Utz Thesis Final Revisions

! 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 institutions 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 perpetrated 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 subsidized 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 construction in Randallstown, citing a lack of adequate infrastructure to keep pace with the rapidly growing 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 suburbia? 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 themselves 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 surrounding 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 escape 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 integration, 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 proposed 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 “integration” and “stability” have assumed in suburbia and how those forms were weaponized by communities 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 urban 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 particular, 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 other declining first tier suburbs that do not have a strong underlying financial foundation. The recent history of Randallstown also shows that a shared sense of class cannot trump racial divisions in suburban space. I argue that this makes post-Civil Rights era

Randallstown an ideal case study to pose several important questions about race, class, and community in the late-20th century suburbs. First, since many of its white residents at least ostensibly believed in the feasibility of a stable middle-class integrated community, why did they eventually abandoned that idea? To what degree did they always maintain a view of suburbia as more defined by racial separation than a shared sense of class? Also, how did African Americans imagine the suburbs, as integrated or segregated or neither? Has this perception changed as the demographics of the community have changed?

In order to begin to answer these questions, this study will focus on the subtle, yet profound ways in which suburbia continues to be race and class coded. In so doing, it also seeks to parse out the blurred lines between the historical events of desegregation, integration, racial transition, and resegregation. These terms all mean something seemingly discrete to us. However, when examined within the context of the specific times in which they were employed and ex-

6 US Census Bureau, “General Population and Housing Characteristics 2010,” https://factﬁnder.census.- gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=CF (accessed June 16, 2016). Census tract data indicates homeownership rates at 71.2% versus statewide average of 66.8%. High School graduation rates at 93.5% versus statewide 89.4%.

7 Census tract data indicates the population of Randallstown grew by roughly 2,000 between 2000-2015. By contrast Lochearn, the second largest majority African American community, saw a population decline by roughly 1,000 during the same period.

5 pressed, they turn out to be anything but distinctive. In historical context even the seemingly progressive terminology of “integration”, “community” and “stability” belied a segregated understanding of suburban space that had literally defined the postwar suburbs. To this point Rabbi

Maroglis, leader of the Beth Israel Congregation in Randallstown, spoke to the Baltimore Sun in

1994 about his decision to relocate his congregation from Randallstown, saying, “[t]he reason

Jews were here at first, historically . . . was discrimination…that’s not why we're leaving though.

We want to remain close to our present membership. . . . We want to be where the people are.”8

In other words, the line between intentional segregation and freedom of movement were not well defined or understood by those who left. Irregardless, Randallstown of intention would resegre- gate. I argue that in the wake of the Fair Housing Act and “integration”, individual and collective motivations of suburbanites were abstracted from the larger context of segregation that built the suburbs. This research aims, in part, to examine the ways that this abstraction occurred.

Literature Review:

Suburbia has been a subject of fascination and fixation for non-historians for decades.

Sociologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, geographers, literary critics, philosophers, and artists alike have all expounded at length on the meaning and nature of suburbia.9 The suburban studies discipline has been around since the postwar period. Owing in large part to the foundational work of French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Social Space, sub-

8 Matt Ebnet, “Young families move, so does synagogue,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), August 22, 1994.

9 For a comprehensive literature review on the multidisciplinary scholarship on suburbanization see Sam Grifﬁths and Muki Haklay. "The Suburb and the City," in Suburban Urbanities: Suburbs and the Life of the High Street, ed. Vaughan Laura (London: UCL Press, 2015), 11-31.

6 urban studies scholars have sought to define, 1) what, if anything, comprises a suburb, 2) what is the relationship between the suburban and the urban, and 3) how is the geo-spatial relationship between the individual, the institution, and the state influenced by, or an influence on, the suburban space?10 Within this extremely broad field we must also account for the litany of popular fac- titious renderings of suburban culture since it became the defining image of Americana in roughly the 1950s.11 All of this combined forms a dense body of in-depth study and theory on suburbanization as a socio-cultural phenomenon.

Historians have been very active in the more specific field of suburban history. The bulk of historical literature on American suburbia has focused on the creation of the postwar working- class consumer suburb. Easily the most widely read and arguably influential work in this field is

Kenneth Jackson’s 1985 work Crabgrass Frontier.12 Jackson lays out a dense history of Ameri- can suburbanization, starting with the migration of Manhattanites to the then undeveloped

Brooklyn area of New York City. However, the real weight of his argument lies in his depiction of the postwar racially exclusive working-class suburb. Jackson argues that pre 1920s and 30s suburbia was largely the dominion of the upper class whites. It wasn’t until postwar federal fi-

10 See J. W. R. Whitehand, ”Makers of the Residential Landscape: Conﬂict and Change in Outer London," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 15 (1990): 87-101; J. W. R. Whitehand and C. Carr, “The changing fabrics of ordinary residential areas,” Urban Studies 36 (1990): 1661–77; R. Sil- verstone, “Visions of suburbia” (London: Routledge, 1997); Henri Lefebvre, “The Production of Space,” trans. D. Nicholson-Smith, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991).

11 By no means a comprehensive list but for a brief overview see American Beauty, directed by Sam Mendes (1999: Universal City, CA: DreamWorks Video); Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road (New York: Little, Brown, 1961); Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993); The ‘Burbs, directed by Joe Dante (1989: Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures); Tom Perrotta, Little Children (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004); Blue Velvet, directed by David Lynch (1986: Wilmington, North Car- olina: De Laurentiis Entertainment Group).

12 see Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: 1985).

7 nancial underwriting of both mass developers, and the mortgage industry, that the gateway was opened to the “mass produced suburbs” for the white working class.13 Jackson argues that the postwar suburbia was the dominion of middle and working-class whites by way of racially bi- ased federal involvement in the housing industry, through the policies and practices of the FHA and HOLC (Home Owner’s Loan Corporation). Building on this narrative many historians have presented closely connected case studies of white flight, urban decline, and the rise of Nixon-era conservatism and white working-class politics in American cities and their suburbs.14 More recent works like N.D.B Connolly’s A World More Concrete, have sought to expand on this narrative by including African American property owners, namely in southern Jim Crow metropolitan areas like Miami, as participants and profiteers in the systemic structure of segregated housing.15

Other historians have focused less directly on the narrative of postwar white supremacy in the creation of suburbia by creating histories which incorporate suburban populations from earlier periods, as well as from more economically and racially diverse backgrounds. For example, as early as the 1960s historians have been making the case that the American suburb is a

13 Becky Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-class Suburbs of Los Angeles 1920-1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2002), 3.

14 see Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton University Press, 2005); Kenneth Durr, Behind the Backlash: White Working Class Politics in Baltimore 1940-1980 (The University of North Carolina Press, 2003); W. Edward Orser, Blockbusting in Baltimore: The Ed- mondson Village Story (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2015); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Ori- gins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, (Princeton University Press, 2005); Beryl Satter, Family Properties: How the Struggle Over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America (New York: MacMillan, 2009); Antero Pietilla. Not In My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City. (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010).

15 N.D.B Connolly, A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow in Southern Flor- ida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 2014).

8 much older phenomenon than popularly understood.16 Sam Warner’s Streetcar Suburbs: The

Process of Growth in Boston 1870-1900 has been called “the first major historical analysis of nineteenth century suburbanization in the United States.”17 Warner was among the first historians to build on the abundant sociological literature by asking questions about the actual social nature and composition of the suburb as an entity independent of urban space. Other works from the

1970s sought to emphasize the role technological advances in the 1920s-1930s, like automobiles and cheap household consumer commodities, into creation America’s early prewar suburbs.18

Later works, like Richard Harris’ Unplanned Suburbs: Toronto’s American Tragedy 1900-1950

(1997), took a more critical view of suburban history by expanding the time frame to encompass the postwar suburban phenomena.19 Harris juxtaposes the early twentieth-century history of

Toronto’s self-built working-class suburbs, against the more modern pre-fabricated developer built suburbs which largely excluded the working class. In doing so, he points out a crucial con- tradiction at the heart of the cultural discourse on suburbia: self-reliance and tight-knit indepen-

16 Sam Bass Warner Jr., Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston 1870-1900 (Cambridge, Mass. 1962); John Stilgoe, Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820-1939 (New Haven, 1988).

17 Margaret Marsh, "Historians and the Suburbs,” OAH Magazine of History 5, no. 2 (1990): 43-49.

18 Jon C. Teaford, Cities and Suburbs: The Political Fragmentation of Metropolitan America (Baltimore, 1979); Philip Dolce, ed., Suburbia: the American Dream and Dilemma (New York, 1976); Michael Ebner, ”Re-reading Suburban America: Urban Population Déconcentration, 1810-1980," in American Urbanism: A Historiographical Review, ed. Howard Gillette and Zane Miller (Westport, 1987), 227-242; Peter Moore, "Public Services and Residential Development in a Toronto Neighborhood, 1880-1915," Journal of Urban History 9 (August 1983); Joel Tarr, "Introduction to the Special Issue on Technology and the City," Journal of Urban History 5 (May 1979): 276.

19 Richard Harris, Unplanned Suburbs: Toronto’s American Tragedy, 1900-1950 (Baltimore: Johns Hop- kins University Press, 1996).

9 dent community versus the multitude of powerful external forces constructing both the image and the edifice of modern suburbia.

More recently historians have sought to build on the racial and policy analysis of Kenneth

Jackson’s work by telling stories of lesser known suburban communities which cut across racial and class lines. These works date from roughly the early 2000s. The collection of essays by prominent historians working in the field of suburban history aptly titled The New Suburban His- tory, is a comprehensive example of this approach.20 This work employs a series of case studies of various suburban and urban communities in order to examine the complex relationships between individuals and institutions as they play out in suburban space. Other similar, but more focused monographs like Becky Nicolaides’ My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working

Class Suburbs of Los Angeles 1920-1965, have sought to portray the early 20th Century Ameri- can suburbs as a literal creation of a self sufficient white working class, driven by anxiety towards taxation and municipal spending. She writes specifically how the Los Angeles community of South Gates’ “propensity for cheap self-building…may have reflected a deep seeded fear of debt…”21 That fear would lead them to send their children to cheaper integrated schools during the 1930s despite a vehement racism that would later calcify a racial border between all white

South Gate and all black Watts, made infamous by the riots that occurred there in 1965.

Also under the broad umbrella of The New Suburban History, a recent wave of monographs, dissertations, and articles similarly starting around the early 2000s have sought to specif-

20 Kevin Kruse and Thomas Sugrue ed. “The New Suburban History” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

21 Becky Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working Class Suburbs of Los Angeles 1920-1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2002), 29.

10 ically tell the stories of African American suburban communities and enclaves dating back as early as the 19th century.22 The works of Andrew Wiese, specifically, Places of Their Own:

African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century, have had a profound influence on the way historians conceptualize race in the history of suburbia. Wiese portrays black suburbia in all of its varieties as a centuries’ long phenomenon in its own right. In doing so he necessarily revises the aforementioned monochrome depictions of white suburbia and black urban slums which dominate so much of the historical literature on suburbanization. That being said, Wiese is also quick to point out the social and political inequities that have plagued the developments of those communities in comparison to white suburbia.

It is worth noting the relative dearth of historical writing on more recent waves of black suburbanization. The same cannot be said for sociologists who have studied and tracked this phenomenon from roughly the late 1970s onward.23 Among the few historical works that do exist, many have focused specifically on Prince George’s County, Maryland. Prince George’s has received a fair amount of scholarly attention across disciplines due to its rather unique standing as a majority middle/upper class African American suburban area. Andrew Wiese devotes a sec-

22 see Andrew Wiese, “The Other Suburbanites: African American Suburbanization in the North before 1950,” The Journal of American History 85, no. 4 (1999): 495-524; Calinda Lee. “Creating the Pleasant View: The Impact of Gender, Race, and class on African American Suburbanization, 1837–1999,” (PhD diss., Emory University, 2002); Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Thomas J. Sugrue. "Concord Park, Open Housing, and the Lost Promise of Civil Rights in the North,” Pennsylvania Legacies 10, no. 2 (2010): 18-23.

23 see Reynolds Farley, “Residential Segregation in Urbanized Areas of the United States in 1970: An Analysis of Social Class and Racial Differences,” Demography 14 (1977): 497–51; Mark Schneider and Thomas Phelan, "Black Suburbanization in the 1980s,” Demography 30 (1993): 269-79; John M. Stahura "Black and White Population Change in Small American Suburbs Since World War II: Regional Differ- ences,” Sociological Focus 21 (1988): 317-29; Jimmie Forrest Monroe, “Blacks in Suburbia,” (PhD diss. University of South Carolina, 1999); Harold M. Rose, Black Suburbanization: Access to Improved Quality of Life or Maintenance of the Status Quo?, (Ballinger Pub. Co Cambridge, Mass, 1976).

11 tion of his book to the history of this region. Valerie C. Johnson focuses entirely on this county in her 2002 book Black Power in the Suburbs: The Myth or Reality of African American Suburban

Political Incorporation. Johnson’s book is a thorough case study of the processes of suburban resettlement for middle-class African American families, and the entrenched systems of white supremacy that deprive African American suburbanites of the commensurate levels of political representation as their white neighbors. My research takes many cues from Johnson’s work, especially the crucial questions she asks about how the divergent political interests of diverse race/ class groups within the African American community can or can not be accommodated in suburban space.

There also exists a body of literature which has begun to specifically examine the evolution of racialized policy and language within the post war suburban landscape. One of the more prominent recent examples is David Freud’s 2007 Colored Property: State Policy and White

Racial Politics in Suburban America. Freund argues that white racist attitudes in suburbia underwent a “fundamental transformation” from explicitly exclusionary towards blacks pre-1968

Housing Act, to the more nuanced, yet equally racialized, language of their “rights as property owners” to justify minority exclusion post-Housing Act.24 My research in particular draws inspi- ration from this kind of examination of how ostensibly race-neutral, or rather, integrationist language, became codified in Randallstown in order to argue against more open housing in suburbia.

24 David Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America, (Chica- go: University of Chicago Press, 2007) 9.

12 Finally, there are a few very recent works that actually have begun to examine the history of suburban resegregation and disenfranchisement. Inspired in large part by the recent waves of police violence against African Americans in segregated suburban communities, these works have sought to expose the detrimental implications of second wave white flight and the impover- ishment of inner-ring suburban communities. Jeff Chang’s We Gon’ Be Alright, specifically speaks to the process of suburban second wave white flight which preceded, and ultimately led to the creation of the majority African-American suburban community of Ferguson, MI.25 Chang offers a profound insight into the suburbs as a physical and mental space which is increasingly becoming as racially tense as Civil Rights-era urban America. He suggests the suburbs are becoming generally more black as an affluent younger generation chooses to live in the “cities that welcomed the diverse, artsy, highly educated workers who formed the ‘creative class’ driving the knowledge industries.”26 Chang argues that as these suburban communities become “darker,” they see an increased police presence which leads to a restriction of physical and political autonomy for the population living there. His observations here challenge our understanding of suburban space as the dominion of the good life and upward social mobility inherent in the American

Dream. Chang’s work is admittedly not an in-depth historical analysis of this process, but his in- sights are important and intimate a need for such an analysis. To this point, although the setting and socioeconomic status of Ferguson is quite different than Randallstown, the process and time- line of racial transition is largely the same.

25 Jeff Chang, We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation (New York: Picador, 2016).

26 Ibid., 66.

13 By situating the time frame of this study after the Civil Rights-era, this study aims to do two interrelated things. First, occupy a chronological place in the literature that has received the least attention from historians. Second, examine the complex, nuanced, and interconnected historical processes of segregation, desegregation, and resegregation. The latter two of these processes, in connection with the historical process of black suburbanization, are understudied. In his 2005 review of Andrew Wiese’ A Place of Their Own, historian Michael Dagen Bloom expressed as much, writing: “[f]or decades urban historians have sensed that black suburbia de- manded closer study, but its apparent novelty made it a dubious historical subject.”27 Owing to

Jeff Chang’s observations on America’s increasingly “Chocolate Suburbs” and “Vanilla Cities”, I submit that this novelty has worn off and the subject is ready for a more in-depth historical analysis. Chang offers a compelling argument using the now prominent community of Ferguson as backdrop. Although Randallstown is different in many ways, I argue that it provides for a similarly insightful setting especially as it pertains to understanding the intersection between race, class and exclusion within suburban space.

Methodology:

It is not my intention to write an all encompassing history of Randallstown or the many generations of people who have lived, and continue to live there. Given the physical and time restraints of this project, such a history was not possible nor would it necessarily be prudent for my stated research goals. For this reason, this project intentionally draws a linear narrative to the

27 Nicholas Bloom, review of Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century, by Andrew Wiese, The Journal of American History 91, March, 2005, 1540-541.

14 specific event of the Shakespeare Park Project controversy, to the exodus of whites and subsequent resegregation of the community. The roughly forty year scope of time around this central event is intended to accommodate a variety of voices of those who were at various times engaged in a conscious, or unconscious discursive interpretation of suburban Randallstown.

Oral histories were an important component of this project throughout. I was able to compile seven different oral histories from a variety of persons who have lived and worked in

Randallstown going back as far as the 1970s. There are obviously countless other individuals whose stories would have enriched this narrative but I did not have enough time to seek out their stories. I also utilized a lot of Census data, specifically from the 1970 (which was the first decade that such data was available pertaining to the Randallstown CDP) up to 2010. The University of

Baltimore Special Collections houses a number of relevant and important sources pertaining to housing discrimination in Baltimore County. Specifically the papers from the Citizens Planning and Housing Association (CPHA), Baltimore Neighborhoods Inc. (BNI), and the League of

Womens Voters. Though many of these sources don’t focus particularly on Randallstown, they are useful in establishing a larger context in which Randallstown developed. Print media sources, both local and regional, figure prominently in this narrative. The Enoch Pratt Library houses a database for the Baltimore Sun and the Baltimore Jewish Times, as well an incomplete microfilm collection for the Randallstown Community Times, Randallstown News and the Baltimore Ameri- can. Other important sources include a host of court documents pertaining to the GRCC lawsuit against HUD. These sources were available through the NARA archives in Philadelphia, as well as the personal collection of former GRCC attorney George Liebmann. I also utilized the available historical records of the Baltimore County branch of the NAACP which are available at the

15 Library of Congress NAACP Papers in Washington, D.C. Lastly are the documents pertaining to the Randallstown UDAT (Urban Design Assistance Team) including the final report/findings, and personal correspondence and papers of the persons who led the research component of the project in 2003.

As with any historical project the above sources will in no way provide a definitive and comprehensive version of the Randallstown’s history. For one, the at times over reliance on prominent regional print media sources like the Baltimore Sun limits the amount of local granular level analysis I was able to achieve. Similarly local periodicals like the Community Times and

Randallstown News present a particularly benign perspective on local events which were often contradicted by accounts at the regional level. The perspectives of the early black pioneers who moved into Randallstown in the 1960s/early 1970s are largely limited to whatever was available in the print media sources. I was unfortunately unable to locate any of these individuals given constraints on my time and physical ability. Similarly, the Baltimore County branch of the

NAACP kept notoriously poor records throughout its history and was often in financial dispute with the national leadership of the NAACP. As a result this research wasn’t able to depict as rich a perspective on the black response to demographic changes in Randallstown as I would have liked. Similarly this research would have benefitted from more perspectives of those white individuals who left the community in the 1990s, especially members of the Jewish community who relocated to nearby suburbs. Further research on this subject would most certainly be required in order to better understand both the shared and complex motivations behind leaving the community. Also, much of this narrative is based on an assumption that community organizations, like

16 the Greater Randallstown Community Council (GRCC) and the Liberty Road Community Coun- cil (LRCC), were representative more broadly of the community in general.

Chapter Summary:

This research is structured into three main chapters. The first chapter discusses the beginnings of the modern suburban community of Randallstown in the late 1960s, to the beginnings of desegregation in the 1970s. More specifically it tells several interrelated stories. First of which is the development of Baltimore County as a community of white suburban homeowners, with a particular emphasis on the development of Randallstown’s initially segregated suburban enclaves, like Mary Basso’s neighborhood of King’s Park. Second it focuses on the growth of the concentrated Jewish community along Liberty Road, and specifically Randallstown, which I argue paved the way for the Liberty Road corridor to become the suburban destination for blacks leaving the city in the 1970s. And last this chapter includes a detailed discussion of efforts by the county government to keep out low-income housing, which set up the eventual dispute over

Shakespeare Park. This chapter largely functions to set up the context in which a sense of class stability and token racial integration would later be used to justify exclusion of both blacks and the poor.

The second chapter focuses on the Shakespeare Park controversy of the late 1970s/early

1980s, and the ambiguous conception of “integration” that would ultimately expose the fault lines upon which integration would eventually break down. In this chapter I argue that the

Shakespeare Park controversy was not a singular isolated event of collective community activism but rather a surface vibration of a much deeper incongruent sense of race and class identity in

17 suburban Randallstown; one that was based on an unequal understanding of “integration” and

“stability” held by both blacks and whites in the community long before the actual dispute started.

The final chapter focuses on Randallstown’s transition to a majority-white community in the wake of the dispute over public housing, and the implications of this process for the community writ large, namely the period of economic disinvestment which followed that transition. This chapter takes a closer look at the mutual exclusivity of race and class stability in suburbia. In the case of Randallstown, specifically the ways in which this emerging middle-upper class black community still struggled to maintain social and economic vitality despite being both ostensibly racial and economically stable.

18 Chapter 1: “The Line of Least Resistance”

In 2018, I spoke with George Liebmann, the attorney who had represented the Greater

Randallstown Community Council (GRCC) in their suit against the Department of Housing and

Urban Development (HUD) between 1979-1983. He expressed to me his personal opinion of why Randallstown was chosen to be the site of the Shakespeare Park housing project, the first

100 percent federally subsidized low-income housing project to be built in Baltimore County. He said: “I guess that Randallstown was thought to be maybe the line of least resistance. If you tried to put one of these in Roland Park it would have been a little harder time.”28

By the end of the 1970s, Randallstown and the Northwest Liberty Road corridor was the only part of Baltimore County with a sizable black population. Liebmann’s statement was based on an assumption that policymakers at that time believed that Randallstown’s bi-racial residents would pose the least resistance to a subsidized housing project that would presumably further increase both low-income and minority concentration in the area. Affordable housing had been a divisive issue in Baltimore County throughout the 1960s and the 1970s. Similarly, this notion of the “line of least resistance” was not without a racial precedent in the county. In 1973, James

Crockett, a black realtor and chairman the Maryland Real Estate Commission, described the Lib- erty Road area as “the path of least resistance” for blacks looking to live in the county.29 To this point, race and class were very much interconnected from the outset of development in suburban

28 George Liebmann, interviewed by Zachary Utz, 2018.

29 Donald Kimelman, “Liberty road area: Blacks enter: whites exit”, The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), November 4, 1973.

19 Baltimore County starting in the 1950s. Throughout the subsequent decades both blacks and the poor looking to find housing in the county were met with significant resistance.

But how was it that the Liberty Road corridor and Randallstown became “the path of least resistance” for blacks looking to live in Baltimore County? Who were some of those early black families to relocate there? What did the larger structure of suburban exclusivity in the county look like during the 1960s/1970s? How was it maintained? How did that structure start to change when blacks began move in? And how did this change set the stage for the dispute over subsidized housing in Randallstown by the end of the 1970s?

“Stability”, as understood by Baltimore County residents, was historically preserved by keeping out those who would upset that “stability.” This understanding of “stability” had carried over from Baltimore City, where so much of the county’s population had come from in the

1950s-1960s. By 1960 this conception of “stability”, which had for generations sought to ex- clude a number of racial and ethnic groups including Jews and blacks, was solidified in many of the first tier suburban communities outlying Baltimore City, like Randallstown. Along Liberty

Road, these barriers of exclusion would first be challenged by Jews. Later, as Liberty Road’s suburban communities began to see the first black families move in, “stability” would take on a seemingly more racially inclusive form. Despite this change, however, “stability” still implicitly meant that the black population would have to be capped in order to maintain the preserve the make up of the neighborhood. This early history of housing discrimination in the county ultimately exposed the fault lines which would prove consequential as the black population continued to grow in the 1970s, and the threat of low-income housing loomed in the distance.

20 Section I “We’re doing everything we can. Which at this point is nothing”

Upon its adoption of a home rule charter in 1956, Baltimore County cemented its state as a prime destination for white middle-class Baltimoreans. In effect, this meant that “voters and taxpayers of Baltimore County” and not the Maryland State Legislature would control “all major phases of local government” in the county, including housing.30 A decade later the Baltimore Sun offered a stark assessment of the county’s racial makeup: “Deliberate, or otherwise, the Negro is being squeezed out of the county and into the city.”31 Between the years 1950-1960, the growth of the suburbs in Baltimore County skyrocketed, going from 270,000 to nearly half a million.

This growth was largely concentrated in what Thomas Vicino calls “first-tier suburbs” along the

“important arterial roadways leading out of Baltimore City,” such as Randallstown and Liberty

Road respectively.32 Though whites had been leaving the city for a multitude of reasons as early as the late 1940s, the exodus grew after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to integrate schools. With that ruling whites who had grown up in city neighborhoods, many to first generation American immigrants, now decided they had no choice but to leave those neighborhoods for the political autonomy and racial homogeneity of the expansive suburbs beginning to emerge in Baltimore County. A great many of those individuals looked to the northwest suburbs along Liberty Road.

30 Proposed Home Rule Charter for Baltimore County, Maryland, November 6, 1956, xiv.

31 David Goeller, “Negro Enclaves Slowly 'Dying Out' In County: Forced Out By Change. Race Is Kept Out By Closed Housing,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), January 14, 1968.

32 Thomas Vicino, Transforming Race And Class in Suburbia: Decline in Metropolitan Baltimore, (New York: Paulgrave MacMillan, 2008), 2.

21 Randallstown was for many a particularly promising option. On October 8, 1961, the Bal- timore Sun ran an advertisement titled “Project at Randallstown.” In it was displayed a modest two story colonial flanked on either side by crops of bushy trees. The text read: “a planned community of 750 houses, will be built near Randallstown, Baltimore county on 367 acres of wooded countryside.”33 It was called The Village of Kings Park. Kings Park was not the first suburban development to be built in Randallstown. In the 1920s and 1930s, a former stone mason turned developer built 80 homes out of “gray, green, blue and brown fieldstone from area quarries” along the then “dirt toll thoroughfare” Liberty Road.34 Fieldstone, as it was called, was the first major suburban development in Randallstown. Fieldstone continued to grow over the subsequent decades, especially in the 1960s.

Despite not being the first development, Kings Park did mark an important change in the composition of suburban Randallstown: affordability. A new home in Kings Parks cost an average of $15,000 compared to roughly $27,000 for a home in the Fieldstone community. Other similarly affordable communities began to develop in the area by the early to mid-1960s. To this point, one former Randallstown resident Richard Hecht who moved with his family to the Old

Court area in 1963 recounted the reason his parents moved: “[t]hey liked the houses because they were cheap, and they got a lot for their money.”35 In 1965, the Real Estate and Building News ran a front-page story on the rapid changes in development occurring along the formerly rural

Liberty Road corridor in Randallstown:

33 “Project at Randallstown,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), Oct, 8, 1961.

34 Joan Jacobson, "Historic Status is Sought for Homes Brick and Stone Houses in Randallstown Area were Built in 1920s, 1930s,” The Baltimore Sun, Jun 04, 2001.

35 Richard Hecht, interviewed by Naima Camara, 2018.

22 “Land prices started to rise. Soon farmland which had sold for a few hundred dollars per

acre was commanding a price of two to three thousand dollars per acre…With the exten-

sion of sewer lines developers started to take a second look at this long neglected area —

this sleeping giant.”36

Thus, these new developments, marked the first time that a wide swath of working and middle- class white families could afford housing in what was then still largely rural Randallstown.

And move there they did. By 1970, the first year we have census tract data for a Randall- stown Census Designated Place (CDP), the tract containing Kings Park had gone from largely uninhabited farmland to a total population of 2,200.37 One of those early suburban pioneers who made the move to the community was Mary Basso. Basso had moved to the Kings Park development of Randallstown in 1968 with her husband Alexander. Born in 1926 to Italian immigrants

Napoleon and Ida DiStefano, she was the oldest of three children. Napoleon had immigrated to

Baltimore City in 1910 at the age of 6 and worked at the downtown Grand Rapids Furniture

Company before eventually taking new employment and moving his family to what was then the growing suburban community of northeast Baltimore City called Hamilton. Nearly fifty years later, Mary and her husband would make a similar move, this time to the growing suburban communities of Northwest Baltimore County.38

36 Charles J. McAvoy, “Land Prices Increasing Along Once-Neglected Liberty Road”, Real Estate and Building News, February 1965, 3.

37 1970 U.S. Census, Baltimore County, Maryland, General Characteristics of the Population, Randall- stown, p. 13, scanned image, Baltimore Metropolitan Council.

38 “DiStefano Rites Set for Tomorrow”, The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), May 8, 1966.

23 The story of new suburbanites like Mary Basso and the growth of suburban Randallstown and Kings Park in the 1960s was mirrored in the movement of countless other families to countless other suburbs throughout the country. It was a continuation, or culmination, of the decentral- ization process that had begun decades before in most of America’s older industrial cities. Sub- urbs, distinctly non-urban communities, had begun cropping up along the periphery of American cities as early as the 19th century. At first this movement was limited almost exclusively to the affluent. However, this would change after the economic devastation wrought by the Great De- pression. In response to the crisis, New Deal agencies like the Home Owners Loan Corporation

(HOLC) and later the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) worked to increase white working and middle-class home ownership through expanding access to government backed low interest, low down payment, and long term amortized mortgages. After World War II, these policies combined with a nationwide economic and population boom would drive the American Dream of owning a home, in the suburbs.

This suburban American Dream was not, however, for African Americans. Federally backed mortgages were not available to many blacks in the ‘redlined areas’ of the inner city. The result was a generational wealth gap where many African Americans did not own their own homes and therefore had no equity with which to invest in homes in the future. Aside from exclusionary federal policy, there was also a discriminatory network of private interests that, in effect, created and maintained near uniformly white neighborhoods within the city. These included homeowners associations that lobbied local politicians for exclusionary zoning ordinances, individual homeowners that implemented racially restrictive covenants, and realtors that intentionally sold homes to African Americans in certain areas and not in others. The result was a rigid sys-

24 tem of de facto housing segregation in northern cities. As Natasha M. Trifun put it, “[s]patial segregation became the northern answer to the paternalistic Jim Crow Laws of the South.”39 The problem was not limited to within the urban borders. In 1967, the Kerner Commission offered a dire assessment of Americas growing housing inequality in the suburbs. Among other things, the

Commission report stated that “cities will have Negro majorities by 1985 and the suburbs ringing them will remain largely all white unless there are major changes in Negro fertility rates, in migration settlement patterns or public policy.”40 Baltimore County was no exception to this trend.

By the end of the 1960s, despite a handful of small historically black enclaves, the county remained almost exclusively white. A 1970 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights put the number of African Americans in the county at 16,580 out of a total 541,610 in 1964, or just 3 percent.41

Undergirding this lopsided percentage was a local political and economic structure that effectively closed off the county to both the poor and black. Early on suburban white voters clearly identified these demographics as threats to the stability of their new communities and households. Baltimore County had reorganized its political structure by adopting a home rule charter in 1956. This reorganization was aimed at placing “control over all major phases of local government in the hands of the voters of Baltimore County”, which in this case were almost en-

39 Trifun, Natasha M. "Residential Segregation after the Fair Housing Act." Human Rights 36, no. 4 (2009): 14-19.

40 Report of the National Advisory Commission On Civil Disorders, (Washington: United States, Kerner Commission : U.S. G.P.O., 1968), 216.

41 Staff Report: Demographic, Economic, Social and Political Characteristics of Baltimore City and Balti- more County, (Baltimore: United States Commission on Civil Rights, 1970), 5.

25 tirely white.42 Almost immediately after adopting the new charter, county voters began to repeat- edly express their discontent with any initiatives aimed at bringing assisted or affordable housing into the county. Under the Housing Acts of 1937 and 1949, any locality wishing to receive public funding for assisted housing had to create a local housing agency to handle such claims. Histori- an Kenneth Jackson summarized the effects of this legislation by saying “A suburb that did not wish to tarnish its exclusive image by having pubic housing within its precincts could simply refuse to create a housing agency.”43 Baltimore County officials applied this technique and refused to create any local housing agency. County Executive Dale Anderson perhaps summed it up best in 1969 when he responded to a reporters questions about the lack of affordable housing in the county: ““[w]e’re doing everything we can (to help these low-income persons) which at this point is nothing.”44

Similarly, any attempts at the state level to impinge on the county’s housing policy sover- eignty were met with stiff resistance from county residents in the form of popular referenda. This occurred first in 1964 with a successful campaign against urban renewal authority for the county, and later in 1967 with the defeat of an anti-poverty program. The refusal of the county to address its low-income housing problem also drew the ire of HUD. In August of 1970, HUD began to withhold federal grant money for “sewer, water, and open space” projects until county officials

42 Ibid., 14.

43 Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 225.

44 “Anderson Wants Answers, Not Complaints on County’s Low Cost Housing Problem,” The Community Times, (Randallstown, MD), September 26, 1968.

26 made good on promises to develop a low-income housing plan in exchange.45 This resulted in a back and forth legal battle that went on for several years, at one point leading the county to sue the Federal government to release the funds.

Perhaps the most contentious fight over open housing occurred between 1969-1972 when a local conservative group based in Catonsville called Maryland Lobby succeeded in placing a referendum on the ballot calling for the creation of state wide housing authority, known as the

Community Development Administration (CDA), with the power to reclaim land and construct low-income housing. The ballot initiative, known as Question 11, was defeated by a vote of

283,462 to 229,248 in November 1970. Although the CDA would later become law after the referendum was voided by a county judge due to a fraudulent petition application by Maryland, the message of popular distrust of the housing authority was received by then Governor Marvin

Mandel. In its final form, the CDA would only have the ability to reclaim land if the residents of the affected area agreed to it, effectively rendering it toothless. On top of this, in July of 1970,

Baltimore County was chosen by the Federal Civil Rights Commission as the “East Coast Proto- type of an area with a ‘white suburban ring’ around an urban center containing a disproportionately large negro population.”46 That Commission yielded, among other things, a report by urban planner and former SNCC member Yale Rabin which stated:

45 Alvin P. Sanoff, “U.S. Freeze Now Lifted For County,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), February 18, 1971.

46 “US Rights Unit to make County Probe”, The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), July 15, 1970.

27 “Development-control activities in Baltimore County over the past ten years have func-

tioned to substantially reduce housing opportunities in the county for low-income, pre-

dominantly (but not exclusively) Black households.”47

All of these developments combined created a Baltimore County structure that a 1974 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights characterized as “a ‘white noose’ economically and socially strangling the city.”48

In order to get a better understanding of how racial segregation was maintained in Balti- more County it helps to look specifically at the history of the Kings Park development. Kings

Park got its name from the hometown of the person who conceived of the development, Morris

Sosnow. Sosnow had purchased the initial tracts of land for what would become Kings Park in

1961. His personal story is illustrative of the larger postwar trend of American suburbanization.

A naturalized Polish immigrant, Sosnow came to New York City in the 1930s with his wife Kate.

Soon after the couple relocated to the growing Great Neck region of Long Island, specifically the

Village of Kings Point which was the original name of what would later become Kings Park.

There he co-founded the real estate development company Birchwood Homes in 1946 with his partner Leonard Schwartz which built and marketed homes directly to GIs returning from over- seas who were looking to escape the increasingly crowded and dilapidated inner cities. Adver- tisements for the new community went out in the Baltimore Sun as early as 1961. However, those ads did not mention one crucial detail about the new community: it was not open to African

47 Yale Rabin, “The Effects of Development Control on Housing Opportunities for Black Households in Baltimore, County, Maryland”, (Report to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights 1970), 2.

48 Thomas B. Edsall, “County called ‘noose’,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), August 13, 1974.

28 Americans. As late as 1966, this was still the case in Kings Park. Louis T. Bosse, sales manager for the new community, was quoted in a 1966 article in the Baltimore Sun as saying that the homes “are not now open to Negroes.”49 This was fairly common in Baltimore County at the time as many whites believed that any incursion of blacks into their communities could diminish property values and destabilize the community. This system of de facto segregation in the county suburbs was maintained not through any law but rather by a network of private individuals and entities. This network was detailed in a 1964 study of housing discrimination by the Baltimore

County Human Relations Commission (BCHRC). It included realtors who “refused to show property in…white neighborhoods to negro buyers, sellers “who refuse to make their property available to negro buyers”, builders who abandon FHA financing “in favor of forms of financing not covered” by executive orders barring discrimination in housing, and lenders which make available forms of financing which allowed builders to avoid those federal regulations.50 The cumulative effect was a near seamless exclusion of African Americans.

That is not to say that there weren’t those fighting for open housing in the county, and in

Randallstown in particular. In 1963, one prominent realtor in northwest Baltimore County and former President of the Maryland Association of Real Estate Boards named Mal Sherman broke with his counterparts and released a well publicized statement in support of open housing legislation for Baltimore City and County. In it he recounted a story relayed to him by the Principal of a local school in which a black school teacher was unable to find a home in the community in

49 Daniel Drosdoff, “Votes, Homes are Sought by Marchers: Registration Urged by C.O.R.E.; New Homes are Picketed,” The Baltimore Sun (1837-1991), August 15, 1966.

50 Report of Housing Study Advisory Committee to the Human Relations Commission of Baltimore County (Baltimore: Human Relations Commission of Baltimore County, 1965), 1.

29 which he taught. Sherman stated “I must say that I am in complete accord that a teacher who teaches our children should be allowed to live in our neighborhood; that I will act and work towards Open Housing in Baltimore County, but I will not pioneer or act alone.”51 Sherman would continue to be outspoken on open housing. He also hired black realtors for his firm and even found former Baltimore Oriole great Frank Robinson a home in a white neighborhood in 1966 despite being called a blockbuster for doing so.52 As indicated by the qualifying of his press statement with “I will not pioneer or act alone,” however, his individual actions had little impact on the larger deeply entrenched system of housing exclusion by the real estate industry.

There were also others working to undermine the system of closed housing. That same year saw the formal creation of the Baltimore County Human Relations Commission with the broad responsibility of “approach[ing] the problem of intergroup relations in a broad and comprehensive manner in the areas of employment, housing, education, [and] public accommoda- tions…”53 BCHRC set to work on various racial and social problems throughout the county including negotiating talks between the owners of a segregated amusement park in Gwynn Oaks and protestors, advocating for open housing in Dundalk, and organizing sit-in’s and protests at a segregated swimming pool in Milford Mill and roller rink in Catonsville. The BCHRC mission was even extended to Randallstown. In August of 1966, former BCHRC chairman Eugene L.

King organized an ultimately unsuccessful picket to protest Kings Park’s exclusionary policy to-

51 Mal Sherman, “Statement of Mal Sherman, Realtor, to the Human Relations Commission of Baltimore County” (Press Release, Baltimore, 1963), 2.

52 Frederick N. Rasmussen, “MALCOLM SHERMAN: FORMER ROUSE CO. EXECUTIVE BATTLED BLOCKBUSTING IN BALTIMORE NEIGHBORHOODS IN THE 1950S AND 1960S,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), November 21, 2009.

53 County Council of Baltimore County, Maryland, Bill No. 54, (Baltimore, MD: 1963), 3.

30 wards black homebuyers. A few weeks prior to the protest King himself had tried to purchase a home in the community, only to be denied “because he was a negro.”54

Despite this pressure for open housing, both race and class integration remained elusive for most of Baltimore County. For most whites residents, suburban “stability” (as understood by white residents) required that blacks and the poor be kept out of the housing market. Throughout the 1960s the county’s political leadership continued to obstruct, or at least remain indifferent to any serious efforts towards opening housing for either of these demographic groups. In 1964,

County Executive Dale Anderson even went so far as to openly proclaim “I am unalterably opposed to open occupancy.”55 Similarly the newly formed BCHRC came under constant fire for taking on issues deemed too “controversial” or as “race-mixing” by many white politicians and voters alike.56 Others charged it was an unwanted tax burden. In response, Anderson moved in

1970 to eliminate much of the commission’s autonomy by making its director a member of the executive staff rather than an independent official. By the beginning of the next decade Kings

Park in Randallstown and the overwhelming majority of suburban communities throughout Bal- timore County remained uniformly white. However this would soon change in the northwest part of the county, specifically the Liberty Road corridor, where an appreciable number of Jews were beginning to move and establish congregations.

54 Daniel Drosdoff, “Votes, Homes are Sought by Marchers: Registration Urged by C.O.R.E.; New Homes are Picketed,” The Baltimore Sun (1837-1991), August 15, 1966.

55 S. Smith, RACIAL UNIT WAS INSULTED, LEADER SAYS, The Baltimore Sun (1964, Nov 08).

56 “County Head of Bias Board Deﬁes Agnew,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), November 21, 1963; Letter from Catholic Anti-Community Committee to Dale Anderson, no date.

31 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”

In 1973, an anonymous Jewish man residing in the northwest suburbs of Baltimore Coun- ty recounted the recent historical mass migration which had brought so many Jews like him to the area: “[t]he impetus towards the Northwest was ‘as direct as squeezing the toothpaste from a tube’.”57 Even today the legacy of this trend is startlingly noticeable. A 1999 study commissioned by The Associated Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore found that 75 percent of the Bal- timore area’s Jewish population was located within the Northwest communities of Pikesville,

Owings Mills, Park Heights (Baltimore City) and Randallstown, confirmation that “[t]hese areas reflect a northwesterly residential pattern of Jewish households.”58 However, as implied by the toothpaste metaphor, this specific pattern of Jewish migration to the northwest was not a matter of choice but rather necessity. Historically, Jews in early 20th century Baltimore had to deal with an entrenched system of housing exclusion, which in effect closed off their access to many Bal- timore neighborhoods in the north and east. As it would happen decades later, black families who were looking to move to Baltimore’s growing suburban areas would later have to deal with the same exclusionary system, thus forcing them to search for housing in communities that had already been opened by Jewish in-migration decades earlier. In his book Not In My Neighborhood,

Antero Pietilla describes Baltimore’s rather unique history of housing discrimination and neighborhood succession. Though it is not entirely applicable in all cases, the succession pattern large-

57 Weldon Wallace, “We Live Here: Jewish Festival Hopeful,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), Octo- ber 15, 1973.

58 The Associated: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore, “Jewish Community Study of Greater Bal- timore” (Study, Baltimore, MD, 1999), 16.

32 ly follows the order of non-Jew to Jew to black. In 1978, one Jewish man described this pattern more bluntly, saying “[t]here’s no doubt that we ran interference for the blacks. We were the

‘white niggers’.”59 For both Jews and blacks, the literal road to open housing that extended northwest from the city to county was Liberty Heights Ave, which eventually turns into Liberty

Road. The Liberty Road corridor became the ultimate destination for many Jewish and later black families who were looking to move out of the aging and dilapidated neighborhoods of the center city for newer and better housing stock along the urban periphery. This process of succession was, in large part, driven by third parties in the form of realtors who actively marketed the northwest as the area in which black families could and should relocate, and in so doing often created racial panic among white residents which caused many of those neighborhoods to destabilize.

Historically, early 20th century European Jewish immigrants in Baltimore were concentrated in overcrowded and run down areas in East Baltimore. A 1913 report by the Federated

Jewish Charities of Baltimore detailed the “overcrowding, filth and crime, within this East Bal- timore ghetto.”60 By the 1920s, many Jewish families of some means were eager to escape these areas for the cleaner and better housing stock being built along the urban periphery. Unfortunate- ly for them, they found that most neighborhoods in the north and east, like Guilford, Roland Park and Mount Washington, were closed off due to restrictive covenants that barred the sale of housing to Jews. However, neighborhoods in the northwest like Ashburton and Forest Park, which by

59 Gene Oishi, “Corridor in Transition: Blacks follow Jews to suburbs,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), February 8, 1978.

60 Ibid.

33 the 1920s had taken a more a “relaxed” stance on covenants, were beginning to open up to Jews.

Many began moving to these areas in the 1930s-1940s. By 1948 restrictive covenants were made illegal by the Supreme Court and other neighborhoods in the northwest, like Pimlico and Park

Heights, began to see a large influx of Jewish families. This trend continued to push towards the county line, along the Liberty Road corridor. By the time the Baltimore Beltway was extended to include Liberty Road in 1958, many Jewish families had already begun moving into the emerging Baltimore County suburbs of Pikesville, Reisterstown, and Randallstown.

Randallstown’s Jewish population began to grow in earnest in the 1950s. According to one Baltimore Sun article, there were roughly 3,000 Jews in the then largely undeveloped rural

Northwest by 1956.61 In response, many city synagogues began to relocate there soon after. In

1956, the Liberty Road Conservative Congregation relocated to an old farmhouse in Randall- stown off of what was then just a two lane Liberty Road. That congregation would later change its name to Beth Israel and build its first permanent structure in 1966, at which point its congregation had grown to nearly 2,000.62 Beth Israel was one of several synagogues to relocate to

Randallstown in the 1950s-60s. Many others soon would follow, including Temple Emmanuel, formerly established in 1955 as the Liberty Road Reform Temple, in 1961. One year later the

Randallstown Synagogue Center (RSC) was established. Three years later, the RSC constructed its permanent home at 8729 Church Lane on the plot of land that would become the proposed site for the disputed Shakespeare Park Homes over a decade later. Actual population numbers of

61 “Plans Progress For Synagogue,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), August 7, 1956.

62 Isaac Rehert, “Beth Israel: from old farmhouse to modern buildings in 25 years,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), December 5, 1981.

34 the Jewish community in Randallstown are difficult to gather. However, given the abundance of synagogue construction/relocation in the 1950s-60s, we can assume that given the massive growth in Synagogues in the community that the actual population was equally substantial.

Those who made the move to the Randallstown area from the city were several individuals who would play important roles in community affairs in the coming decades. They included

Martin Sussman, who moved from Pimilico in 1967 and who in 1981 would be one of the plaintiffs in the suit filed against HUD over Shakespeare Park, and Henry Carp, who left Pimlico in

1959 and would go on to become president of the Liberty Road Community Council in the early

1970s and lead the charge against real estate solicitation in that area.63 In general, the Jewish population grew so much that there were at times not enough houses of worship to accommodate all the parishioners. In 1963, the first Presbyterian Church of Randallstown was asked by the then building-less Old Court-Liberty Road Synagogue to loan its facilities so its congregation would have ample space to observe Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana.64

Though Jews moved to Randallstown in droves during this period, it was often not a smooth transition for them. Anti-semitism, which was commonplace in Baltimore City, was also an issue in the northwest suburbs of the county. To many white gentiles in Randallstown these new Jewish arrivals represented a threat to the “stability” of the suburban community long before black families began to arrive there years later. For example in 1967, Lawrence J. Ageloff, a can- didate for Baltimore County’s Second Legislative District, brought to the attention of the

63 Deposition of Martin Sussman, Julius Edmonson, et. al v. Phillip Abrams, et. at, Civil Action No. B-82-985 (United States District Court for the District of Maryland 1982).

64 “Church Facilities Loaned to Jews For High Holidays,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), September 20, 1963.

35 BCHRC the decade old discriminatory policy of the Rusty Rock Swimming Pool in Randall- stown. The pool had opened sometime around 1957 as a ‘private club’ serving only “white,

Christian families.” At the time, Maryland allowed for exemptions from “public accommodation laws” at private clubs. Despite initial ambivalence on the part of the BCHRC, and resistance by the pool management, it was eventually opened to Jews after Ageloff successfully petitioned against the policy. In addressing this decision at the time, Connie Lehet who was membership chairman of the pool, made a vulgarly prescient observation: “[we] will probably include Jews soon anyway, furthermore we’re going to get even niggers eventually, even living out here.”65

The process of black families migrating to the new suburbs of Baltimore County would be a much more tortuous, lengthy, and complicated one. Simply put, the majority of white homeowners and realtors in the county, who viewed potential desegregation as a threat to their communities, refused to sell to blacks. There was a general stigma associated with whites selling to blacks because of fears it would undermine “stability” in the greater neighborhood leading to further black in-migration and subsequently white flight. This stigma was understood by both home sellers and realtors, the latter of which often refused to show potential housing to blacks in neighborhoods deemed white. By the 1950s, however, this would begin to change as African

Americans’ outsized need for housing, combined with the lack of options, led some Baltimore

County realtors to engage in the lucrative practice that had pejoratively come to be known as

“blockbusting.” Blockbusting was relatively simple process. First a realtor would intentionally sell a home to a black family on an all white block. Once the black family moved in, their white neighbors assumed that other black families were soon to follow. This would create a racial panic

65 “Jew Assails Private Pool,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), May 31, 1967.

36 in which all the whites on a given block would sell their homes for reduced prices anticipating a decline in property values once more blacks moved in. Realtors would then re-sell the houses, often to blacks, for higher prices. It was called blockbusting because the introduction of a single black family would effectively induce the total breaking up of white homogeneity on the block.

Once a block was broken, it would soon experience a racial turnover as all the whites would move out. This process occurred in many neighborhoods throughout northwest Baltimore. Ed

Orser in his book, Blockbusting in Baltimore, describes at length how it happened in the Edmon- son Village neighborhood, which went from entirely white to entirely black in the span of roughly a decade.66

As it happened, the Liberty Road corridor became the de facto location in which this practice would occur in Baltimore County. In 1973, James Crockett, a black realtor and chairman of the state Real Estate Commission, told the Baltimore Sun that the Liberty Road area offered

“the path of least resistance for blacks. It’s a Jewish neighborhood and I don’t know of any kinds of violence perpetrated on the homes of blacks by Jewish people.”67 In other words, there was a perception amongst prominent realtors that Jewish neighborhoods were prime locations for opening up an otherwise closed housing market to black homebuyers. Crockett’s insight is telling for why the Liberty Road corridor eventually became the epicenter for black migration out of the city and into the suburbs. As a leader in the Baltimore real estate industry, we can assume that his belief was shared by many other realtors operating in Baltimore County at the time. This was

66 W. Ed. Orser, Blockbusting in Baltimore: The Edmonson Village Story (Kentucky: University of Ken- tucky Press, 1997).

67 Donald Kimelman, “Liberty road area: Blacks enter: whites exit”, The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), November 4, 1973.

37 also not without precedent. A 1960 sociological study on intergroup relations in the New Jersey suburbs concluded that “Jews either facilitated or were more favorable toward the entry of Ne- groes into Bridgeview. This view is widespread among both whites and Negroes, and—all within the white group—among Jews as well as non-Jews.”68 As such, Liberty Road, with its large concentrated Jewish populations, became the prime location to which many aspiring black homeowners were “steered”. Steering was the deliberate action by realtors of showing black families houses in neighborhoods which were deemed by the realtors to be ok for them to move into.

Many in the northwest at the time believed there was a deliberate, almost conspiratorial, plan by realtors to designate the Jewish northwest as the location of black settlement. For instance G.

James Fleming, professor at Morgan State, said in 1978 that he “is convinced that at one point certain real estate operators and bankers sat down together with a map of Baltimore to decide where to put the growing black population.”69 Four years later, a study by Baltimore Neighbor- hoods Incorporated (BNI) seemed to confirm as much, saying: “Sufficient evidence was found to conclude that differential treatment by real estate sales associates of buyers (including steering) based on race is extensive in portions of West and Northwest Baltimore County…”70 Jewish neighborhoods in the northwest part of Baltimore City along the Liberty Road corridor had begun transitioning to majority black by as early as the 1950s. The first major instance occurred in

68 Joshua A. Fishman, "Some Social and Psychological Determinants of Intergroup Relations in Changing Neighborhoods." Social Forces, vol. 40, no. 1, Oct. 1961, pp. 42-51.

69 Gene Oishi, “Corridor in Transition: Blacks follow Jews to suburbs,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), February 8, 1978.

70 A Study of Real Estate Practices By Race in West and Northwest Baltimore County, The Baltimore Plan for Afﬁrmative Marketing in Real Estate (Baltimore Neighborhoods Incorporated, May 1982), Univer- sity of Baltimore Special Collections, Baltimore Neighborhoods Incorporated Records.

38 Ashburton, when a single black school principal and his family moved into the area in 1956.

Soon after the neighborhood became a major destination for black families moving from the city.

Many Jewish families initially resisted this change, charging that blockbusting and steering were occurring. In fact, in 1959, two city realtors were actually found guilty and their licenses sus- pended by the Maryland Real Estate Commission of “misrepresentation, bad faith, and fraudulent advertising” in Ashburton.71 Despite these charges and resistance by many in the community, by the mid-1960s the neighborhood was predominantly black. It was but the first of many. One by one communities extending northwest along Liberty Road, like Forest Park and Gwynn Oak, underwent a similar transition.

It is important to note that by the end of the 1960s, all of these local housing concerns and issues were also playing out on national stage. In recognition of the need for some kind of reform, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which contained an anti-blockbusting statute. The landmark legislation, which barred any form of discrimination in the sale or rental of housing nationwide, was passed just a week after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King.

The aftermath of his killing saw wide spread civil unrest and violence throughout the nation’s cities, including Baltimore, which left many neighborhoods completely destroyed. This would further drive many middle-class blacks to seek housing further outside of the city limits in the growing northwest suburbs of Baltimore County, which in turn would fuel more allegations of steering and blockbusting by realtors. In 1969, the Baltimore Sun printed a two page story entitled “Blockbusting in Baltimore: Less Blatant and Rapacious” in which it made the observation,

71 Douglas Connah Jr., “Blockbusting in Baltimore: less blatant and rapacious,” The Baltimore Sun (Bal- timore, MD), January 26, 1969.

39 “[i]t is not just an inner city problem.”72 It went on to identify Liberty Road “as far out as Old

Court Road” as one of three areas where realtors appeared to be engaged in the much maligned practice. However, as one Jewish civic leader in the county neighborhood of Lochearn would put it, “[i]t’s definitely there but it’s awfully hard to prove.”73

It wasn’t really until the early 1970s that concerns over blockbusting and steering began to come up on the radar of many outside the Baltimore Beltway. Greater Randallstown remained virtually entirely white in 1970. However, in January of 1971, the local Randallstown newspaper

Community Times ran a front-page story titled “Blacks Face Housing Dilemma in Northwest.”

In it, Ilse Darling, chairman of the Pikesville-Randallstown Human Relations Council (PRHRC) anticipated a coming wave of black migration, saying “integration centers mainly in the Liberty

Road developments near the city line while the communities of Randallstown and Pikesville remain virtually untouched all-white communities.”74 Groups like the PRHRC were active in the area at the time trying to calm the fears of white homeowners unsettled by the prospect of desegregation and alerting black families to the availability of housing in majority-white enclaves like those in Randallstown. Later that year, the Liberty Road Community Council (LRCC), an umbrella group of 22 different businesses and neighborhood associations within and outside of the beltway along the Liberty Road corridor began openly protesting the actions of what LRCC president Henry Carp described as “unscrupulous realtors who channel black homebuyers to the Lib-

72 Ibid.

73 Antero Pietilla and Mark Reutter, “Corridor in Transition - II: As blacks settle along Liberty Road, charges of illegal ‘steering’ persist,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), February 6, 1978.

74 Miriam Otterbein, “Blacks Face Housing Dilemma in Northwest,” Community Times (Randallstown, MD), January 28, 1971.

40 erty Road area only” adding that “the problem [had] shifted from below the beltway to above it.”75

As the perceived threat of blockbusting crept closer to Randallstown, local civic organizations began to take actions to protect neighborhood “stability.” In 1971, the Maryland Real Es- tate Commission proposed a solicitation ban on its realtors, which would include a “ban on circu- lation, door to door, telephone and other methods of solicitation by other licensed real estate operators.”76 However Henry Carp, the President of the LRCC, thought the measure didn’t go far enough, declaring the self-policing “totally ineffective.” In September, the Greater Randallstown

Community Council (GRCC) voted to form its own “Community Stabilization Committee”, chaired by one John Livingston of the Kings Park development, to counteract the “unethical practices in selling property and that, in essence, is blockbusting.”77 By the end of 1971 local political representatives stepped into the debate. In December, Second District County Councilman

(representing the Liberty Road corridor) Gary Huddles had introduced an anti-solicitation bill for adoption by the County Council. The proposed legislation would “[ban] real estate operators from solicitation practices and from putting up ‘for sale’ signs in established neighborhoods.”

Additionally it would take the anti-blockbusting component of the Fair Housing Act and adopt it into county law. The bill was debated early in 1972 with support largely coming from local homeowners and opposition from the real estate lobby. It was eventually passed on February 7

75 Miriam Otterbein, “Area Council Counters ‘Panic’ Tactics”, Community Times (Randallstown, MD), July 22, 1971.

76 “Solicitation Ban May First Apply to Liberty Road”, Community Times (Randallstown, MD), November 25, 1971.

77 “Blockbusting, Zoning Topics of Randallstown Council Meet,” Community Times (Randallstown, MD), September 23, 1971.

41 by a vote of 6 to 1 in the County Council. The new legislation would give communities the power to petition for an up to two year ‘for sale’ sign ban in their particular neighborhood, to be ultimately decided by the County Council. All that residents had to do in order to petition was col- lect 10 signatures from residents with a collective complaint. Soon after, the LRCC assembled a group of 30 persons and lodged a formal request for the ban in their collective area. They were successful and the first for sale sign ban in the history of Baltimore County went into effect on the Fourth of July, 1972, covering “all residential property bounded on the east by Baltimore city, on the south by Windsor Mill road, on the west by Rolling road and Milford Mill road and on the north by the Western Railroad tracks.”78 It would remain in effect for the next two years. It would, however, not extend to upper Liberty Road corridor and Randallstown.

Section III: “…a different kind of neighborhood”

The 1970 census indicated an interesting and, for some, concerning, set of developments for the future of Randallstown and the Liberty Road corridor. For one, the community along the corridor had grown enormously in a short period of time. What was a largely uninhabited rural community in the early 1950s had swelled to nearly 34,000 people by the end of the 1960s. As a result, the residential and commercial infrastructure meant to support what some in the community were beginning to characterize as “chaotic” growth was failing to keep pace.79 In the words

78 “For Sale sign ban for county area,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), July 23, 1972.

79 Miriam Otterbein, “Sewer, Roads, School Lacks Highlight Residents Concern,” The Community Times (Randallstown, MD), January 19, 1973.

42 of another resident, “Randallstown is bowing to the rush of suburbia.”80 There was also another noticeable change in the overall demographic makeup of the community: a significant increase in the arrival of new black families into the area. This increase was on top of the historical black population which had called rural Randallstown home since the 1800s. The Union Bethel A.M.E.

Church was established in 1822 on a gifted plot of farm land along Church Lane. It served the black small community in Randallstown well into the twentieth century. This new growth in the black population was, however, coming largely from Baltimore City and they were not spread evenly across all the census tracts comprising Randallstown. In fact, if you were to imperfectly divide Randallstowns eight census tracts in half along Old Court Road in an east-west pattern you would notice a disproportionately larger percentage of African American families on the eastern side of the line as opposed to the western side (see figure on the following page).81 In keeping with the trends of western migration out of Baltimore City along Liberty Road, the tracts closest to the city had the largest black populations in Randallstown. By 1970, Kings Park, which was west of Old Court, had only 5 black persons living in the community compared to Richard

Simmons’ new neighborhood in the eastern section along Church Lane which had 172. Commu- nity-wide the percentage of African Americans still remained extremely low at 2.5 percent.

However noticeable change was certainly occurring. For instance, one particular tract just north

80 “Letter to the editor: Crush of Growth on Liberty Road,” The Community Times (Randallstown, MD), January 21, 1971.

81 CENSUS BUREAU, US DEPT. OF COMMERCE, 1970 CENSUS OF POPULATION AND HOUSING, CENSUS TRACTS, BALTIMORE MD, STANDARD METROPOLITAN STATISTICAL AREA. Map provided by Baltimore Metropolitan Council.

43 of Church Lane, was 9.5 percent black by 1970.82 In this way Randallstown and the Liberty

Road corridor began to see a higher degree of black families beginning in the early 1970s, albeit in an uneven fashion with certain areas seeing a higher increase in black families than others. For example, by the end of the decade, areas like Kings Park would go from a virtually all white de-

82 1970 U.S. Census Tracts and Block Numbering Areas, Baltimore, MD SMA, Race and Hispanic Origin, Randallstown, p. 201,; U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data (CCD), "Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey", 1990-91 v.1a.

44 velopment to being over 50 percent black by 1980. Others tracts, like the one containing the communities of Briarhurst and Fieldstone and the eventual Shakespeare Park homes, remained low at just 13 percent black.83

From early on some whites in Randallstown did perceive this diminutive in-migration of blacks into their community as a potential threat to the “stability” of their neighborhood. By the early 1970s the Baltimore Sun began documenting some of the negative experiences of specific families relocating to the burgeoning suburbs of Randallstown. Such was the case for Richard

Simmons in 1972. Simmons and his family had relocated to Randallstown from their row house in the Rosemont neighborhood of West Baltimore. Despite being the only black family in the vicinity, Simmons was undeterred, saying “[w]e moved here without giving one though to being the only black family on the block.” However, three days before moving in they were shocked to find that their new home had been horribly vandalized with “a redwood oil base stain splattered across the front entrance of his new home.” Simmons lamented the vandalism saying “I thought

Randallstown was a different kind of neighborhood…We’ve never been the victims of racial discrimination before, but I believe this incident was racially motivated—to harass us. But I have no intention of moving.”84 Other whites began to express their discontent with the new demographic trend in a way that many more would later on. Willie H. Williams, who moved to the Woodmoor

83 1980 U.S. Census, Baltimore County, Maryland, General Characteristics of the Population, Randall- stown, Baltimore Metropolitan Council.

84 Jerome Mondesire, “Vandals, not Welcome Wagon, greet black family moving into Randallstown,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), August 6, 1972.

45 community just south of Randallstown remembered coming home one day in 1973 only to learn that “the white family next door was gone.”85

In response to this very limited black in-migration many Randallstown whites began to embody a kind of identity that would prove consequential for future developments in the community. As one Jewish resident from the Villa Nova community, just southeast of Randallstown, put it: “[i]f anyone can afford to live up to my standard of living and can afford to live in this neighborhood, what the hell do I care what his color is?”86 This class based identity, which attempted to blur the lines between black and white, would be tested as the decade progressed and

Randallstown entered a phase of rapid, and often reckless, commercial growth all while the black population continued to grow. As the 1970s progressed, community associations in Randallstown grew in prominence as they fought first against the threats to neighborhood “stability” posed by reckless growth in the community, but later the threat posed by continued in-migration of the poor and blacks. In doing so, these groups would conflate neighborhood “stability” with their own self perceived notion of “integration.” Whereas black in-migration had been seen as a threat previously, it would soon be used as an asset to protect “stability”, albeit in an opaque and ultimately unequal way.

85 Donald Kimelman, “Blacks seek to coexist peacefully in county,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD) November 5, 1973.

86 Mark Reutter, “Corridor In Transition - I: Blacks follow Liberty Road to the Suburbs,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), February 5, 1978.

46 Chapter 2: Shakespeare Park and the “American Dream of Integration”

On February 4, 1978, the Baltimore Sun printed what would be the last entry of its seven- part series entitled “Corridor In Transition.” This extended series focused specifically on the Lib- erty Road corridor in northwest Baltimore County and the dynamic changes that had been occurring there throughout the 1970s. The final entry dealt with the future of the corridor and the issues it faced from racial and economic transition. In it, Sun journalist Antero Pietilla, made a prescient observation:

“Many homeowners of both races maintain the apartment complexes are drawing fami-

lies of lower socio-economic strata…Should the construction of new apartment complex-

es in the future also mean conversion of existing, owner occupied homes to high-density

rental units, Liberty road’s communities might experience blight similar to that which had

accompanied racial change elsewhere. To those who moved along Liberty Road in search

of country-like serenity—it is hard to imagine….”87

Pietilla’s insight, namely that the perceived image of “serenity” in suburbia was threatened by the inclusion of residents of different economic and racial backgrounds, spoke to the fragility of racial integration in the transitioning suburban communities along the corridor, including Ran- dallstown.

The decade of the 1970s in suburban Randallstown was a period of immense change and growth. It was during this time that the area began to see a notable in-migration of black families. While some of these families had made the move to Randallstown in the 1960s, it wasn’t

87 Antero Pietilla, “Corridor in Transition VI - Liberty Roads Future: Self-image is critical,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), February 11, 1978.

47 until the following decade that the entire community, for example Kings Park, would see significant increases in the black population. As it would happen, this process of desegregation followed a wave-like pattern. The lower Liberty Road corridor (south and east of Old Court Road) experienced a faster increase of black families than the upper corridor (north and west of Old

Court Road). For many on both sides of the corridor, this brought back fears of racial steering and blockbusting in suburban communities closer to the city line. As blacks moved further out along Liberty Road, the possibility of rapid racial turnover of the neighborhood, would be on the mind of many in these outer-ring communities, like Randallstown.

Desegregation along the corridor was complicated by a boom in commercial and residential development in the area, and especially in Randallstown. The often unchecked nature of this growth during the 1970s gave rise to a number of community associations which initially formed, in part, to “alleviate present and future problems of rapid growth in the Liberty corridor area,” according to a 1973 article in the local Randallstown periodical Community Times.88

Though race ostensibly wasn’t a factor of concern for these community associations from their inception, it would explicitly become one by the end of the 1970s, most visibly in the dispute over low-income housing, in the form of the Shakespeare Park project between 1979-1984. Dur- ing this dispute, the Greater Randallstown Community Council (GRCC) in Randallstown would use what was in reality token integration, or the presence of some blacks in segregated pockets of the larger community, as a rhetorical weapon against federal efforts to make affordable housing available in Baltimore County. They did this by emphasizing a shared understanding of suburban identity built around both class and “integration.” “Integration”, in this sense, didn’t necessarily

88 “Moratorium Plans to Be Discussed,” Community Times (Randallstown, MD), July 5, 1973.

48 mean integration in any quantifiable or consensual form. At best it could be understood as majority white. The community was predominantly white before the dispute and would remain so for nearly a decade afterwards. The bi-racial coalition of the GRCC rooted their opposition to the subsidized housing project in the familiar language of protecting and preserving neighborhood

“stability” with the important caveat that “integration” was now a part of that overall “stability.”

They would invoke a positive image of “successfully integrated” suburbia that they had achieved. In the words of GRCC members Saul and Sylvia Goldberg: “It has not been easy or automatic to reach this point of stabilized integration in present day Randallstown…we have worked long and hard…”89 By the time that Goldberg made this statement, Randallstown’s black population was approximately 15 percent of the total community.

Section I: “…a well known and respected community”

The story of the Shakespeare Park dispute necessarily has to start by examining the history of the community organizations that would later challenge the project. By the 1970s, community associations assumed a large role in Randallstown as the level and rate of development which was occurring in the suburb increased. They represented a large swath of the community.

Greater Randallstown Community Council (GRCC) president Mary Basso described the reach of the organization: “community associations in the area; all the PTAs; the commercial enterpris- es…The social organizations: Optimists, Jaycees…the religious organizations, the synagogues and churches and whatever. So, it almost encompasses everyone in the community in some form

89 Saul and Sylvia Goldberg, “Wrong Project, Wrong Place, Wrong Time,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), June 9, 1979.

49 or another.”90 From the historian’s perspective, the stories of these organizations provide a unique window into the shared aspirations, visions, and identity of a community. Groups like the

GRCC also gave voice to the shared frustration and anger of residents responding to often unwanted growth. During the 1970s they would routinely champion the cause of preserving

“neighborhood stability” amidst the dramatic changes then occurring. The leaders of these associations became minor local celebrities for their efforts in defining that sense of identity. For example Mary Basso who, upon stepping down from her position as president of the Greater Ran- dallstown Community Council (GRCC) in 1975, received this passionate thank you letter from one Randallstown resident: “Randallstown was a little-known community before the leadership of Mary Basso. Today, from Towson, Essex, Dundalk and Catonsville, as well as throughout the state of Maryland, Randallstown is a well known and respected community….”91 In other words, groups like the GRCC were seen by many as important entities guiding and steering the growth of the suburban community.

The two largest and most influential associations active along the Liberty Road corridor in the 1970s, and specifically Randallstown, were the Greater Randallstown Community Council

(GRCC) and the Liberty Road Community Council (LRCC). Founded in 1965 and 1958 respectively, together they represented a plurality of residents along the along the Liberty Road corridor. Precise numbers on membership for either group at a given time are hard to gather as they ebbed and flowed throughout the decade. A 1973 estimate put membership at 16,000 between the

90 Deposition of Mary D. Basso, Julius Edmonson, et. al v. Phillip Abrams, et. at, Civil Action No. B-82-985 (United States District Court for the District of Maryland 1982), 20.

91 “Letters to the Editor: Tribute to Basso,” The Community Times (Randallstown, MD), September 17, 1975.

50 two groups.92 Geographically the two groups represented different areas. Though this was not a hard and fast border, the GRCC covered the areas roughly west of Old Court Road, heretofore referred to as the upper Liberty Road corridor, and the LRCC covering the area west of that boundary, or the lower Liberty Road corridor. Both the LRCC and GRCC were umbrella organizations. As such they represented a disparate collection of various homeowners associations, religious and community groups within their respective spheres of influence, many of which had existed independently prior to joining either group. For example, the Village of Kings Park Asso- ciation had its own homeowners association, of which Mary Basso was the elected president, prior to joining the GRCC in the early 1970s. By 1971, the GRCC had grown to include 12 community associations. The LRCC, which still exists, currently has over 30 member associations.

From early on in the development of suburban Randallstown, both the GRCC and LRCC grew out of a recognition that civic unity gave them collective strength. During the period of rapid development in the late 1960s/early 1970s, many individuals had become more acutely aware of their individual lack of power to enact change on their own. Mary Basso described this need for co-operation upon her move to Kings Park in 1968, saying, “In my area at the time we were mostly new communities. And most people transferred out there and didn’t have the stability of a recognized neighborhood at the time.”93 This was a common sentiment that helped the

GRCC grow during the decade to include other large community groups like Kings Park, Bri-

92 Miriam Otterbein, “Liberty Road Council Seeks Expansion,” The Community Times (Randallstown, MD), March 15, 1973.

93 Deposition of Mary D. Basso, Julius Edmonson, et. al v. Phillip Abrams, et. at, Civil Action No. B-82-985 (United States District Court for the District of Maryland 1982), 7.

51 arhurst, Randall Ridge, and Fieldstone. They relied primarily on member dues to function day to day, which included everything from organizing food drives to lobbying planning board officials on local zoning policy. But they were also effective fundraisers (raffles, door to door collections and crab feasts) when it came to what Basso called “special issues.” One such special issue occurred in 1973 when the GRCC hired attorney George Liebmann to fight a statewide reappor- tionment plan which would have effectively divided Randallstown into two separate congressional districts, thus dividing its collective voting power on local issues, a case they ultimately won. It is also worth noting that despite the existence of multiple community associations like the GRCC and LRCC, there was initially much overlap in the overall agenda. For example, in

1973 Henry Carp, president of the LRCC, actually proposed a merger with the LRCC, saying

“for the most part the problems the two groups face are common ones. To that extent the merger could probably serve to make us more cohesive and effective.”94

The image of the Liberty Road corridor was an important issue of concern for these organizations. Image, in this case, pertained to the actual look of the Liberty Road corridor in terms of what was being built, or not built. By the 1970s, both LRCC and GRCC members were becoming more aware of how development was changing the image of their community, mostly for the worse. As one Randallstown resident described it: “[o]ur open spaces along Liberty Road have just about disappeared. I had hoped that with all this progress we, as a Community, could have remained a bit rural and the City not brought so close.”95 A boom in residential and com-

94 “Liberty Expansion,” The Community Times (Randallstown, MD) March 15, 1973.

95 “Letters to the editor: Crush of Growth on Liberty Road: A brief history,” The Community Times (Ran- dallstown, MD), January 21, 1971.

52 mercial construction had led to an increasingly congested and polluted Liberty road corridor. In

1971, the LRCC engaged in a series of disputes over zoning to keep commercial development at bay. In the words of LRCC member Howard Green “[w]e just can’t take any more and we’re going to fight like hell to keep this out.”96

Similarly both the LRCC and GRCC were keen to make sure that commercial buildings that were built would be maintained. In 1975 both groups worked with local politicians and held a series of protests in front of a recently vacated grocery store in order to force the owners of the building to re-open, arguing that the “poorly maintained, dark and deserted” building discour- aged patrons from shopping in the area.97 An overabundance of gas stations was also a concern for the GRCC, with one member describing the 24 stations on a four mile stretch of Liberty Road as “[p]aradise fading.” The group would eventually successfully petition county planners to halt the construction of new gas stations in 1973. Eyesores weren’t the only concern, the groups also occasionally advocated for the smell of the community. By 1970, the over-paving of the Gwynns

Falls water basin had created a situation in which sewage overflows and flooding was commonplace in Randallstown, leading Mary Basso to rhetorically ask county planners: “[h]ave any of them ever walked along the Gwynns Falls stream and seen the raw sewage in it”?98 By 1972, the

GRCC and LRCC had successfully led a campaign to implement a six-month ban on new con-

96 “Zoning Battles,” The Community Times (Randallstown, MD), September 23, 1971.

97 “LRCC Continues Feud, Vow to Picket New Store,” The Community Times (Randallstown, MD), Feb- ruary 19, 1975.

98 Frank Fairbank, “Solomon’s Ban Overthrown,” The Community Times (Randallstown, MD), August 14, 1974.

53 struction in a 12 square mile area encompassing greater Randallstown, citing concerns over inadequate sewer infrastructure.

Commercial development wasn’t the only thing changing the image of the Liberty Road corridor, and specifically Randallstown. By the 1970s patterns of residential development in the form of high-density apartment buildings were increasingly remaking the image of housing in the area. This trend had actually begun in the 1960s. In 1965, the Baltimore Sun commented on this change, saying “[t]he greatest concentration of garden apartment building activity is in the

Liberty Heights, Randallstown, and Towson areas.”99 Five years later this “activity” had increased exponentially. In September 1970, the Liberty Road corridor, and specifically Randall- stown, had become, according to the Baltimore Sun, “the metropolitan areas single largest garden apartment haven.”100 Two years later the Baltimore Sun described apartment housing as “a new factor in the commercial real estate market” in Randallstown.101 In reality this development was more nuanced than how the Baltimore Sun portrayed it. By and large the construction of apartment buildings was occurring more prominently in the lower Liberty Road corridor. The 1970

Census data indicates that the tracts west of Old Court road, those represented by the GRCC, had disproportionately less multi-unit housing totaling 10 percent of housing stock (80 percent of which was concentrated in a single census tract containing the Kings Park community where

99 Jack Gill, “Apartment Boom Continues,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), September 12, 1965.

100 “Apartments Lead New Building,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), September 20 1970.

101 Carleton Jones, “Rental Lifestyle gains,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), September 24, 1972.

54 Mary Basso lived), than those east of that line, represented by the LRCC, which had 30 percent of its total housing as apartments.102

This was not a coincidence. By the early 1970s the GRCC in particular was taking an especially strong anti-apartment stance. As such the organization would fight a great many apartment building proposals in the upper corridor throughout the decade. A good example of this can be seen in the story of how Basso actually became affiliated with the GRCC. In 1971 the Village of Kings Park Association organized a series of successful petitions against Morris Susnow’s

Birchwood Corporation’s efforts to re-zone a plot of land behind Kings Park for high-density residential housing. At the time, Mary Basso who was the association president, claimed that “[t]he area is already oversaturated with apartments.”103 One of her neighbors who was also involved in the petition would add, “[w]e’ve had enough apartments in the Liberty Road corridor and we don’t need any in Kings Park.”104 The early success of the petition was what brought Basso and the Village of Kings Park Association to the attention of the GRCC, which grew in large part by offering assistance to other neighborhoods in fighting high-density rezoning petitions. For example, the Randall Ridge Community Association (later affiliated with GRCC) led a similar initiative to “save one hundred and forty acres of farm and undeveloped land from becoming 1400 apartment units,” leading one resident of the community to ask “[we’ve] staved off the apart-

1021970 U.S. Census Tracts and Block Numbering Areas, Baltimore, MD SMA, Structural, Equipment, and Financial Characteristics of Housing Units, Randallstown, p. H-55.

103 “Kings Park Residents Wage Court Battle,” The Community Times (Randallstown, MD) March 18, 1971.

104 “Liberty Road Corridor,” The Community Times (Randallstown, MD) January 21, 1971.

55 ments—but for how long?”105 The GRCC would go on to fight several other apartment construction plans, including the Woodridge apartments next to the detached home neighborhood of

Wildwood. By 1973, the same year Mary Basso was first elected president of the organization, the issue had become a central focus of the GRCC. In June, the group helped to convince the

County Council to impose a six-month ban on new construction, including apartments, in a “12 square mile area around Randallstown.”106 Five years later, Basso and the GRCC would support a total ban on apartment construction in the area, with Basso expressing a familiar refrain:

“[a]partments would overcrowd the school system and cause more traffic problems.”107 This same refrain would later be used by the group in opposing subsidized housing as well.

At the same time that the GRCC was actively fighting against apartment housing and over-development, issues of race slowly began to come to the forefront for Liberty Road’s community organizations. This was a result of the changing demographics along Liberty Road. Black population increases along the corridor were initially concentrated closer to the city line, in communities represented by the LRCC. This changed by the mid-1970s when communities west of Old Court Road also began to see sizable increases in the number of new black households. As a result groups like the LRCC and GRCC began to take a defensive posture to “‘stabilize” the

105 “Staved Off Apartments But For How Long,” The Community Times (Randallstown, MD), September 30, 1971.

106 Stuart Taylor, “Sewage Troubled Randallstown Area Gets Building Ban,” The Baltimore Sun (Balti- more, MD), June 5, 1973.

107 “Basso wins re-election,” Community Times (Randallstown, MD), October 26, 1978.

56 neighborhood.”108 The same terminology of “stability” would later be employed by the GRCC to fight against further black in-migration and subsidized housing in Randallstown.

To this point, recently historians have begun to explore the evolution of racialized language and terminology from its explicit origins to its more subtle modern constructs. In his book

Colored Property, David Freund has argued that the postwar suburban “[a]dvocates of racial exclusion regularly used the terms ‘homeowner’, ‘citizen’, ‘voter’, and ‘white’ interchangeably, but then insisted that it was their status as property-owning citizens, not as white people, that afford- ed them special prerogatives and protections.”109 In other words the traditional language of racial exclusion of the early twentieth century evolved into something that was more palatable for the time in which it was employed. Sociologist Karyn Lacy’s work dealing specifically with black suburban identity in white suburbs addresses this phenomena as well. She writes “[w]hen suburbanites do allude to racial distinctions, these differences are framed within broad discussions of exclusion, discussions that make no mention of race….”110 There are many parallels in this approach to the racially coded language of Randallstown’s community groups and how it evolved over the course of the 1970s. This gets to the most important, and complex terminology on race employed in Randallstown during this period: “integration.”

This terminology had its own history of being employed by community associations in

Randallstown. Long time resident and husband of current LRCC President Shirley Supik, Jeff

108 R. Whitney Christian, “Study of For Sale Sign Ban Submitted,” The Community Times (Randallstown, MD), May 30, 1974.

109 David Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chica- go: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 17.

110 Karen R. Lacy, “A Part of the Neighborhood?”: Negotiating Race in American Suburbs,” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 22 no. 1/2/3 (2002): 46.

57 Supik, conceded that “the race and equality issues and all that didn’t come up in 1958 when [the

LRCC] was formed. It was closer to the time of ‘68.”111 This statement is indicative of the fact that early suburban Randallstown effectively had no black population to represent due to the closed nature of housing in the community. As the first black families began to move there in the late 1960s, many members of the white community would frequently employ language similar to that described by Freund, like ‘citizens’, ‘voters’, and ‘homeowners’, to justify their right to maintain what was in reality whiter neighborhoods. Here the lines between the outright exclusion of blacks and the desire to maintain token but “stable” levels of “integration” became highly blurred. This was because regardless of the specific motivations of whites, and later black residents, the underlying belief shared by both was that the potential of racial turnover in the community was bigger than any single individual or family could themselves combat. It was therefore understood by both whites and blacks in Randallstown that the survival of the community depended upon a consensual yet necessarily unequal conception of “integration.” During the dispute over Shakespeare Park, Willie Oates, a black member of the GRCC, aptly described this reality, saying “[j]ust because you see a few blacks in Randallstown, you want to change it and make it another Cherry Hill [the impoverished, majority African American community built in

1946 in southern Baltimore City].”112 In other words, there was a finite limit to how much the community could “integrate” before it tipped over. Once “integration” was reached it had to be maintained.

111 Jeff Supik, interviewed by Zachary Utz, 2017.

112 Joel McCord, “Baltimore County Planners Vote for Randallstown Housing Project,” Baltimore Sun, April 17, 1981, C20.

58 The GRCC in particular would take an increasingly active position in defending that “integrated” status by combatting any efforts by “outsider” organizations they viewed as trying to undermine that status. Interestingly these disputes serve to highlight the dubious and often ambiguous nature of both “stability” and “integration” regardless of perspective. The most illustrative example of this occurred in 1976 in the GRCC response to the SAVE organization. SAVE

(Strategy and Action for Vital Education) was formed in 1974, by a coalition of white and black teachers, parents and educators. The group sought to combat concerning trends that were emerging in the schools along the Liberty Road corridor. During the early 1970s, many schools along the lower Liberty Road corridor had begun to see a marked increase in black student enrollment and decrease in white students. Woodmoor Elementary was one particularly striking example of this trend. By 1975, Woodmor’s student population was 90 percent black. Although Woodmoor was a bit of an outlier, the same trend was occurring in other schools in the lower corridor. In response, SAVE put forward their agenda of “[achieving] a racial balance with no more than 33% black student population in a school.”113 This was, however, ironically an acknowledgment of the fragile nature of “ stable integration” not dissimilar from the way the GRCC would ultimately view the issue.

SAVE ultimately had no legislative power, but rather functioned in an advisory role, calling for “voluntary transfers, pairing schools, redrawing school boundaries, and busing” to achieve their goals of racial balance. The group was not met with much resistance in the lower

Liberty Road corridor, which was seeing the largest racial turnover. For his part, LRCC president

Chester Cohen was fairly welcoming of the group and their initiative, saying “[t]hey have a legit-

113 S.A.V.E Committee, Brief Summary of Results and Plans for 1975-76 School Year, 1976.

59 imate claim to be a community voice.”114 The upper Liberty Road corridor, however, as represented by the GRCC, was much more hostile. Their feelings toward SAVE were aptly expressed in a 1976 letter from Randallstown’s state delegate, Theodore Levin, to Baltimore County Super- intendent of schools Dr. Joshua Wheeler:

“It is perfectly legitimate for SAVE to offer solutions, to send out circulators, and hold

hearings on racial imbalance in lower Liberty Road…But it is highly improper to use

public money to finance SAVE when it shifts its activity to Randallstown. Specifically I

call upon you to withdraw any support you may be giving SAVE if it insists on conduct-

ing activities in Randallstown, creating a racial problem where none heretofore

existed.”115

Levin was expressing a sentiment that would be echoed by others in the community that the upper corridor was in fact demographically “stable” in terms of race. Others, like upper corridor resident Phillip Matz, expressed a similar sentiment saying “[o]nly SAVE thinks we have a problem. We already have the only multi-ethnic schools in the county.”116 Also implicit in the words of Matz and Levin, however, was the same underlying idea expressed by SAVE that “stable integration” depended upon maintaining a black minority, which many in the GRCC believed they had achieved. The GRCC would later vote to block a public meeting that was scheduled to be held in the upper corridor by SAVE in January, 1976, calling the group’s agenda “inflammatory”

114 Antero Pietilla, “5 choices posed: Busing option worries county,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), February 22, 1976.

115 Theodore Levin, “Intercepted Letter: Levin on SAVE,” The Community Times (Randallstown, MD), March 3, 1976.

116 Linda G. Weimer, “SAVE fought during meeting,” The Community Times (Randallstown, MD), March 31, 1976.

60 and “unwelcome publicity.” At the same meeting, several audience members expressed their fears that the SAVE meeting would “give Randallstown the image of an area ‘going black’ and discourage whites from moving in.”117

Two years after the SAVE ordeal, the GRCC found itself again fighting back against outsider suggestions that the community had a “racial problem.” In February 1978 the

Baltimore Sun printed the seven-part series “Corridor In Transition”, which detailed the many changes facing Liberty Road communities. The GRCC complained that “the articles did not

‘show the real image’ of Liberty Road communities” and even “debated whether to ask its members to cancel subscriptions to the Baltimore Sun or contact the state’s attorney Sandra O’Conner and ask for a tax reduction for the “alleged damage the articles had caused homeowners.”118

Mary Basso echoed the sentiments expressed during the SAVE dispute two years earlier that the upper corridor didn’t have a “racial problem”:

“In effect they were talking about the portion from the city line up to the Beltway…And

that created, oh, I couldn’t begin to tell you how upset the people were in the area. And

they wanted to distinguish between Randallstown and the lower Liberty Road

corridor.”119

Though the GRCC would try to distance themselves from the issue of race that they saw as being exclusive to the lower corridor, it too would soon become an issue in the upper corridor.

117 Linda G. Weimer, “GRCC Votes to Block Racial Balance Meeting,” The Community Times (Randall- stown, MD) January 28, 1976.

118 “O’Conner Aid asked by GRCC,” The Community Times, (Randallstown, MD), February 23, 1978.

119 Deposition of Mary D. Basso, Julius Edmonson, et. al v. Phillip Abrams, et. at, Civil Action No. B-82-985 (United States District Court for the District of Maryland 1982), 29.

61 In large part the impetus for this would come from policy decisions made at the national level to combat what a 1975 housing report by the Baltimore County Branch of the League of Womens

Voters called “the lack of progress [on low-income housing] lies in the attitudes of people.”120

The resulting legislation would fundamentally alter the way subsidized and public housing in

America was administered, particularly in suburban areas. As it happened, it would also have significant implications for Randallstown. In part, the new housing legislation of 1974 was meant to undo some of this discourse of fear and prejudice towards the poor and public housing by fundamentally restructuring housing policy and subsidized housing in suburbia. In Randall- stown, however, it would expose and amplify that prejudice.

Section II: A Failing Urban Strategy: Subsidized Housing Policy in the 1970s

In her article, “The emotions of racialization: examining the intersection of emotion, race, and landscape through public housing in the United States”, geographer Ellen Hostetter briefly examines the history of racial discourse over U.S. public housing since its inception in 1937. She writes that during the first roughly 20 years of public housing programs in the country, the public perception was that it was largely providing housing to the “‘deserving’ poor, people deemed worthy of government support.” She also writes that despite the fact that public housing “housed both whites and blacks separately” the program by and large maintained a public image of “racial diversity.”121 This image had changed significantly by the 1960s when urban renewal programs

120 League of Women Voters, “Everybody’s Got To Be Somewhere,” Baltimore, MD, VI-2.

121 Ellen Hostetter, “The emotions of racialization: examining the intersection of emotion, race, and landscape through public housing in the United States,” GeoJournal 75, no. 3 (2010): 290.

62 began to fundamentally reshape urban areas by displacing large numbers of black city-residents through slum clearance projects. Many of these displaced people were forced to take housing in the growing number of high-rise public housing projects popping up in many of Americas older industrial cities. Hostetter goes on to write, “[b]y the mid-1960s, however, demographic change had caught up with many pubic housing developments which crossed the line to majority black and poor.” At the same time, the racially-driven urban unrest in many of America’s cities of the late 1960s led to a belief that “the black Civil Rights movement increasingly threatened white society” and that black urban America posed a safety threat to the majority-white suburbs along the urban periphery. Concurrent with this was a change in the media representation of public housing as being crime-ridden and “poor and black”122

By the 1970s the common image of public housing held by many in suburban America was that it was essentially a black and urban problem. Thus maintaining “stability” i.e. race and class homogeneity in suburbia required keeping public housing out. Baltimore County was no exception. As described in chapter one, the county had gone out of its way in the 1960s to close itself off from an influx of black and poor residents. County officials, channeling voters, had intentionally chosen not to have a county level housing department, which in turn meant that there were no public housing complexes or buildings, like those in Baltimore City. As such, the poor were largely relegated to public housing in the city. By the 1970s, Baltimore City was responsi- ble for over 73% of the regions “assisted low-income housing stock.”123

122 Ibid., 291.

123 Nancy Nyman, Naomi Russell, and Jerry Doctrow, Shelter Today: A Progress Report On The Housing Plan For The Baltimore Region (Baltimore: Regional Planning Council, 1976), 6.

63 This reality was reflected and reinforced by the Federal policy of the 1960s. President

Lyndon Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ initiative focused heavily on addressing the problems of urban

America. In 1965, Johnson created the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) which significantly expanded federal power and funding to create more public housing options and opportunity for low-income Americans. By the end of the 1960s, the overwhelming majority of federal dollars for housing was going to urban areas and public housing projects. As Hostetter described, it was during this era that a “poor and black” image of public and subsidized housing replaced the older image of the “deserving” poor in the minds of many suburbanites.

At the same time America’s suburbs were becoming a dominant political force. This cul- minated in 1968, when Richard Nixon and the new ‘Silent Majority’ swept into power on a plat- form largely aimed at undoing the perceived federal overreach and overspending of the ‘Great

Society’. Nixon won in large part by appealing to an almost uniformly white new suburban coalition who increasingly came to look at the urban violence of the late 1960s, and the taxation associated with the federal entitlement programs of the Great Society, as money wasted on insur- mountable black urban problems. Housing policy in the 1970s would reflect this perception by focusing more on the suburbs. In doing so, this new policy would fundamentally restructure how housing policy was administered in suburbia.

In August of 1974, Congress passed the Housing and Community Development Act

(HCDA). Although it passed under Gerald Ford, it was the culmination of years of negotiation under President Nixon. The HCDA fundamentally restructured housing policy in the U.S., particularly the way in which it proposed to deal with subsidized public housing for low-income people. On its surface, the HCDA was intended to cut down on bureaucratic red tape, that had

64 increased during Johnson’s presidency, by emphasizing a more streamlined process of dispersing funding to communities via Community Development Block Grants (CDBG). The CDBG program allowed local authorities and governments more of a say in how they utilized funds compared to the federal bureaucracies which formerly oversaw the administration and implementation of federally funded projects. As one New York Times article put it, “by replacing the special- ly targeted categorical grants that made up the Great Society’s urban arsenal with a block grant program, H.U.D. has been able to put out more money in a year than has ever previously been the case.”124

Arguably the most important legacy of the HCDA was the way that it fundamentally changed how housing policy would impact suburban America. It did this in two ways. First, it restructured the way in which all communities received federal development funds. Previous to the HCDA, federal funds for community and housing development were largely administered through what were known as “special purpose agencies.” These agencies included local housing and urban renewal authorities, the heads of which were often appointed by local officials rather than elected by voters creating a system that was “insulated from government and not easily ac- cessible through common electoral and political processes.”125 As a result many suburban areas, like Baltimore County, who lacked these agencies were not able to access federal funds. The

HCDA changed this protocol by reflecting the growing conservative ideology which emphasized

“that local jurisdictions can best determine local needs.”126 The indirect consequence of the Act

124 “Failing Urban Strategy,” The New York Times (New York, NY), January 14, 1976.

125 William Frej and Harry Specht, "The Housing and Community Development Act of 1974: Implications for Policy and Planning," Social Service Review 50, no. 2 (1976): 283.

126 Ibid., 276.

65 was that it made it easier for suburban and rural locations to access federal funds which had previously gone overwhelmingly to cities. Under the HCDA, “core cities [would be] forced to com- pete for funds with affluent suburbs.”127 In short, a more liberal definition of community size and composition meant that smaller localities, like suburbs, could apply for federal funds that had previously been given overwhelmingly to cities.

The impact of these changes was substantial. A 1976 New York Times editorial highlight- ed specifically how the policy had affected both Baltimore City and County:

“This year [Baltimore City] is to receive the average of the amounts doled out over the

last five years, a level which with inflation insures a decreased sum of program activity.

Next year the city will be reduced to half the amount, while affluent Baltimore County

suburbs, which previously received no urban aid, will get more than ever.”128

An important, and consequential caveat, of this new policy was something called a Housing As- sistance Plan (HAP). In order to receive to apply for federal grants all individual localities, like

Baltimore County, were required to submit a “Housing Assistance Plan” (HAP) along with their application. The HAP was intended to “[summarize] existing housing conditions, assesses housing needs, particularly for lower-income persons, and establishes housing goals”, along with any application for federal funds.129 If a community submitted such a plan, it could then apply for a limited pool of federal grant money. As a 1976 New York Times editorial pointed out, however,

“[t]he act’s requirement that each application contain a housing assistance plan had been largely

127 “Failing Urban Strategy,” The New York Times (New York, NY), January 14, 1976.

128 Ibid.

129 William Frej and Harry Specht, "The Housing and Community Development Act of 1974: Implications for Policy and Planning," Social Service Review 50, no. 2 (1976): 281.

66 ignored.”130 The arbitrary and often lackadaisical enforcement of this precept would lead to several legal disputes between cities and suburbs shortly after passage of the HCDA. Most notably a case in 1976 where the city of Hartford, Connecticut sued to block the approval of grant funding to seven of its surrounding peripheral suburbs.

The second way the HCDA restructured housing policy for suburban America was also perhaps its most significant and controversial legacy: the Section 8 program. The Section 8 program was designed as an update of the old New Deal approach to pubic housing that emphasized construction of new housing structures specifically designed to house the poor. Under the old system, cities overwhelmingly became the sites of these new public housing projects. By mid century, this had created an image in the minds of many suburbanites of slum city neighborhoods with designated subsidized housing complexes and buildings. New York Times journalist Joseph

Fried characterized how this perception “‘isolated’ the poor in ‘subsidized ghettos’.”131 Section 8 aimed, in part, to undo the social and cultural stigma of public housing by allowing low-income and elderly people to access housing outside of the traditional public housing system. Under the new program, individuals and families would receive a rent subsidy voucher from the government which would cover the majority of their rental costs. The recipient in turn could use the voucher anywhere that was participating in the Section 8 program. The idea was to allow for greater access to housing by relying on market forces, i.e. increasing supply by making existing housing structures, as well as new construction, available to participate in Section 8. This would,

130 “Failing Urban Strategy,” The New York Times (New York, NY), January 14, 1976.

131 Joseph P. Fried, “Program Of Rent Aid To Poor Is Insecure: Program of Rent Aid to Poor Is Insecure,” The New York Times (New York, NY), December 19, 1976.

67 in effect, allow for low-income tenants to seek housing outside of the cities, which contained the majority of subsidized housing options, but also in suburban communities, many of which had no designated public housing to begin with. Under the HCDA, these suburban communities, like

Baltimore County, could now, for the first time, access federal funds to actually build new low- income specific housing. Proponents of the HCDA also argued that the new Section 8 allowed for the promotion of “economic and racial integration more readily than was possible under old programs” because the stigmas of race and class distinction was theoretically not as prominent as it would be if one were living in a designated public housing complex.132

Despite the intentions behind the new legislation, the implementation of the HCDA exposed just how intractable perceptions of public housing in suburbia really were. Baltimore

County is a case in point. After the HCDA was passed in 1974, Baltimore County officials and residents remained indifferent, if not obstinate, when dealing with the issue of subsidized housing and low-income people generally. It was such a controversial issue that by the time the county finally submitted its own Housing Assistance Plan (HAP), as part of a 1975 community development block grant (CDBG) application, it had to literally be secretly inserted into the application by county planners so as not to be held up by conservative County Council members. After- wards County Councilman Clarence Ritter, representing the county’s 3rd district, said “[w]e were lied to…If we can rescind it, I’ll support such a move” once he learned of the clandestine effort.133 That HAP would later have to undergo significant revisions, after HUD threatened to

132 Ibid.

133 Michael Weisskoph, “County aid program questioned”, The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD) October 2, 1975.

68 halt community development funding unless county planners and officials “revise[d] [the] housing assistance plan and recommend[ed] subsidized family housing in widespread areas of the county” rather than the two areas recommended by the plan.134 The initial plan indicated that new subsidized housing construction should occur in only two areas of the entire county, Owings

Mills and White Marsh. Both had been designated as key growth areas in a 1979 County Master

Plan.

Subsidized housing in the county in the 1970s was also encumbered by systemic corrup- tion. Many county leaders were keen to take the money now offered under the HCDA while doing as little as possible to fix problems of housing inequity. The case of Ross Diffenderffer is a good example. By the end of the decade, Baltimore County still had no local housing authority and therefore had no designated public housing buildings. Instead, in 1972 it hired a Towson based realtor, Ross Diffenderffer, with close ties to the soon to be indicted County Executive

Dale Anderson, to manage its first rent subsidy program which was later replaced by the Section

8 program. In 1974, Anderson would go to jail after pleading guilty to taking kick-backs from county developers. Four years later, the Section 8 program in Baltimore County had run out of money, leaving over 3,000 people on the wait list for subsidized housing. Diffenderffer, who the non-profit Citizens Planning and Housing Association had earlier commended for “his excellent job in locating and leasing housing within Baltimore County for more than 200 low and middle

134 Katherine White, “County Must broaden housing or lose U.S. aid,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), June 23, 1979.

69 income families”, would also go to jail in 1982 for embezzling $187,000 from the subsidized housing programs he was being paid to run.135

The HCDA was intended to alleviate low-income housing need by adding to the supply by allowing existing housing units to be eligible for Section 8. This was largely ineffective as many existing apartments did not meet specific HUD guidelines for participation. By 1977, over half of the units authorized for rental subsidies under the Section 8 program were going unused because of a “shortage of apartments meeting the federal rent ceiling.”136 This shortage was not helped by a federal moratorium on subsidized housing construction imposed in 1973, which actually resulted in no units being constructed in the county from 1973 to 1975. The lack of housing supply was a major reason why on January 14, 1979, the Baltimore Sun printed a Notice of

Funds Available (NOFA) advertisement by HUD that made $761,400 in section 8 financing available to county developers to “assist development of an estimated 150 units of new housing designed for the elderly.”137 The only developer who would respond was Morton Macks, who had recently bought a six acre site on the 8800 block of Old Court road in Randallstown. The apartment complex he intended to build there would prove consequential. It would expose the failure of Section 8 policy to deal with entrenched systemic issues of race and class in suburbia.

135 Citizens Planning and Housing Association, “Report”, (Baltimore: CPHA), 4.

136 Antero Pietilla, “Rent Subsidy Goes Unused in County”, The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), March 15, 1977.

137 “Aid available for elderly housing units,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), January 14, 1979.

70 Section III: Shakespeare Park

On April 18, 1979, Baltimore Neighborhoods Incorporated (BNI) was forwarded a copy of a letter that had been circulating around Randallstown. The letter, which according to the person who sent it, had been circulated exclusively to “all the white residents in the Randallstown area”, and was addressed to “THE HOMEOWNERS OF RANDALLSTOWN.” It was mailed under GRCC letterhead and asked those who read it to get “mad as hell” about the Shakespeare

Park Homes, a proposed subsidized housing project which had been announced earlier that year to be constructed in Randallstown at the intersection of Liberty and Old Court roads. It also painted a dystopian and racially charged image of the future of the community if said project were to be completed:

“During the past 20 years, families buying a house in this section of the county faced a

choice. For x dollars, you could buy in Pikesville and be reasonably certain that your

neighborhood would remain desirable. Or for the same dollars, you could purchase a con-

siderably larger, more luxurious home in Randallstown. But in doing so, you gambled

that Randallstown would remain a stable, desirable community. To date, this gamble has

paid off…But unless something is done fast, all of this is going to change. Because HUD

is now considering a proposal to build subsidized apartments for the inner-city poor at

Church Lane and Brenbrook…In a nut shell, the Randallstown of the ‘80s will be a re-

gurgitation of the Forest Park of the ‘60s.”138

In referencing “Forest Park of the ‘60s” and the “inner city poor”, the letter depicted a crossroads for the community of Randallstown in 1979. On one hand the community was “stable” and “de-

138 Greater Randallstown Community Council Inc., “A Letter to the Homeowners of Randallstown,” 1979.

71 sirable.” It was still a majority-white network of neighborhoods, mostly comprised of homeowners. The black population in the upper corridor had increased through the 1970s, though not as dramatically as in the lower Liberty Road corridor. By 1980, blacks made up an appreciable 15 percent of the total population in the upper corridor, though it was still substantially less than the

35 percent of the lower corridor.139 For many in the upper corridor, however, that 15 percent number wasn’t an indication of “instability” but rather “stability”, or “successful integration.”

For example, Kings Park, which was 35 percent black by 1980, was, according to Mary Basso,

“one of the best integrated communities in the state.”140 Which given the broader demographics of Baltimore County at the time was arguably true. On the other hand, the same argument went, the reality of the upper corridor was imminently fragile, ready to fall apart with a sudden influx of black and/or poor people. In this fragile version of reality, property values could “plummet”, crime and vandalism would be rampant, and “[b]usinesses, restaurants, theaters, chain stores,

[would] start to exit in droves.”141 In effect the flier painted a picture of the “integrated” suburb of Randallstown having just the perfect balance of blacks and whites. So much so that any influx of minorities, by a project like Shakespeare Park, could instantly upset the delicate balance.

Although the dispute over Shakespeare Park really began in 1979, the site of what would become the Shakespeare Park Homes was disputed years before. The original name of the project was to be the Free State Post Projects. That name had come from the Free State Post 167, Jewish

139 1980 U.S. Census Tracts and Block Numbering Areas, Baltimore, MD SMA, Race and Spanish Origin, Randallstown, p. 133.

140 Deposition of Mary D. Basso, Julius Edmonson, et. al v. Phillip Abrams, et. at, Civil Action No. B-82-985 (United States District Court for the District of Maryland 1982), 9.

141 Greater Randallstown Community Council Inc., “A Letter to the Homeowners of Randallstown,” 1979.

72 War Veterans (JWV) who in 1972 formed a separate corporation with the Randallstown Syna- gogue Center called the Randallstown Community Center (RCC), in order to purchase a plot of land on which to build “housing for lower income, elderly, handicapped, and families.”142 In

1973 the RCC was successful in purchasing the six acre lot at the intersection of Brenbrook Dri- ve and Liberty Road for $75,000. They then tried to have the property rezoned to high-density residential. As was discussed at length earlier in this chapter, community groups often aggres- sively opposed high-density apartment zoning in the upper corridor in the 1970s. The Shake- speare Park site was no exception. As indicated by a 1979 letter from RCC secretary Benard

Plotkin to the GRCC, “[RCC] attempts at rezoning were thwarted by neighborhood groups.”143

Finally the RCC was able to rezone the property to high-density,; however, their search for developers to build on the site were “fruitless.” The RCC attempted to get Community Develop- ment Block Grant (CDBG) funding made recently available to Baltimore County under the

HCDA in order to hire a developer. According to an RCC document “construction of this project would work towards implementing Baltimore County’s Housing Assistance Plan (HAP)…for the new construction of housing for lower income persons would be considered an eligible activity under CDBG Eligible Administrative Costs.”144 Ultimately attempts to secure funding or a developer were unsuccessful. By 1978, the financial burden of the property became too large for

142 Unknown Author, document entitled “Description of Project” which described the history of the site which the Shakespeare Park Project (Shakespeare Park) was to be located, Page 4. Document was contained within George Liebmann Esq. records of the case. Used with the permission of Mr. Liebmann.

143 Letter from Bernard Plotkin, Secretary Randallstown Synagogue Center, to Charlotte Kaplow, Admin- istrative Aide Greater Randallstown Community Council (GRCC), May 13, 1979. Contained within George Liebmann Esq. records of the legal case. Used with permission of Mr. Liebmann.

144 Author unknown, “Description of Project” Page 5. George Liebmann Esq. personal records of the case, used with the permission of Mr. Liebmann.

73 the RCC to manage and they began looking for someone to buy the property. Morton Macks purchased it December of 1978 for $200,000.

Morton Macks was a Baltimore native, a prolific builder and developer who began his career in 1946. He was also no stranger to HUD financed projects, which made him rather unique in the Baltimore metropolitan region. According to GRCC lawyer George Liebmann,

Macks was “virtually the only [developer]” in the Baltimore metropolitan region who had the means and capacity to deal with the mountains of “red tape” that were required when working with HUD.145 By the time Macks was getting set to buy the property in question from the RCC,

Baltimore County was still struggling to meet its low-income housing needs. This was despite the sweeping changes brought about by the 1974 Housing and Community Development Act

(HCDA) and the Section 8 housing program. By the end of the decade, affordable existing housing supply was grossly inadequate and there was no new construction of any fully subsidized housing units anywhere in the county. As of 1979 there were “approximately 4500 households on the waiting list Countywide.”146 Against this backdrop, HUD announced in January of 1979 that it was making $761,400 in section 8 financing available via a Notice of Funds Available (NOFA) advertisement in the both the Baltimore Sun and Afro. Morton Macks was the only developer who responded and submitted a proposal. The project he proposed to build, 106 units available to both low-income and elderly, would be the first fully subsidized new construction of family units in the history of Baltimore County. Almost immediately after the project was made public, the

145 George Liebmann, interviewed by Zachary Utz, 2018.

146 Attachment to application for Section 8 funding from Morton Macks per Shakespeare Park. Citation found under the “Conclusion” section of the attachment. Document located at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Philadelphia, PA. Part of records for the case ﬁle GRCC v. HUD housed at the archives.

74 GRCC began to mobilize their opposition. The suit they would eventually file against HUD would allege, among other things, that “[the GRCC] are thus injured in fact by the proposed project and are fairly representative of a national class of persons who reside and desire to reside in stable integrated neighborhoods.”147

This concept, or perception, of “stable integration” would become the most important issue throughout the dispute. As evinced by legal depositions taken at the time, blacks and whites affiliated with the GRCC lawsuit shared a particularly vague understanding of “stable integration” within their neighborhoods, one that was largely anecdotally based. In fact, it was this shared understanding of “integration” that led to a tangible sense that by 1979 Randallstown was, as GRCC member David Harris described it, at the tipping point between “stable integration” and “white flight.”148 It was the same characterization as had been employed in the April 1979

GRCC flier which had centered the conversation on Shakespeare Park around race in the first place. Integration was a rallying cry, something worth preserving.

But what did “integration” actually mean to those in the GRCC? What did it look like?

What is perhaps most telling from the four year legal battle between the GRCC and HUD is the lack of any consistent quantitative and qualitative metric by those in the upper corridor for an- swering these questions. For many in the GRCC “integration” meant the mere visible presence of black people living in Randallstown writ large. For example, Dave Harris, who was a black vice president of the GRCC who lived in the predominantly white Fieldstone community, could de-

147 Document outlining the charges brought by GRCC against HUD per the Shakespeare Park project. Page 4 under the section entitled “The Plaintiffs.” Part of case records housed at NARA Philadelphia.

148 Deposition of David Harris, Julius Edmonson, et. al v. Phillip Abrams, et. at, Civil Action No. B-82-985 (United States District Court for the District of Maryland 1982), 42.

75 fine “racial integration” in his immediate sphere, by saying “[w]ell we’ve got blacks; we have

Chinese. We have various different races now”, adding that he made the determination that his neighborhood was racially integrated by what he personally “observed.”149 On the other hand,

Julius Edmonson, who was also black and lived nearby Harris provided a similar yet more un- clear answer. When asked if “[his] immediate neighborhood…enjoy[ed] a high degree of integration?” he answered “[y]es, it may not be in the same street [as he lived], but it’s integrated.”150

This perception that the mere presence of some blacks in a clearly majority-white community denoted integration was shared by other black GRCC members. For example, Merle Hendricks described the Pikesville neighborhood she lived in before Randallstown, saying “I can’t tell you how many blacks were there. It was predominantly white; but because of the blacks it was integrated.”151 Later she added that despite being the “first black family on [her] court” upon moving to Randallstown, she considered the area surrounding her court as “integrated.”152 White GRCC members offered a similarly vague assessment of how they gauged integration. Martin Sussman, whose community was adjacent to the Shakespeare Park site, understood Randallstown to have a

“high degree of racial integration” because “people of different races and different ethnic back-

149 Ibid, 6-7.

150 Deposition of Julius Edmonson, Julius Edmonson, et. al v. Phillip Abrams, et. at, Civil Action No. B-82- 985 (United States District Court for the District of Maryland 1982), 5.

151 Deposition of Merle Hendricks, Julius Edmonson, et. al v. Phillip Abrams, et. at, Civil Action No. B-82-985 (United States District Court for the District of Maryland 1982), 7.

152 Ibid., 7.

76 grounds [lived] in the neighborhood.”153 Mary Basso defined Randallstown as “highly integrated…because a lot of our residents are Oriental, black and white.”154

If there wasn’t a strong consensus among GRCC members on how to define integration, there was a consensus on what public housing represented. By 1979, the GRCC membership, both black and white, held especially strong negative opinions about subsidized housing and what it meant for their suburban community. This translated at times directly from the broader fight of many in the upper corridor, especially the GRCC, against apartment housing generally.

In fact, by the time of the Shakespeare Park debate, many in the GRCC leadership were unaware of what apartment housing within the Liberty Road corridor was actually subsidized and what wasn’t. As was discussed in the previous section, by the 1970s the perception that public housing was associated with crime, blacks, the poor, and the inner city had calcified in the minds of many suburbanites. The GRCC and their bi-racial members and supporters were no exception. To them an influx of subsidized housing effectively meant an influx of blacks and crime into the community. This belief was especially strong among the black members of the GRCC. Merle Hendricks, who would go on to be one of the plaintiffs in the GRCC lawsuit against HUD, stated “I grew up in the city. I’ve been exposed to housing projects, I know what they’re like…When I think about it now and think back, I can see where it did but and now it’s 100% black.”155 Another black plaintiff for the GRCC Willie Oates stated “[j]ust because you see a few blacks in Randallstown,

153 Deposition of Martin Sussman, Julius Edmonson, et. al v. Phillip Abrams, et. at, Civil Action No. B-82-985 (United States District Court for the District of Maryland 1982), 8.

154 Deposition of Mary Basso, Julius Edmonson, et. al v. Phillip Abrams, et. at, Civil Action No. B-82-985 (United States District Court for the District of Maryland 1982), 9.

155 Deposition of Merle Hendricks, Julius Edmonson, et. al v. Phillip Abrams, et. at, Civil Action No. B-82-985 (United States District Court for the District of Maryland 1982), 11.

77 you want to change it and make it into another Cherry Hill (the historically black public housing projects in south Baltimore City).”156 Whites expressed similar sentiments. Mary Basso stated in

1979 that the subsidized apartments would be inhabited by “certain minorities which will probably come from Baltimore City.”157 Similarly the April 1979 GRCC flier, which led to charges of racism by those supporting the project, claimed that the “inner-city poor” would inhabit the project, referencing the fact that by the 1970s Baltimore had become a majority African Ameri- can city.

The perceived connection between crime and subsidized housing was also frequently expressed by the GRCC, most often in connection with the nearby Hillcrest Apartments. Hillcrest was a partially subsidized housing complex in the lower Liberty Road corridor (which was seeing a higher degree of black in-migration) and was for many in the upper corridor their most immediate experience with subsidized housing. Julius Edmonson, who was president of the

GRCC at the time of the lawsuit, stated how after his house was burglarized one of his neighbors suggested that he “could probably find his stuff down at Hillcrest.”158 Similarly Mary Basso described her experience with Hillcrest: “…whenever there was a robbery, or any kind of trouble out there, [the police] knew immediately to go to Hillcrest Apartments — that this is where these

156 Joel McCord, “Baltimore county planners vote for Randallstown housing project,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), April 17, 1981.

157 “Written Finding” case of GRCC v. HUD DH182-41 RA, Page 12. Part of case ﬁle housed at NARA Philadelphia.

158 Deposition of Julius Edmonson, Julius Edmonson, et. al v. Phillip Abrams, et. at, Civil Action No. B-82- 985 (United States District Court for the District of Maryland 1982), 81.

78 people lived.”159 Merle Hendricks would later comment: “I like the idea — in our society, as it is

— my kid being able to [play outside] by himself without locking everything up.”160 In this way, there was an outspoken, and at times unspoken, association between crime and subsidized housing in Randallstown.

It’s important to note that the overwhelming majority of those who protested the project were not black, just as blacks similarly were a minority population community wide. Census data for 1980 indicates that blacks made up just 15 percent of the total population of Randallstown, that figure being significantly lower in several of the individual tracts, including the one that was to contain Shakespeare Park. Although I have no real way of knowing the full extent of black opposition to the project, nor do I have a way of discerning precisely how many blacks were in the GRCC, I can make some strong inferences about both of these figures from the reporting done by the Baltimore Sun surrounding the event. This information mostly comes from the extensive reporting by Katherine White of the many town hall style meetings the GRCC, and another affiliated group called CASH (Citizens Against Subsidized Housing), held concerning the project. At one such meeting in April, White observed that only “[a] few black residents dotted the crowd” of over 600.161 In May of 1979, the GRCC and CASH jointly held a larger town hall meeting of over 1,000 residents in which White observed a “relatively small number of which were black.” At that meeting one black GRCC member, Willie Oates, who would go on to be one

159 Deposition of Mary Basso, Julius Edmonson, et. al v. Phillip Abrams, et. at, Civil Action No. B-82-985 (United States District Court for the District of Maryland 1982), 25.

160 Deposition of Merle Hendricks, Julius Edmonson, et. al v. Phillip Abrams, et. at, Civil Action No. B-82-985 (United States District Court for the District of Maryland 1982), 11.

161 Katherine White, “Rent-subsidy housing fought in Randallstown,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), April 18, 1979.

79 of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against HUD, made a comment which implied that blacks were clearly in the minority of the opposition, saying he “wanted ‘to put on the record that there are blacks opposed to the development also.”162 As an aside, it’s worth mentioning that this rally was also attended by Congressman Clarence Long in which he received a standing ovation after stating to the majority-white audience that “race had nothing to do with opposition to the project and observed that the area is fully integrated.”163 Just six months after giving that speech, Long gave another in which he was heavily criticized for suggesting that “blacks are superior ‘intellectually’ because “Southern white blood flows in every black today.”164 Also even though blacks were clearly a minority in the upper corridor, “the majority” of the seven plaintiffs from the GRCC who filed suit against HUD in 1981 were black, including the lead plaintiff GRCC president

Julius Edmonson who was elected just weeks before the suit was actually filed.165 On the surface this presented the image of an equally “integrated” coalition and community despite a reality contradicted by statistics. In fact, the census tract in which the Shakespeare Park homes were to be built had the lowest percentage of blacks, 6%, of any of the developed tracts in the upper corridor.166 The circumstances and timing of Edmonson’s election prior to the suit, given former

162 Katherine White, “Randallstown Residents protest subsidized housing,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), May 30, 1979.

163 Ibid,.

164 Richard H.P. Sia, “Long Angers blacks with comments,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), February 15, 1980.

165 George Liebmann, interviewed by Zachary Utz, 2018.

166 1980 U.S. Census Tracts and Block Numbering Areas, Baltimore, MD SMA, Race and Spanish Origin, Randallstown, p. 133.

80 President Mary Basso past controversial statements, were questioned by HUD’s lawyers during their deposition of Edmonson.

The 1979 debate about Shakespeare Park would do much to tarnish the image of racial harmony that many in the community had been projecting throughout the 1970s. It is worth re- membering that the local debates in 1976 over the SAVE education committee when Randall- stown delegate Theodore Levin had commented that SAVE was “creating a racial problem where none heretofore existed.” Three years later over the issue of subsidized housing race and “racial problems” were clearly on the mind of many in Randallstown, especially blacks both within and beyond the community. One such group was the Liberty Road Black Citizens Coalition (LR-

BCC), which had formed in June 1979 in response to an unsolicited pre-recorded telephone message by CASH calling for a boycott of any merchants in Randallstown who didn’t donate “$100 to the [GRCC’s anti Shakespeare Park] legal fund.”167 By August the LRBCC was demanding that Basso resign from the GRCC, calling her a “symbol of white racism”, while also calling for the GRCC to work with them to help employ more black youths in the community.168 Basso, for her part, denounced the LRBCC with the familiar refrain accusing them of “making the subsidized housing question a ‘racial issue’.” Another strong, albeit more racially ambiguous, rebuke to the GRCC position actually came from Baltimore City. In August of 1979, city NAACP branch President Enolia P. MacMillan wrote an open letter to the Baltimore Sun in which addressed the figurative and psychological barriers that had developed between the city and suburb:

167 “Boycott Threat Dies,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), June 26, 1979.

168 Katherine White, “Blacks decry ‘racism’ in the county now,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), Au- gust 22, 1979.

81 “[i]s there any reason why the poor and lower middle classes should be denied decent housing, because the well-to-do wish to bottle up the poor in the city and keep them “a safe distance” from themselves?”169 The newly established Baltimore County branch of the NAACP also entered into the debate because they “didn’t want to sit back and let the GRCC have the only voice.”170 In May of 1979 then branch President Colonel James Pennington issued a press release that stated “[b]lacks are seeking to maintain integrated neighborhoods” but added:

“…these people must have a chance to improve their lifestyle. But it is our responsibility

as Baltimore County citizens to involve ourselves in the American process of extending

to them our friendship, our guidelines for a community of properties which are appreciat-

ing rather than depreciating.”171

Three months after Pennington’s letter, branch co-ordinator Garland Brown echoed this sentiment, saying:

“I certainly don’t want to be caught in an attempt to keep the poor and black out of the

county. At the same time, I don’t want crime and overcrowding. I’m just as concerned

about good living as [my white neighbors]. But the two aren’t necessarily

contradictory.”172

169 Enolia P. McMillan, “In Randallstown,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), August 21, 1979.

170 Katherine White, “Blacks Ready Support for Apartments,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD) August 6, 1979.

171 Col. James Pennington, “News Release: SUBSIDIZED HOUSING IN BALTIMORE COUNTY”, Balti- more County NAACP Press Release, May 8, 1979.

172 Katherine White, “Blacks Ready Support for Apartments,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), August 6, 1979.

82 In effect these statements amounted to a hedging of the bet, or towing the fine line between exclusion and inclusion, or “integration” and “white flight.” A line not too dissimilar from the one towed by the GRCC.

The perspective of the county NAACP is illustrative of an important point about the nature of population growth in Randallstown by the end of the 1970s: the threat of “overcrowding” both in Randallstown and the Liberty Road corridor would have been the result of black in-migration rather than white in-migration. Between 1970-1980, the black population in the three communities comprising the Liberty Road corridor (Milford Mills, Lochearn, and Randallstown) had increased by over 700 percent. At the same time the white population in these areas had decreased by 14 percent. Randallstown individually actually saw a minor increase of 14 percent in the white population, however the black population increased by over 500 percent.173 To be clear, this didn’t indicate a black majority but it didn't indicate a trend of outsized black population growth comparable to white population growth. Furthermore this underscored the reason that many blacks both in the GRCC and elsewhere, like in the County NAACP, had concerns about subsidized housing and more black in-migration. Maintaining “stable integration”, in effect, meant limiting both.

Ironically this tremendous growth trend in the black population during the 1970s would prove consequential for the legal proceedings of the Shakespeare Park dispute. Prior to 1980, the

GRCC campaign to halt the project was working. By petitioning the county planning board with various appeals, the construction of Shakespeare Park was effectively stuck in bureaucratic red

173 1970 U.S. Census Tracts and Block Numbering Areas, Baltimore, MD SMA, Race and Spanish Origin, Randallstown, Lochearn, and Milford Mills;1980 U.S. Census Tracts and Block Numbering Areas, Balti- more, MD SMA, Race and Spanish Origin, Randallstown, Lochearn, and Milford Mills.

83 tape. This changed, however, in 1982 when the county Board of Appeals ruled in the developer’s favor, which on paper cleared the way for the construction of the project. This decision ultimately prompted the GRCC to file suit against HUD. In the suit GRCC lawyer George Liebmann would allege damages to the GRCC members, citing HUD’s own guidelines for siting low-income housing projects: “ [Section 8 subsidies] Shall not be located in…a racially mixed area if the project will cause a significant increase in the proportion of minority to non-minority residents in the area.”174 Interestingly this part of the federal statute did seem to confirm the validity of concerns expressed by the GRCC of the project's potential to upset “stable integration”, in effect saying that maintaining “integration” did require a cap on the number of minorities in an a community. Liebmann was able to make this argument because the recently released 1980 census had in fact shown that the Liberty Road corridor was now home to the county’s largest concentration of black households. He would go on to allege “…the proposed project will adversely af- fect…the character of [Randallstown] as a racially integrated neighborhood…” adding, “[Ran- dallstown was] the very model of an area in which, under the siting regulations, projects of this character are not supposed to be located….”175 The irony of course was that the Federal Gov- ernment via HUD, which had created the Section 8 program to alleviate the kinds of low-income housing deficits which were so prevalent in Baltimore County, had also acknowledged through its policy the very real possibility of transition from integrated to segregated in communities where section 8 housing was placed.

174 Written Finding”Federal case summary case of GRCC v. HUD DH182-41 RA, Page 9. Part of case ﬁle housed at NARA Philadelphia.

175 “Memorandum of Plaintiffs in Opposition to Movement to Dismiss”, GRCC v. HUD, Civil Action B-82-985, Page 3. Case records housed at NARA Philadelphia.

84 The lawsuit would culminate in January of 1983 when US District Court Judge Walter

Black’s ruled against HUD’s motion to dismiss the GRCC suit, stating that the plaintiffs did have grounds to further pursue the suit. Soon after this ruling the two parties agreed to settle the case by requiring that at least 35 percent of the housing units go to the elderly, in effect stipulating a cap on the number of low-income tenants. The agreement also stipulated the creation of “tenant selection committee” to screen potential occupants which would have representatives selected both by the developer and the GRCC. The final project would have only 83 units compared to initial plan which called for well over 100. Construction on the Shakespeare Park project com- menced soon thereafter.

By 1984 the GRCC effectively began to what George Liebmann described as a “sort of natural death.”176 Correspondence between Liebmann and GRCC president Julius Edmonson after the case was settled indicate the community association was in a compromised financial position after the four-plus years of paying to litigate the Shakespeare Park dispute. One letter from

Liebmann to Edmonson in May 1983 discussed Liebmann’s dissatisfaction “at the complete lack of progress on my bill over the course of the last several months.”177 By mid-decade the GRCC was largely gone from civic life in Randallstown. Basso would remain in Randallstown until her death in 2008. For many in the community, the post-Shakespeare Park era finally promised a reality of “stability” in what had been socially turbulent 1970s-early 1980s. This sentiment was perhaps most aptly expressed in a condensed history of Randallstown printed in a yearbook for

Randallstown High School in the mid-1980s. It read:

176 George Liebmann, interviewed by Zachary Utz, 2018.

177 Letter to Julius Edmonson from George Liebmann Esq., May 18, 1983.

85 “During the past decade, Randallstown had undergone an adjustment period of racial un-

easiness created by the movement of urban blacks into an all-white community. Residents

accused real estate agents of drawing urbanites to the Liberty Road corridor. Despite

these problems, today blacks and whites live together harmoniously…Thus, although

change has stripped Randallstown of it’s community identity, rising concerns over resul-

tant problems indicate that Randallstown will become more stable in the near future.”178

This prediction of “harmonious” racial “stability”, as understood in post-Shakespeare Park era was Randallstown, would, however, be dubious. The 1980s-1990s would see an even more dramatic change in the demographics of the community than had occurred in the 1970s. Ironically enough Randallstown High School, and the schools more generally along the Liberty Road corridor, would prove to be consequential sites in driving this change.

178 Excerpt of yearbook from Randallstown High School, some year after 1983, year unknown. Found using ancestry.com March 18, 2018.

86 Chapter 3: Resegregation in Randallstown

In 1982, with the GRCC lawsuit against HUD over Shakespeare Park still pending, many in the Liberty Road corridor were more than eager to move beyond the divisive issue. Among them was Jo Fisher, the recently appointed president of the LRCC, who that year claimed, “[i]n this community, we’ve successfully hurdled the barrier of race and we’ve been moving on to deal with problems that really matter to people.” Similarly Ralph Markus, a member of the LRCC advisory board, echoed the sentiment that “[i]t’s time people stopped talking of changing neighborhoods and [realize] we are an integrated neighborhood.”

“Stability” and “integration”, however, would remain as elusive and dubious a reality as they had ever been in Randallstown. By the end of the decade, entire census tracts in the upper

Liberty Road corridor would transition from majority white to majority black. Throughout the

1990s, this trend would continue. Among the whites who left Randallstown, a great many would be Jewish. Many Jews would move to nearby suburbs like Pikesville and the emerging community of Owings Mills, north of Randallstown. Throughout the process younger black families from across the region would continue to move in. This white exodus was prompted by several factors, not least of which was a marked increased in the percentage of black students in Ran- dallstown public schools, which predated flight. By 1991, all of the public schools in the community had a black student population of nearly 50 percent, prompting unsuccessful policy re- sponses by county officials and the school board to try to fix the imbalance. By 2000, the black student population had risen well above 90 percent in all of Randallstown’s schools.

The transition from white to black also occurred despite a historically consistent shared sense of class-based identity, one which had developed between whites and blacks prior to the

87 Shakespeare Park dispute, and, remarkably, continued to exist after. The black families who moved to Randallstown in the 1980s/1990s were, much like their predecessors, middle class. The dire future of crime and poverty that the GRCC and CASH had portended for Randallstown in

1979 with the introduction of subsidized housing had not come to fruition. In fact, the median household income throughout this transition period would be among the highest in the state of

Maryland (see figure 2.1 below).179 These new black families would move to Randallstown from a variety of places, and a variety professional backgrounds. Many came in search of the same kinds of things that whites had a generation before. Regardless of motivation, the Randallstown that emerged in the 1980s-1990s would largely maintain its standing as one of the more economically stable, middle-class suburbs in Baltimore County and statewide.

Despite this economic reality, however, the decades’ long process of racial transition would prove to be a consequential event for the future development of the suburban community.

179 U.S. Census Bureau; “American FactFinder”; generated by Zachary Utz; using American FactFinder; ; (27 April 2018); 1980 U.S. Census Tracts and Block Numbering Areas, Baltimore, MD SMA, Income and Poverty Status, Randallstown, p. 326; 1990 U.S. Census Tracts and Block Numbering Areas, Baltimore, MD SMA, Income and Poverty Status, Randallstown, p. 637.

88 By the mid-1990s, the now majority-black community found itself addressing the same historical issues of “stability” in suburbia but from a different angle than previous generations. As the community transitioned to majority black, there also developed an acute shared perception that outside financial and commercial investment in Randallstown was decreasing. Whereas previous generations of mostly white suburbanites had fought vigorously to temper commercial development and growth, the new generation of black suburbanites found themselves trying to encourage that same growth. By 2000, race had become the defining variable, for many in the community, in explaining this lack of investment. This disinvestment would take many forms. Not just in the recently resegregated public schools but also the lack of typical suburban amenities, such as businesses, restaurants, shops, movie theaters, and departments stores. In response to these chal- lenges, a new vibrant and outspoken cohort of local civic and political leaders would emerge during this period to redefine the image of Randallstown. Their efforts are still underway today.

In the previous chapter I argued that an inherently unequal and ambiguous conception of

“successful integration” in suburban Randallstown was used to justify further exclusion of minorities. This conception was the historical by-product of generations of segregation in suburban space. In this context both blacks and whites developed a shared understanding that the only fea- sible way to maintain “stability” and “integration” in the suburbs was to limit to the number of minorities. This chapter will continue with this but will expand upon it in two ways. First by arguing that, despite outspoken claims to the contrary and a shared sense of class-based identity, whites in Randallstown were unwilling to live in a majority-minority suburban area. And second, by arguing middle-class black communities looking to maintain “stability” in the postwar era suburbs have largely had to do so on their own compared to the enormous infrastructure of capi-

89 tal investment that underwrote the construction of those same suburbs in a time when they were intended for whites. In effect, whites initially found the post war suburbs as a place that was socially, economically, and politically built for them; a place that capital flowed to, not from. Gen- erations later, however, blacks have had to largely rebuild and reimagine those same places according to their own image, determination and investment without outside capital.

Section I: Schools and the Beginnings of Racial Transition

Resegregation in Randallstown’s schools drove the final phase of resegregation in the community as a whole. Beginning in roughly 1985, just barely two years after the dispute over

Shakespeare Park, schools along the Liberty Road corridor began to rapidly transition to majority black, often at a pace much quicker than the neighborhoods which they served. It was during this period that schools became another important factor, not unlike subsidized housing, in determin- ing the relative “stability” of neighborhoods. And like subsidized housing, the fight over schools often pitted locals against policy makers at a higher level, in this case the county school board.

To this point Ronald Gilliam, who was the deputy director of the Philadelphia regional office for the US Dept. of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, argued the latter: “[t]he county is not respon- sible because the racial imbalance is the result of changing neighborhoods, not any deliberate action by the school system.”180 Gilliam was right in saying that neighborhoods were changing; however, he also neglected to mention that steps were taken, or in many cases not taken, by school board officials that drove those changes. This section will take a closer look at the history

180 Amy Goldstein, “Advice on racial balance has mostly been ignored,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), January 8, 1985.

90 and granular mechanics of school resegregation along the corridor. During the 1980s-1990s individual schools along Liberty Road would become both symbolic and literal spaces of conflict between the majority white and growing black communities in the northwest county. So much so that policy decisions at individual schools could effectively determine the perceived “stability” of the surrounding neighborhood. Schools would serve as geographic and psychological demar- cation points along unspoken racial boundaries that were beginning to crystallize around the Lib- erty Road corridor. In other words, just as the viability of suburban living along Liberty Road for many residents had hinged on the introduction of subsidized housing in the 1970s, so too did that viability hinge on schools in the 1980s/1990s. In the end, as schools changed demographically, many whites would give up on the possibility of living along the corridor and choose to leave.

The rumblings of school resegregation in Randallstown started around 1977 when the

Baltimore County school board began to undertake a year’s long initiative to consolidate and close under-utilized schools county-wide, thereby reducing the growing problems of over-spending and under-enrollment. The problem of under-enrollment was a long brewing consequence of the tremendous growth in the overwhelmingly white population that the county had experienced during the first two decades of home rule. By the end of the 1970s, this growth had stalled dramatically as birth rates declined steeply. A 1975 report by the Regional Planning Council signaled the change by estimating 7,000 new babies were born county-wide, a nearly 50 percent drop from the height of early 1960s.181 This was especially true along Liberty Road with its predominantly-white Jewish population. In 1982, the Center for Metropolitan Planning and Re-

181 Donald Kimelman and Michael Weisskopf, “After the Boom — Baltimore County in 1985”, The Balti- more Sun (Baltimore, MD), January 19, 1975.

91 search at Johns Hopkins released the findings of a year’s long study entitled “Baltimore’s Elderly

Jews.” It detailed how “[t]he Jewish community, due to lower birth rates, and greater longevity, may be aging faster than [the US average].”182 In effect this meant that there were now there were too many schools for too few children. This new reality prompted then county school superintendent Robert Duvel to propose in 1977 taking the extreme step of closing several schools county wide to deal with the problem. The schools on the list spanned virtually the entirety of the

Beltway, from Reisterstown Road all the way around to Dundalk in the southeast, with one notable exclusion: the Liberty Road Corridor. County school superintendent Robert Duvel ex- plained his decision to leave off those schools from the list, saying “no single school nor cluster of schools had a declining enrollment significant enough to force the closing of one of them.”183

Dubel’s decision was telling. In many ways it was an acknowledgement of the unique state of the schools along the Liberty Road corridor. This was because despite leveling off populations elsewhere in the county, the Liberty Road corridor continued to grow rapidly in large part because of the significant influx of black families into the area. As such, it was often the case that over-crowding rather than under-enrollment was more of a concern at schools along the corridor.

By 1978, virtually every public school in the lower Liberty Road corridor had a black student population of at least 15 percent. Some, like Woodmoor Elementary in the Lochearn area, actually had a sizable black majority. Hence Dubel based his decision not to intervene in the workings of these schools on the common understanding that by the late 1970s Liberty Road’s schools,

182 Allen C. Goodman, and Janet R. Hankin, “Baltimore’s Elderly Jews,” (Center for Metropolitan Planning and Research at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD, April 1982), page 1-1.

183 Montel Trammer, “School Board lists 34 county schools to study for closing,” The Baltimore Sun (Bal- timore, MD), September 16, 1977.

92 like its housing, were especially susceptible to “destabilization” if the number of black students increased too much.

This, however, changed soon after when the school board did finally decide to enact controversial changes in schools along the corridor, like in Sudbrook Middle School. Sudbrook

Middle School was originally called Sudbrook Junior High School. The school was built in what was then an almost entirely white census tract centrally located between Pikesville and the lower

Liberty Road corridor. However as the lower Liberty corridor began to see an influx of black families in the 1970s, the school would soon find itself literally and figuratively occupying a space between white and emerging black communities. In 1977, in an effort to ease overcrowding of the majority-black Woodmoor Elementary, Dubel proposed to change Sudbrook from a junior high to a middle school, thereby allowing it to receive students from elementary grade

6.184 This seemingly innocuous plan drew the ire of parents almost immediately. The shared fear of many black and white parents of Sudbrook Junior High students was that the any relocation of the school’s majority-white students to, say nearby Pikesville Middle, coupled with the introduction of students from predominantly black Woodmoor Elementary, would, in the words of one parent, “create another segregated school”, thus further “destabilizing” the surrounding neighborhood.185 Another parent named Helen Reich was more dramatic, writing a letter The Balti- more Sun entitled “School’s Last Rites”:

184 Junior High Schools served grades 7-9 whereas Middle Schools served grades 6-8.

185 “County delays action on three middle schools,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), January 14, 1977.

93 “Sir: On January 27 I witnessed the ‘Last Rites’ for Sudbrook Junior High School, ad-

ministered unanimously by the Baltimore County School Board. Rarely have I ever seen

such a callous, calculated disregard for the wishes of a majority of parents in the com-

munity.”186

Superintendent Dubel initially decided to delay the move. In 1978, however, despite continued protests, the school board went ahead with the plan to change the school. Following the changes to Sudbrook Middle, a group of mostly white sixth graders from the Millbrook area just west of

Pikesville were transferred from Sudbrook to nearby Pikesville Middle School, while students from mostly black Woodmoor were fed into Sudbrook. By 1980, Sudbrook’s total student enrollment had fallen bellow 50 percent of total capacity, half of whom were black students. That same year, the census figures for the tract surrounding Sudbrook showed that blacks for the first time now made up a slim majority of the community, a ten fold increase from the previous decade. Sudbrook Middle School closed in 1981 leaving an empty school building between majority-white Pikesville and the now majority-black Lochearn.

Soon after Sudbrook, other school changes would further solidify the quickly emerging boundaries between the whiter surrounding suburbs and the growing black communities of Lib- erty Road. In 1981, Baltimore County introduced the “gifted” program which was an early version of the “magnet” program, meant to draw students across school boundary lines, regardless of race, to a single school. In response, then president of predominantly-black Milford Mill High

School, Andrew Dotterweich, proposed to bring one of the new “gifted programs” to Milford, creating what he hoped would be “a regional center for the brightest students in western Balti-

186 Helen Reich, “Letters to the Editor,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), February 13, 1977.

94 more county…that would draw students including white students, from neighboring high schools.”187 Despite efforts to create the program at Milford, the largely white Pikesville High

School was chosen for one of the new programs, leading “gifted students—many of them white

—who would have gone to Milford” to enroll in Pikesville instead. By 1990, Milford Mill High was over 85 percent black and growing.188 In yet another instance, the school board voted in

1985 to close the majority-black Campfield Elementary and send 100 of its students to majority- white Wellwood Elementary in Pikesville, which at the time was only at half capacity. Despite protest from some Campfield parents over the proposed closing, the actual formal appeal to keep the school open ironically came from Wellwood parents, making them the first such group in county history to appeal the closing of a school other than their own. The appeal ultimately did not hold up and the school was closed at the end of the school year 1985 and the group of black students were sent to Wellwood. With the closing of Sudbrook and now Campfield, the majority- black Lochearn community now had lost two of its schools. Those schools that remained open saw dramatic increases in black student population soon to be followed by increases in the black neighborhood population. In 1991 Dunbar Brooks, a longtime educator and school board official in Baltimore County, acknowledged this trend: “once a school becomes 35 percent black, racial change occurs swiftly and irreversibly in the school and then the neighborhood.”189 By the end of

187 Amy Goldstein, “Advice on racial balance has mostly been ignored,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), January 8, 1985.

188 U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data (CCD), "Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey", 1990-91 v.1a.

189 Larry Carson, “Residents of Randallstown look for the 'right' balance As more blacks move in, more whites move out,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), November 4, 1991.

95 the decade, Lochearn had gone from having a 200 person white majority in 1980 to a nearly

10,000 person black majority in 1990.

At the same time, the upper corridor, and specifically Randallstown, was also beginning to show signs of racial transition. In particular, occurrences at Randallstown High School between 1985 through the 1990s offer an up-close perspective on how changes in school demographics occurred and how those changes affected the image of stability in the larger community.

By 1985 the school had a sizable black population. Concurrent with this growth were charges from many white parents and students that these new black students were having trouble assimi- lating socially into the school. For example, one white parent named Charles Minor, whose daughter attended Randallstown High in 1985, described how she would “tell [him] of instances where black students exhibit disruptive behavior… I’m not just hearing this from my daughter…

I’m hearing this everywhere and I’m concerned.”190 In 1985 a group of black parents and PTA members responded to these concerns by organizing a seminar entitled “On Being a Black Parent in the Baltimore County Schools.”191 The following year the Baltimore County NAACP filed a complaint, on behalf of several black parents at the school, against several faculty members of

Randallstown High School alleging that “Randallstown High School faculty exhibit racist attitudes towards black students.”192 The allegations went on to detail how black students at the school were disproportionately targeted for administrative discipline. Soon after many white par-

190 Kim Hicks, “Seminar to focus on black parents’ role in schools,” The Randallstown News (Randall- stown, MD), February 13, 1985.

191 Kim Hicks, “A Parent Teacher discusses seminar for black parents,” Randallstown News (Randall- stown, MD), February 28, 1985.

192 Bill Gates, “At Randallstown High: County NAACP alleges school discrimination,” Randallstown News (Randallstown, MD), April 23, 1986.

96 ents began to withdraw their kids from the school. By 1990 the school became majority black for the first time since it opened in 1968. That year the schools SAT scores fell well below the state average. More white parents continued removing their kids from the school. One white father described his motivation for removing his child, saying “I just can't see a scenario where I have to have my kid in a school that's 90 percent black when the county is 11 percent black.”193 Others like Baltimore Sun reporter Kevin Thomas, would comment on the increasingly negative reputation of the school from a distance, saying “[t]he truth is, if I lived in Randallstown, I might move too … I don’t want my children growing up where one of the local high schools is 86 percent black, in a county that is 11 percent minority.”194 By 1994, the change at the school was strikingly noticeable. It had gone from majority white just five years prior to over 77 percent black.195

Then Randallstown High senior Mike Steinberg would comment on this reality, saying ”[l]ook at our ninth-grade yearbook and then look at our 12th-grade yearbook [this year], I'm amazed at how many faces are not still here.”196 Compounding this trend were many of Randallstown’s

Jewish parents who removed their children from the high school and sent them to private or parochial schools. By 1999 nearly half of the Randallstown areas Jewish students were attending

Jewish day schools as opposed to just 15 percent in the adjacent majority Jewish community of

193 Larry Carson, “Residents of Randallstown look for the 'right' balance As more blacks move in, more whites move out,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), November 4, 1991.

194 Kevin Thomas, “Dreaming of Dubuque,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), December 22, 1991.

195 U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data (CCD), "Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey", 1989-90 v.1a.

196 Lisa Goldberg, “Turning The Page: Despite a reputation that has sent many ﬂeeing, Randallstown High and Old Court Middle say they are changing for the better,” The Baltimore Jewish Times (Baltimore, MD), February 18, 1994.

97 Owings Mills.197 This pattern of change at Randallstown High was not an outlier but rather the norm. For example, nearby Old Court Middle School followed a strikingly similar pattern. For- mer teacher and principal at the school recounted her experience there during the period between

1988-1995:198

“Old Court was still predominantly Jewish [when I started teaching] in terms of its stu-

dent Jewish population. And then we just watched that shift so that by 1995 when Dr.

Berger appointed me as the principal there, it was 98 percent African American. The de-

mographics had completely changed.”

In many cases, once a school began transitioning, disinvestment from the school board in that school would follow suit, which in turn drove resegregation. A pointed example of this occurred again at Randallstown High School, over the schools magnet program. The magnet school concept was actually originally conceived to achieve school desegregation. It involved setting up a specialized curriculum in a given school (for example in the arts or medical sciences), to draw students from across school boundary lines, in hopes that schools in traditionally black areas could draw white students county wide based on their academic interests or talents. In 1992, then

Baltimore County school board superintendent Stuart Berger, proposed to open 6 magnet schools county-wide. The ensuing four years were a boom period which saw the creation of 25 magnet programs county wide, though notably there were none in the upper Liberty road corridor despite

Randallstown High School inching quickly towards resegregation. This initial wave of magnet

197 The Associated: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore, “Jewish Community Study of Greater Baltimore” (Study, Baltimore, MD, 1999), ii.

198 Cheryl Pasteur, interview by Zachary Utz, November 11, 2017.

98 schools, including the newly reopened Sudbrook Middle School, would receive a significant amount of state and federal funds to develop their programs and desegregate.

When Sudbrook did reopen in 1994 it had a majority-white student body despite being in a majority-black area. For its part, the then majority-black Randallstown High School tried in

1993 to get in on this first wave a major funding to develop its own magnet program but was turned down. By 1996, the boom years of magnet construction and funding had effectively ended amidst criticism that the schools “[sprung] up randomly, [cost] too much and [siphoned] money from neighborhood schools.”199 The following year, Randallstown High was able to finally get funding for a performing arts magnet program, though at significantly lower level of funding than the initial wave of magnets like Sudbrook and the Carver Center for Technology. The resulting program was what many students and parents viewed as a second rate program, one that was ultimately not effective in either drawing in white students or retaining them. Former Sudbrook

Middle School assistant principal Cheryl Pasteur, who later went to work at Randallstown High during this time, recounted this experience:

“When I left Sudbrook we were trying to move young people over to Randallstown be-

cause Randallstown was starting a performing arts magnet and the bulk of those children,

it was a good diverse group of young people who were interested and we really thought

we had a handle on it. But again the program wasn’t as substantive as they wanted com-

ing out of Sudbrook because they had not really put a whole lot [of funding] into it.”200

199 Mary Maushard, “Magnet programs to grow, but slower; Baltimore County schools to modify their proposal after summer review,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), January 15, 1996.

200 Cheryl Pasteur, interview by Zachary Utz, November 11, 2017.

99 The year that Randallstown High got its magnet program, 1997, the school would cross the 90 percent black threshold for the first time since it was built in 1969.201

That same year coincidentally the decades old “for-sale sign” ban (discussed in chapter one) expired in Baltimore County, prompting then LRCC executive director and founder of the recently established Randallstown branch of the NAACP, Ella White Campbell to comment

“[t]his might make people more anxious.” Campbell had actually founded the Randallstown

Branch just a few years before specifically to focus on the “the lack of progress in terms of what was happening with our students at schools” along the emerging majority-black communities along Liberty Road.202 Her concerns were validated by the fact that by the time the ban had expired many of Randallstown whites, and especially its Jews, were already gone or in the process of leaving.

Section II: “We want to be where the people are”: Jewish Flight From Randallstown in the

1990s

By the 1990s, whites were leaving Randallstown en masse for surrounding suburban areas. In commenting on this movement, Ray Moseley who had moved to the area in 1996, told me

“it was happening at tremendous speed.”203 A plurality of those leaving were Jewish. The reasons for many of the Jews who left Randallstown during this period mirrored many of the same reasons that previous generations of Jews had moved to the area in the 1950s/1960s, though in per-

201 U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data (CCD), "Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey", 1997-98 v.1a.

202 Cheryl Pasteur, interviewed by Zachary Utz, November 11, 2017.

203 Ray Moseley, interview conducted by Zachary Utz, 2017.

100 haps unexpected ways. As it would happen, the historical processes of discrimination which had brought many Jews from the city to Randallstown would in effect be turned around in order to justify their fleeing of the community in the 1990s. This would lead to a further evolution in the historically complex and ambiguous language of separation in suburban Randallstown. On the one hand many Jews would leave Randallstown in search of a new Jewish “community” elsewhere. On the other hand it cannot be overlooked that implicit within this decision to leave was a desire to separate from an African American “community” that many perceived as different from their own.

By the 1990s Randallstown’s younger adult Jewish population was steadily leaving. A

1999 report by the Associated Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore confirmed this reality with a few sobering statistics: 1) “Park Heights and Randallstown each lost about half of the

Jewish households that were there in 1985”, and 2) “[a]lmost half of Randallstown area respon- dents say they are likely to move in the next 2-3 years.”204 At the end of the 1990s, over 27 percent of the Jews in Randallstown were older than 65, making it on average one of the oldest Jew- ish communities in Baltimore.205 Young Jews simply weren’t staying in the Randallstown. Many instead opted to move to traditional Jewish enclaves like Pikesville, or in even more instances the new emerging Jewish communities in Owings Mills and Reisterstown, where the number of 65 plus demographic only comprised 4 percent of the community.206 Owings Mills in particular had

204 The Associated: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore, “Jewish Community Study of Greater Baltimore” (Study, Baltimore, MD, 1999), ii.

205 Ibid., 34.

206 Ibid., 18.

101 grown precipitously since Baltimore county had designated it a targeted growth area in the late

1970s. Between 1985 - 1999, Owings Mills Jewish population had increased a staggering 170 percent. Driving this growth was a “concentration of younger [Jewish] families” that had begun moving to the area in earnest in the early 1990s.207 By 1999, 33 percent of Jews in Owings Mills were younger than 17, the highest of any geographic area in the Baltimore area.208

Many of these younger families came to Owings Mills in search of housing stock and amenities that were newer than what was available in Randallstown. In 1979, Owings Mills was a targeted by Baltimore County planners as designated growth area. Since then, the community had grown rapidly. By 1990, despite the nationwide economic recession and a generally lousy housing market in Baltimore County, building construction starts in Owings Mills were at peak levels. Two years later, a combination of public and private funds were flowing into the community to develop the “New Town” planned community replete with a mix of shops and affordably priced housing. Summarizing the investment mode around Owings Mills at the time was Bob

Lefenfeld, vice president of the Legg Mason Realty Group in Baltimore who would proclaim in

1992, "I am bullish on Owings Mills New Town and corridor.”209 Compounding this growth were recent developments in transportation infrastructure. In 1985, the Northwest Expressway had opened connecting the beltway directly to Owings Mills boulevard which greatly increased commercial and residential development of the community.

207 Ibid., page vii.

208 Ibid., 18.

209Audrey Haar, “OWINGS MILLS DEFIES MARKET Amid housing slowdown, community prospers with midpriced homes,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), August 16, 1992.

102 Jewish institutions, like synagogues, began to follow their younger parishioners to Ow- ings Mills. In 1988 the Liberty Jewish Center had migrated from Randallstown to Pikesville, making it one of the first major Jewish community institutions to leave the area. A member of the

Randallstown Synagogue Center remembered the event, saying "When Rabbi Max [leader of the

Liberty Jewish Center] left, it didn't help. He was the first one who said, `OK, I'm going. This isn't where the Jews are.'"210 Others would follow suit. In 1994, the Beth Israel Congregation moved to Owings Mills after nearly forty years in Randallstown. In speaking of the move Rabbi

Richard Margolis, said ”[t]he bulk of our membership has moved. We're simply following Beth

Israel's members. There is a very real demand for a major congregation in that area.”211 The following year, Temple Emmanuel made plans to sell its property in Milford Mills and relocate to

Reisterstown.

All of these factors combined to create a strong incentive for many Jews in racially-transitioning Randallstown to move to the emerging communities in Owings Mills and Reisterstown during the 1990s. Richard Hecht was one such individual. Hecht was born in Baltimore City off of Greenspring Avenue in the 1950s. In 1963 his family moved to Randallstown during the boom years of Jewish in-migration to the area. He would later move into a townhouse off Wynans

Road in 1978 when he began his career teaching at a number of schools in the area including Old

Court Middle just as it opened. In 1992 Hecht moved his family to Owings Mills: “We moved to

Owings Mills in 92’ [when he was 37]. We lived right off Wynan’s Road for a while. We found

210 Lisa S. Goldberg, “It's Not The Neighborhood Anymore: Randallstown,” The Baltimore Jewish Times (Baltimore, MD), February 11, 1994.

211 Elaine Tassy, “Suburban Community in a ‘state of transition’,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), Oc- tober 9, 1994.

103 this deal on this housing development and got a good deal on a single family house as opposed to a town house.”212 He described his decision to move as being driven at least in part by a sense of upward social mobility that the rapidly developing area offered:

“I think it was about the housing. We moved into a brand new house and there weren’t

that many build in Randallstown [at the time]. In my area [off Wynan’s Road] the houses

were built in the 60’s and 70’s and we wanted something new. In fact, a lot of my neigh-

borhood moved to where I am [Owings Mills].”213

In this way, the reasons for movement to areas like Owings Mills strongly mirrored the reasons many Jews moved to Randallstown decades prior. In the words of one Jewish man who moved to the Randallstown area in 1955: “[i]t was a brick house, the price was right and the schools were good.”214

During the height of Jewish flight during the 1990s, the word “community” would become a common refrain for explaining why many were leaving Randallstown. For many Jews, it was “community” that had brought them to the northwest suburbs in the first place. A 2012 exhibit by the Jewish Museum of Maryland entitled “Jews on the Move: Baltimore and the Subur- ban Exodus, 1945-1968” contained a segment entitled “A Close-Knit Community” which cited various historic Jewish voices who had moved to the area in search of “community”. For example Jack Levin: “[w]e were accustomed to living with a similar culture and tastes.”215 This senti-

212 Richard Hecht, interview by Naima Camara (intern), 2017.

213 Ibid.

214 “Jews on the Move: Baltimore and the Suburban Exodus, 1945-1968”, Brochure from an exhibit organized by the Jewish Museum of Maryland, 2012.

215 Ibid.

104 ment was also expressed by both individual and institutions during the 1990s exodus from Ran- dallstown with many citing a perceived sense of loss of the Jewish community, or a desire to be a part of a new Jewish community, as a reason for leaving the area. For example Phyllis Bloom who had lived in Randallstown for many years but left sometime in 1995: "Randallstown is not a diversified community. The Jewish segment I want to be a part of is not here.”216 Jonathan

Kollin, executive director of the large Beth Israel congregation which had roots in Randallstown dating back to the 1950s, echoed this sentiment in 1994 after the synagogue sold his property in order to make the move to the Owings Mills area, saying “[t]here is no future in the Randall- stown community. We at Beth Israel provide a full-time congregation to the Randallstown area.

However, our congregants aren't here anymore. White flight has taken over good sense, we have to follow our group.”217 Also former Beth Israel Rabbi Rabbi Seymour Essrog who effectively sounded the death knell of the Jewish community in Randallstown: ”Randallstown Jews will hold on as long as they can. But it's always a shame to see the end of a Jewish community.”218

In the case of Randallstown, the language of building and maintaining Jewish “community” was necessarily tied to race. This had been the case historically in much of Baltimore City and especially along the Liberty Road corridor. As described in the first chapter, so many of

Randallstowns Jews had come there in the first place after leaving predominantly-Jewish city neighborhoods, for example Forest Park, which had transitioned from predominantly-Jewish to black in the 1950s. There was, in many instances, a racial undertone to this movement. For ex-

216

217 Lisa Goldberg, “It's Not The Neighborhood Anymore: Randallstown,” The Baltimore Jewish Times (Baltimore, MD), February 11, 1994.

218 Ibid.

105 ample, one Jewish homeowner from that era described their personal justification for leaving their neighborhood as part of a 2012 exhibit by the Jewish Museum of Maryland’s exhibit entitled “Jews on the Move: Baltimore and the Suburban Exodus, 1945-1968”: “[i]t’s not that you want to be part of any panic. You don’t. But when all your friends are leaving, and you’ve got little children, what are you going to do?”219 Forty years later, Jews leaving Randallstown expressed similar sentiments. For example, former Randallstown Rabbi Margolis in 1994 on his congregations decision to relocate to Owings Mills:

“I want to get away from the negative things, like the notion that this could be white

flight. Sure, that may be some of it…But there are definitely other reasons…. We want to

remain close to our present membership. . . . We want to be where the people are.”220

Rabbi Margolis’s comments allude to the complex, and often ambiguous, relationship between

“community” and exclusion. Recent scholarship has endeavored to further this connection. Mi- randa Joseph, in her book Against the Romance of Community, synthesizes this body of thought:

“Many scholars and activists observed that communities seem inevitably to be constituted

in relation to internal and external enemies and that these defining others are then elided,

excluded, or actively repressed…emancipatory movements are often (maybe inevitably)

implicated in the oppressive practices that they seek to resist, not least in the invocation

of community.”221

219 “Jews on the Move: Baltimore and the Suburban Exodus, 1945-1968”, Brochure from an exhibit organized by the Jewish Museum of Maryland, 2012.

220 Matt Ebnet, “Young families move, so does synagogue,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), August 22, 1994.

221 Miranda Joseph, Against the Romance of Community (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2002), xviii-xix, xxiv.

106 This “inevitable” conception of an exclusive community certainly hearkens to a continuity of language employed by many of the Jews who came to and later left Randallstown. Just as so many Jews had come to area in the 1950s/1960s either following or in search of “community”, many later left for the same reason. Rabbi Margolis acknowledged as much prior to relocating to

Owings Mills: “[t]he reason Jews were here at first, historically . . . was discrimination…That’s not why we're leaving though. We want to remain close to our present membership. . . . We want to be where the people are."222 In 2017 Current LRCC President Shirley Supik recounted to me a similar story of an elderly Jewish friend of hers who relocated to Pikesville during this period:

“When she finally moved, she moved to Pikesville because her son was living there, and

said ‘mom why don’t you come live with us?’ So, I don’t necessarily think that they

moved out because blacks moved in. I think they moved out because they were forming a

community of their own.”223

As evinced by this quote, the reasons for many Jews leaving Randallstown were complex and multi-dimensional. Though it also worth worth considering that the acts of leaving in order to

“[form] a community of their own” and leaving “because blacks moved in” are not mutually exclusive but rather two parts of the same whole. In a postwar-suburban landscape that was literally created upon a foundational belief that blacks and whites shouldn’t live together, it is not possible to distinguish between them.

222 Matt Ebnet, “Young families move, so does synagogue,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), August 22, 1994.

223 Shirley Supik, interviewed by Zachary Utz, 2017.

107 Section III: Disinvestment and the Randallstown UDAT

In August 1994, Ken Gelula, executive director of Comprehensive Housing Assistance

Inc., the Jewish Community Federation's housing arm, made an important comment on the nature of racial transition in Randallstown: “In terms of African-Americans, the people moving in are just as well off, if not better off, than the ones that are leaving. This is very middle-class movement.”224 Several estimates actually would actually put the Randallstown as one of the most affluent suburbs in all of Baltimore County. With its recent transition to a black majority, it was in fact arguably the most “stable” that it had ever been in terms of race and class. However despite this reality there was growing concern by the year 2000 that outside economic and commercial investment was sorely lacking, especially for a community that had the means and de- sires to be middle-class consumers. For many local residents, race was the variable explaining this lack of investment. In response to these concerns several members of the now majority-black community would take it upon themselves to revitalize the image of Randallstown from within.

As one Randallstown resident would express in 2007 "…in this community, it doesn't seem like anything is given to them. They have to fight their way through every step.”225 This would culminate in a project known as the Randallstown UDAT (Urban Design Assistance Team). The

Randallstown UDAT would largely mirror an early UDAT in another declining first tier suburbs in Baltimore County, Dundalk. This despite the fact that majority-black Randallstown has much more economic stability compared to majority-white Dundalk. Years later one of the main pro-

224 Matt Ebnet, “Young families move, so does synagogue,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), August 22, 1994.

225 Jennifer Choi, “FINALLY, A COMMUNITY CENTER: RANDALLSTOWN FACILITY TO BE LARGEST IN THE COUNTY,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), September 14, 2007.

108 ponents of the project, Ken Oliver, would recount the overall goal of the UDAT: “Randallstown needed an identity.”226 The end product of the UDAT however, would largely eschew race from that identity in favor of one more defined by class. Ultimately the project was a mixed success. It did bring some new community buildings and commerce to the area. Randallstown, however, continues to struggle to bring in and retain franchises, restaurants, and other outside capitol investment in the years following that project. It was as if suburban Randallstown, as a place so historically coded by skin color, could not be remade in a way that negated this historical reality.

Similarly, “stability” in Randallstown, as a reflection of outside capital investment in community, depended upon more than just a “stable” conception of class identity. This section will explore that dichotomy.

By the year 2000, Randallstown was a solidly middle-class black majority suburb. 21,385 persons out of a total population of 31,428 were black, or 68 percent.227 The median household income of the community was over $58,000, which was nearly $6,000 higher than the state average and $8000 higher than the county average. In fact, data available from the year 2000 confirmed that the community had consistently maintained the same level of economic status since the booming development period of the 1970s, when the community was predominantly white

(see figure 2.1 on the following page).228 Similarly, by the new millennium Randallstown’s per-

226 Kenneth Oliver, interviewed by Zachary Utz, 2017.

227 U.S. Census Bureau; “American FactFinder”; generated by Zachary Utz; using American FactFinder; ; (27 April 2018).

228 U.S. Census Bureau; “American FactFinder”; generated by Zachary Utz; using American FactFinder; ; (27 April 2018); 1980 U.S. Census Tracts and Block Numbering Areas, Baltimore, MD SMA, Income and Poverty Status, Randallstown, p. 326; 1990 U.S. Census Tracts and Block Numbering Areas, Baltimore, MD SMA, Income and Poverty Status, Randallstown, p. 637.

109 centage of families and individuals below the poverty line were both lower than the county and statewide averages. Its rate of homeownership was also higher than both with nearly 80 percent of people owning their own homes, compared to just over 70 percent statewide. Former LRCC president Dr. Ella White Campbell, who had moved to Randallstown in 1986, summarized the economic standing of Randallstown in the early 2000s, saying: “This is a diverse community with plenty of money. The people are well-educated, very active, perhaps one of the most active communities in the state. It's almost as if Randallstown is a mini-American dream.”229 Campbell would later mention in 2002 that Randallstown was the “23rd-highest [median income] in the nation for a black-majority community.”230

Many of Randallstown’s emerging black majority came to the community in search of the kinds of things that community associations like the GRCC had fought to maintain during the

1960s-1970s, for example, housing. Ken Oliver who had been a successful banker in the city before moving to Randallstown in the mid 1980s, described to me what brought him to Randall-

229 Proﬁle: Attempts by the community of Randallstown to attract big chain businesses to their city, transcript, Weekend All Things Considered (2004; Washington: NPR), Radio.

230 Andrew A. Green, “Suburb feels shortchanged on amenities ; Randallstown: Despite one of the highest median household incomes in Baltimore County, the majority-black community ﬁnds that businesses aren't keeping up with its growing wealth,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), June 30, 2002.

110 stown: “The neighborhood. Those were old homes that were very well built and they were built out of flagstone. You don’t see that anymore.”231 Others, like Ray Moseley, had moved to Ran- dallstown from the affluent suburb of Columbia, Maryland. Moseley worked in Columbia as a market manager for IBM prior to moving to Randallstown with his wife in 1996. He recounted to me what drew him to the area:

“…we were in Columbia. We had a big house and decided to downsize so we came out to

the Randallstown area in 1996….We looked at the housing…We were really just looking

for a good area. I won’t call it upscale, lets call it middle class. We were looking for a

good middle-class area with friendly people. So that was really the driving force.” 232

Both Oliver and Moseley, along with a number of other residents, would also play key roles in leading the economic and social revitalization in the community during the 2000s. For example,

Dr. Ella White Campbell, who came to Randallstown in 1986, served as both head of the LRCC and founder of the Randallstown NAACP. Campbell, along with Cheryl Pasteur, a prominent educator in the Liberty Road corridor, would serve on the steering committee of the Randallstown

Urban Design Assistance Team (UDAT). Ken Oliver was appointed the first black chairman of the Baltimore County Planning Board by Maryland Congressman Dutch Ruppersburger in the

1990s. He would later be elected to the in County Council in 2002 just before spearheading the

Randallstown UDAT.

By the early 2000’s, the glaring problem of disinvestment in Randallstown was very much on the minds of these local leaders. For example, Ella White Campbell who commented

231 Kenneth Oliver, interview by Zachary Utz, 2017.

232 Ray Moseley, interviewed by Zachary Utz, 2017.

111 “[I] always have to travel somewhere else if [I] wanted to go to visit a major department store.”

Campbell was highlighting the fact that by 2000, Owings Mills and Reisterstown, two of the more popular destinations of the many Jews who left Randallstown in the 1990s, had plenty of

“top-tier” suburban amenities. For example, by 2002, Reisterstown Road had a “Target store, two

Staples stores, a Wal-Mart, a Sam’s Club and a Home Depot.” The only big box store in Randall- stown, K-mart, had closed years prior, just as the only movie theater had closed in 1999. In comparison Owings Mills had an abundance of top-rated restaurants, the Owings Mills Town Center and two movie theaters. One Randallstown woman Dena Jackson would comment, “"There's really nothing there in Randallstown. We have plenty of drugstores and plenty of supermarkets, but as far as restaurants and novelty shops and that kind of thing, we just don't have it.”233 Despite its very stable middle-class population, Randallstown in many ways was having the same problems drawing investment as the struggling post-industrial suburbs of southeast Baltimore County like

Dundalk.

Race became for many an important indicator of why this was happening. Dunbar Brooks of the Baltimore Metropolitan Planning Council described this phenomena at the time time, saying ”[m]any times as neighborhoods go into a [racial] transition ... some businesses that were mainstays leave, and because of whatever ideas or perceptions, many times businesses, even though there is a market there, don't come back into that neighborhood.”234 Penny McCrimmon, who was running for County Council in 2002, echoed Brooks, saying “[p]eople move to Balti-

233 Andrew A. Green, “Suburb feels shortchanged on amenities ; Randallstown: Despite one of the highest median household incomes in Baltimore County, the majority-black community ﬁnds that businesses aren't keeping up with its growing wealth,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), June 30, 2002.

234 Ibid.

112 more County for a certain lifestyle, and they're really grumbling because they haven't received it.

It's got to be race."235 Similarly Henry Weisenberg, who was head of the Liberty Road Business

Association in the early 2000s, commented on the negative perception of black suburbs held by commercial real estate investors, saying “[n]ow when I talk to commercial real estate people, what I hear is, ‘It's an African-American community. It's Randallstown; it's changed’.”236 There was a precedent for what Weisenberg was describing. Prince George’s (PG) County, which had emerged in the 1980s-1990s as the “wealthiest black-majority county in the nation” was having similar problems drawing investment into its communities. In the early 1990s PG County actually became the subject of several hearings held by the Congressional House Banking Committee, who were investigating a notable lack of banking services available to the predominantly black county compared to the whiter areas surrounding it nearer to Washington D.C. The Washington

Post reported on the issue in 1993, writing:

“Prince George's has a relative lack of services and businesses that are in abundance

elsewhere in metropolitan Washington… In short, Prince George's County continues to

suffer from old stereotypes and assumptions held by many in the business community

who consider it less desirable for investment than other areas of metropolitan Washing-

ton.”237

235 Ibid.

236 Proﬁle: Attempts by the community of Randallstown to attract big chain businesses to their city, transcript, Weekend All Things Considered (2004; Washington: NPR), Radio.

237 Rudolph A Pyatt Jr., “Banks Face the Gonzalez Challenge,” The Washington Post (Washington D.C.), October 18, 1993.

113 Nearly a decade later Joseph James, the chief executive of the Prince George’s County Economic

Development Corp, echoed this sentiment in regards to similar problems Randallstown was facing since transitioning to a majority-black community: "Retailers are risk-averse. They're follow- ers, not leaders…especially when you're looking at a community that's demographically different than what they are used to.”238

By 2003, many of the communities’ local civic leaders began to take up on their own the mantle of revitalizing the image and commercial viability of Randallstown. This would eventually culminate in the Randallstown UDAT (Urban Design Assistance Team). The Randallstown

UDAT actually had its roots in an earlier project aimed at revitalizing, interestingly enough,

Dundalk. In 2000, then county executive Dutch Ruppersburger was pushing forward with senate bill 509 (SB 509). SB 509 would have given the county eminent domain powers to condemn and redevelop parts of three declining county communities: Dundalk, Essex and Randallstown. SB

509 failed to pass largely because Ruppersburger had failed to include his constituents in the planning phase of the bill. It did pave the way however for his successor James T. Smith to propose a more community sensitive approach to revitalization in the form of the Urban Design As- sistance Team (UDAT). The UDAT process was to work directly with members of the community to better understand the ways in which state level spending would actually benefit them. Dun- dalk would be the first location to get a UDAT. In 2001 a team of researchers and urban planners from the University of North Carolina went to work in the community compiling data from a protracted study of its residents, buildings, businesses, and history. The goal was to compile the

238 Andrew A. Green, “Suburb feels shortchanged on amenities ; Randallstown: Despite one of the highest median household incomes in Baltimore County, the majority-black community ﬁnds that businesses aren't keeping up with its growing wealth,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), June 30, 2002.

114 findings into a formal presentation that would include recommendations for how the community might be successfully revitalized. Two years later a similar effort would be undertaken in the

Randallstown UDAT. The Randallstown UDAT largely mirrored the Dundalk project. During a six month period in 2003, a team of landscape architects and urban planners examined the community and interviewed residents in order to better understand Randallstown’s unique identity.

To this point, the leader of the UDAT Team, University of North Carolina Landscape Architec- ture Professor and UDAT team leader Fernando Magallanes, commented on the process: ”[w]e don't have a river, we don't have a bay, we don't have these kinds of natural features. Maybe we need to think of Liberty Road as our natural feature. We've got to start thinking about some kind of identity.”239

The “kind of identity” that the final UDAT report, which was published and presented in

2005, settled on made virtually no mention of race. In the final 79-page presentation, the words

“black” and “African American” were mentioned 5 times combined, “race” wasn’t mentioned once. In a section of the report titled “Community Avoidance of Sensitive Issues” which detailed

“issues that everyone has on their minds, but uses other words to discuss them”, there we no explicit mentions of race or the history of racial transition which had so clearly defined and rede- fined Randallstown in the recent decades. In the place of any overt usage of racialized language was the previously discussed ambiguous language of “community.” “Community” appeared over

40 times in various contexts. For example, the report identified “threats” to Randallstown, name-

239 Ibid.

115 ly an “Evaporating sense of community.”240 Likewise one of the main takeaways from UDAT team members interviews with residents was a shared desire to “[c]reate a center that caters to the diverse interests of the community.”241 Though there was no explicit description of what was meant by “diverse” in this context or how that diversity had historically developed. In this way, the findings of the report echoed the kind of language expressed decades earlier of arbitrary “integration” in the community.

The final UDAT report mapped out a 10-year development plan with a litany of recommended changes to Randallstown, the most central of which was a proposed Civic Center and an expansive “Randall’s Village” which would serve as the “Heart of the Community” in the words of the UDAT report.242 In the end, the only major part of the plan to be implemented was the construction of the Randallstown Community Center. It opened in 2009 at a cost of $13 million dollars as the “largest building of its type in Baltimore County” according to Sun reporter Jen- nifer Choi.243 Upon its opening, Baltimore County Executive James Smith echoed the language of the original UDAT report, saying “I hope it becomes the heart of the community.”244 The new center however was not built facing Liberty Road, the historic and densely crowded thoroughfare which had served as the commercial center for the development of suburban Randallstown for

240 “Community Presentation, Findings and Recommendations,” Randallstown UDAT. October 27, 2003, 32.

241 Ibid., 20.

242 Ibid., 75.

243 Jennifer Choi, “FINALLY, A COMMUNITY CENTER: RANDALLSTOWN FACILITY TO BE LARGEST IN THE COUNTY,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), September 14, 2007.

244 Mary Gail Hare, “GREEN' COMMUNITY CENTER A HUB FOR LIBERTY RD.”, The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), May 21, 2009.

116 the past fifty years; the road that UDAT team leader Magallanes had called Randallstown’s “natural feature”; the road that generations both blacks and whites had traveled to settle in the community. The new “heart” of the majority African American community would be tucked back away from the Liberty Road nearly 600 feet behind another building. In this way, the future of the “community” would, in a sense, not be dependent on its past.

117 Conclusion: “a stable community”

In 2010 the Baltimore Sun posted an article by an anonymous writer describing the ongo- ing efforts to revitalize the commercial sector of Randallstown in the wake of the UDAT. Ac- cording to the writer there was some positive news. For example, a Home Depot had recently opened in the building formerly inhabited by a K-Mart. Also a new branch of the Community

College of Baltimore County (CCBC) had opened in the Liberty Road Shopping Center, now called the Liberty Center. And a Ruby Tuesday’s was scheduled to open soon which would go a long to way to address complaints by locals that there were no dining options available in the area. The article was not entirely positive though. The writer also described how “[d]espite the progress Randallstown has made over the last eight years, it still hasn't reached its potential.”245

There was still a deficit of the kinds of amenities that residents had hoped the UDAT would help bring in. The grocery store Giant had recently closed and local business leaders were still unable to find anyone to take its place. The anonymous author, who seemed to be trying to understand just why investment was still relatively slow to come in, went on to echo a common refrain about

Randallstown, one that could have been said at really any time during its fifty plus year history and which summarized both its past and present: “[i]t’s a stable community of middle-class families….”246

The irony of this statement at this particular time was that it might actually have been the most accurate characterization of “stability” in the history of the community. From its beginnings

245 Anonymous, “LIFE ON LIBERTY ROAD: OUR VIEW: RANDALLSTOWN'S COMMERCIAL CORRI- DOR HAS NEVER MATCHED THE HIGH-INCOME DEMOGRAPHICS OF NEARBY RESIDENTS; THAT'S CHANGING, BUT MORE NEEDS TO BE DONE,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), May 23, 2010.

246 Ibid.

118 in the 1950s, Randallstown has been in an almost continuous state of demographic change. The graph above displays the approximate movement of population numbers by race in the community since these numbers were available in 1970.247 Only recently have the lines more or less “stabilized”. “Stability” in this sense is defined by a black majority and a white minority, which is wholly different from the kind of “stability” that had existed for the first roughly thirty years of suburban Randallstown between 1950-1980. This, of course, is a literal flip flop from the supposedly “stable” period of “integration” in the 1970s-1980s. It’s impossible right now to surmise whether or not these lines will remain where they are now. My point here is to reiterate the opaqueness of terms like “stability” and “integration” in the suburbs. They were each used historically in Randallstown, and perhaps other suburbs, to justify exclusion. They were used to stop development, keep out blacks, keep out the poor and affordable housing. “Stable” has de-

247 1980 U.S. Census Tracts and Block Numbering Areas, Baltimore, MD SMA, Income and Poverty Sta- tus, Randallstown, p. 326; 1990 U.S. Census Tracts and Block Numbering Areas, Baltimore, MD SMA, Income and Poverty Status, Randallstown, p. 637; U.S. Census Bureau; “American FactFinder”, Randall- stown population by race 2000 and 2016(estimate) ; generated by Zachary Utz; using American FactFinder; ; (27 April 2018);

119 fined the class status of suburban Randallstown virtually through its entire history yet it has late- ly been employed to encourage development rather than discourage it. In suburbia, these terms mean nothing unless viewed through the historically contextualized lens of those who said and used them. And as this narrative has endeavored to show, those usages change depending on the context.

After finishing the research component of the UDAT in 2003, team leader Fernando Ma- gallanes wrote down some personal reflections on where he thought the focus of the project might have missed the mark. Specifically he was concerned with the way in which the project might have “validated” the history that residents wanted to tell about the community rather than asking the more difficult questions about how the historical processes of exclusion shaped Ran- dallstown over the decades. In 2018, Magallanes provided me with a word document outlining his reflections: “Was the project an inner suburban ring issue or an African American issue?

Maybe the root of the issue is why did black people move out there [to Randallstown] to begin with…How did all this start?”248 These questions speak to several larger issues that this thesis has explored, namely the intersection of race and class in suburbia. Ultimately there is no clear cut answer to Magallanes’ first question. As Baltimore County NAACP founder Garland Brown said, “the two aren’t necessarily contradictory.” In a space like the suburban Randallstown, which owes its existence to systemic practices of race and class based exclusion, the distinction between “inner suburban ring issue” and “African American issue” cannot be so clearly drawn.

Race and class were, and are inextricably entwined. In the wake of the 1968 Fair Housing Act

248 Fernando Magallanes, POST UDAT THOUGHTS 2003, provided by Magallanes to Zachary Utz via email 2018.

120 and black suburbanization in the 1980s, the historical context for how we have traditionally understood segregation and exclusion in suburbia was forever changed. Therefore we must also change how and why we discuss these issues. To this end, appropriate language is essential. This research has tried to parse through the language of historical agents to show how benign terminology like “integration”, “stability” and “community” was understood by suburbanites both black and white during a crucial time period in which each group was, in its own way, trying to define their vision of suburbia. In reality, each group’s vision and language was coded, or abstracted, albeit perhaps unwittingly, by systemic racism.

In regards to Magallanes’ second question, “why did black people move out there [to

Randallstown] to begin with…How did all this start?”, this narrative has endeavored to tell this very story. The implications of the actual story are profound. Suburbia has often been portrayed in popular culture through the lens of upward social mobility; a place where people go to shed their diverse and often turbulent pasts and assimilate into a fresh homogeneity rooted in their middle-class economic standing. It has also been presented in pop culture as a banal place, one without any connection to the vibrant histories or architecture of the early American experience.

I would suggest, however, that it is worth taking a closer look at the history of these places. For its part, suburban Randallstown does have a dynamic and fluid history, in which race, class and exclusion have figured prominently from the outset. Many of its residents expressly sought to embody Congressman Doc Long’s reality of the “American Dream of integration”; a reality where both black and white residents could co-exist “stably.” As this research has show, however, this particular version of reality was undermined by the very history of systemic racial segre-

121 gation that it claimed to have superseded. It remains to be seen if a different reality of “stable integration” is possible or, if so, what it would look like or how it would even be defined.

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Dissertations

Monroe, Jimmie Forrest. Blacks in Suburbia. Ph.D. Dissertation. (University of South Carolina, 1999).

134 Manuscripts Chang, Jeff., “We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation (New York: Picador, 2016).

Connolly, N.D.B. “A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow in Southern Florida.” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 2014).

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Durr, Kenneth. Behind the Backlash: White Working Class Politics in Baltimore 1940-1980. (The University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

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Freund, David. Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

Griffiths, Sam and Muki Haklay. "The Suburb and the City” in Suburban Urbanities: Suburbs and the Life of the High Street. Edited by Vaughan Laura, (London: UCL Press, 2015).

Harris, Richard. Unplanned Suburbs: Toronto’s American Tragedy, 1900-1950. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

Johnson, Valerie C. Black Power in the Suburbs: The Myth or Reality of African American Sub- urban Political Incorporation. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).

Joseph, Miranda. Against the Romance of Community. (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2002).

Kruse, Kevin. White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. (Princeton Uni- versity Press, 2005).

Kruse, Kevin and Thomas Sugrue ed. The New Suburban History. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

Lee, Calinda Nivel. Creating the Pleasant View: The Impact of Gender, Race, and class on African American Suburbanization, 1837–1999. Ph.D., Emory University, 2002.

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Miguez, Ricardo. ”The American Dreams: A brief historical outline”, in R. Miguez, editor,

135 American Dreams: Dialogues in U.S. Studies. (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press 2007).

Nicolaides, Becky. My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working Class Suburbs of Los An- geles 1920-1965. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2002).

Orser, W. Edward. Blockbusting in Baltimore: The Edmondson Village Story. (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2015).

Pietilla, Antero. Not in my neighborhood: how bigotry shaped a great American city. (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010).

Rose, Harold M. Black Suburbanization: access to improved quality of life or maintenance of the status quo? (Ballinger Pub. Co Cambridge, Mass, 1976).

Satter, Beryl. Family Properties: How the Struggle Over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America. (New York: MacMillan, 2009).

Stilgoe, John. Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820-1939. (New Haven, 1988).

Sugrue, Thomas J. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. (Princeton University Press, 2005).

Teaford, John. Cities and Suburbs: The Political Fragmentation of Metropolitan America. (Bal- timore, 1979).

Walker, R., 1981. “A Theory of suburbanization: Capitalism and the construction of urban space in the United States.” In M. Dear and A. Scott, editors, Urbanization and Urban Planning in Capitalist Society. New York, NY: Methuen Young Books, 383–430.

Warner Jr., Sam Bass. Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston 1870-1900 (Cam- bridge, Mass. 1962).

Whitehand, J. W. R. ”Makers of the Residential Landscape: Conflict and Change in Outer Lon- don," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 15, no. 1 (1990).

Wiese, Andrew. Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Cen- tury. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

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