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24 J. Affordable Hous. & Cmty. Dev. L. 205 (2015-2016)
From Ferguson to Baltimore: The Fruits of Government-Sponsored Segregation

handle is hein.journals/jrlaff24 and id is 223 raw text is: 






   From Ferguson to Baltimore: The Fruits

   of  Government-Sponsored Segregation

                        Richard  Rothstein


   In Baltimore in 1910, a black Yale law school graduate purchased a
home  in a previously all-white neighborhood. The Baltimore city govern-
ment reacted by adopting a residential segregation ordinance, restricting
African Americans  to designated blocks. Explaining the policy, Balti-
more's mayor  proclaimed, Blacks should  be quarantined  in isolated
slums in order to reduce the incidence of civil disturbance, to prevent
the spread of communicable   disease into the nearby White neighbor-
hoods, and to protect property values among the White majority.
   Thus began a century of federal, state, and local policies to quarantine
Baltimore's black population in isolated slums-policies that continue to
the present day, as federal housing subsidy policies still disproportion-
ately direct low-income black families to segregated neighborhoods and
away  from middle class suburbs.
   Whenever  young black men riot in response to police brutality or mur-
der, as they have done in Baltimore this week [April 18-May 3, 20151,
we're tempted to think we can address the problem by improving police
quality-training officers not to use excessive force, implementing com-
munity policing, encouraging police to be more sensitive, prohibiting ra-
cial profiling, and so on. These are all good, necessary, and important
things to do. But such proposals ignore the obvious reality that the pro-
tests are not really (or primarily) about policing.
   In 1968, following hundreds of similar riots nationwide, a commission
appointed by President Lyndon Johnson  concluded that [olur nation is
moving  toward  two societies, one black, one white-separate and un-
equal and  that [slegregation and poverty have created in the racial
ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Ameri-
cans. The Kerner Commission (headed by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner)
added  that [wihat white Americans have never fully understood-but
what the Negro  can never forget-is that white society is deeply impli-
cated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions main-
tain it, and white society condones it.
   In the last fifty years, the two societies have become even more un-
equal. Although a relatively small black middle class has been permitted




   Richard Rothstein (rrothstein@epi.org) is a research associate of the Economic Pol-
icy Institute. Reprinted with permission from Richard Rothstein, From Ferguson to
Baltimore: The Fruits of Government-Sponsored Segregation, Working Economics
(Economic Policy Institute blog), April 29, 2015; www.epi.org/blog.


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