosis, were especially influential on an international scale. The city’s historians have often assumed that proponents of the segregation ordinance promoted the law as a public health measure, designed to spread the spread of tuberculosis from black slums to white neighborhoods.36 That is to some extent true. For example, the same editorial in the Sun that proclaimed the Ordinance a guar- antor of racial peace also assured readers that the measure would “contribute to the health and efficiency of the colored population.” The rawer sentiment that negroes endangered the health of whites was quite common among grassroots supporters of segregation as well.37 However, looked at in transnational perspective, it is clear that Baltimore’s segregationists—despite their self-image as reformers and despite their interest in changing urban space—did not make the kinds of deep ties with other urban reformers as their counterparts did elsewhere in the world. The relative political distance they maintained also reveals some big limits in the extent to which West Ordinance supporters—and Ameri- can urban racial segregationists in general—ever thought about reshaping cities according to grand spatial designs. The urban reformers with the most impact on the proliferation of urban racial segregation worldwide were people concerned with disease: doctors, medical re- searchers, public health practitioners, and sanitation experts. These professions organized along transnational lines relatively early in the nineteenth century, and their conferences and journals were heavily preoccupied by the idea that urban disease, whether carried by miasmas, infections, or contagions, could be THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION 677 stopped by isolating different groups of people from one another, whether by quarantine, in sanatoria, or in separate residential zones of a city. “Segregation” was originally a medico-scientific term describing the separation of chemical substances from one another in experiments, and it later emerged as a term to designate the isolation of human sources of disease. Public health officials also pioneered the use of disease mapping to identify the location of the sources of disease. These linguistic and technical innovations lent themselves well to racialized conceptions of public health: non-Europeans were the source of disease, and separating Europeans from natives in cities, especially tropical ones, would solve a major dilemma of empire, the high death rate of European colonial officials. Some of the world’s greatest scientists traded in these ideas, the most important being Ronald Ross, the discoverer of the connection between mosquitos and malaria, who praised programs of European segregation in In- dia and West Africa.38 In addition, sanitarians spearheaded the idea that urban slums should be regulated or cleared altogether, a program which would have enormous impact on the shape of cities and on the techniques and politics of racial separation in many places worldwide. Such thinking was critical in the development of separate European districts in India and elsewhere in the tropical colonies. On the advice of sanitation experts, colonial authorities and engineers sited these enclaves upwind from “native” residential zones, and architects filled the “White Towns” with widely- spaced bungalows whose ventilation systems were scientifically designed to the dispel bad air and germs imagined to be emanating from across the color line. Hill Station in Freetown, Sierra Leone represented a new advance in this field made possible by Ross’s identification of mosquitoes as the vector for malaria germs, and the idea that African bodies, customs, and neighborhoods were particularly likely to generate both germs and mosquitos. The site for Hill Station was selected by calculating the distance a mosquito could fly from the African town, adding altitude for good measure. Authorities in South Africa used similar arguments, which historian Maynard Swanson dubbed the “sanitation syndrome,” amidst outbreaks of other infectious diseases, as a pretext for the establishment of African locations on the outskirts of Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Durban, and Johannesburg. In Johannesburg, sanitarians linked the health problems of slums to blacks, coloreds, and Asians, and referred to the imperatives of public health to clear those inner-city slums and remove their inhabitants to racially separate ex-urban townships. The same logic justified the provision of much higher-standard suburban public housing for working-class and poor whites.39 In the United States, the sanitation syndrome had a widespread impact on urban social politics as well, first on the West Coast, where opponents of Chinese immigration regularly compared the influx of Asians itself to a pestilence. In cities such as San Francisco, public health officials helped fan anti-Chinese sentiment to pass the country’s first urban segregation laws restricting the spread of Chinatown, and at one point even threatened to remove the whole Chi- nese population to an industrial suburb. If the courts had not intervened, they would have created the closest thing in the United States to a South African township.40 Baltimore had already become a site of considerable significance for discus- 678 journal of social history spring 2006 sions of urban sanitation and race by the 1880s. Then, Baltimore doctors like Edward Gilliam and William Lee Howard had played key roles in a national debate on a question critical to race conflict theory: whether the black population was actually growing despite its inherent inferiority, thus threatening to wrest control of North America; or decreasing, as the theory of the survival of the fittest would predict, to the point of racial extinction. The influential writer Frederick L. Hoffman resolved this debate in favor of racial extinction by mus- tering new-fangled vital statistics collected by municipal health commissions, including Baltimore’s, to show that blacks’ greater propensity for vice and disease had increased their death rates since slavery. Segregation, he and Howard had argued, was the only way to ensure that blacks’ inevitable doom did not extend to whites.41 Baltimore made a truly international mark on this subject in the first decade of the twentieth century when the city’s Municipal Health Commission teamed up with the John Hopkins Medical School to launch an international exposition on the prevention of tuberculosis. Because of the involvement of John Hopkins, the exposition could draw on the clout of two the world’s most celebrated doctors, William Osler and William Welch, who were credited with bringing European standards of training to the United States, and who had also helped found the Laennec Society, based at the University, the first national association devoted to the study of tuberculosis. The exposition toured across the U.S., traveled to points in Canada and Mexico, climaxed at the International Conference on Tuberculosis in Wash- ington D.C. in 1908, and from there resonated “throughout Great Britain and her colonies” according to a prominent New York sanitarian. Exhibit A in the exposition was a map of Baltimore peppered with dots representing deaths from tuberculosis in the city. The dots converged into a black mass centered on Bid- dle Alley, the “lung block,” part of the Negro slum across Druid Hill Avenue from the Northwest Side’s favored fan. Viewers probably didn’t need Baltimore’s Deputy Health Commissioner C. Hampson Jones to tell them what the map implied, that “the prevalence of this disease amongst the colored people is a great menace to our white population.”42 By 1910, such fears were still fresh enough, and they do appear to have been on the minds of grassroots supporters. Petitions from neighborhood associations routinely included health concerns in their lists of problems caused by negroes. Since guaranteeing the public health was one of the municipal obliga- tions which justified the use of city police powers, health concerns also made their way into legal briefs filed on behalf of the ordinance. As late as 1918, a full year after the law had been declared unconstitutional, Mayor Preston still received letters from pro-ordinance homeowners who railed against the horrors of the alleyways and kept tabs on the count of black tuberculosis deaths.43 Still, the “sanitation syndrome” played a decidedly secondary role in the rhetoric of the segregation ordinance’s most prominent backers, and, for their part, the city’s most prominent doctors and sanitarians never went on public record in clear support of the Ordinance. In part, this may reflect a problem in the argument’s own tortuous racial logic, a problem public health-based arguments for segregation also faced in India, South Africa, and everywhere else they were used. As many contemporary Baltimoreans noted, if black people were the cause THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION 679 of disease, then the biggest problem facing whites was black household servants, not black neighbors. In Baltimore such servants routinely commuted from places like Biddle Alley to places like William Marbury’s house on Lanvale Street, which employed no less than six black servants. Black laundresses washed and folded many prominent white Baltimoreans’ very clothes, towels, and bed sheets, often in their overcrowded alleyway hovels. Who could be sure that “infected sputum” didn’t make its way directly into the private sanctums of the “favored fan” through that route? Framers of the West Ordinance, like residential color- line drawers going back to Madras, had made an exception for live-in black servants, who could have access to the most intimate reaches of white people’s houses. If health concerns did not move whites to forego these services, how could they argue that keeping blacks from living in separate houses, even on their street, would help prevent tuberculosis?44 Furthermore, some asked, wouldn’t it make more sense to provide better housing for blacks than to segregate them? The celebrated Baltimore contrarian (and inveterate racist) H.L. Mencken argued as much in an unpublished column attacking the West Ordinance:

Who ever heard of a plan for decent housing for negroes in Baltimore? ... The persons who govern us have never looked into this matter. When the darky now tries to move out of his sty into and into human habitation a policeman now stops him. The law practically insists that he keep on incubating typhoid and tuberculosis ... for the delight and benefit of the whole town”45 Certainly Mencken was right that reformers in Baltimore did little to improve conditions for blacks. Their exposés of other urban evils, like alleyway housing, prostitution, and crime, mostly reinforced the idea that blacks were constitu- tionally more prone to poverty, immorality and disease, and that they would bring those problems with them, like a contagion, wherever they moved. Sug- gestions for housing reform mostly focused on closing alleyways and clearing slums, a prescription which progressive city planners and William Welch did publically endorse.46 No doubt the most prominent West Ordinance supporters knew that talk of slum-clearance would only get them stuck in quagmires they’d prefer to avoid. First of all, black leaders themselves played up the alleyway issue: how could Or- dinance supporters claim to have the welfare of Negroes in mind if they expected even the most prominent leaders of the black community to live in filth when they could afford to live more decently? Secondly, closing up alleyways would only put more pressure on the housing of the Northwest Side, not less. When authorities had cleared a black slum for the Camden Railroad Station earlier in the century, the process only forced more blacks to move into the Druid Hill Avenue area. Thirdly, slum clearance touched on the political third rail of property rights: American courts were much more solicitous of slumlords’ interests than those elsewhere in the world. And finally, as Mencken had implied, no one among the conservative Ordinance supporters (or for that matter among most progressive housing reformers) wanted to contemplate the expense, let alone the specter of socialism, involved in building public housing for blacks.47 No grand vision of city space emerged from the imaginations of early-century Baltimore segregationists as it would among the architects of Rabat, New Delhi, 680 journal of social history spring 2006 or South African urban apartheid. No one jumped on board, for example, when in 1911 Baltimore’s city planner William Emmart, who himself lived on the Northwest Side, proposed a comprehensive city plan which included alleyway closings and “wide boulevards connecting together the various parks or ‘squares’ of [the Northwest Side] ::: and with Eutaw Place”—probably, as Emmart suggested, because of the jump in “tax rate” that would be needed to finance the scheme.48 The Sun limited itself to weakly responding to black homeowners that “Baltimore is large enough to provide suitable opportunities for the expansion of both races” and that they could find “decent sanitary residences” within the many blocks set aside by the Ordinance for black residence alone.49 Indeed, looking back through the changes that occurred in American cities since the era of segregation ordinances, it is important to remember that the West Ordinance supporters did not even envision the creation of anything resembling a clearly defined or contiguous black ghetto, unlike the creators of contemporary colonial “black towns” and South African locations. If left to stand, and if the black population had not increased as dramatically as it did throughout the century, the law might have created something familiar in many other Southern cities at the time: a racial patchwork with substantial numbers of at least theoretically mixed blocks. It was not until the emergency of the Great Depression, when the federal government underwrote an expanded program of slum clearance and segregated public housing projects for those displaced, that the sanitation syndrome had a huge impact on the overall design of the American city and the growth of the American ghetto.50 In the 1910s, American segregationists’ relationship with reformers who had bigger urban visions in mind was much more opportunistic. To the extent that fears of “black plagues” animated their supporters, the sanitation syndrome played into their hands. And to the extent that reform sentiment provided political cover, it could be useful. If prominent reformers never endorsed the ordinance, they did not publically lift a finger against it either: among whites only a small group of socialists opposed it once the initial kinks were worked out.51 When in triumph, progressive elites joined in organizing the first City- Wide Congress of Baltimore, on three days in March, 1911, as segregationists geared up to push for yet another version of the West Ordinance, their collective stand must have been clear to the black community. Johns Hopkins Medi- cal School luminary Dr. William H. Welch shared vice-presidential duties, and later the lectern, with the “negro problem” theorist William Cabell Bruce. The MMEPPA, the Northwest Improvement Association, the Harlem Improvement Association, and no less than twenty-seven other white neighborhood home- owner groups were all cordially invited, but no black minister, city councilman, or any representative of the NAACP. On days like those, racial segregationists could camouflage themselves cozily amongst Baltimore’s grand crusaders for urban reform.52

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On most other days, Baltimore segregationists were much less interest in grand city-wide plans than on retaining a quality of their own neighborhood, that is, THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION 681 its racial exclusivity, and on individualistic concerns, getting a return on their investments in their own homes. The argument that “the proximity of the Ne- gro race to good property means its undoing” was by far the most oft-repeated mantra of segregationists, from the leadership to the grassroots.53 It clearly gave the movement its biggest political draw. Supporters of the Ordinance, especially those from the grassroots, almost always followed up their rhetoric of “black peril” derived from racial theory and “black plague” derived from urban re- formism with reflections on the black threat to property. When segregationists did translate their highly local and personal concerns into a vision of the city, theirs was not a city suffused with the “cooperative” spirit reformers’ called for so resoundingly at their Congress, nor was it a city that even communicated clear lessons about racial hierarchies, as segregationists in India and South Africa contemplated at the same time. Instead, as we shall see, theirs was a city as self-promoter and competitor, a bloodied contes- tant in a zero-sum race against other cities for resources and growth. In this way, West Ordinance supporters helped forge a mindset central to American urban policy throughout the twentieth-century and beyond. As part of that legacy, the property values argument ironically both spelled the death of municipal segregation ordinances themselves, and deeply inspired the longer-term success of American segregationism by other means. Despite these differences, racial arguments about property values in general developed in the context of conversations of an international scope that, once again, involved professionals and propagandists in Europe, the colonies, and across the Americas—conversations which in this case were critical to the very creation of capitalist housing markets. These conversations concerned the def- inition of desirable urban real estate for the middle class and also arguments over the best means to protect middle-class investors in that valued real estate from various sorts of threats. As Robert Fishman has shown, these debates go back at least to late-eighteenth century London, where evangelical moralists touted the virtues of bourgeois enclaves in the city’s first suburbs.54 Contem- porary merchants in British India also promoted the value of life on the urban fringe, in their case by using free-market arguments against the East India Com- pany’s monopoly on outlying real estate in Asian colonial cities. There they successfully convinced authorities to make grants of semi-rural land for “garden houses” and even to foot the bill for wider carriage roads designed to facilitate the daily commute between the fringe and the business district of places like Madras’s White Town.55 Such ideas later made their way via London to the Americas through the international professional connections of architects, developers, and later urban planners. Along the way, they helped foster the development of such quasi-suburbs as Baltimore’s favored fan itself, platted out in the 1830s.56 Fishman and others have argued that gender and class segregation were critical to establishing the desirability and the property values of the urban fringe. Racial threats to the value of investing in “bourgeois utopias” became an in- creasing concern as the nineteenth century wore on, first in India, then in South Africa and the U.S., when black urban populations there began to grow quickly towards the end of the nineteenth century. The precise idea that non-whites could threaten white property played a different role in local segregation cam- 682 journal of social history spring 2006 paigns across the world, however, depending first upon the extent and nature of white urban property ownership, and secondly on the legal context in which governments could act in protection of whites and within which non-Europeans could resist state-sponsored segregation. In India and later West Africa, the European merchants and colonial officials who invested in the relatively small private suburban housing markets generally did not plan on remaining there long, let alone settle their families there for generations. In fact, most whites in in suburban civil lines and cantonments did not own the houses they lived in at all; the Raj provided the typically temporary shelter there as partial payment colonial service.57 At times, the Raj was called upon to protect white investors fearful of Indian neighbors, such as in the privately-owned hill station of Simla during the 1890s. State action in those cases was ruthless, directed by the law of conquest, and unbound by what one commissioner called “sentimental reasons of freedom of movement and politico- economic reasons of liberty of trade.” But even there, state action and white grassroots pressure never sustained itself in the way it would in the U.S. or South Africa. Faster steam ships ultimately made the trip home to England just as easy and much more desirable than a summer stay in the hill stations, underscoring Britons’ relative lack of commitment to real estate investments in India. Inde- pendence movements in Asia and Africa of course eventually sent most of all the whites in a “White Town” home by the middle of the twentieth century.58 In South Africa, by contrast, urban Africans faced a white settler population that invested in real estate with future generations in mind, and which was eventually able to persuade the quasi-colonial state to use the law of conquest against any assertion of black property rights. In 1913, as Baltimore finally passed the third version of its beleaguered Ordinance on city blocks, South Africa passed the Native Lands Act, which separated the whole country, rural as well as urban, by race, and envisaged nationwide measures of urban “influx control” designed to keep the vast majority of blacks on rural reserves. In such a climate, arguments about black threats to property values do seem to have flourished, though they have yet to be the subject of intensive research. Just as in some southern cities of the United States, for example, racially restrictive covenants appeared in real estate deeds of properties in Johannesburg’s new suburbs as early as the 1890s. However, in the more repressive environment, South African authorities used the sanitation argument more readily than in places like Baltimore. The state was also more able to circumvent organized resistance. Though African property owners often mobilized claims based on property rights to forestall dispos- sion of their houses in the name of segregationist schemes, white South African segregationists also backed up public health rhetoric with slum-clearance and segregated black public housing, financed not by white tax payers but by the infamously artful use of municipal monopolies on African beer sales. Disease- based arguments were critical to the passage of the Urban (Native Areas) Act of 1923, which severely undercut black claims’ to property rights, slowly strangled the African elite, and severely eroded local anti-segregationist movements.59 In American cities such as Baltimore, with their large settled white majorities, segregationists disseminated the idea that blacks brought down property values probably more profusely than anywhere else in the world. To be sure, it could not have worked without the language of “black peril” and “black plague.” But THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION 683 the property values argument also took on a life of its own. Petitioners made up statistics predicting in one case that property in the Northwest Side “would depreciate 25 per cent.” An editorial in the Sun a few months later doubled that figure to 50 percent. Such calculations helped translate the neighborhood’s crisis into one affecting the city as a whole, since depreciation on that scale “would mean a loss of about $600,000 in yearly taxes to the city.” From there, segregationism became a part of city boosterism. In an early endorsement of the West Ordinance, the Sun wrote that

a condition of affairs exists in some sections of the city which is a distinct reproach to our city in the eyes of the outside world, and not only injurious to the social and business interests of the people of those sections more particularly affected, but vastly injurious to the reputation of the city as a whole as a place of residence.60

In November of 1910, a city-wide census revealed that Baltimore’s population had fallen behind that of Cleveland, moving the city down a notch from the fifth largest in the country to the sixth, and the idea spread that people were avoiding the city because its prominent residents had failed to do something to keep its large black population in check.61 Others despaired about the legacy of the urban improvements the city was making: “We are building a fine city, with civic centres, boulevards, monuments, etc., to be occupied by the colored people when we all move to the suburbs. Why all these blessings? Are they the favorite people?” “Have the colored people the right of eminent domain?” asked another frantic letter writer.62 By May of 1911, though, the Sun was reassuring Baltimoreans that “the best advertisement Baltimore has had in the last decade is the West Segregation Ordinance, as witnessed by the nation-wide interest shown by other municipalities in this law.”63 Such concern with Baltimore’s competitive position, and pride for “this fair city on the Chesapeake” may have been real, but the Ordinance supporters’ main concern was clear, as the very name of the MMEPPA, a Property Protection As- sociation, attested. The identity of “Property Owner Of Baltimore City,” as one letter-writer typed under his signature, was the glue that brought their otherwise fairly diverse ranks together—or, as another letter-writer chose to call herself, summing up the tone of three years of petitions that flooded city hall, “Prop- erty Owner—and Sufferer.”64 Once they accepted the idea that blacks would lower property values, it is clear that all of the petitioners did really have a lot to lose. Almost all of the eighty grassroots petitioners and letter-writers who left their identities in the public record in support of the West Ordinance lived in clusters closest to areas where black middle class people had bought homes. After lawyers, the largest occupational group among these supporters were secretaries and clerks, people who would have especially felt the weight of the period’s burdensome mortgages and who would have been particularly concerned to guard whatever equity they had acquired in their house. Other large groups included medium-sized business owners and shop owners, some of whose busi- nesses doubled as homes and who thus worried about risk to both; medical doctors, most of whose homes doubled as offices; and preachers, who worried out loud in their letters about losing their denomination’s investment in expensive church buildings.65 684 journal of social history spring 2006 It was thus the city’s “middling sort” that pushed the Ordinance through. Though some of Baltimore’s bluest bloods, including about seventeen out of the fifty-three Officers and Members of the Executive Committee of the reformist City-Wide Congress, still lived in the Northwest Side, most of the most prominent citizens—blue-chip firm attorneys, bank presidents, top university officials and professors, and owners of heavy industrial corporations, the big to- bacco houses, and downtown hotels—lived well to the east or north of the color line, whether in Mount Vernon, Roland Park, or in the surrounding countryside. Many of the wealthier people who did live in the neighborhood may have also held somewhat less of a proportion their total assets in their homes, and had more flexibility to move out with a gain. Whatever the economics of the situation, it appeared to many, including black observers, that the true upper- crust of Baltimore had decided to stand above the fray of racial politics, issu- ing grand sentiments about urban reform, while they relied on their clerks and secretaries—and maybe a few angry Southrons like Marbury and Grasty—to do the bulk of the dirty work of segregating the town.66 Real estate agents played a more ambiguous role in the movement, which dif- fered from that historians have described in other cities during the 1920s. For the most part real estate agents were not instrumental in founding the neighborhood associations that pushed the West Ordinance. Most were founded in the 1880s, long before fears of black invasion, and served other purposes. The MMEPPA may have been an exception—a real estate agent was among the petitioners, and he may have had a hand in organizing the group, as many agents did in cities across the country after 1920. Charles Grasty was heavily involved in the real estate business in the 1890s, and acquired the capital he used to buy the News and Sun through his involvement in the development of the suburb of Roland Park. Mayor J. Barry Mahool later became a major player in Baltimore real estate. However, only two other real estate agents are on record of having joined in the petitions or any of the protective associations. The venerable Baltimore Real Estate Exchange stayed out of the fray entirely, at least publically, perhaps imitating the behavior of most of its members’ generally more prestigious and business customers. As in segregationist efforts elsewhere, some “unscrupulous real estate men” were also actually the target of many white property owners’ anger, for “blockbusting” sales of houses in white neighborhoods to blacks.67 The “real estate men” who were most active in the debate actually protested against the first version of the West Ordinance, and precisely because it threatened their property values. These were the owners of speculative property in mixed blocks which were majority white at the time of the ordinance, blocks which under the first version of the law would be considered white blocks. “Even though there may be colored people on either side of a vacant house,” they com- plained, “the owner is, according to the terms of this ordinance, compelled to rent it to white people,” a very unlikely prospect, “or hold it vacant. Is this booming Baltimore? It does not appear that way to me.” Such complainants took pains to explain that they adamantly supported segregation, if in different form.68 They got their way, when the third version of the ordinance, which Mahool signed on May 15th, 1911, dropped all references to mixed blocks. The biggest role of real estate agents in the segregation of Baltimore appears to have been in the development of racially restrictive covenants, not the seg- THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION 685 regation ordinance. Historians consider Baltimore’s Roland Park to be among the forerunners of the restriction movement, since its developers Fredrick Law Olmstead Jr., Edward Bouton, and Charles Grasty placed numerous restrictions on the land use and architectural style on the properties there. However, they shied away from racial covenants on the advice of their lawyers who feared such clauses would run counter to the 14th Amendment. When the same developers opened the neighboring subdivision of Guilford in 1910, as the ferment on the West Ordinance began, they felt emboldened enough to include restrictions on resale to Negroes to the deeds, in a pattern that may have reflected a practice already common in other Southern cities. Still, the practice was not widely known in Baltimore even as late as 1917, when Mayor Preston, who lived in Mount Vernon, responded to disappointed letters from Ordinance supporters by consulting a friend active in Chicago’s real estate circles. The advice the Mayor received from the Windy City was to organize block associations to promote restrictive covenants. The Real Estate Exchange of Baltimore apparently had not yet considered this idea, but they soon endorsed a city-wide campaign, and William Marbury, among many others, enlisted his young son in the new cause, sending him to go door to door among the neighbors of the Northwest Side with the latest idea about how to keep negroes out.69 If the property values argument was the most effective of the three lines of argument in developing political support for the West Ordinance, in the end, unlike the racial conflict argument, it did little to advance the law’s cause in the courts. Milton Dashiell’s original draft of the Ordinance which bore the title “An ordinance for preserving order, securing property values and promoting the great interests and insuring the good government of Baltimore City” was dismissed by the court precisely because securing property values was outside the purview of the city’s police powers, and future versions of the law dropped that phrase. But bigger legal issues were at stake. Residential segregation ordinances ultimately fell to the argument that they interfered with individuals’ right to dispose of property as they saw fit—a legal concept deeply embedded in the common law, interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and central to laissez-faire economic ideology. When the NAACP organized its test case against Louisville’s segregation ordinance, it skillfully used the problems that arose in majority-white mixed blocks. The organization’s local branch president William Warley contracted to buy a property in a block designated white that had a large minority of blacks, then refused to go ahead with the sale because it was illegal under the segregation ordinance. Charles Buchanan, the seller, who was white, then sued Warley, claiming the ordinance violated his property rights. When the state courts upheld the ordinance, the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court which unanimously decided in November 1917 that “the difficult problem arising from a feeling of race hostility” was not enough of a justification to enact ordinances which “directly violat[ed] ::: the fundamental law enacted in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution preventing state interference with property rights by due process of law.”70 The American career of residential segregation by municipal ordinance thus ended strangely. In a situation where whites had a strong stake in a capitalist property market, arguments based on property values ran into the creative efforts of a black professional class who mobilized arguments based on prop- 686 journal of social history spring 2006 erty rights against it. This was something of a fluke, and it should be taken as a sign of black lawyers’ creativity, not the exceptionally enlightened character of American constitutionalism. In the early twentieth century neither the heroic efforts of black lawyers or even the most promising bodies of constitutional law they sought to use to their advantage were enough to make the Plessy-v. Fer- guson American judiciary anything approaching an ally in the struggle against Jim Crow. However, in the limited case of municipally ordered residential segregation, the NAACP could win a significant enough victory by leveraging the Supreme Court’s Lochner-era laissez-faire liberalism and its insistence on a constitutional right to freedom of contract against the logic of Plessy. Like slum clearance, racial segregationism was, in this particular case, limited by the Amer- ican judiciary’s especially fierce insistence on private property rights. In comparative perspective, the Buchanan decision was quite significant nonetheless. The question of constitutionality did continually help to undercut larger-scale segregation schemes in the U.S., such as agricultural reformer Clar- ence Poe’s South-African style efforts to segregate the rural south, or measures to control African-American migration to the cities, as the Chicago Real Es- tate Board proposed in 1917, then promptly withdrew once the court spoke in Buchanan. The end of residential segregation by municipal ordinance was, to be sure, only the beginning of the story of the state intervention on behalf of black ghettoization. U.S. courts went along with restrictive covenants until 1948, and the Federal Housing Administration and other New Deal-era federal agencies positively “exhorted” segregation through racial discriminatory loan- guarantee programs, transportation policy, and public housing programs until at least the early 1960s. Still, whites never got an explicit government guarantee that their neighborhoods would never be “invaded.” In the absence of that guarantee, however, the idea that blacks drove down property values did become among whites a kind of “average opinion about what the average opinion will be” that placed race at the very heart of the valuation of real estate, and thus gave all white people regardless of their racial ideology an economic stake in segregation. The residential color line was thus effectively institutionalized within the very economic marrow of the market for housing. It guaranteed that the color line would remain intact, even as many urban whites lost their fight to keep their neighborhoods white in the face of expanding black ghettos.72

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Across the world at the turn of the twentieth century local segregationists cobbled together different combinations of arguments derived from the three larger conversations about the inherent conflict of commingled races, urban reform, and urban property values. The differences in these efforts of ideological bricolage reflected more than white residential patterns and legal systems, however, and this paper should be taken as an initial foray into the comparative history of urban racial segregation, not a comprehensive treatment. India, South Africa, and the United States were, of course, vastly different societies in many other respects. In colonies like India, urban segregation was much more about creating urban theaters for the display of imperial power and the health and THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION 687 comfort of a relatively small number of Europeans on relatively temporary duty than it was about control over private housing markets. In South Africa, urban segregation and later apartheid undergirded the country’s migrant labor system and ultimately its police state as well as its divided property markets. Residential segregation in the United States by contrast was overwhelmingly focused on the goal of sustaining white control over urban property, especially housing. In that context, the fusing of race and property values became the touchstone of the American segregationist imagination, not segregation by city ordinance. That made American segregation no less dangerous, and in the longer run it has proved itself more durable than other forms. The marketized system of urban residential segregation—along with its consequences for unequal access to the job market, education, and transport, and for unequal exposure to environmental toxins and the criminal justice system—remains virtually unscathed at the beginning of the twenty-first century, easily cloaked inside the broader New-Right effort to sustain white privilege by denying the existence of institutionalized racial inequality. It also threatens to become a dangerous American export. As nineteenth- century colonialism fell, to be followed at long last by South African apartheid, a new global debate about urban segregation began. It started in Western Eu- rope, increasingly the home to its own giant urban populations of color, and then flowed elsewhere in the world’s European diaspora—to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, and even South Africa itself. Had American-style “ghettos” somehow made their way from New York, Chicago and Los Angeles to im- plant themselves in Paris, London, Munich, Toronto, Sydney, São Paulo, and Johannesburg?73 The global history of urban residential segregation offers two responses to that question: One, Europeans, not Americans invented urban residential segregation by color and race. Two, this advice: instead getting mixed up in all the sensationalism about ghettos growing in your midst, focus more on the presence of racialized valuations of urban property, and learn more about the social and global historical dynamics that can bring such a system into being. Britain, with its redlining, racial steering, and increasingly racialized public housing system should serve as a good case in point. We need a new generation of Dr. Lyons to send out the warning: such an ideological virus, capable of dividing housing markets and spawning institutionalized racial inequalities, is one American product no one should seek to import.

Department of American Studies Buffalo, NY 14260

ENDNOTES 1. “Colored Methodists Should Get Out Says Dr. Lyon in Forceful Sermon,” Afro American Ledger (Baltimore), Dec 10, 1910 p. 4.

2. Stephen Frenkel and John Western, “Pretext or Prophylaxis? Racial Segregation and Malarial Mosquitos in a British Tropical Colony: Sierra Leone,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 78 (1988): 211–28; Thomas S. Gale, “Segregation in British 688 journal of social history spring 2006

West Africa,” Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines 20 (1951) 495–507; Philip D. Curtin, “Medi- cal Knowledge and Urban Planning in Tropical Africa,” American Historical Review 90 (1985): 600–601. 3. The ﬁrst version of the West Ordinance (December 20, 1910) can be found in Bal- timore City Archives, Mahool Files, #404; the fourth, and most successful version, of September 25, 1913 is published in Ordinances and Resolutions of the Mayor and City Coun- cil of Baltimore Passed at the Annual Session 1913–1914 (Baltimore, 1914), pp. 117–19. A supplement to that version is on pp. 141–45.

4. See for examples, BCA, Mahool Files (MF) 406 Nov 5, 1910 Letter from Mayor of Roanoke, also 404 Dec 17 1910; 475 April 6, 1911, letter from Mahool to Charles Woodruff, Cebu, Philippine Islands. BCA Preston Files (PF) 21-d March 26, 1916, letter from Harry A. Kahler, Esq President, New York Title & Mortgage Co., 135 Broadway, New York City, which says “The rapid increase in the negro population in New York City is creating, in some sections of the city, very serious depreciation in real estate values, affecting not only individual owners of property, but the City’s revenue, through falling in taxable values. We are considering whether the lead taken by your City in this matter may be taken as a guide for us, here.” PF 21-d July 24, 1917 letter from Frederick Rex of Chicago Municipal Reference Library, City Hall, Chicago. The Chicago Real Es- tate Board discussed a measure like Baltimore’s in the Chicago Real Estate Board Bulletin, 1917, pp. 315, 551. The CREB was inﬂuential in establishing the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB), and remained the most important body within the larger federation for many years.

5. W.Ashbie Hawkins, “A Year of Segregation in Baltimore,” Crisis 3 (Nov., 1911), pp. 27–30; Roger L. Rice, “Residential Segregation by Law, 1910–1917,” Journal of Southern History 179 (1968) 179–99; Christopher Silver, “The Racial Origins of Zoning: South- ern Cities from 1910–40,” Planning Perspectives 6 (1991): 189–205; Garrett Power, “Apar- theid Baltimore Style: The Segregation Ordinances of 1910–1913,” Maryland Law Review 42 (1983): 289–349; Joseph L. Arnold, “The Neighborhood and City Hall: The Origin of Neighborhood Associations in Baltimore, 1880–1911,” Journal of Urban History 6 (1979) 3–30. Gretchen Boger, “Shifting Ground, Shifting Meaning: Baltimore’s Residential Seg- regation Ordinances, 1910–1913,” (unpublished M.A. research paper, Princeton Univer- sity, 2003 generously provided to the author by Gretchen Boger). On rural segregation see Jack Temple Kirby, Darkness at the Dawning: Race and Reform in the Progressive South (Philadelphia, 1972), pp. 108–130; reference to inﬂuence of Baltimore on p. 123.

6. On early colonial cities and color segregation, see Carl Nightingale, “The Urban and Global Dynamics of Color Lines at Colonial Madras and New York” (unpublished paper); Thomas R. Metcalf, “Imperial Towns and Cities,” in The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire, ed. P.JMarshall (Cambridge, U.K., 1996) pp. 242–43; Dilip K. Basu, ed. The Rise and Growth of Colonial Port Cities in Asia (Lanham, MD, 1985). For Madras, most of the ofﬁcial sources for the period have been published. Government of Madras, Records of Fort St. George. Diary and Consultation Books (Madras, 1910–53), 82 volumes covering 1672–1751; Despatches from England (Madras, 1911–71), 61 volumes covering 1670– 1758; Despatches to England (1670–1758) 61 vols. (Madras, 1916–32); Letters to Fort St. George, 1681–1765 45 vols. (Madras, 1916–1945); Letters from Fort. St. George 38 Vols., (Madras, 1914–46). Other primary sources are collected in: J. Talboys Wheeler, Annals of the Madras Presidency, Being a History of the Presidency From the First Foundation to the Gov- ernorship of Thomas Pitt, Grandfather of the Earl of Chatham Compiled from Ofﬁcial Records (1861; Delhi, 1982); William Foster, The Founding of Fort St. George, Madras (London, THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION 689

1902); and Henry Davison Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1640–1800 Traced From the East India Company’s Records Preserved at Fort St. George and the India Office and From Other Sources (1913; New York, 1968), 3 vols. Also, see William Foster, The Founding of Fort St. George, Madras (London, 1902); N.S. Ramaswami, Fort St. George (Madras, 1980); and Ramaswami, The Founding of Madras (Madras, 1977); Rao C.S. Srinavasachari, History of the City of Madras (Madras, 1939); Arjun Appadurai, “Right and Left Hand Castes in South India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review, 11 (1974): 216–59; Patrick Roche, “Caste and the Merchant Government in Madras, 1639–1749” in Indian Economic and Social History Review 12 (1975): 381–407; Joseph J. Brenning, “Chief Merchants and the European Enclaves of Seventeenth-Century Coromandel,” Modern Asian Studies 11 (1977): 321–40; Susan M. Nield, “Madras: The Growth of a Colonial City in India, 1780–1840” (Ph.D Dissertation, University of Chicago, 1977); Susan M. Nield, “Colo- nial Urbanism: The Development of Madras City in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Modern Asian Studies 13 (1979): 217–46; Susan Nield-Basu, “The Dubashes of Madras,” Modern Asian Studies 18 (1984): 1–31. On Calcutta: C.R. Wilson, ed. Old Fort William in Bengal: A Selection of Official Documents Dealing With its History (Lon- don, 1906); P.J. Marshall, “Eighteenth-Century Calcutta,” in Colonial Cities ed. Robert J. Ross and Gerald J. Telkamp (Dordrecht, the Netherlands, 1985), pp. 87–104; Marshall. “British Merchants in Eighteenth-Century Bengal,” Bengal, Past and Present 95 (1976): 151–63; Marshall, “British Society Under the East India Company,” Modern Asian Stud- ies 31 ((1997): 89–108; Marshall, “The White Town of Calcutta Under the Rule of the East India Company,” Modern Asian Studies 34 (2000): 307–31; Farhat Hassan, “Indige- nous Cooperation and the Birth of a Colonial City: Calcutta, c. 1698–1750,” Modern Asian Studies 26 (1992): 65–82; Rev. James Long, Calcutta and Its Neighborhood: History of Calcutta and its People from 1690–1357 (Calcutta, 1974), edited by Sankar Sen Gupta; Sukanta Chauduri, Calcutta, The Living City Volume I: The Past (Calcutta, 1990); Pradip Sinha, Calcutta in Urban History (Calcutta, 1978); Durba Ghosh, “Colonial Compan- ions: Bibis, Begums, and Concubines of the British in North India. 1760–1830” (Ph.D Dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 2000); Swati Chattopadhyay, “Blur- ring Boundaries: The Limits of White Town in Colonial Calcutta,” Journal of the Society of American Architectural Historians 59 (2000): 154–79. On Bombay: John Burnell, Bom- bay in the Days of Queen Anne: Being an Account of the Settlement Written by John Burnell (1710) edited by Samuel Sheppard (Cambridge, U.K., 1933); Dulcinea Correa Rodrigues, Bombay Fort in the Eighteenth Century (Bombay, 1994), pp. 58–59, 72–115; S.M. Edwardes, The Rise of Bombay: A Retrospect (Bombay, 1902), pp. 104–109, 138, 146, 152–53, 170–78, 206, 229–238; Gilliam Tindatt, City of Gold: The Biography of Bombay (London, 1982); Meera Kosambi, Bombay in Transition: The Growth and Social Ecology of a Colonial City (Stockholm, 1986); Dirk Kooiman, “Bombay: From Fishing Village to Colonial Port City (1662–1947),” in Ross and Telkamp, Colonial Cities, pp. 207–30. Elsewhere in Asia see: Robert R. Reed, Colonial Manila: The Context of Hispanic Urbanism and Process of Morphogenesis (Berkeley, 1978), pp. 38–63; Leonard Blussé, “ ‘An Insane Administration and an Unsanitary Town’: The Dutch East India Company and Batavia (1619–1799)” in Ross and Telkamp, Colonial Cities, pp. 65–86; Remco Raben, “Batavia and Colombo: The Ethnic Spatial Order of Two Colonial Cities, 1600–1800” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Rijkuniversiteit Leiden, 1996), pp. 162–247; Heather Sutherland; “Ethnicity, Wealth, and Power in Colonial Makassar: A Historiographical Reconsidera- tion,” in Peter J. M. Nas, The Indonesian City: Studies in Urban Development and Planning (Dordrecht. Netherlands: Foris Publications, 1986), pp. 37–55. On the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Anthony D. King, Urbanism. Colo- nialism, and the World Economy: Cultural and Spatial Formations of the World Urban System (London, 1990), pp. 41–42; King, “Colonial Cities: Global Pivots of Change,” in Ross and Telkamp, Colonial Cities, pp. 7–32; Veena Talwar Oldenburg, The Making of Colo- 690 journal of social history spring 2006 nial Lucknow. 1857–1877 (Princeton, 1984), pp. 27–144; Mark Crinson, Empire Building: Orientalism and Victorian Architecture (London, 1996; Miriam Dossal, “Limits of Colonial Urban Planning: A Study of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Bombay,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 13 (1989): 19–31; Dane Kennedy, Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj (Berkeley, 1996); Brenda Yeoh, Contesting Space: Power Rela- tions and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial Singapore (Kuala Lumpur, 1996); Donald B. Freeman, “Hill Stations or Horticulture? Conflicting Imperial Visions of the Cameron Highlands, Malaysia” Journal of Historical Geography 25 (1999): 17–35; Anthony D. King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power, and Environment (London, 1976), pp. 180–276. Janet Abu-Lughod, Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco (Princeton, 1980); Gwendolyn Wright, “Tradition in the Service of Modernity: Architecture and Urban- ism in French Colonial Policy, 1900–1930,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley, 1997), pp. 322–45; Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago, 1991); Paul Rabi- now, French-Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, MA, 1989), pp. 211–50; X. Guilliaume, “Saigon, or the Failure of an Ambition (1858–1945),” in Ross and Telkamp, pp. 181–93; Raymond F. Betts, “Dakar, Ville Imperiale (1857–1960),” in Ross and Telkamp, pp.193–206; Betts, “The Establishment of the Medina in Dakar, Senegal, 1914,” Africa 41 (1971): 143–52; Elikia M’Bokolo, “Peste et Société Urbaine à Dakar,” Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines 85–86 (1982): 13–46; J.S. La Fontaine, City Politics: A Study of Leopoldville, 1962–63 (Cambridge, UK, 1970), pp. 3–27; J. L. Miege, “Al- giers: Colonial Metropolis (1830–1961),” in Ross and Telkamp, pp. 171–80; Douglas L. Wheeler, “ ‘Angola is Whose House?’ Early Stirrings of Angolan Nationalism and Protest, 1822–1910,” African Historical Studies 2 (1969): 1–22; Colin G. Clarke, Kingston. Ja- maica: Urban Development and Social Change, 1692–1962 (Berkeley, 1975); Ema Brodber, A Study of the Yards in the City of Kingston (Mona, Jamaica, 1975); Aggrey Brown, Color. Class, and Politics in Jamaica (New Brunswick, N.J., 1979). Sidney Chaloub, Cidade Febril: Cortiços e Epidemias na Corte Imperial (São Paulo, 1996); Teresa A. Meade, “Civilizing” Rio: Reform and Resistance in a Brazilian City, 1889–1930 (University Park, PA, 1997); Donald H. J Clairmont, Africville: the Life and Death of a Canadian Black Community (Toronto, 1974); Kay J. Anderson, Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875–1980 (Montreal, 1991); Anderson, “The Idea of Chinatown: The Power of Place and Institutional Practice in the Making of a Racial Category,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77 (1987): 580–98; Anderson, “Place Narratives and the Ori- gins of Inner Sydney’s Aboriginal Settlement, 1972–73,” Journal of Historical Geography 19 (1993): 314–35. 7. Charles van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwater- srand 1886–1914 (Johannesburg, 1982) vols. I and II; Philip Bonner, Peter Delius, and Deborah Posel, Apartheid’s Genesis 1935–1962 (Johannesburg, 1993); Rodney Daven- port, “African Townsmen? South African Native (Urban Areas) Legislation Through the Years,” African Affairs 68 (1969) DT 1.R6; George Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (Oxford, 1984); Robert H Davies, Capital, State and Labor in South Africa 1900–1960 (Brighton, 1979); Martin Legassick, “British Hegemony and the Origins of Segregation in South Africa, 1901– 14,” in Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth Century South Africa (London, 1995), ed. William Beinart and Saul Dubow; Bernard M. Magubane, The Making of a Racists State: British Imperialism and the Union of South Africa, 1875–1910 (Trenton,1996); Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido, “Lord Milner and the South African State,” in Working Papers in Southern African Studies (Johannesburg, 1981), Philip Bonner, ed., vol II; Maynard Swan- son, “The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and the Urban Native Policy in the Cape Colony,” Journal of African History 18 (1977): 387–410; Swanson, “ ‘The Asiatic THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION 691

Menace’: Creating Segregation in Durban, 1870–1900,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 16 (1983): 401–21; Anthony Lemon, ed., Homes Apart: South Africa’s Segregated Cities (Cape Town, 1991); Alan Mabin, “Labour Capital, Class Struggle and the Origins of Residential Segregation in Kimberley, 1880–1920,” Journal of Historical Ge- ography 12 (1986): 4–26; Rob Turrell, “Kimberley: Labour and Compounds, 1871–1888,” Industrialization and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation, Culture, and Consciousness, 1870–1930 (London, 1982) ed. Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone, pp. 45–76; Christopher C. Saunders, “The Creation of Ndabeni: Urban Segregation, So- cial Control, and African Resistance,” unpublished paper in author’s possession; Vivian Bickford-Smith, Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town (Johannesburg, 1995); A.J. Christopher, “From Flint to Soweto: Reﬂections on the Colonial Origins of the Apartheid City,” Area 15 (1983): 145–49; Christopher, “Spatial Variations in the Application of Residential Segregation in South African Cities,” Geoforum 20: 253–67; Christopher, “Race and Residence in Colonial Port Elizabeth,” South African Geographi- cal Journal 69 (1987); Christopher, “Roots of South African Segregation: South Africa at Union,” Journal of Historical Geography 14 (1988): 151–69; Paul Maylam, “The Rise and Decline of Urban Apartheid in South Africa,” African Affairs 89 (1990): 57–84; E.L. Nel, “Racial Segregation in East London, 1836–1948,” South African Geographical Journal 73 (1991); Sue M. Parnell, “Johannesburg Slums and Racial Segregation in South African Cities, 1910–37” (PhD. Dissertation: University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1993); Parnell, “Racial Segregation in Johannesburg: The Slums Act, 1934–39,” South African Geographical Journal 70 (1988); Parnell, Sanitation, Segregation and the Native (Urban Areas) Act: African Exclusion from Johannesburg’s Malay Location, 1897–1925,” Journal of Historical Geography 17 (1991): 271–88; Parnell, “Slums, Segregation and Poor Whites in Johannesburg, 1920–1934,” in White But Poor: Essays on the History of Poor Whites in Southern Africa, 1880–1940 (Pretoria, 1992), ed. Robert Morrell, pp.115–29; Harriet Deacon, “Racial Segregation and Medical Discourse in Nineteenth Century Cape Town,” Journal of Southern African Studies 22 (1996): 287–308; Gary Baines, “The Origins of Ur- ban Segregation: Local Government and the Residence of Africans in Port Elizabeth, c. 1835–1865,” South African Historical Journal 22 (1990): 61–81; J. Robinson, “‘A Perfect System of Control’? State Power and ‘Native Locations’ in South Africa,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 8: 135–62; Hilary Sapire, “African Settlement and Segregation in Brakpan, 1900–1927” in Holding Their Ground: Class Locality and Cul- ture in 19th and 20th Century South Africa (Johannesburg, 1987) ed. Philip Bonner, Isabel Hofmeyr, Deborah James, and Tom Lodge.

8. W.E.B. DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro (Millwood N.Y., 1973), pp. 10–45; Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge, MA, 1988); David Katzman, Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana, 1975); Roger Lane, Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860–1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1986); Theodore Hershberg, “Free Blacks in Antebellum Philadel- phia: A Study of Ex-Slaves, Freeborn, and Socioeconomic Decline,” in Hershberg. ed., Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family and Group Experience in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1981); Theodore Hershberg, Alan N. Burstein, Eugene P. Eriksen, Stephanie W. Greenberg, and William L. Yancey, “A Tale of Three Cities: Blacks, Immigrants, and Opportunity in Philadelphia, 1850–1880, 1930, 1970,” in Hershberg, ed. Philadelphia, pp. 461–91; Harold X. Connolly, A Ghetto Grows in Brooklyn (New York, 1977, pp. 1– 50; John Daniels In Freedom’s Birthplace (New York, 1969); James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North (New York, 1979); George Levesque, Black Boston: African American Life and Culture in Urban America, 1750–1860 (New York, 1994); Gerald Gamm, Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left and the Catholics Stayed (Cambridge, MA, 1999); Thomas J. Davis, “A Histor- 692 journal of social history spring 2006 ical Overview of Black Buffalo, Work, Community, and Protest,” in African Americans and the Rise of Buffalo’s Post-Industrial City, 1940–Present Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., ed. (Buf- falo, 1990), pp. 8–47; Robert Austin Warner, New Haven Negroes: A Social History (New Haven, 1940); Spencer R. Crew, Black Life in Secondary Cities: A Comparative Analysis of the Black Communities of Camden and Elizabeth, N.J. 1860–1920 (New York, 1993); Henry Louis Taylor, Jr. and Vicky Dula, “The Black Residential Experience and Com- munity Formation in Antebellum Cincinnati,” in Taylor, ed. Race and the City: Work, Community, and Protest in Cincinnati, 1820–1970 (Urbana, 1993), pp. 96–125; Asa E. Martin, Our Negro Population: A Sociological Study of the Negroes of Kansas City, Missouri (Original ed., 1913; by New York, 1969); Delores Nason McBroome, Parallel Commu- nities: African Americans in California’s East Bay, 1850–1963 (New York, 1993); James Borchert, Alley Life in Washington: Family Community, Religion, and Folklife in the City, 1850–1970 (Urbana, 1980); Leroy Graham, Baltimore: the Nineteenth Century Black Cap- ital (New York, 1982); Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865– 1890 (New York, 1978); Howard Beeth and Cary D. Wintz, eds., “Introduction” to Part II: “Slavery and Freedom: Blacks in Nineteenth Century Houston,” in Beeth and Wintz, ed. Black Dixie: Afro-Texan History and Culture in Houston (College Station, TX, 1992); St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York, 1945), pp. 31–64; Robert Gregg, Sparks from the Anvil of Oppression: Philadelphia’s Methodists and Southern Migrants, 1890–1940 (Philadelphia, 1993), pp. 1– 20; 98–104; 147–222; Albert Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890– 1920 (Chicago, 1969), pp. 129–146; Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto, Negro New York, 1890–1930 (New York, 1963), pp. 127–49; Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870–1930 (Urbana, 1976); James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago: Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago, 1989); Florette Henri, Black Migration: Movement North, 1900–1920 (Garden City, N.Y., 1975); Joe William Trotter, ed. The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gen- der (Bloomington, IN, 1991); Abraham Epstein, The Negro Migrant to Pittsburgh (New York, 1969); Elizabeth Pleck, Black Migration and Poverty: Boston, 1865–1900 (New York, 1979); Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (New York, 2004). 9. Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Washington, D.C., 1996); Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York, 1965); Fredrick- son, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (Ox- ford, 1981), p. 49–50; Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origins and Evolution of a Worldview (Boulder, CO, 1993); Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA, 1981); Rodney Davenport and Christopher Saunders, South Africa: A Modern History (New York, 2000), p. 77; John W. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (Cambridge, UK, 1982); Arthur de Gobineau, The Inequality of the Human Races (L’Inégalité des Races Humaines) tr. Adrian Collins ([1853] New York, 1967), pp. 29–33, 90 (Gobineau also argued that European “races” attained supremacy by means of particular intermixtures, though). Herbert Spencer, “The Comparative Psy- chology of Man,” (1876) in Essays Scientiﬁc, Political, and Speculative (New York, 1910), pp. 351–70; Robert Knox, M.D. Races of Men: A Fragment (Philadelphia, 1850), pp. 145– 46. 10. Kennedy, Magic Mountains, pp. 19–38, 117–47; Clifton C. Crais, “ ‘The Vacant Land’: The Mythology of British Expansion in the Eastern Cape, South Africa,” Jour- nal of Social History, 25 (1991): 255–76; DuToit, A., “No Chosen People: The Myth of the Calvinist Origin of Afrikaner Nationalism and Racial Ideology,” American Historical THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION 693

Review 88 (1983): 920–52; Paul Rich, “Race, Science, and the Legitimation of White Supremacy in South Africa, 1902–1940,” International Journal of African Historical Stud- ies, 23 (1990): 665–86.; Davenport, “African Townsmen?”

11. Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny; George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York, 1971); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Cenury America (London, 1990); Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill, 1998).

12. John Van Evrie, White Supremacy and Negro Subordination or Negroes a Subordinate Race, and (So-Called) Slavery Its Normal Condition; with an Appendix, Showing the Past and Present Condition of the Countries South of Us. (2nd ed New York, 1868, reprinted at New York, 1993), pp. 168–70.

13. Henry Woodﬁn Grady, “The New South,” in The New South and Other Essays, ed. Edna Henry Lee Turpin (1904) (New York, 1969), pp. 35–36; Grady, “The South and Her Problems,” in same collection, pp. 43–91; and “At The Boston Banquet,” (1889), in same volume, pp. 92–123.

14. The following joint biography was pieced together from numerous sources. On Ma- hool, see Wilbur F. Cole, “The Mayors of Baltimore: J. Barry Mahool,” in Baltimore Mu- nicipal Journal Aug. 27, 1919, pp. 2–3. On Dashiell, see Distinguished Men of Baltimore and of Maryland (Baltimore, 1914), p. 66. Biographical information is scarce on West. See Baltimore Sun Dec 20 1910 p.7; his plantation roots are suggested in a letter to Mayor Preston from August 7, 1913 in Baltimore City Archives, Preston Files, #21-d. On Edgar Allen Poe, see History of Maryland from its Founding as a Town to the Current Year, 1729– 1890 (n. pl.: S.B. Nelson, 1898), pp. 691–92; and Sun Dec. 18, 1910, p.7. On William Luke Marbury, Sr., see William Luke Marbury Jr., In the Catbird Seat (Baltimore, 1988), chapters 2, 3, 5. On the relationship of Marbury and Bruce, see William Cabell Bruce, Se- lections from the Speeches, Addresses and Political Writings of Wm. Cabell Bruce (Baltimore, 1927), p. 60. On Grasty, see Gerald W. Johnson, Frank R. Kent, and H.L. Mencken, and Hamilton Owens, The Sunpapers of Baltimore (New York, 1937), pp. 285–339; Harold A. Williams, The Baltimore Sun, 1837–1987 (Baltimore, 1987), pp. 125–63; Daniel W. Pfaff, “Charles H. Grasty,” in American Newspaper Journalists, 1901–1925 (Detroit, 1984), ed. Perry J. Ashley, pp. 93–97.

15. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA, 1998), pp. 52–75; illustration facing p. 208.

16. Marbury, Jr., Catbird Seat, pp. 51, 321. For two examples of Sun editorials, see “Peace and Good-Will Between the Races,” July 10, 1910, p. 6; and “Duty of the United States in Respect to Nicaragua,” July 13, 1910, p. 6.

17. Letter from Edgar Allen Poe to Mayor J. Barry Mahool, December 17, 1910, BCA Mahool Files, 451. Also in Sun Dec 18, 1910, p. 7.

18. In an address to an elite Baltimore boys’ school in the all-white Baltimore suburb of Roland Park, Bruce remembered with fondness the days of his youth on his father’s plantation when he played rollicking games with black boys his age without any sense of antagonism, and when blacks knew their place so well it was even comforting that when “you met a person on one of its roads, the chances were as about 500 to 25 that it was a person of African descent.” Bruce, “Address to the Boys of the Gilman Country School, 694 journal of social history spring 2006

Baltimore, Md., May 19, 1912,” in Bruce, Selections, p. 86. In his later years, he retired to a “venerable home” in rural Ruxton, Maryland. Marbury remained a city dweller, though his family took vacations on his family’s estate in Southern Maryland. He also served on the board of a Farm for the Colored Insane nearby on another old plantation where “part of the cure” for the racial and mental condition of the unfortunate inmates consisted in the facility’s “favorable climate” and the “proper occupation” it offered them, picking and weaving basket palms. Baltimore Sun, Dec 11, 1910, p. 6.

19. For an example, see Boger, “Shifting Ground,” p. 20.

20. William Cabell Bruce, The Negro Problem (Baltimore, 1891), pp. 4, 13–14, 20, 31.

21. Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill, 2001), pp. 254–56; David Skillen Bogen, “Predecessors of Rosa Parks: Maryland Transportation Cases Between the Civil War and the Beginning of World War I,” University of Maryland School of Law, Legal Studies Research Papers No. 2004– 16; from Social Science Research Network Electronic Papers Collection, http//ssrn.com/ abstract=570082: 17–22; “Will Oppose ‘Jim Crow’ Cars,” Afro-American Ledger, April 4, 1914, p. 1.

22. All of the most prominent white supporters of the West Ordinance were associated with reform wing of the Democratic Party. Marbury had made his local reputation in his twenties by giving a speech against the machine in front of a decidedly hostile crowd. Grasty had authorized damning exposés of the machine as editor of the Baltimore News, and Marbury later successfully defended Grasty in a defamation suit resulting from his muckraking. A stint as State Attorney General followed for Marbury, and it was soon after that that he was being bruited as a candidate for U.S. Senate. Then he cast his lot with Maryland’s ill-fated disfranchisement campaigns. At the University of Maryland, Marbury and Bruce had been taught by John Prentiss Poe, father of Edgar Allen Poe, the city solicitor. Bruce later wrote a laudatory address about Poe including him among “Seven Great Maryland Lawyers,” though there must have been some tension when Poe drafted the state’s ﬁrst disfranchisement amendment, which included the language that would have cut into reformers’ support. Marbury later helped write the second of Mary- land’s proposed disfranchisement bills, the Strauss Amendment, which he designed to shore up reformers’ political standing. Grasty’s News dutifully printed Marbury’s arguments for the measure in 1908. By the time of the West Ordinance, though, all of these campaigns had come to naught, though in court, Marbury continued to defend a disfranchisement bill passed by the city of Annapolis. Marbury’s arguments for the Strauss amendment are in the Baltimore News, February 12, 1908, p. 12. Later, as editor of the Sun, Grasty published Marbury’s argument in the Annapolis disfranchisement case in which he used John Prentiss Poe’s contention that the Fifteenth Amendment was in- valid because of the way it was ratiﬁed without the approval of Southern states. Sun, October 12, 1910, p. 5.

23. Addresses for Mahool, Preston, Grasty, and Bruce from Polk’s Baltimore, City Di- rectory (Richmond, 1909). On Grasty’s role in Roland Park, see below. Also, James F. Waesche, Crowning the Gravelly Hill: A History of the Roland-Park-Guilford Homeland Dis- trict (Baltimore, 1987,) p. 54; and Roberta Mouldry, “Gardens, Houses, and People: The Planning of Roland Park, Baltimore” (Master Thesis, Cornell University, 1990), p. 281.

24. Sherry L. Olson, Baltimore: The Building of An American City (Baltimore, 1997), pp. 270–78; Garrett Power, “Apartheid Baltimore Style,” pp. 18–19. On the designation THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION 695

“favored fan” for the Northwest Side see James F. Waesche, Crowning the Gravelly Hill: A History of the Roland-Park-Guilford Homeland District (Baltimore, 1987), p. 26.

25. ”Negro Invasion Opposed,” Baltimore Sun July 6, 1910 p.7; The Sun ran front-page coverage of the Johnson-Jeffries ﬁght on July 5, and had numerous articles about Mahool’s efforts to stop the newsreels during the month. Biographical information on Hawkins from NAACP Branch Files, Baltimore Md, 1914–1930, microﬁlm slide 00855. 26. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York, 1998), pp. 121–99. John Cell also makes an argument about the urban origins of Jim Crow in The Highest Stage of White Supremacy.

27. “The West Ordinance,” Sun April 7, 1911, p. 6. On complaints about working-class white rioting, see Sun, Dec 18, 1910, p. 7; Sun April 7, 1911; resolution of North Balti- more Improvement Association in favor of a new segregation law to avoid “racial conﬂicts replete with disorder,” BCA, Preston Files 21-D Apr 26, 1913; The mayor of Roanoke, Virginia perceived a similar dynamic in his city. “The negroes show a disposition to en- croach upon white sections continually, and while the best class of whites are powerless, as they seem to think, there is another class which takes the law into their own hands and run undesirable people out of their section.” BCA, Mahool Files 404, Dec. 17 1910.

28. Preston Files 21-D June 3, 1918. 29. When it got out that McMechen had moved in to the neighborhood in celebration of his admission to the state bar, the Sun ridiculed this overreaching as behavior typical of ‘uppity negroes.’ Dashiell appears to have taken on the Ordinance project largely for professional reasons—as Gretchen Boger has shown, he was a renter in the neighborhood, so he did not have real estate interests at risk. Later he wrote a letter imploring Mayor Mahool to let him have the pen used to sign the Ordinance as a talisman of professional success (in the event, Mahool used two pens, so he could give one to West as well). Hawkins later snorted that Dashiell, who did not have formal training like himself, was a “lawyer without brief” in an article in the NAACP’s Crisis, noting that the courts had quickly dismissed his version of the law on obvious technical grounds, requir- ing the intervention of the more experienced William Marbury. As if in response, the Sun offered this backhanded swipe at the NAACP and its ofﬁcers: “The best and most respectable members of the colored race have no desire to leave their own people and mingle with white people. It is only the aggressive ones who are ever on the lookout for trouble, who wish to obtrude where they are not welcome.” “The West Ordinance,” editorial in the Baltimore Sun, April 7, 1911, p. 6. Hawkins, “Year of Segregation,” p. 28. The Sun by contrast did everything it could to enhance Dashiell and West’s reputation, fussing at length over their legislative victory and noting that each claimed trophies from the exploits: Dashiell got the pen Mahool used to sign the Ordinance, and West got a framed copy of the law. Letter from Edgar Allen Poe to Mayor J. Barry Mahool, Decem- ber 17, 1910, BCA Mahool Files, 451. p. 2. Sun, Dec 18, 1910, p. 7. Marbury probably had the greatest professional stake in his residence in the neighborhood. His home at 159 West Lanvale Street, a few blocks east of McMechen’s new house, was known as one of the larger houses in the community. Because it was located nearer to the center of town than other elite neighborhoods it had become a kind of nerve-center of progressive Democratic politics—the editorial page editor of the Sun was also a regular visitor—and was almost certainly a meeting place for the leaders of the campaign to pass the West Ordinance. Looking back many years later Marbury’s son writes of the place with enormous nostalgia, as a meeting place for his entire extended clan and all the children of 696 journal of social history spring 2006 the neighborhood as well as city politicos. Race conﬂict thus threatened the very bosom of a deeply nurtured sense of home as a professional asset. For years after the failure of the West Ordinance, the elder Marbury remained in the neighborhood, even sending his son through the streets to his neighbors’ houses to get them to put restrictive covenants in their housing deeds barring them from selling to negroes. Marbury, Jr., Catbird Seat, pp. 29–37; 321. Polk’s Baltimore City Directory for 1929 lists Marbury at the same West Lanvale Street address. 30. “Against Negro School,” Sun, Oct. 13, 1910, p. 14.

31. The fight and ensuing riots were covered on the front page of the Sun, July 5, 1910, and Mahool’s action to stop showing the films was reported on July 6, 1910, p. 6. On July 8, 1910, p. 6 the paper reassured whites in its editorial page that blacks have accompished nothing without tutelage of whites, so black preachers should not gloat over the victory. It cited Charles Frances Adams on his trip to Africa. The paper also printed a dispatch from Britain warning Americans to “keep check on blacks is necessary” after the fight, on July 7, 1910, p. 7, and a note that the fight films had also been suppressed in London (July 13, p. 13).

32. Petitions from Harlem Improvement Association, June 5, 1913, and from North Baltimore Improvement Association, May 17th, 1913; letter from C. E. Stonebraker (full name Cora E. Stonebraker listed in Polk’s Baltimore 1909 as the owner of Howard Novelty Co.) to Mayor Preston, May 12, 1913, all documents in Preston Files 21-D.

33. Letter from “R.” to Sun, May 15, 1918; and letter from Alice J. Reilley to Mayor Preston, July 21, 1918, Preston Files, 106.

34. Quote is from the title of an editorial “The Segregation Ordinance Should Bring Peace,” in the Sun, September 27, 1913, p. 8. For more on this sentiment, see “The West Ordinance” Sun, October 10, 1910, p. 6; “Strong for West Plan,” Sun, October 11, 1910, p. 16; “The West Ordinance Constitutional” Sun December 20, 1910, p. 6; and “Segregation in Force,” same date, p. 7, “The West Ordinance,” Sun April 7, 1911, p. 6. Edgar Allen Poe’s analysis of the ordinance is dated December 17, 1910, in Mahool Files, 451. 35. On the origins of these ideas in late-eighteenth century London see Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York, 1987), pp. 51–72. Racialized language was even used in campaigns for urban reform in mid to late nineteenth-century London, as when the poorer East End was compared to “darkest Africa.” See Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and American Thought (New York, 1985), pp. 109–110; Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (London, 1963), pp. 60, 111, 325–26. On a similar theme, the “theory of urban degeneration,” see Garth Steadman-Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between the Classes in Victorian Society (London, 1971), pp. 127–51. On the earliest use of racial segregation to solve urban problems in India, see Nightin- gale, “Urban and Global Dynamics of Color Lines;” P.J. Marshall, “British Society in In- dia under the East India Company,” Modern Asian Studies 31 (1997): 89–108; and “The White Town of Calcutta Under the Rule of the East India Company,” Modern Asian Studies 34 (2000): 307–31. In her excellent “Colonial Companions: Bibis, Begums, and Concubines of the British in North India, 1760–1830” (Ph.D Dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 2000), Durba Ghosh argues that sentiments against unions between British upper class men and Indian women, as well as their children had soured well before Cornwallis. THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION 697

36. See for example, Sherry H. Olsen, Baltimore: The Building of an American City (Balti- more, 1997), pp. 269–79; Garret Power, “Apartheid Baltimore-Style,” pp. 292–97, 301– 303; Samuel Roberts, “Contagious Fear,” p. 307 and chapter 8 as a whole. 37. Sun, Sept 27, 1913, p. 8.

38. The literature on the medical profession and its ﬁght against urban disease is vast. Here are some works I have relied on. Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex, and Class Under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 1793–1905 (London, 1980); David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley, 1994); Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York, 2000); Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventative Medicine 1859–1914 (Cambridge, UK, 1994); Warwick Anderson, “Excremental Colonialism, Public Health, and the Politics of Polution,” Crit- ical Inquiry 21 (1995): 640–69; Alison Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health (Houndmills, UK, 2004); Vijay Prashad, “Na- tive Dirt/Imperial Ordure: The Cholera of 1832 and the Morbid Resolutions of Moder- nity,” Journal of Historical Sociology 7 (1994): 243–60; Peter Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830–1930 (Cambridge, UK, 1999); Charles Rosenburg, Explaining Epi- demics, And Other Studies in the History of Medicine (Cambridge, UK, 1994); Reynaldo Illeto, “Cholera and the Origins of American Sanitary Order in the Philippines,” in Dis- crepant Histories: Translocal Essays on Filipino Cultures, ed. Vicente Rafael (Philadelphia, 1995), pp. 51–82.

39. The use of health arguments to segregate colonial cities is discussed in King, Colonial Urban Development, pp. 180–276; Oldenburg, Colonial Lucknow, pp. 27–144; Kennedy, Magic Mountains; Yeoh, Contesting Space; Maynard Swanson, “The Sanitation Syn- drome”; Swanson, “ ‘The Asiatic Menace’ ”; Parnell, “Sanitation, Segregation, and the Native (Urban Areas) Act”; Harriet Deacon, “Racial Segregation and Medical Dis- course”; Frenkel and Western, “Pretext or Prophylaxis?”; Gale, “Segregation in British West Africa”; Curtin, “Medical Knowledge and Urban Planning”; John W. Cell, “Med- ical Theory and the Origins of Segregation,” 307–35; Abu-Lughod, Rabat; Gwendolyn Wright, “Tradition in the Service of Modernity; Wright, Politics of Design; Betts, “The Establishment of the Medina in Dakar”; M’Bokolo, “Peste et Société Urbaine à Dakar”; Sidney Chaloub, Cidade Febril; Teresa A. Meade, “Civilizing” Rio; Nayan Shah, Conta- gious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley, 2001); Samuel Roberts, “Infectious Fear: Tuberculosis, Public Health, and the Logic of Race and Illness in Baltimore, Maryland, 1880–1930” (Ph.D Dissertation: Princeton University, 2002); David McBride, From Tuberculosis to AIDS: Epidemics Among Urban Blacks Since 1900 (Albany, 1991); Vanessa Gamble, Germs Have No Color Line: Blacks and American Medi- cine, 1900–1940 (New York, 1989); William Deverell, “Plague in Los Angeles: Ethnic- ity and Typicality,” in Over the Edge: Remapping the American West, ed. Valerie Mat- sumoto and Blake Allmendinger (Berkeley, 1999), p. 172–200. On South Africa, see Gary Baines, “The Origins of Urban Segregation”; Swanson, “The Sanitation Syndrome”; Swanson, “ ‘The Asiatic Menace’; Deacon, “Racial Segregation and Medical Discourse; Bickford-Smith, Victorian Cape Town. On Johannesburg, see Parnell, “Johannesburg Slums”; and Parnell, “Sanitation, Segregation and the Native (Urban Areas) Act.”

40. Shah, Contagious Divides pp. 71–73.

41. See E.W.Gilliam, The African in the United States” (1883), Popular Science Monthly 22 (February, 1883): 438–40; and Gilliam, “The African Problem,” North American Re- view 139 (1884): 417–44; Frederick L. Hoffman, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American 698 journal of social history spring 2006

Negro New York, 1896), 314, 328; William Lee Howard, “The Negro as a Distinct Ethnic Factor in Civilization,” Medicine 9 (1903): 423–26. 42. Herman M. Biggs, address in Addresses Delivered at the First City-Wide Congress of Baltimore, MD (Baltimore, 1911), p. 1; Roberts, “Infectious Fear,” pp. 278–79; quote from Jones, p. 301.

43. See, for example, BCA, Preston Files 21-d, letter from Rev W.J. MacMillan, January 18, 1916, and letter from Alice Reilly, July 2, 1918.

44. Marbury Jr., Catbird Seat, pp. 32–33; Roberts, “Infectious Fear,” pp. 235–36; 253–56; Mayor Preston himself articulated these concerns in an article “What Can Be Done to Improve the Living Conditions of Baltimore’s Negro Population?” Baltimore Municipal Journal, March 16, 1917, p. 1.

45. H.L. Mencken, The Free Lance (unpublished collection of essays from 1911–1915 in Mencken Room, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore), p. 137. Quoted in Garret Power, “Apartheid Baltimore Style,” p. 307.

46. See Janet Kemp, Housing Conditions in Baltimore (Baltimore, 1907), pp. 18–19; Will- iam W. Emmart, “City Plan, “ in Addresses Delivered at the First City-Wide Congress of Baltimore, Md. (Baltimore, 1911), pp. 134–35; William Welch “Sanitation in Relation to the Poor” (1892), in Papers and Addresses by William Henry Welch ed. Walter C. Burkett (Baltimore, 1920), pp. 594–98.

47. On American courts’ obstacles to the importation of European slum-clearance and public housing schemes see Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, pp. 201–208.

48. William M. Emmart, “City Plan,” p. 129. Most historians of the Congress agree that the segregation ordinance was not discussed there. This passage is the closest anyone made direct reference to the law and to Northwest Side residents’ concerns with declining property values. Emmart’s home address in 1909 was 817 N. Fremont Ave., more or less right on the racial frontier (Polk’s Baltimore City Directory, 1909). The scheme would have also probably involved some “excess condemnation” of properties adjacent to the proposed avenues in order to give the City land which could be resold at increased price after the projects’ completion and could help in its ﬁnancing. American courts tended to disallow this sort of planning device too. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings pp 201–208.

49. “Ordinance Should Bring Peace,” Sun, Sept. 27, 1913, p. 8.

50. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, pp. 461–68; 473–79.

51. “Segregation Opposed: Socialists Plead for the Negro,” Baltimore Sun, October 4, 1910. At the time of the Ordinance “congestion” had become the key enemy for housing reformers across the country. Yet there is no evidence that Baltimore’s white housing reformers responded to testimony given by several African Americans at a public hearing held by the City Council’s Committee on Police and Jail that the Segregation Ordinance would increase congestion in black areas. Afro American Ledger, October 29, 1910, p. 4. 52. Addresses at City-Wide Congress, pp. 3–8.

53. Letter from Reverend William J. MacMillan to Mayor Preston, Jan. 18, 1916, PF 106. THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION 699

54. Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York, 1987), pp. 51–72. Quote from Lees, Cities Perceived, pp. 109–110; Briggs, Victorian Cities, pp. 60, 111, 325–26. On a similar theme, the “theory of urban degeneration,” see Steadman- Jones, Outcast London, pp. 127–51.

55. Nield, “Growth of a Colonial City,” pp. 309–36; Robert Archer, “Colonial Suburbs in South Asia, 1700–1850 and the Spaces of Modernity,” in Visions of Suburbia ed. Roger Silverstone, (London, 1973) pp. 26–54; Swati Chattopadhyay, “Blurring Boundaries: The Limits of ‘White Town’ in Colonial Calcutta,” Journal of the Society of Architectural His- torians 59 (2000): 160. 56. James F. Waesche, Crowning the Gravelly Hill: A History of the Roland-Park-Guilford Homeland District (Baltimore, 1987), p. 26. On Brooklyn Heights and Cambridge, see Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford, 1985), pp. 20–31. As late as the 1910s, the Sun declared that in Baltimore’s Mount Ver- non Place neighborhood, not far from the Northwest Side the high housing values alone protected the neighborhood from black inﬁltration. Sun April 7, 1911, p. 6. This was not, apparently the feeling of the developers of Roland Park, which was further out and more expensive, but who nevertheless added restrictive covenants against selling property to blacks to newer developments around this time.

57. Racial ideologies and cultural chauvinism amplified the class and gender segregation that underlay middle-class English people’s desire to live on urban fringes in India. Houses in white town were worth much more than in black town, even when the grand palaces of the wealthiest Indians were compared with those of their closest British counterparts. Early nineteenth-century advertisements for houses in White Town often touted their location near the residences of prominent Englishmen. Chattopadhyay, “Blurring Boundaries,” pp. 159–60 and 178, note 30. According to Pradip Sinha, some Englishmen were puzzled that wealthy Indians in Calcutta’s black town seemed to see it as a sign of prestige if their palaces were surrounded by teeming, thatch-roofed bustees (slums) inhabited by poor servants, clients, and political faction followers—those in charge of sanitation and fire safety were especially dismayed. Sinha, Calcutta in Urban History, p. 28, notes 49 and 50. The novelist Sara Jeanette Duncan wryly but realistically narrates the story of a modest British couple in search of a house in Calcutta in The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib ([1893] Ottawa, 1986). She notes that the Brownes were “lucky” in that they found “a house in a suburban locality where a number of Europeans had survived for several years.” She also later notes that the house was across the street from a bus- tee, whose “proximity does not enhance rents” (pp. 54, 162). But, no matter how much Englishmen may have insisted upon racial segregation, Englishmen themselves lived surrounded by armies of Indian servants—even modest households in Calcutta could have over a hundred. Residential separation in colonial India was more permeable than anywhere else, and as Duncan suggests, bustees housing these domestic retinues often grew up in White Town too, despite repeated demolition efforts. Also, Indians who could and often did buy property in white area often did so because they were comfortable with Eu- ropeans’ own violations of caste traditions and were eager to adopt Western ways. Given their wealth, they would also most likely raise surrounding property values. Veena Old- enburg, Colonial Lucknow, p. 176. In Hill Stations, as Pamela Kanwar has shown, the situation was somewhat different, as the need for Indian servants and builders swelled the Indian population and as Indian Princes sought to acquire luxury properties in the booming real estate markets of places like Simla. Kanwar, “The Changing Profile of the Summer Capital of British India: Simla 1864–1947,” Modern Asian Studies, 18 (1984): pp. 228–36. 700 journal of social history spring 2006

58. Kanwar, “Changing Proﬁle,” p.225. On West Africa, see Curtin, “Medical Knowl- edge,” pp. 600–605.

59. Susan Parnell, “Sanitation, Segregation, and the Natives (Urban Areas Act),” p. 272. Black property owners continued to press their claims in such famous “freehold” townships as Sophiatown into the 1950s, when the apartheid regime ended them entirely. Suburban developers in Johannesburg and elsewhere apparently used restrictive covenants as early as the 1890s, and they were virtually universal after 1912. We know little about the ideologies employed in pushing these covenants, but presumably concerns about property values were critical. See Keith S. O. Beavon, Johannesburg: The Making and Shaping of the City (Pretoria, 2004), pp. 103, 128–33; Lemon, ed., Homes Apart, pp. 3, 46, 78, 92, 176–77, 181; Christopher, “Spatial Variations.”

60. Quotes from “Negro Invasion Opposed” Sun July 6, 1910, p. 7; and “The West Or- dinance” editorial in the Sun, October 10, 1910, p. 6. For other references to property values see Property see Sun Oct. 4, 1910; PF 21-d June 12 1913, June 14; PF 21 d Aug 14th; PF 21-d Jan 18 1916. 61. “Strong for West Plan,” Sun, Oct 11, 1910, p. 16.

62. Letters to the Sun, October 2, 1910, p. 6, and October 7, 1910, p. 6.

63. Editorial in Sun, May 15, 1911, p. 6.

64. Letters to Mayor Preston from Charles M. Childs, 1142 Myrtle Ave., Jan. 24, 1918, PF 106; and from Mrs. A J Reilly, 1008 Lafayette Ave., June 16, 1913, PF 21-D.

65. This sample is somewhat unscientific but I believe it is useful nonetheless. It was derived from everyone who I could find who were reported by the Sun and the News as speaking out publically in favor of the Ordinance, all signers of petitions and officers of Neighborhood Organizations behind those petitions, and all writers of letters pertaining to the Ordinance to the offices of Mayors Mahool and Preston during their full terms, dating from 1910 to 1918. I did not include the large numbers of Lafayette Street residents who petitioned Mayor Preston on June 3, 1918 (PF 106) to have the black residents of a house nearby removed because of alleged pistol shots that came from the house, though many of the names appear elsewhere in petitions clearly focused on the Ordinance itself. Of eighty names, the names or professions of 12 were not listed in the Polk’s Baltimore City Directory in 1909. Fourteen were attorneys; 11 were secretaries or clerks; 10 were medium-sized business owners; 5 were shop owners; 6 were physicians; 2 were pastors or priests; and 10 were in a miscellaneous category. There were 8 women in the group, some of whom are included among those owning shops or boarding houses, but most of whom were not listed in the directory. Only two of the eighty were real estate agents.

66. The arguments are based on the home street addresses listed in Polk’s Baltimore City Directory, 1909 of all the Offices and Executive Committee members of the City Wide- Congress, as listed in the Addresses Delivered at the City Wide Congress. The professions also listed in the directory attest to the fact that these figures included some of Baltimore’s most important industrialists, downtown businessmen, and they of course included both political figures like William Cabell Bruce and world-renowned academics like William Welch. 67. Letter from Reverend William McMillan to Mayor Preston, January 18, 1916, in PF 106 THE TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF URBAN SEGREGATION 701

68. Letter from Harry T. Giesendaffer, Real Estate Broker, to Mayor Mahool, Dec. 10, 1910, BCA, Mahool Files, 451, p. 2. See also letters from Charles Otto, John M. Hering, Franklin F. Johnson, J.I. Goldstein, and the Realty Securities Corporation in the same ﬁle. 69. On Roland Park, see Roberta Mouldry, “Gardens, Houses, and People.” Grasty’s role is described in Daniel W. Pfaff, “Charles H. Grasty,” in American Newspaper Journalists 1901–25, ed. Perry J. Ashley (Detroit, 1984), p. 93. The exchange between Preston, his Chicago friend, A.K. Warner, and the Real Estate Board of Baltimore can be found in PF 106. 70. Power, “Apartheid Baltimore Style,” 312–13.

71. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, pp. 153, 173.

72. The phrase “average opinion about what the average opinion will be” is John May- nard Keynes’s, describing the “herd” mentality of unregulated speculative currency markets. 73. Carl Nightingale, “A Tale of Three Global Ghettos,” Journal of Urban History 29 (2003): 243–57; Brahim Chanchabi, with Catherine de Withol de Wenden, Cités et Di- versités: L’Immigration en Europe (Paris, 1995); Peter Hall, “The Inner City Worldwide,” in The Inner City in Context: The Final Report of the Social Sciences Research Council Inner Cities Working Party ed. Peter Hall (London, 1981); John Rex, The Ghetto and Under- class: Essays on Race and Social Policy (Aldershot, UK, 1988); Susan J. Smith, “Residen- tial Segregation and the Politics of Racialization, “ in Racism, the City and the State ed. Malcolm Cross and Michael Keith (London, 1993), pp. 128–43; Loic J.D. Wacquant, “The Rise of Advanced Marginality: Notes on its Nature and Implications,” Acta Socio- logica 39 (1996): 122–39; Wacquant, “Banlieues Françaises et le Ghetto Noir Americain: de l’Amalgame à la Comparaison,” French Politics and Society, 10 no. 4 (Fall, 1992): 81– 103; Wacquant, “Urban Outcasts: Stigma and Division in the Black American Ghetto and the French Urban Periphery,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 17 no. 3 (1993): 366–83; Wacquant, “The Comparative Structure and Experience of Ur- ban Exclusion: ‘Race,’ Class, and Space in Chicago and Paris,” in Poverty, Inequality, and the Future of Social Policy: Western States and the New World Order ed. Katherine Mc- Fate, Roger Lawson, and William Julius Wilson (New York, 1995), pp. 543–70; Adil Ja- zouli, Les Années Banlieues (Paris, 1992), pp. 17–63; Hervé Vieillard-Baron, Les Banlieues Françaises: ou le Ghetto Impossible (n.p.,: Editions de l’Aube, 1994); François Dubet and Didier Lapeyronnie, Les Quartiers d’Exil (Paris, 1992); Sophie Body-Gendrot, “Migration and the Racialization of the Postmodern City in France,” in Cross and Keith, Racism, the City and the State, pp. 77–92; Enzo Mingione, “Urban Poverty in the Advanced Industrial World: Concepts, Analysis and Debates,” in Urban Poverty and the Underclass: A Reader ed. Mingione, pp. 3–40; Nick Buck, “Social and Economic Change in Contemporary Britain: the Emergence of an Urban Underclass?” in Mingione Urban Poverty, pp. 277– 98; Hartmut Häusserman, Andreas Kappha, and Rainer Muenz, “Berlin: Immigration, Social Problems, Political Approaches,” unpublished paper delivered at the International Symposium on Social Exclusion and the “New Urban Underclass,” Berlin June, 1996; Hartmut Häussermann, “Social Transformation of Urban Space in Berlin Since 1960,” unpublished paper delivered at the International Symposium on Social Exclusion and the “New Urban Underclass,” Berlin June, 1996; Jens S. Dangschat and David Fasen- fest, “(Re)Structuring Urban Poverty: The Impact of Globalization on its Extent and Concentration,” unpublished paper delivered at the International Symposium on Social Exclusion and the “New Urban Underclass,” Berlin June, 1996; Christian Kesteloot, “La 702 journal of social history spring 2006

Problématique de l’Intégration des Jeunes Urbains: Une Analyse Géographique du Cas Bruxellois,” unpublished paper delivered at the International Symposium on Social Ex- clusion and the “New Urban Underclass,” Berlin June, 1996; Sophie Watson, “Work and Leisure in Tomorrow’s Cities,” in Beyond the Market: Alternatives to Economic Rationalism, eds. Stuart Rees, Gordon Rodley and Frank Stilwell (Sydney, pp. 11–12; see also Mark Peel, “The Urban Debate: From ‘Los Angeles’ to the Urban Village,” in Australian Cities: Issues, Strategies and Policies for Urban Australia ed. Patrick Troy (Hong Kong, 1995), pp. 39–40.