Chapter 33

D’ALESANDRO AND HIS DEMOCRATS

IN POSTWAR BALTIMORE, the Democrats may not have been as sharply divided as the Republicans, but they were hardly at peace with one another. William Curran found himself competing with nonparty organizations for the loyalty of voters. The local CIO political action committee transformed itself into a campaign organization to mobilize voters in favor of a fourth term for FDR. Representatives of the labor organization showed up at the state Democratic convention, demanding that the party go on record in support of Roosevelt. Curran charged that they had no place in party business unless they could prove consistent party loyalty from the top of the ticket to the bottom: “Are you for Fallon? Are you for Tydings? You people will have to get right with the party before you come down here.”¹ Curran regarded his party organization as a bulwark against the kind of political radicalism that he saw in the CIO.

But the Democratic organization split when the alliance between Curran and district leader Jack Pollack fell apart in a petty patronage dispute over the appointment of election judges. Pollack, in an unlikely pairing, joined with the CIO-PAC in opposition to Curran. In 1946, the two bosses aligned themselves with different Democratic gubernatorial candidates. The city’s district leaders joined their colleague Pollack in his support of William Preston Lane, who won the Democratic primary, defeating Curran’s Eastern Shore candidate, J. Millard Tawes. Curran was able to carry only one of the city’s six districts for Tawes, and his candidate for state comptroller lost all six. A majority of his candidates for the General Assembly survived the Democratic primary, but once the legislature convened they could be expected to succumb to the patronage at Governor Lane’s disposal.²

Curran’s defeats in the state elections of 1946 may help to explain his shaky leadership as he approached the municipal elections of 1947. In February he called a meeting of the ward executives, party committee members, and elected officials who made up the Curran organization. The 83 politicians who gathered in the Emerson Hotel voted overwhelmingly that the organization should unify behind a single aspirant to the mayor’s office, but they could not agree on a candidate. The leading prospect was Howard Crook, the unfortunately named city comptroller who was acknowledged to be Curran’s personal choice as mayoral candidate. Congressman Thomas D’Alesandro, from Southeast Baltimore’s Little Italy, was 10 votes back in second place. Curran expressed disappointment that “the vote wasn’t more one-sided in favor of somebody” and confessed that he had no idea what could be done to avoid a wide-open primary that would fragment his own forces and Democrats in general. Less than two weeks later, a meeting of Democratic leaders not associated with Curran was also unable to unify behind a single mayoral candidate, though D’Alesandro, the only candidate to make a personal appearance, seems to have made some converts among those in attendance.³

Finally, Pollack declared his preference, beginning with a condemnation of his former ally William Curran and his mayoral candidate Howard Crook. The election of Crook, said Pollack, would make Curran the de facto mayor. “Crook is Curran,” he shouted, “and Curran is Crook.” The statement lent itself to more than one interpretation. Pollack followed up with an endorsement of Congressman D’Alesandro.⁴ In the Democratic primary, D’Alesandro won 48 percent of the vote, a near majority over his nine opponents, and then won the spirited general election by more than 24,000 votes, defeating Republican Deeley K. Nice, nephew of former Republican governor Harry Nice. Democrats won every seat in the city council.⁵

Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr., was a different kind of Democratic mayor. Unlike his Democrat predecessors, he was a committed advocate of the New Deal. He named one of his sons Franklin D. Roosevelt D’Alesandro. Unlike William Curran, he did not distance himself from labor organizations such as the CIO-PAC. Instead he made the group part of his constituency. D’Alesandro was a mayor for Baltimore’s working class, but mostly its white working class. In 1947, the city’s white working-class wards gave “Tommy” two-thirds of their votes; in the black wards, he received only 44 percent.⁶

The mayor’s election had been achieved by a “coalition of bosslets,” and they were not ready to surrender their independence to the mayor or to any other boss.⁷ Within the council, there were sharp debates about the deference to be shown to Mayor D’Alesandro’s nominations to city offices. The members were especially aroused when one among the bosslets appeared to gain ground on the others. Jack Pollack, whose support had been critical to D’Alesandro’s election, emerged as the principal beneficiary of mayoral patronage—and the chief object of attack in the council.

The appointment of the city solicitor generated especially sharp controversy. D’Alesandro first nominated a former state senator, Milton Altfeld, who had been identified in the Baltimore Sun as a Pollack crew member. Altfeld issued a statement denying that he was one of Pollack’s followers. Pollack was furious that his lieutenant had disowned him and informed the mayor that he no longer supported Altfeld’s appointment. D’Alesandro’s next choice was Edwin Harlan, a young and promising attorney. Rumors circulated that Harlan, too, was a Pollack stalwart. Altfeld seems to have been a principal source of the rumors, which were probably correct, and Harlan became unacceptable to the council. D’Alesandro next turned to assistant state’s attorney Thomas Biddison, who had no known associations with Pollack. Pollack insisted, and D’Alesandro agreed, that Harlan be appointed immediately as Biddison’s deputy.⁸

The council continued to complain about Pollack’s influence over mayoral appointments, but council members also squabbled among themselves about the allocation of city jobs among council districts. Almost everyone claimed to be shortchanged. The vacancy created by the death of a councilman created a new source of dispute. Rejecting the candidate favored by the mayor (and allegedly by Pollack), the council named a replacement not identified with Pollack or D’Alesandro—then mobilized the new voting alignment to oust the council’s clerk, a Pollack adherent, and replace him with a loyal Curranite. It was, said the Sun, “the first direct victory—and the only one in the present Council to date—for William Curran.” Almost a year later, in the spring of 1949, the remnants of the Curran organization would come together as the council’s majority coalition, united against Pollack and the mayor.⁹

PRIORITIES VS. PROBLEMS

A Democratic mayor with a solidly Democratic council might have expected gentler treatment than D’Alesandro received. A hint of the troubles that awaited him was evident in the Democratic primary of 1947, when he confronted nine opponents from his own party. Once in office, he found that the repeated formation and collapse of council coalitions limited progress on his policy initiatives. He had sketched out his priorities a few months after taking office, identifying three projects: construction of a crosstown expressway, construction of a new stadium (and, by implication, acquisition of a major league baseball team), and consolidation of the agencies concerned with the city’s harbor into a single port authority.¹⁰

The mayor’s vision of a crosstown expressway was a revival and revision of Mayor McKeldin’s highway proposal. D’Alesandro’s road suffered many cuts at the hands of the city council, but not death. As originally proposed by the mayor, the freeway would have crossed the city diagonally from northeast to southwest. One by one, council representatives from districts in the path of the road eliminated the segments that would have cut through their home territories. In the end, only a little more than a mile of highway would remain—enough to link up with a road being built by the federal government from Washington to a military base just southwest of Baltimore. The new link would give Baltimoreans easy access to the new Friendship Airport begun under Mayor McKeldin.¹¹

At first, D’Alesandro’s stadium project seemed more promising than his highway proposal. The voters had approved a $2.5 million stadium bond issue in the same election that made D’Alesandro mayor. The money was to finance the replacement of an existing city stadium built in the early 1920s and used primarily by college and high school football teams and, later, by the Baltimore Colts. The minor league Baltimore Orioles played at a nearby ballpark owned by the team, but the park burned down in 1944, and the city stadium on 33rd Street became their home field. D’Alesandro envisioned a new stadium on the same site that would increase seating capacity from about 40,000 to at least 60,000, and he wanted it to have a roof. Engineers and architects, however, estimated that a roofed ballpark would cost twice the $2.5 million approved by voters. The stadium’s neighbors objected to the crowds, the noise, the parking, and the lighting needed for night games. The city hired a team of engineers to evaluate 22 possible sites for the new arena. The 33rd Street location was their first choice, and the state courts disposed of the neighbors’ objections. Persuading voters to authorize an additional $2.5 million bond issue proved more difficult. Having approved a stadium loan in 1947, voters were unwilling to approve another in 1948, especially since the size and design of the new arena were still uncertain.¹² By 1950, after city leaders began to talk about getting a major league baseball team, the electorate was ready to approve the money for a bigger stadium. In the meantime, D’Alesandro had already been building as much stadium as he could afford with the money in hand. He would not get the roofed stadium that he wanted, but Baltimore would have the big-league park that would enable it to compete for big-league teams.

As a port city, Baltimore was already in the big leagues, but it was threatened by competition with East Coast and Gulf Coast cities and soon to face the St. Lawrence Seaway. After World War I, Baltimore had created the Port Development Commission. It issued bonds to finance loans to some of the railroads that radiated from the harbor; they used the money for construction of new piers, warehouse expansion, and development of rail access to shipping. The commission, however, shared its authority over the port with five other agencies and had undertaken only two major projects from the time of its formation in 1920 to the end of World War II.¹³

According to a special committee of the Baltimore Association of Commerce, “Large sums for new port development are being expended by our competition on the Atlantic and Gulf seaboards.” The competition relied heavily on public funds provided by state or municipal port authorities that exercised general control over harbor facilities. Unlike its rivals, Baltimore had no port authority with the power to issue bonds, levy taxes for harbor improvements, or acquire property by eminent domain.¹⁴

Railroads generally controlled the maintenance and improvement of Baltimore’s port facilities. The municipality had taken over several piers in the aftermath of the 1904 fire, but the city exercised only limited authority over the harbor. Mayor D’Alesandro appointed a committee to come up with a coherent program of port improvements, partly because “the division among the shipping people in Baltimore” made it “difficult to determine what is necessary here.” The committee, noting that the railroad companies were “definitely opposed to the construction . . . of truck terminals or other facilities which may in any way compete with existing rail owned and operated facilities,” proposed an independent study, financed by the city and the state, to estimate how much truck traffic the port handled and how much more it might attract with a program of improvements.¹⁵

Baltimore had been a railroad pioneer, but now the city’s commitment to railroads had become a drag on its economic growth. The port specialized in the bulk cargoes that railroads carried—coal, grain, potash, or gypsum; it was short on facilities for handling the kinds of shipments that trucks carried—everything from bales of textiles to machinery and shoes. At the railroad-owned piers, wharfage fees discriminated against cargoes carried by truck and, it was argued, diverted business to New York, where fees and facilities were more favorable to the trucking industry.¹⁶

The B&O freight yard on Locust Point in the early 1950s, when railroads monopolized access to the waterfront. Courtesy Maryland Historical Society

The Port Development Commission hired a New York engineering firm to conduct a comprehensive study of port operations and facilities. It recommended creation of a centralized port authority with the power to take property by eminent domain and to issue bonds to pay for harbor improvements. Nine port-related organizations and agencies picked the report apart before the mayor’s port committee could issue its conclusions. The president of the Western Maryland Railroad was ready to state his views even before receiving the report: “Baltimore has become a great port primarily because the railroads have kept a steady, lower freight rate for goods handled through Baltimore. Let the trucks with their hodge-podge rates, which can never be relied upon, take control and see what a great port that will be.”¹⁷

The harbor advisory board, one of the agencies to be phased out under the study’s recommendations, delivered another negative verdict on the study. Not long afterward, the mayor expressed reservations about the condemnation powers assigned to the proposed commission, and the influential Baltimore Association of Commerce rejected almost all of the study’s conclusions, arguing in favor of a slightly modified version of the existing Port Development Commission—one that was likely to increase private ownership of the port. Projects financed by commission loans would revert to private ownership once the borrowers paid off the debts.¹⁸

Some participants in the discussion that followed tried to preserve a measure of consensus by accepting the consultants’ advice to create a Port District Commission and leaving it to the commission to hammer out the hard decisions on the other recommendations. But members of the new Port of Baltimore Commission soon complained that they lacked the powers to upgrade the port and were too dependent on the city government for approval of their spending and development plans.¹⁹ By 1953, the commission members were discussing the authorization of yet another study, “the feasibility of a single body operating all harbor activities.” Nothing happened. Two years later, a new city business organization, the Greater Baltimore Committee (GBC), persuaded the state legislature to create an independent Maryland Port Authority with its own earmarked stream of funds from state corporate tax revenues.²⁰ The port had long been one of Maryland’s vital assets. Now it would be run by Maryland, not Baltimore. The city did not protest.

THE BALTIMORE PLAN

Baltimore’s public improvements rose up against a background of private squalor. Much of the city’s housing stock was old, deteriorating, and overcrowded. The redevelopment commission could only whittle away at the slums, and public housing could accommodate only a small fraction of their residents. A new civic organization, the Citizens Planning and Housing Association (CPHA), formed in 1941 to promote a new approach to the problem. It persuaded the city council to specify minimum standards for housing—basic plumbing, ratio of windows to floor space, square footage per occupant, and more. Fire, health, police, and public works officials were to carry out a strict enforcement program demanding that landlords bring their properties up to code. The campaign drew national attention. It was the “Baltimore Plan.” In 1947, a city housing court, the first in the country, began to hear cases generated by the plan. Two and a half years later, it had cleared 90,000 complaints. In 1949, Mayor D’Alesandro created a special office of housing and law enforcement in the city’s health department with sole responsibility for the Baltimore Plan.²¹

The plan’s new bureaucratic location was not ideal. The priorities of the health department and those of its housing office were out of joint with one another, and now that the office fell within the jurisdiction of a single city department, it had difficulty drawing together the fire and building inspectors whose expertise was essential to its work. The director of the housing office, G. Yates Cook, lobbied for creation of an independent agency to carry on the work of the Baltimore Plan. He had the support of James Rouse, real estate developer and chairman of the office’s citizen advisory board. The CPHA also backed him. But the mayor rejected the proposal for a new agency. Yates resigned early in 1953. Rouse followed, as did several other members of the advisory committee.²²

Independent status may not have made the program successful. In 1951, the housing office had targeted a 27-block section of East Baltimore for strict enforcement. Landlords complained of harassment. Instead of making needed repairs, they expelled hundreds of tenants and sold their buildings. Rents soared. A subsequent study of the Baltimore Plan estimated that the human costs of the code-enforcement campaign exceeded the benefits.²³

The Baltimore Plan was classic Baltimore—an effort to conserve the old rather than build anew—and one of its unintended consequences may have served the city’s traditional aversion to contentious public discussions of race and discrimination. Bringing slum housing up to code allowed the city’s disproportionately black population to remain in segregated neighborhoods. A more ambitious program of slum clearance would have scattered black residents and risked the nasty reactions that broke out when African Americans landed in white residential areas. Such conflicts were not inevitable. Blockbusting real estate entrepreneurs could trigger white flight from racially changing neighborhoods, leaving few white residents to stand and fight the newcomers. Edward Orser’s account of racial turnover in Baltimore’s Edmondson Village neighborhood shows how 20,000 black residents replaced 20,000 whites in a decade. One of the new African American homeowners commented on the white departure: “They were friendly, but they were prejudiced. They didn’t want to live where colored people did . . . They didn’t tell you [why they moved]; they just moved.” These white Baltimoreans, like many others, kept their prejudices to themselves. Race was a private problem, not a public issue.²⁴

To cope with such issues if they arose, the mayor proposed creation of a 20-member commission on human relations. Among the commission’s responsibilities would be the conduct of educational programs to eliminate discrimination based on race, religion, and national origin. On the day of the mayor’s announcement, Baltimore park police broke up a baseball game in Easterwood Park between an African American team and a team of sailors from a naval ship undergoing repairs at a city dry dock. Two weeks earlier, the police had intervened to end an interracial tennis match between a team from Howard University and another from a nearby military base.²⁵

Racially integrated athletic competition violated a longstanding policy of the board of recreation and parks. The board’s chairman was Robert Garrett, grandson of B&O president John Work Garrett and a respected Baltimore banker. In 1948, Garrett and his board disqualified a boys’ basketball team from competing in the city’s recreation league because two of its members were African American. The board’s action prompted a stream of protests addressed to Mayor D’Alesandro, including two letters from the formidable president of Baltimore’s NAACP branch, Lillie Mae Jackson. She complained that the “Park Board, which you have appointed, is a disgrace to the democratic way of life.”²⁶ In a letter of his own, Garrett outlined his reasons for sustaining the ban on interracial athletics: “I voted in favor of the old policy believing it wise to go slow in this difficult problem . . . In this case there is no adequate means of determining what the majority may desire. There are many thousands of persons involved in the work of the Department of Recreation and Parks and for us to put over a ruling covering a new practice would in my judgment involve an element of dictatorship.”²⁷ Garrett added that race had been only one consideration in his decision. The basketball team in question had been sponsored by a local chapter of the Progressive Citizens of America, and “that organization by general reputation is subversive as to the government of the United States and the American way of life as is shown clearly in the pamphlet covering certain Hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee.”²⁸

The mayor took issue with Garrett’s position. “As public officials,” he wrote, “our duty is to consider and decide questions that properly come before us, on the basis of merit regardless of sponsorship.” While acknowledging Garrett’s devotion to democracy, D’Alesandro dismissed his refusal to depart from established policy without a clear expression of majority opinion. Decisions “are made daily by public officials who are chosen for this very purpose, without opportunity for a referendum.”²⁹ But the mayor did not attempt to reverse the board’s ruling.

Three years later, the city council unanimously approved D’Alesandro’s proposed human relations commission. On the same day, the park board announced the integration of the city’s four golf courses. Interracial play would also be permitted at specifically designated tennis courts and baseball diamonds. But teams would have to secure a special permit from the parks department before engaging in interracial contests. Robert Garrett had resigned from the park board a year earlier.³⁰

BROKEN MACHINES

Mayor D’Alesandro’s reelection campaign began while the Port of Baltimore Commission was still being prodded into existence and shortly after creation of the mayor’s human relations commission. The city council was in a state of paralysis. The resignation of one member created a numerical tie between the council’s two factions, and they were unable to agree on a replacement. The mayor stood aloof from the council’s squabbles; he did not even bother to take a position on the four-way contest for the Democratic nomination for council president. His ticket consisted only of himself and the incumbent city comptroller, J. Neil McCardell. Ward leaders from the mayor’s own district unanimously announced their support of C. Lloyd Claypoole for the council presidency. Claypoole’s sponsor was Fourth District boss and mayoral ally Jack Pollack. If successful, Claypoole’s election would elevate Pollack even further above the city’s other bosslets and aggravate the factional tensions that had divided the city council since Thomas D’Alesandro, Pollack’s candidate, had become mayor. Two Sixth District bosslets from Southwest Baltimore—senate president George Della and municipal judge Joseph Wyatt—put forward Arthur B. Price, a former councilman, as candidate for the council presidency, and they declared war on Pollack.³¹

Virtually all of the Democratic combatants in the contest for the council presidency supported Mayor D’Alesandro for reelection, and the remnants of William Curran’s organization advanced no candidate to challenge him. D’Alesandro steadfastly refused to take part in the many brawls that churned beneath him in the Democratic Party. Neutrality enabled the mayor to deflect the enmity of the politicians struggling to check Pollack’s ambitions while being the quiet beneficiary of the Pollack machine’s vote-mobilizing power. A frustrated reform candidate for mayor argued that the apparent independence of D’Alesandro from Pollack was an election tactic designed “to lull the Democratic party into a state of security.”³²

For Democratic politicians, there was little security. Old allies became antagonists, and longstanding enemies formed partnerships. The mayor coasted to easy victory in the Democratic primary, as did his candidate for city comptroller, but two incumbent council members were defeated. The Della-Wyatt organization was the second most significant winner in the primary. It picked up a seat on the city council, and its candidate for city council president, Arthur Price, unexpectedly defeated Pollack’s candidate by just over 1,000 votes.³³

Price’s victory in the Democratic primary was followed by a more notable surprise. C. Markland Kelly, the incumbent city council president, filed with the board of elections as an independent candidate for mayor, submitting a petition signed by 2,800 registered voters (only 1,500 were required). The board rejected the petition on a technicality, but was overruled by a city court. As council president, Kelly had often been at odds with Mayor D’Alesandro. Now he launched a full-scale attack. Corruption, he said, was pervasive in the D’Alesandro administration, and his position as chairman of the city’s board of estimates, he said, gave him a ringside seat on the unsavory processes by which municipal contracts were awarded. “There is no planning,” Kelly complained, “most things are helter-skelter depending on the wishes of cheap, offensive politicians and paving contractors.” According to Kelly, D’Alesandro simply failed to understand the problems of the city because he was “lacking in education and business experience.”³⁴

The voters apparently disagreed. D’Alesandro defeated his Republican opponent by a margin of two to one, and Kelly finished a distant third. The mayor was only the most prominent victor in a Democratic sweep of the municipal election. The party’s success seemed to heal its most persistent internal divisions. Days after the election, the Curranites, who made up the council’s Third District delegation from Northeast Baltimore, declared their readiness to cooperate with the mayor. The mayor reciprocated. He supported the delegation’s senior member for a seat on the city’s planning commission. A Sixth District Curran partisan who had lost his council seat in the Democratic primary gained a place on the mayor’s staff, along with another from the First District.³⁵

The D’Alesandro administration took care to monitor hiring in city government at large. During the first year of the administration, the number of African Americans working for the city had increased by about 7 percent. The gain would have been greater had there not been an inexplicable drop in total employment for the Department of Public Works.³⁶ But even African Americans who had won city jobs were dissatisfied. Late in 1951, they were considering a strike. A walkout would be unprecedented. The city had faced strikes by workers employed by city contractors, but workers employed directly by the municipality had never walked off the job. Black employees accounted for 1,300 of the 3,300 city workers who belonged to the Municipal Chauffeurs, Helpers, and Garage Employees, Local 825—affiliated with the Teamsters Joint Council of Baltimore and the national Teamsters Union. They wanted a raise from $1.10 to $1.60 an hour. The city offered $1.18. Noting that the mayor and the director of public works had recently won annual pay increases of $5,000 apiece, the members voted overwhelmingly to go on strike. But the union called off its strike at the last minute and grudgingly accepted a city offer to increase hourly pay by 12 cents.³⁷

A year later the union resolved not to be bought off so cheaply, and Local 825 became the first public employee union in the history of the municipality to go on strike. The union’s heterogeneous membership performed services essential to the life of Baltimore. They included collectors of garbage, janitors and furnace men in the public schools, street sweepers, and workers who repaired water mains. Others operated the water filtration and sewage treatment plants. The city dog pound had no one to drive the trucks that picked up stray animals. For a time, 104 of Baltimore’s 174 schools had to send their pupils home because it was January and their buildings lacked heat. Uncollected garbage accumulated at the rate of 1,000 tons a day.³⁸ While the strike threatened essential city services, it also challenged Mayor D’Alesandro’s status as a firm friend of labor. He sought to secure his political reputation by characterizing Local 825’s job action not as a strike against an employer but as a strike against the public. “Even the most ardent friends of labor,” he said, “recognize that the strike is not an appropriate weapon to be used by labor against the public.” It was an attempt to “club the public into submission.” If Baltimoreans would “stand firm and endure whatever temporary inconveniences may be involved, then these tactics will not succeed and the public interest will prevail.”³⁹

The union may have exposed the weakness of its position by the progressive reduction of its demands. It retreated from its insistence on an hourly raise of 50 cents to propose a 10 percent increase, then 9 percent. The mayor and board of estimates rejected all these demands because, they said, there was no money in the 1953 budget to pay for them. The union proposed that the administration take advantage of a city charter provision authorizing “emergency” borrowing when “the health, safety and sanitary condition of the city” were threatened. The mayor responded that borrowing money would increase the cost of raising laborers’ incomes by adding interest payments to the wage increase. The city solicitor pointed out that the strike did not meet the judicial definition of an emergency because it “was not sudden, unexpected and unforeseen.” The mayor offered the possibility of a cost of living increase in 1954 and “fringe benefits,” such as an increase in the pay differential for night work from 5 to 10 cents an hour.

The union rejected the proposal. On January 14, the board of estimates unanimously voted to withdraw the city’s recognition of the union. The mayor announced that men who returned to work would receive the package of fringe benefits previously offered. Those who failed to show up would be fired. Two days later, almost all of the workers were back on the job.⁴⁰

D’Alesandro, a self-described friend of unions, had won a local reputation for his effectiveness in dealing with labor. About a year before he faced down Local 825, the mayor had gotten most of the credit for preventing a walkout by transit workers. Not long afterward, an “appreciation dinner” honored D’Alesandro for his prowess as a “skilled labor negotiator.” It drew 800 guests. If any union officials attended, their presence escaped the notice of the local press. When transit workers later threatened another strike, the mayor was not on hand to dissuade them. For over three weeks he had been hospitalized with a respiratory infection and high blood pressure. His physician attributed his condition to “overwork” and agreed to discharge him only if he would immediately embark on a Caribbean cruise that would take him out of the city for another two weeks.⁴¹ The mayor would also remain on the sidelines in what may have been Baltimore’s most challenging case of conflict resolution.

RACE AND RETICENCE

I heard about the US Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education while listening to the car radio from the backseat of my father’s ’49 Studebaker. I had just turned 11 years old and was about to finish sixth grade at a legally segregated, all-white elementary school. At the time, I thought that the Court’s decision would take effect almost immediately. It was, after all, Supreme. In fact, the justices would hold the Brown case over for a year so that they could hear argument about implementation of their decision. The Baltimore Board of School Commissioners, however, acted more quickly than the Court. On June 3, 1954—just 17 days after the Court announced its decision—the school board voted unanimously to desegregate the city’s schools when they reopened in September. The meeting was the first at which local department store executive Walter Sondheim served as board president. (His predecessor, Roszel Thomsen, was being sworn in as a federal judge on the same day.) The school commissioners’ decision took up just a minute and a half of their meeting, and there was no public discussion.⁴² My expectations about the speed of the integration process turned out to be roughly accurate. In September, I would be attending a racially desegregated junior high school named after Robert E. Lee.

Under the freedom-of-choice plan approved by the school board, the number of black students attending formerly white schools was small. In 1954, only about 1 percent of the city’s black secondary school students attended junior or senior high schools previously reserved for whites. But they were concentrated in a relatively small number of schools. Several black children started with me at Robert E. Lee. We never talked about race. Neither did the teachers. In fact, no one discussed racial desegregation with the students.

The city at large was almost as quiet on this subject. It was so silent that one segregationist expressed his puzzlement at the absence of debate in a letter to the Sun. “Somewhere in this town of ours,” he wrote, “there must be others with the urge to voice the opinion.”⁴³ For four and a half months, however, Baltimore did nothing but congratulate itself, quietly. Such resistance as there was broke into the open at the beginning of the new school year. Then, in working-class Pigtown, about 30 white women picketed the neighborhood elementary school to protest its integration. A much larger crowd—mostly students—gathered at Southern High School, not far from the waterfront. Fistfights broke out, and there were several arrests. But the protests lasted for only three days and affected only about 3 percent of the school population. In a statement that would later be echoed by public officials in the deeper South to dismiss integrationists, Southern’s principal blamed the segregationist disturbances on “agitators” who had spread false rumors about conditions at his school. Nineteen civic and religious organizations announced their support for the school board’s decision to desegregate voluntarily. A superior court judge threw out a suit challenging desegregation.⁴⁴ The city’s police commissioner delivered a televised statement in which he warned that the picketing of schools might constitute a misdemeanor under a state law prohibiting disruption of classes and that inciting children to boycott their classes was a crime.⁴⁵

Baltimore, as Robert Crain pointed out, stood apart from other cities facing school integration. It had “no demonstrations of importance and hardly any public statements that suggested conflict.”⁴⁶ The Maryland Petition Committee voiced opposition to school integration, but most of its supporters were outside the city. Its most prominent adherent in Baltimore was attorney George Washington Williams. According to a local Urban League official, Williams’s racist rants actually “did a great deal to help our cause.”⁴⁷

The protests evaporated, and for the time being the debate about school integration in Baltimore was over. Prolonged discussion would have suggested uncertainty and encouraged resistance. Saying as little as possible was the conscious policy of the superintendent of schools. According to a subsequent review of school integration, sponsored by city and state human relations commissions, the superintendent “and his administrative staff, backed by the Board of School Commissioners, believed firmly that the less said in advance about integration the better, since talking about it would focus attention on presumed problems and create the impression that difficulties were anticipated.” In a memorandum from headquarters, school staff members were instructed to carry out desegregation “by ‘doing what comes naturally,’ so that children would look upon it as a natural and normal development and hence nothing over which to become excited or disturbed.”⁴⁸

The silence that I encountered at Robert E. Lee was not just one school’s response to integration. It was school system policy. Its aim was not just desegregation but conflict avoidance. The school board’s early and abrupt compliance with the Brown decision was a preemptive strike designed to minimize political contention about race, and its short-term effect was to foreclose most public discussion of desegregation.⁴⁹

The decision, however, may have been less precipitous than it seemed. Baltimore had been moving quietly toward integration for years. In 1952, Ford’s Theater dropped its whites-only admission policy; most downtown department stores, which had discouraged if not excluded black customers, agreed to serve them—except in women’s wear. In 1953, the Baltimore Fire Department hired its first black firefighters. Not long before the opening of schools in 1954, Baltimore’s public housing agency dropped its segregation policy. Almost six months before the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Brown, a Sun reporter had asked Mayor D’Alesandro how the city might respond to court-ordered desegregation. D’Alesandro did not hedge. If the verdict was for desegregation, “it will be my duty and the responsibility of the Board of School Commissioners to carry out the mandate of the Supreme Court.”⁵⁰

The school system had been unobtrusively preparing for integration since the 1940s. In 1947, for example, school staff meetings were integrated. Integration of the citywide PTA council followed. Two years before the Brown decision, 16 black boys were admitted to a demanding college preparatory curriculum—the “A course”—at the all-male Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, one of the city’s elite high schools. The local Urban League had insisted that nothing equivalent to the program could be created at any of Baltimore’s black high schools. Thurgood Marshall argued before the school board that the desegregation of Poly’s A course was required by law. There was talk of litigation, but none was needed. During the summer following the Brown decision, adult education classes were desegregated. The Baltimore Division of Colored Schools was abolished, and the administrator who headed it became assistant superintendent of the entire system. With the exception of the decision to admit black students to Poly, none of these preparatory steps had caused comment. While the Supreme Court was still deliberating about the Brown cases, Baltimore’s school superintendent visited the headquarters of the city’s NAACP branch to discuss desegregation plans with the organization’s leaders.⁵¹ Baltimore’s quiet approach to integration had begun years before the Brown decision. It was settled policy.

Keeping quiet was not the same as doing nothing. The city’s leaders had to make significant adjustments to minimize public debate about race in Baltimore. Integration of the schools may have been insignificant at first, but by 1957, 26 percent of the city’s African American pupils were attending school with whites.⁵²

Baltimore had to work hard to restrict the politicization of race. The acquiescence of Baltimoreans in general could not be taken for granted. Thousands of white southerners had migrated to the city during World War II to work in defense plants,⁵³ and many native Baltimoreans shared southern attitudes about race and segregation. The city, after all, had named one of its public schools after Robert E. Lee. For the most part, however, Baltimoreans made little or no trouble for their leaders. The muffling of racial conflict was not just a matter of elite convenience; it was a widespread political convention.

TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS

School board president Walter Sondheim told Mayor D’Alesandro about the desegregation decision only after the board had voted. Keeping the decision out of the hands of local politicians was an essential element of the board’s low-profile approach to integration. It was also consistent with the board’s conviction that its responsibility for the schools was “a cherished, sacred, and separate-from-politics duty.”⁵⁴ The point, in short, was to prevent politicians from making an issue of school desegregation. One of them tried. A city councilman from Northwest Baltimore’s Fifth District introduced a resolution asking that the school board retain racially separate schools as required by municipal ordinance. He had trouble getting anyone to second the measure, and when he asked for unanimous consent to bring his resolution to the floor immediately, no one joined him. His bill was eventually defeated.⁵⁵

Important local policies were being made outside the reach of party politicians. The Baltimore Plan, like school desegregation, had emerged outside the realm of the bosslets. It began as an initiative of the CPHA, whose leaders “designed a precise plan for implementing and coordinating the different enforcement procedures and services needed” to prevent or reverse urban decay; the CPHA promoted the plan and sold it to Mayor D’Alesandro, who directed city agencies to cooperate in enforcement program. It was overseen by a citizens’ advisory board that included several leaders of the CPHA.⁵⁶

The CPHA was regarded with some suspicion by the Democratic regulars at city hall, and the organization soon clashed with the mayor over his appointments to the zoning appeals board. By one account, the mayor actively promoted this dispute to demonstrate to party loyalists that he had not gone over to the civic do-gooders.⁵⁷ The CPHA and the party politicians operated in different arenas. While the housing association launched programs to rescue neighborhoods from decay, the city’s Democratic politicians fought a measure that would have consolidated Baltimore’s courts and diminished the supply of clerkships available for distribution as patronage.⁵⁸

The games played by party politicians seemed increasingly marginal to the city’s existence. While the CPHA worked on the city’s residential neighborhoods, the congregation of business firms that formed the Greater Baltimore Committee saw to the city’s commerce and its downtown. After persuading the General Assembly to create the Maryland Port Authority in 1953, the GBC returned to Annapolis in 1955 to win legislative approval for a civic center authority with the power to issue bonds to finance a facility that would accommodate indoor sports, concerts, theatrical productions, and conventions. Originally, the authority was to operate independently, without relying on the city’s credit. But financial advisers doubted that the authority could raise sufficient funds on its own. The civic center authority requested city financing; the board of estimates agreed to provide a home for the authority within the municipal bureaucracy. Its $6 million bond issue won the required voter approval. The authority considered several different sites for the civic center, including one in Druid Hill Park, where the building could rise on land donated by the city. But critics attacked the loss of valuable park land. The influential Baltimore Commission on Governmental Efficiency and Economy noted that the civic center “could offer a dramatic implementation of the City’s developing plans to revitalize downtown Baltimore.” Downtown land was expensive, but the commission uncharacteristically endorsed the additional cost with the expectation that it would yield more revenue than any of the other sites proposed.⁵⁹

The GBC also formed a subcommittee, headed by developer James Rouse, to address the larger problem of urban deterioration. Its report, issued in 1955, noted that the city’s loss of population and purchasing power meant a “loss of markets to the business enterprises in the central city.” The future of city government looked no brighter. Decaying neighborhoods inhabited by needy residents would increase the cost of city services while property assessments and tax revenues diminished. Responsibility for reversing the city’s physical decline, wrote the subcommittee, was divided among several city agencies. It recommended a thorough study “to determine what must be done to develop a program in scale with the problems the city faces.”⁶⁰

About two months later, the city’s board of estimates approved $35,000 for the proposed study. A committee of six outside experts, headed by the director of the Institute of Urban Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, submitted its report in November 1956. It called for a $900 million urban renewal program. Mayor D’Alesandro announced that he would immediately take steps to carry out one of the committee’s recommendations. He got city council approval for an urban renewal superagency that would combine the functions of the redevelopment commission, the code enforcement office responsible for the Baltimore Plan, and the housing authority. He also designated Baltimore’s first urban renewal area—Harlem Park—where the new Baltimore Urban Renewal and Housing Agency (BURHA) would begin work on its $900 million magnum opus.⁶¹ Walter Sondheim would serve as chairman of the new agency’s citizen advisory commission.

Baltimore’s urban renewal effort moved into new territory. Originally, the federal renewal program was tailored to upgrade or replace housing in slum neighborhoods, but the Housing Act of 1954 made commercial areas eligible for federal subsidies. Mayor D’Alesandro designated the central business district as a renewal zone. Baltimore was the first city in the country to take such action. But the GBC, not city government, would oversee planning for downtown renewal. A new GBC Planning Council would hire its own planner and, together with an organization of downtown retailers, cover the costs of designing a downtown renaissance. Privatization, according to the Sun, would enable the business community to avoid making “its plans in a goldfish bowl, subject to the vagaries of public opinion.” If renewal schemes had to be “watered down to meet all objections, there would be little to inspire the private developer to take a plunge.”⁶²

The GBC took the plunge when it announced plans for the Charles Center Project. This would include eight office buildings, an apartment complex, a hotel, a theater, a parking garage, and shops. It would link the department store and retail district on the downtown’s west side to the financial district on the east. The new civic center would occupy a site just to the south. Charles Center would not rely on federal funds, at least at first, and the city would have to cover only about $20 to 25 million of its estimated $180 million cost. The rest would come from private developers.⁶³

The city provided something even more essential than its financial investment: the power of eminent domain. Land for Charles Center had to be acquired from more than 200 property owners, some of whom were understandably determined to hold on to their parcels of real estate at the very heart of the city.⁶⁴

In a 1956 speech before the GBC, Mayor D’Alesandro declared, not for the first time, his support for the renewal program outlined in the committee’s report. He warmly endorsed its observation that the mayor’s office must serve as “the essential center of leadership in this undertaking.” But he had been something less than central in the early stages of Baltimore’s urban renewal effort, which was dominated by local business leaders. Although he could expect to exercise more influence in the clearance and rehabilitation of deteriorating residential neighborhoods like Harlem Park, downtown renewal would proceed largely under the auspices of downtown business. The business district’s chief planner, David A. Wallace, acknowledged the leadership of Mayor D’Alesandro and the facilitating role of Baltimore’s consolidated urban renewal machinery. But the planning council that he led was “a wholly owned subsidiary of the Greater Baltimore Committee” and operated under a contract with the Committee for Downtown, another organization of local business leaders. The contract was signed in the presence of the mayor, but he was not a party to it. City government had no representation on the planning council and covered none of its costs.⁶⁵

Charles Center Courtesy Maryland Historical Society, Item B95

D’Alesandro followed up his uncertain assertion of leadership with a characteristic Baltimore lament: “Why do we always seem so content with things as they are? Why do we never go quite far enough to round out an idea with the drive and the promotion essential to compete with other large urban centers?” “During the last several months,” he added, “I have been prompted to make some pretty bad comparisons between Baltimore and some other cities.”⁶⁶

The city’s downtown redevelopment effort did compare favorably with those of other cities. Theodore McKeldin, who would succeed D’Alesandro, expanded on the Charles Center initiative while the project was still under construction. He urged extension of the downtown renewal effort to the Inner Harbor, with its rotting piers, empty warehouses, and derelict Chesapeake Bay steamers. Rehabilitation of the city’s waterfront added 240 acres to Baltimore’s downtown revival program. A private, nonprofit corporation—Charles Center–Inner Harbor Management Corporation—would oversee the planning and execution of the more ambitious enterprise under the general direction of the city’s urban renewal and housing administration.⁶⁷