Black Baltimore: A New Theory of Community

by Harold A. McDougall

Describes how 'base communities' small peer groups that share similar views, circumstances, and objectives have helped neighborhoods respond to the failure of both government and the market to create conditions for a decent quality of life for all. The author also argues for the primacy of church leadership within the black community.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

334 pages, Paperback

First published April 28, 1993

Reviews

[Paul Haspel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The black community of Baltimore has been strong and cohesive since the earliest days of Maryland’s largest city. The members of that community have worked together to combat injustice and discrimination since Baltimore's founding in 1729 – fighting the horror and cruelty of slavery in antebellum times, and then the injustice and indignity of segregation in the post-Civil War years and the time before the Civil Rights Movement. In more contemporary times, the African American community in Baltimore, as in other areas across the nation, copes with continuing inequities in areas like education, housing, jobs, and the justice system, and with issues like poverty and crime; and the best possible strategies for continued forward movement may come from within rather than outside challenged communities, as Harold McDougall makes clear in Black Baltimore: A New Theory of Community.

McDougall, a professor of law at Catholic University, emphasizes not only the contemporary aspects but also the historical dimension of Baltimore’s African American community working for the recognition of equal rights and equal human dignity. In 1937, for example, black citizens of Baltimore, seeing that the national NAACP was overlooking poverty issues in its focus on discrimination, responded to the problems of slums and blight in Baltimore (and to the opportunities offered by a new U.S. Housing Act, just passed by the federal Congress) by forming a Baltimore Citizens Housing Committee (BCHC), designed to ensure that a racially integrated housing authority would look to the interests of all Baltimore’s poor.

When Baltimore Mayor Harold W. Jackson tried to mollify the BCHC by appointing a committee, but staffed the committee with people dedicated to the maintenance of a racially unjust status quo, the BCHC, not fooled one bit by Jackson’s obstructionist maneuverings, took action. “Dissatisfied, the BCHC increased its efforts to create a local housing authority under the U.S. Housing Act. Over Jackson’s opposition, the City Council of Baltimore declared the need for a public housing program. Eventually Jackson succumbed to the mounting public pressure, and on December 13, 1938, he appointed the first five commissioners to the Baltimore Housing Authority (BHA)” (p. 50).

This historical example of activism on the part of Baltimore’s African American community serves as a prelude to more contemporary activism. That activism takes place against a background of significant challenges, and McDougall pulls no punches in chronicling the problems that Baltimore’s contemporary black community faces, but he makes clear that issues like crime, poverty, unemployment, undereducation, and lack of community participation did not occur in a vacuum: “Baltimore, like many cities, has been forced to deal with the cumulative effects of previously legal practices such as segregation ordinances and restrictive covenants….Hypersegregation in the Baltimore metropolitan area can be traced directly to the [Federal Housing Administration’s] post-World War II policy of requiring racially restrictive covenants to protect the ‘property value’ of the developments it insured” (p. 101). Small wonder, then, that many members of Baltimore’s African American community “feel more oppressed by and suspicious of civilian authorities than helped by them” (p. 100).

In the face of this difficult and forbidding scenario, what is to be done? Looking mainly at four historically African American and economically challenged Baltimore communities – Harlem Park, Park Heights, Sandtown, and Upton – McDougall focuses upon community building through the formation of “base communities,” small groups of local residents who bring to neighborhood issues their first-hand understanding of their neighborhoods’ problems and potential. McDougall describes in these terms the genesis of the concept of “base communities”:

“First seen in the liberation theology movement of Latin America, base communities are important networking and empowering devices by which development – economic, political, and social – can be rooted deep in the community....Base communities can be formed by churches building peer groups within their congregations, by community-based organizers, even by social workers among their clientele.” (pp. 7-8)

McDougall’s ideas for community empowerment have an admirably common-sense, practical quality to them; and those practical and common-sense qualities come through in the testimony of many of the community activists whom McDougall cites in his book. For example, consider the words of Athena Young, a CBIP (Community Building in Partnership) member who spoke at a meeting of the Enterprise Foundation, a group set up by developer James Rouse to try to encourage community growth and revitalization.

Rouse’s status as a developer of racially and economically integrated communities is a matter of record (his planned city of Columbia, Maryland, is a good example), and his good will and benevolent intent were never in question; but Athena Young “warned that focusing on physical development alone was like building a shiny new car for the Sandtown community without providing the means to maintain it. ‘Without oil, that car won’t run, it will break down quickly. The oil is the soul and spirit of the community, brought to the project by active, continuous participation’” (p. 151). Her logic is unassailable.

McDougall’s final reflections upon the idea of "base communities" sets the concept in an international context:

Peer groups inspired by the base communities of Latin America have the potential, in all countries, of bringing the general movement for participatory democracy and community empowerment alive. Such peer groups have the potential to evolve into a loose network I call the New Community, which exists independently of public or private bureaucracies. The New Community follows a pattern of mutual and other-regarding behavior, drawing from the vernacular but refined with modern democratic and humanistic concerns. It is created and re-created every day, in small cells, by the enlightened behavior of people in their relationships with their children, their families, their fellow religious devotees, their coworkers, and their fellow citizens. (pp. 200-01).

In many ways, Black Baltimore: A New Theory of Community offers an inspiring vision; and while the Baltimore neighborhoods studied by McDougall have continued to face challenges in the decades since McDougall's book was published by Temple University Press, I still feel that there is something compelling, and hopeful, in McDougall’s suggestion that community empowerment can and must come from within the community.

[Paul Haspel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Harold McDougall's Black Baltimore is a well-written and thought-provoking study. The author, a law professor at Catholic University, offers innovative strategies for community renewal in four Baltimore neighborhoods: Upton, Park Heights, Harlem Park, and Sandtown. In a time when the norm has too often been for “experts” to come in from the outside and tell the residents of challenged urban communities what should be done in the cause of revitalization, Harold McDougall sets forth the idea of “base communities,” small groups of local residents who bring to neighborhood issues their first-hand understanding of their neighborhood's problems and potential. McDougall's penetrating look at African American life in modern Baltimore is complemented by a thorough and thoughtful look at the city's African American history, with particular emphasis on Old West Baltimore. Considerable time has passed since this book's original publication in 1993; it might be interesting to hear more about what has changed or remained the same since the book's initial publication. Still, Black Baltimore remains an excellent presentation of truly new ideas for real urban renewal.