Utz Thesis Final Revisions
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! ! ! ! ABSTRACT Title of Document: Re-thinking "The American Dream of Integration" in Suburbia: Race, Class and Resegregation in Randallstown 1956-2003 Zachary Utz Directed by: G. Derek Musgrove, Ph.D This research focuses on the suburban community of Randallstown in the northwest corner of Baltimore County, Maryland. During the approximately fifty years covered in this narrative (1956-2006) Randallstown underwent a significant shift in its demographics, going from nearly entirely white to overwhelmingly black. I present a linear narrative describing how this happened by drawing particular emphasis to the ambiguities of terms like “integration” and “stability” in suburban Randallstown. I argue that historians need to re-examine the contexts in which this terminology was employed in suburban communities in the wake of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. This research aims to offer a unique insight into the complex ways that individuals and in- stitutions navigate their places within a suburban context that is historically defined by legacies of discrimination and segregation. Re-thinking "The American Dream of Integration" in Suburbia: Race, Class and Resegre- gation in Randallstown 1956-2003 by Zachary Utz Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (M.A), Historical Studies 2018 © Copyright by [Zachary Utz] [2018] Table of Contents I. Introduction — 1 Literature Review — 6 Methodology — 14 Chapter Summary — 17 II. Chapter 1: “The Line of Least Resistance” — 19 Section I: “We’re doing everything we can. Which at this point is nothing” — 21 Section II: “It’s a Jewish neighborhood and I don’t know of any kinds of violence perpe- trated on the homes of blacks by Jewish people” — 32 Section III: “…a different kind of neighborhood” — 42 III. Chapter 2: Shakespeare Park and the “American Dream of Integration” — 47 Section I: “…a well respected community” — 49 Section II: A “Failing Urban Strategy”: Subsidized Housing Policy in the 1970s — 62 Section III: Shakespeare Park — 71 IV. Chapter 3: Resegregation In Randallstown — 87 Section I: Schools and the Beginning of Racial Transition — 90 Section II: “We want to be where the people are”: Jewish Flight From Randallstown in the 1990s — 100 Section III: Disinvestment and The Randallstown UDAT — 108 V. Conclusion “a stable community” — 118 VI. Bibliography — 123 !ii Introduction: In early 1979, the community of Randallstown, a majority-white middle-class suburb in Baltimore County, was selected as the proposed site for the construction of a new federally sub- sidized low-income housing project, the Shakespeare Park homes. Many residents of Randall- stown protested the decision. Leading the charge was Mary Basso, the vociferous head of the Greater Randallstown Community Council (GRCC). Basso was no stranger to civic engagement and activism. A few years prior she had successfully fought for a moratorium on new construc- tion in Randallstown, citing a lack of adequate infrastructure to keep pace with the rapidly grow- ing suburban community. Now she wanted to stop the housing project, citing concerns such as traffic congestion, safety, and “stability.” The latter concern ignited a firestorm of debate within Randallstown, which had recently seen a noticeable increase in the black population. This in turn had prompted fears of ‘white flight’ amongst the community’s residents. By August of 1979, a bi-racial coalition of Randall- stown residents, organized under the GRCC, was openly fighting against the project. This was despite racial overtones that signaled to many that racism was driving their opposition. In an op- ed to the Baltimore Sun, GRCC members Sylvia and Saul Goldberg responded to these charges, asking “If we were racist, would we have moved into this already integrated area?”1 Soon after Basso herself was labeled a racist by certain proponents of the housing project after recordings of a GRCC meeting where one attendee asked whether “certain minorities would come out of Bal- 1 Saul and Sylvia Goldberg, “Wrong Project, Wrong Place, Wrong Time,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), June 9, 1979. !1 timore City” to rent the housing units, became public.2 Despite the local controversy, the GRCC was not without powerful allies. One of them was Maryland’s 2nd District Congressional Repre- sentative, Clarence “Doc” Long. After a series of heated debates between the GRCC and the De- partment of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Long publicly made his opinions known on the matter. In an interview with the Baltimore Sun, Long emphatically stated that “[p]utting a low-income ghetto in Randallstown is an act of injustice in an area where housing patterns live up to the American Dream of integration.”3 The Goldberg’s, Basso, and Long’s comments were what initially stirred my interest in this research project. They raise a set of interesting questions about the nature of integration in postwar era suburban America. First, is the “American Dream of integration” possible in subur- bia? What did the word “integration” even mean, or look like, to those living in the postwar/post- Civil Rights era suburbs? Are “stability” and “integration” mutually exclusive terms in suburban communities? And last, is it possible for stable suburban integration to exist if the suburbs them- selves were necessarily built upon a foundation of exclusion that has historically required that some must be kept out? The history of postwar Randallstown, and particularly the events sur- rounding the Shakespeare Park project, can offer insight into these questions. At that specific moment in time, a bi-racial coalition, supposedly representing the larger community, would uti- lize their self-proclaimed status as “successfully integrated” to argue that black, low-income per- 2 “Written Finding”, Federal case summary case of GRCC v. HUD DH182-41 RA, Page 8. Part of case file housed at NARA Philadelphia. 3 Katherine White, “Foes of Randallstown Subsidize Units Fight on,” Baltimore Sun, June 25, 1979, C1. !2 sons should be kept out. Implicit within that argument was a shared local understanding of what suburban integration meant and looked like. The story of Randallstown is representative of a broader trend in the post Civil Rights era history of America’s suburbs. Beginning in the 1970s, African American families looking to es- cape the crime and poverty of Baltimore City began to make the move west up the Liberty Road corridor to Randallstown and the surrounding suburbs of Northwest Baltimore County. In 1972, sociologist Thomas Schelling argued that there was a “tipping point” to neighborhood integra- tion, arguing that once a community experiences a certain percentage of black integration, the white majority subsequently flees. By the time the Shakespeare Park housing project was pro- posed in 1979, Randallstown’s black population had grown to nearly 20 percent.4 Two decades later, the community had transitioned to majority black. While historians have paid significant attention to the creation of the racially segregated postwar suburbs, few have explored white and black suburbanites’ distinct and collective reac- tions to the process of desegregation in the years after passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act. Similarly, few have probed the various forms that the seemingly benign terminology of “integra- tion” and “stability” have assumed in suburbia and how those forms were weaponized by com- munities to justify exclusion. Randallstown has continuously oscillated between self-perceived and expressed periods of demographic “stability” and “instability”, so much so that it begs the question of just what qualifies as “stability” in suburbia, if anything. I argue that the postwar suburbs, initially conceived as stable bulwarks against the dramatic social and civil unrest in ur- ban America, are in fact themselves places of unending instability. 4 US Census Bureau, “General Population and Housing Characteristics 1980,” Randallstown. !3 The intersection of race and class is also a central theme of the Randallstown story. Ran- dallstown occupies a unique place within predominantly white Baltimore County, Maryland. It is situated along the Liberty Road corridor in the northwest part of the county. The Liberty Road corridor represents the largest cluster of majority African American communities in Baltimore County. For the sake of this research, the Liberty Road corridor will specifically refer to the three communities of Randallstown, Lochearn and Milford Mill (see the map above). Each of these communities experienced African American in-migration starting in the early 1970s. In particu- lar, Randallstown stands out as both the largest by population and the most affluent by average median income.5 The community’s current rate of homeownership and high school graduation 5 CityData.com: Randallstown, MD,” http://www.city-data.com/city/Randallstown-Maryland.html. Randall- stown’s media income is $75,235, approximately $500 less than the statewide average and nearly $20,000 higher than both Lochearn and Milford Mills. Maryland consistently ranks among the top states in the country in per capita income. !4 exceed the statewide average.6 It is by any metric a stable, and still growing, majority African American middle-class suburban community.7 Despite these positive economic metrics, Randall- stown struggles to draw outside capital investment. In this way, the community is dealing with issues more typical of