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"Brown" in Baltimore: School Desegregation and the Limits of Liberalism
In the first book to present the history of Baltimore school desegregation, Howell S. Baum shows how good intentions got stuck on what Gunnar Myrdal called the American Dilemma. Immediately after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the city's liberal school board voted to desegregate and adopted a free choice policy that made integration voluntary.
Baltimore's school desegregation proceeded peacefully, without the resistance or violence that occurred elsewhere. However, few whites chose to attend school with blacks, and after a few years of modest desegregation, schools resegregated and became increasingly segregated. The school board never changed its policy. Black leaders had urged the board to adopt free choice and, despite the limited desegregation, continued to support the policy and never sued the board to do anything else.
Baum finds that American liberalism is the key to explaining how this happened. Myrdal observed that many whites believed in equality in the abstract but considered blacks inferior and treated them unequally. School officials were classical liberals who saw the world in terms of individuals, not races. They adopted a desegregation policy that explicitly ignored students' race and asserted that all students were equal in freedom to choose schools, while their policy let whites who disliked blacks avoid integration. School officials' liberal thinking hindered them from understanding or talking about the city's history of racial segregation, continuing barriers to desegregation, and realistic change strategies.
From the classroom to city hall, Baum examines how Baltimore's distinct identity as a border city between North and South shaped local conversations about the national conflict over race and equality. The city's history of wrestling with the legacy of Brown reveals Americans' preferred way of dealing with racial issues: not talking about race. This avoidance, Baum concludes, allows segregation to continue.
Baltimore's school desegregation proceeded peacefully, without the resistance or violence that occurred elsewhere. However, few whites chose to attend school with blacks, and after a few years of modest desegregation, schools resegregated and became increasingly segregated. The school board never changed its policy. Black leaders had urged the board to adopt free choice and, despite the limited desegregation, continued to support the policy and never sued the board to do anything else.
Baum finds that American liberalism is the key to explaining how this happened. Myrdal observed that many whites believed in equality in the abstract but considered blacks inferior and treated them unequally. School officials were classical liberals who saw the world in terms of individuals, not races. They adopted a desegregation policy that explicitly ignored students' race and asserted that all students were equal in freedom to choose schools, while their policy let whites who disliked blacks avoid integration. School officials' liberal thinking hindered them from understanding or talking about the city's history of racial segregation, continuing barriers to desegregation, and realistic change strategies.
From the classroom to city hall, Baum examines how Baltimore's distinct identity as a border city between North and South shaped local conversations about the national conflict over race and equality. The city's history of wrestling with the legacy of Brown reveals Americans' preferred way of dealing with racial issues: not talking about race. This avoidance, Baum concludes, allows segregation to continue.
- GenresHistory
296 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 2010
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November 9, 2022
Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) declared school segregation unconstitutional throughout the United States of America. In the wake of that landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling, millions of Americans hoped that its result would be schools where children of all races would learn and work together in peace and harmony. But in many communities across the U.S.A., that did not happen; and in Brown in Baltimore, Howell S. Baum of the University of Maryland explores why it did not happen in Maryland’s largest city.
The early passages of Brown in Baltimore offer some inspiring examples of how, even before Brown, some brave people, both Anglo and African-American, spoke out boldly for justice and fairness, as when Maryland Governor Theodore McKeldin strongly endorsed the Urban League’s call for white schools to be opened to black students: “The only question which remains is whether the School Board will act in accordance with the requirements of the law, and good standards of fairness and sound community relations, or will force court action to compel it to do what it should do voluntarily and graciously” (p. 53).
The book’s subtitle -- School Desegregation and the Limits of Liberalism -- speaks to a central theme of the book: Baum’s belief that liberalism, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, worked against desegregation efforts in Baltimore. Once the Supreme Court had promulgated Brown, the Baltimore City school board ended de jure segregation by instituting a “free choice” policy that “simply continued the district’s historic enrollment policy, with the removal of racial restrictions” (p. 72). This policy proceeded from the way Baltimore school officials “construed students’ freedom of choice, or individual liberty, in negative terms. They had in mind freedom from external restraint, rather than freedom to get or achieve anything in particular” (p. 73).
One thinks here of philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between “negative liberty” – freedom from -- and “positive liberty” – freedom to. The Baltimore school officials utilized what we might regard today as a very conservative, "negative liberty" form of liberalism – the belief that government should simply stay out of the way and let citizens choose what they want to do. It may all sound very Jeffersonian, but it didn’t end up bringing real desegregation to the school children of Baltimore.
Increasing numbers of white students and their parents either moved out to suburban Baltimore County, chose mainly white private schools, or switched repeatedly from one public school to another in attempts to find a school community that would be predominantly white. As a result, “a growing black majority made it harder for families to choose schools that were racially mixed. In addition, the fluidity of registration set in motion by free choice and compounded by white withdrawal made it difficult for parents to choose schools with any certainty about the race of their children’s classmates” (p. 93).
It also did not help that a number of education leaders espoused beliefs that were ostensibly race-neutral, but that in fact ignored the impact of centuries of racial discrimination. When board member William Stone decried the amount of time the board spent talking about race, he was verbalizing an ideology under which “all children had legitimate claims on the state for a good education, but the social conditions under which they attended school – for example, classroom racial composition – did not matter so long as they learned” (p. 111). Such thinking clearly pushed desegregation as a social goal to the margins.
As the 1950’s passed away and the 1960’s progressed, historical developments throughout the U.S.A. had their impact on desegregation efforts in Baltimore. A stronger sense of impatience took hold within some sectors of the civil-rights movement, as when a leader of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) said that Baltimore, the largest city of the border state of Maryland, “embodies all the evil attributes of the south and all of the more subtle and discriminatory patterns of the north” (p. 125). The idea of metropolitan desegregation – that is, combining the school-age population of majority-black Baltimore City with that of majority-white Baltimore County, so that “white flight” from city to suburbs would no longer enable whites to avoid attending school with blacks – was considered, but ultimately went nowhere in the face of opposition from state and county authorities.
The tragedy of Martin Luther King Jr.’s April 1968 assassination, and the rioting that followed, further complicated the picture. For Baltimore, this time is still a singularly painful moment in the city’s history; and many Baltimoreans I have spoken to – both black and white – who were alive at that time, and are old enough to remember the riots, have vivid memories of that difficult and frightening era. Baum lets the numbers speak for themselves in terms of the riot’s impact on Baltimore: by the end of the four days of rioting,
“A sixth person had been killed, and injuries had reached 600 people, including 50 policemen….5,512 people had been arrested, nearly all black, about one of every 75 black citizens. There had been 1,208 major fires, and 1,049 businesses were destroyed. Nearly 12,000 National Guard and Army troops had occupied the city – one soldier for every 75 Baltimore residents.” (p. 135)
White flight accelerated in the wake of the riots, but Baltimore school officials persisted in their hope that a policy of free choice would by itself produce a harmonious tableau of effectively integrated schools. Instead, in Baum’s formulation, “voluntary school desegregation policies like the one Baltimore officials favored contributed to white flight by keeping school makeup uncertain” (p. 182).
The book’s subtitle -- School Desegregation and the Limits of Liberalism -- refers to the contradictions that Baum sees as existing within the classical or Jeffersonian liberalism espoused by so many people in our strongly individualistic society. The integrationist policies being pursued by the federal government, and particularly by the Office of Civil Rights, ran squarely into these contradictions:
“A wide range of black and white Baltimoreans were classical liberals, who believed that school enrollment should be a matter of individual choice, free of coercion by local or national government. Many blacks who remembered legal segregation did not want anyone of any race ever again telling them where to go to school. Many whites who were anxious about blacks wanted desegregation left voluntary in the hope that they could avoid mixing. School officials of both races…embraced a laissez-faire position that removed the school system from responsibility for race relations. Some came to their position from explicit liberal principles. Some followed the tacit liberalism in American culture. All found that liberalism, besides making sense of troubling issues, conveniently served their interests” (pp. 184-85).
The story of Baltimore’s unsuccessful attempts at achieving school integration in the post-Brown era has implications today. One sees echoes of the classical liberalism that Baum cites in the way opponents of busing for purposes of integration successfully mobilized opposition to the practice in many cities by denouncing what they called “forced busing.” Today, many conservatives embrace a policy of “school choice” that involves, among other things, state funding for private religious schools, as well as the provision of money to help parents move their children out of “failing” public schools and into for-profit charter schools.
Left out of the “school choice” equation, however, is the question of what will happen in the communities served by those “failing” schools. Will those communities be left with no public schools at all? Will they be served only by religious and charter schools? Will families that do not share the religious beliefs of those who operate a particular private school have to compromise their beliefs in order to get their child a chance at a quality education? What will happen for those families who, even with a “school choice” check from the federal or state government, cannot afford to send their child to a charter school?
Such questions are troubling, and have no easy answers; and they speak to the value that Brown in Baltimore holds as an examination of some of the possible reasons why, 60 years after de jure segregation ended, de facto segregation has persisted in so many parts of the country.
The early passages of Brown in Baltimore offer some inspiring examples of how, even before Brown, some brave people, both Anglo and African-American, spoke out boldly for justice and fairness, as when Maryland Governor Theodore McKeldin strongly endorsed the Urban League’s call for white schools to be opened to black students: “The only question which remains is whether the School Board will act in accordance with the requirements of the law, and good standards of fairness and sound community relations, or will force court action to compel it to do what it should do voluntarily and graciously” (p. 53).
The book’s subtitle -- School Desegregation and the Limits of Liberalism -- speaks to a central theme of the book: Baum’s belief that liberalism, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, worked against desegregation efforts in Baltimore. Once the Supreme Court had promulgated Brown, the Baltimore City school board ended de jure segregation by instituting a “free choice” policy that “simply continued the district’s historic enrollment policy, with the removal of racial restrictions” (p. 72). This policy proceeded from the way Baltimore school officials “construed students’ freedom of choice, or individual liberty, in negative terms. They had in mind freedom from external restraint, rather than freedom to get or achieve anything in particular” (p. 73).
One thinks here of philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between “negative liberty” – freedom from -- and “positive liberty” – freedom to. The Baltimore school officials utilized what we might regard today as a very conservative, "negative liberty" form of liberalism – the belief that government should simply stay out of the way and let citizens choose what they want to do. It may all sound very Jeffersonian, but it didn’t end up bringing real desegregation to the school children of Baltimore.
Increasing numbers of white students and their parents either moved out to suburban Baltimore County, chose mainly white private schools, or switched repeatedly from one public school to another in attempts to find a school community that would be predominantly white. As a result, “a growing black majority made it harder for families to choose schools that were racially mixed. In addition, the fluidity of registration set in motion by free choice and compounded by white withdrawal made it difficult for parents to choose schools with any certainty about the race of their children’s classmates” (p. 93).
It also did not help that a number of education leaders espoused beliefs that were ostensibly race-neutral, but that in fact ignored the impact of centuries of racial discrimination. When board member William Stone decried the amount of time the board spent talking about race, he was verbalizing an ideology under which “all children had legitimate claims on the state for a good education, but the social conditions under which they attended school – for example, classroom racial composition – did not matter so long as they learned” (p. 111). Such thinking clearly pushed desegregation as a social goal to the margins.
As the 1950’s passed away and the 1960’s progressed, historical developments throughout the U.S.A. had their impact on desegregation efforts in Baltimore. A stronger sense of impatience took hold within some sectors of the civil-rights movement, as when a leader of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) said that Baltimore, the largest city of the border state of Maryland, “embodies all the evil attributes of the south and all of the more subtle and discriminatory patterns of the north” (p. 125). The idea of metropolitan desegregation – that is, combining the school-age population of majority-black Baltimore City with that of majority-white Baltimore County, so that “white flight” from city to suburbs would no longer enable whites to avoid attending school with blacks – was considered, but ultimately went nowhere in the face of opposition from state and county authorities.
The tragedy of Martin Luther King Jr.’s April 1968 assassination, and the rioting that followed, further complicated the picture. For Baltimore, this time is still a singularly painful moment in the city’s history; and many Baltimoreans I have spoken to – both black and white – who were alive at that time, and are old enough to remember the riots, have vivid memories of that difficult and frightening era. Baum lets the numbers speak for themselves in terms of the riot’s impact on Baltimore: by the end of the four days of rioting,
“A sixth person had been killed, and injuries had reached 600 people, including 50 policemen….5,512 people had been arrested, nearly all black, about one of every 75 black citizens. There had been 1,208 major fires, and 1,049 businesses were destroyed. Nearly 12,000 National Guard and Army troops had occupied the city – one soldier for every 75 Baltimore residents.” (p. 135)
White flight accelerated in the wake of the riots, but Baltimore school officials persisted in their hope that a policy of free choice would by itself produce a harmonious tableau of effectively integrated schools. Instead, in Baum’s formulation, “voluntary school desegregation policies like the one Baltimore officials favored contributed to white flight by keeping school makeup uncertain” (p. 182).
The book’s subtitle -- School Desegregation and the Limits of Liberalism -- refers to the contradictions that Baum sees as existing within the classical or Jeffersonian liberalism espoused by so many people in our strongly individualistic society. The integrationist policies being pursued by the federal government, and particularly by the Office of Civil Rights, ran squarely into these contradictions:
“A wide range of black and white Baltimoreans were classical liberals, who believed that school enrollment should be a matter of individual choice, free of coercion by local or national government. Many blacks who remembered legal segregation did not want anyone of any race ever again telling them where to go to school. Many whites who were anxious about blacks wanted desegregation left voluntary in the hope that they could avoid mixing. School officials of both races…embraced a laissez-faire position that removed the school system from responsibility for race relations. Some came to their position from explicit liberal principles. Some followed the tacit liberalism in American culture. All found that liberalism, besides making sense of troubling issues, conveniently served their interests” (pp. 184-85).
The story of Baltimore’s unsuccessful attempts at achieving school integration in the post-Brown era has implications today. One sees echoes of the classical liberalism that Baum cites in the way opponents of busing for purposes of integration successfully mobilized opposition to the practice in many cities by denouncing what they called “forced busing.” Today, many conservatives embrace a policy of “school choice” that involves, among other things, state funding for private religious schools, as well as the provision of money to help parents move their children out of “failing” public schools and into for-profit charter schools.
Left out of the “school choice” equation, however, is the question of what will happen in the communities served by those “failing” schools. Will those communities be left with no public schools at all? Will they be served only by religious and charter schools? Will families that do not share the religious beliefs of those who operate a particular private school have to compromise their beliefs in order to get their child a chance at a quality education? What will happen for those families who, even with a “school choice” check from the federal or state government, cannot afford to send their child to a charter school?
Such questions are troubling, and have no easy answers; and they speak to the value that Brown in Baltimore holds as an examination of some of the possible reasons why, 60 years after de jure segregation ended, de facto segregation has persisted in so many parts of the country.
March 18, 2016
Excellent in-depth review of how Baltimore City Public Schools "desegregated" without ever figuring out how to achieve integration. The school board, many citizens, courts, and local mores contributed to the failures and numerous attempts were unsuccessful in spite of the work done by the NAACP, prominent local figures, and federal officials who were involved in larger desegregation/integration efforts nationwide. In the conclusion, Baum writes, "Although a 1987 observer would see a preponderance of black faces, what stands out in the decades of desegregation effort is black children's invisibility in school policy." At the end of the day, African American students were failed by everyone; which is not different from what happened in practically every other American city dealing with competing educational/societal interests, post-"Brown-v-Board - I & II" (1954, 1955). The question is, will we ever figure this out?
March 12, 2015
Very informative but also very dense
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews