TURNING POINT
AS BALTIMORE GAINED NATIONAL VISIBILITY, it lost jobs and population. In 1977, Mayor Schaefer appointed Johns Hopkins professor Abel Wolman to head the newly created Task Force on Population Migration. Its report found that residents were leaving the city at an accelerating pace. In the 1960s, Baltimore lost population at an average rate of about 3,000 a year. In the 1970s, the annual exodus averaged 11,000 to 12,000. On paper, at least, the city had lost no jobs. From the mid-1960s to mid-’70s, the number had remained steady at over 400,000. But by the mid-’70s, Baltimore City residents held only about half of those jobs. The rest were filled by commuters from the suburbs, largely because they had training or skills that city residents lacked.1
The jobs for which many Baltimoreans could qualify were disappearing. General Motors and Bethlehem Steel, two of the metropolitan area’s biggest industrial employers, eliminated 12,000 jobs between 1978 and 1982.2 Mayor Schaefer’s urban renaissance coincided with Baltimore’s decline.
Like other American cities, Baltimore was undergoing deindustrialization. But even as the Schaefer administration moved the city toward a new, tourist-based economy, it also struggled to save industrial jobs. Its highway plans, after all, had taken account of the needs of manufacturing firms. Schaefer’s people also took more direct steps to prevent the decline in industrial employment. The city’s economic trajectory could be traced in the fortunes of Bethlehem Steel’s Key Highway Shipyard. Until the 1980s, the ship repair facility reliably employed 1,000 workers, but then the workforce declined to 400, and at the end of 1982, Bethlehem Steel closed the yard and put it up for sale. The Schaefer administration was committed to the site’s continued use as a shipyard. Bernard Berkowitz led the city’s efforts in that direction. He was president of the quasi-public Baltimore Economic Development Corporation (BEDCO) and formerly the mayor’s development coordinator. BEDCO offered to arrange financing to potential buyers who would reopen the yard as a ship repair facility. The city’s endeavor had the support of the Council of Peninsula Organizations, a coalition of Locust Point community associations originally formed to oppose the city’s plans for Harborplace. Timothy Murphy, one of the area’s city council representatives, also endorsed the plan to get a new owner for the shipyard on Key Highway.3
In 1984, the yard was purchased by a Baltimore real estate developer, Richard Swirnow, in conjunction with a local bank, Fairfax Savings Association. BEDCO encouraged the new owners to use the site for a “marine industrial park.” The city’s development corporation identified potential clients for the ship repair facility and referred them to Swirnow and Fairfax, but the new owners apparently did not follow up on these leads. Berkowitz offered to meet with some of the prospects himself. Only two months after the purchase of the yard, Berkowitz “was informed that the owners had concluded that marine industrial use was not feasible.” Mayor Schaefer had become deeply suspicious of Swirnow. “I think he saw it as an opportunity to buy waterfront land,” said the mayor, “and I don’t think he was ever very serious about trying to reopen it as a shipyard.”4
Swirnow and his partner continued to assure the mayor that they were serious about reviving the shipyard. “To the best of my knowledge,” wrote Swirnow, “I have done everything within my power to comply with all your wishes.” But his efforts, he claimed, had run up against economic conditions that doomed the yard. Swirnow and the president of Fairfax wrote repeatedly to Schaefer to reaffirm their commitment to his vision. The mayor did not respond. The partners had already started to sell off the yard’s equipment. Three years later, Swirnow unveiled plans for a marina, a yacht club, and a cluster of high-rise condominiums with spectacular views of the harbor and the city skyline. The Council of Peninsula Organizations announced its opposition. But the city had already given preliminary approval to the plan.5
Baltimore seemed destined to become a city of tourism, recreation, and entertainment, struggling to attract residents of middle-class status or above. Even when its political establishment was bent on preserving the working-class city of factories, mills, and shipyards, the town drifted in the direction set by Harborplace and its environs. What Swirnow was trying to accomplish on the south side of the Inner Harbor roughly matched what Schaefer was attempting on the north. It was all part of the Baltimore renaissance.
“SHAKY” CHALLENGE
In 1983, a credible black candidate challenged Mayor Schaefer’s bid for a fourth term. William H. (“Billy”) Murphy, Jr., was a circuit court judge. His great-grandfather founded the Baltimore Afro-American in 1892, and the paper was still in the family, one of the most prominent black dynasties of West Baltimore. Murphy attacked the mayor for giving too much attention to building projects for tourists and too little to the people of his city, especially its low-income black people. He emphasized the importance of the city’s public schools in improving African American lives. Julian Bond, Jesse Jackson, and Atlanta’s first black mayor, Maynard Jackson, visited Baltimore to promote Murphy’s candidacy. As in previous elections, Schaefer was “Shaky” and anxious about defeat.6
He may have had reason for the jitters. In November 1980, Baltimore’s African American leaders had convened at a westside banquet hall to create a new coalition, the Committee on Political Equality (COPE) ’83. Its goal was to win control of the city at the next municipal election. Mayor Richard Hatcher of Gary, Indiana, was the keynote speaker. Congressman Parren Mitchell and some of the city’s most prominent black pastors rounded out the program. A fact sheet distributed to the guests noted that African Americans made up about 60 percent of Baltimore’s population but held less than a third of the seats in the city council and less than a fourth of the judgeships on the Supreme Bench. They were similarly scarce on city boards and commissions and in executive-level jobs in the city bureaucracy. In 1970, Baltimore had elected Milton B. Allen as state’s attorney, the first elected black prosecutor in the country. But a white candidate sponsored by Jack Pollack defeated him for reelection in 1974 because only 24 percent of Baltimore’s African American voters showed up at the polls. There were signs of recovery, however. In the judicial election just a few weeks before the banquet, a black candidate, Judge Robert Bell, finished first in a field of six candidates, and Billy Murphy came in third. About 55 percent of the city’s registered voters were African American, but they had to show up on election day if COPE ’83 was to realize its ambitions.7
In the months before the banquet, a committee of black political leaders had drawn a detailed program and timetable for the election of 1983. It set a fundraising goal of $500,000 to support voter registration and mobilization efforts as well as candidates’ campaigns. An executive committee would oversee the program and identify candidates worthy of support.8
The organization showed its strength in 1982, when its support helped a young lawyer, Kurt Schmoke, win election as state’s attorney, defeating the white incumbent who had beaten Milton Allen eight years earlier. But COPE’s campaign fell behind its timetable. More than a year after its inaugural banquet, the group’s leader, Samuel T. Daniels, conceded that the organization had raised only $72,000 of its planned half-million-dollar war chest. Daniels was a longtime civil rights crusader and political leader. Beginning in 1958, he had worked to wrest control of the Fourth District from Pollack. He had been chairman of the Community Relations Commission and a member of the school board, and for 20 years was executive director of the Black Council for Equal Business Opportunity. In May 1983, five months before the primary election, Daniels announced that he was supporting Mayor Schaefer’s reelection.9 A majority of Baltimore’s black electorate went along. In the Democratic primary, the voters gave the mayor his fourth term by his biggest majority so far. In the general election, he won 90 percent of the votes. A local community organizer suggested that Billy Murphy may have made a mistake by bringing in civil rights celebrities such as Jesse Jackson and Julian Bond to campaign for him. “Baltimore is a parochial town,” he said. “If anything, outsiders might have hurt him more than help him.”10
But an Afro-American columnist condemned COPE: “The old leadership faked out the masses in the black community by toying with [the] idea of COPE ’83 which was supposed to organize the black community for taking citywide elective office. When confronted with their fear of the white political establishment this old line leadership backed the mayor with a servility that was both embarrassing and revealing.”11
RENAISSANCE MEN
Baltimore voters had given the mayor’s urban renaissance a vote of confidence, but some had misgivings. Schaefer’s campaign to restore the economy of his drab metropolis seemed out of joint with the Daily Record’s claim that Schaefer “fit in well with Baltimore’s traditional style.” Schaefer’s style could be dictatorial, impatient, and secretive, and he had engineered an unprecedented and decidedly un-Baltimorish concentration of bureaucratic authority.12
Financing Baltimore’s renaissance had been a problem for Schaefer. He might prod the slow-moving council to get a bond issue onto the ballot and then persuade the voters to go along. But the process was time-consuming, and there was no guarantee that the outcome would be positive. The city’s first attempt at winning voter approval for Inner Harbor development had failed in 1964.13 Federal grants for city projects were similarly encumbered by lengthy application processes and regulations.
At the end of 1976, the mayor created a bureaucratic mechanism designed to circumvent these hindrances to urban rejuvenation by creating a “corporate” government. At its center stood the “trustees”—finance director Charles Benton and treasury manager Lawrence Daley. Since they were already city employees, they did not need council approval to assume their new duties. The board of estimates granted them authority to oversee city loans to builders, developers, or quasi-public corporations created by the city itself. By 1980, the trustees controlled a “bank,” or loan fund, of $100 million largely outside the purview of the city council and beyond the reach of the city charter. The money had originally come from federal grants, proceeds of bond issues approved by voters, and funds from the capital budget. The trustees initially drew on these funds to make loans to developers and contractors, most of which were earmarked for specific projects approved by the council, the board of estimates, or the federal government. Once the loans were repaid, however, the funds fed an accumulation of “clean” money that the trustees and mayor could use with few restrictions, needing only the approval of the board of estimates.14
The board did not keep the trustees on a short leash, and at times the dynamic duo ran wild. For example, the trustees withdrew $2.75 million from a federal community development block grant they were supposed to use as a loan to cover construction of a shopping center in Walbrook, a predominantly African American neighborhood. The trustees invested the money instead. Their financial acumen yielded a $209,000 return. But they had violated a federal regulation that prohibited withdrawal of community development funds more than three days before they were needed for their intended purposes. The trustees were obliged to surrender their investment earnings to the federal government, along with $786,000—the unspent balance of the funds for the shopping center.15
Fred Durr, a Johns Hopkins undergraduate writing his senior thesis, conducted the first comprehensive investigation of what he called the “corporate branch” of city government. He presented his findings to a city council committee in the summer of 1979 and later rewrote his thesis as a report to the council’s Policy and Planning Committee, while serving as an intern to Councilman Thomas J. Waxter. One of the pivotal agencies of the “corporate branch” was BEDCO, created by Arthur Held, a former executive of the Rouse Company and a member of the Greater Baltimore Committee. On Held’s recommendation, the city dissolved its Economic Development Commission and the Baltimore Industrial Development Corporation. In their place, the city incorporated BEDCO to manage Baltimore’s economic development efforts as a city contractor. Contracts were approved not by the city council but by the board of estimates, where the mayor was in control.16
Durr’s report raised worries about the accountability of city government’s corporate extensions: “As the corporate branch gains strength, the City Council grows weaker . . . As more and more money is transferred to corporations outside the Council’s control, there is less and less public accountability. Through the corporate structure, city government is short-circuiting various checks and balances established by the City Charter.”17
Baltimore Sun reporter C. Fraser Smith used Durr’s thesis as the starting point for an eight-part series in which Durr’s “corporate branch” became Mayor Schaefer’s “shadow government.” “In the name of Baltimore’s renaissance,” wrote Smith, “a parallel—or ‘shadow’—government has been formed, a kind of corporate Baltimore.” An armada of 25 quasi-public corporations conducted municipal business outside the framework of the municipality and beyond the bounds of its charter. The National Aquarium, for example, operated as the Baltimore Aquarium, Inc., with an all-volunteer board. Its independent status placed it outside civil service regulations, which, it was claimed, would have impaired its ability to assemble the expertise necessary to run the facility.
Some problems required such prompt action that they could not wait for the council to pass an ordinance. The city urgently needed to find a place to dump its garbage. A landfill site favored by the Schaefer administration, near the Bayview hospital complex, was ruled out of bounds when the General Assembly, prompted by some East Baltimore delegates, made it illegal to locate a landfill within half a mile of a hospital. The city then used a $2.3 million bond issue for industrial development to purchase a 143-acre tract for a landfill. BEDCO was the vehicle for the transaction. The city’s “trustees” lent the money to the corporation, which then bought the land. But 98 acres of the tract were in Anne Arundel County, which prohibited their use as a landfill. Normally, the purchase would have been part of the city’s capital budget, drawn up by the City Planning Commission and approved by the council. Either or both of these bodies might have raised objections to acquiring unusable property in Anne Arundel County. The “shadow government” created a path around those potential impediments.18
The developer of Coldspring Newtown demanded that the city compensate him for $1.4 million in “construction losses,” which he blamed on minority contractors. Though the project was aimed at bringing middle-class homeowners into the city, the trustees drew on federal funds for low-income housing to cover the alleged loss on the middle-income project. Once again, they proposed to channel the money through BEDCO. Arthur Held, the corporation’s founder and CEO, resigned.19
The ambiguous public/private character of the “shadow” corporations carried marked advantages. As private corporations, they did not have to observe city requirements that contracts be assigned by competitive bidding. As agencies of government, they could qualify for the “nontaxable” interest rate on loans, several percentage points below the interest charged to private borrowers.20
In the absence of competitive bidding, the trustees could do favors for contractors and developers who were close to Mayor Schaefer. One of them was Mendel Friedman, mayoral friend and campaign contributor, who received $27 million in low-interest construction loans between 1977 and 1980, more than any other developer. His biggest venture was a $10 million project to build a new headquarters for the Municipal Employees Credit Union. (The city would rent 9 of its 10 floors.) Friedman formed a partnership to oversee the project and sold shares to wealthy investors, who would own the building when it was completed and then lease it back to the credit union and the city, while writing off the building’s depreciation for tax purposes. The trustees would later bail Friedman out on two condominium projects that went bad.21
According to Smith, “The Schaefer administration has established, in effect, a corporate machine in which the trustees have become distributors of patronage in the form of low-interest loans to Schaefer supporters and politically important community corporations.”22
Instead of provoking outrage, the public exposure of the shadow government initially prompted talk about revising the city charter to accommodate the trustees’ operations. City council president Walter Orlinsky, one of Mayor Schaefer’s most consistent political antagonists, attempted to get the state legislature to dismantle the “corporate” branch of city government through an amendment to the city charter, but hardly anyone seemed ready to follow him. The mayor did appoint an “unofficial” six-member committee of the council, including some of his more reliable allies, to meet with the trustees to discuss their operations and shine some light on the shadow government. Two years later, the committee’s chairman, council member Carroll Fitzgerald, resigned in “total disgust” because, he said, the trustees had failed to inform the committee about two loans for condominium projects that had gone sour—the loans made to Friedman.23
Councilman Fitzgerald subsequently proposed an amendment to the city charter that would require the trustees to get council approval for any loan exceeding $1 million. It passed easily and seemed headed for consideration by the voters at the next election. Mayor Schaefer could have vetoed the bill. He simply chose not to sign it. His inaction would not keep the amendment off the ballot in the 1983 municipal election—unless the council recalled the measure. Councilman Clarence “Du” Burns, the mayor’s floor leader, made a motion for reconsideration at a special meeting in the heat of August. Orlinsky ruled Burns’s motion out of order. Burns challenged his ruling, thus requiring Orlinsky to abandon the chair while the council voted on his procedural decision. His place at the podium was taken by the council’s vice-president—Clarence Burns. Since the council was meeting long after its regular session had ended, it was unclear just what procedures should be followed. Councilman Norman Reeves attempted a filibuster, reading aloud from the council’s rule book—which he abandoned when several other members all tried to speak at the same time. Reeves repeatedly shouted, “Point of order!” until one of Burns’s allies unplugged his microphone. After an hour of parliamentary anarchy, one councilman bellowed a motion to adjourn. Burns gaveled the meeting to a close.24
The charter amendment to rein in the trustees did not appear on the ballot in 1983. William Donald Schaefer and Clarence Burns did. Burns ran to replace council president Orlinsky.25
DOUBTERS
A year after Schaefer’s reelection, Esquire published a long article naming him the best mayor in the country. The writer was Richard Ben Cramer, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer after years of not winning a Pulitzer at the Baltimore Sun. Schaefer was displeased with the piece. He and his inner staff—described by Cramer as the “All-Girl Gestapo”—had expected to see another of the “glittering urban renaissance-up-from-the-ashes stories” that had celebrated the mayor’s success in other newspapers and magazines around the country. Instead, Cramer profiled a mayor who cursed at his cabinet members, threw temper tantrums in his office, slammed down the telephone, stomped out of meetings. Readers got a glimpse of Schaefer at one of his first cabinet sessions after his reelection in 1983: “You think we’ve been in this job twelve years and we’ve done this and we’ve done that. Well you’re wrong. This is a new administration . . . What has this government done for the city? Nothing. Not a thing. Where’s the new ideas? WHERE? What’s NEW? NEW! There isn’t a damn thing new.”26
Some observers echoed the mayor’s complaint that there was nothing new in Baltimore—in particular, no urban renaissance. Urban historian Marc Levine argued that the chief beneficiaries of Baltimore’s downtown–Inner Harbor development had been developers, financiers, real estate speculators, suburbanites, a few affluent condo dwellers, and tourists. Resident Baltimoreans—especially poor, black Baltimoreans—sank deeper into poverty and occupied increasingly dilapidated housing. Levine conceded that the success of Charles Center and Harborplace had stimulated $700 million in private investment and generated another $52 million in annual convention business. But little of that money had moved outside the central business district to uplift the economies of the city’s blighted neighborhoods. When the municipality set its sights on the Inner Harbor, it seemed to turn its back on Baltimore’s neediest residential communities. Adjusted for inflation, Levine charged, the city had cut its general funds budget by 20 percent between 1974 and 1984, but expenditures for economic development rose by 400 percent. Baltimore had set business development above social spending.27
BEDCO’s Bernard Berkowitz, in response to Levine’s critical appraisal, pointed out that Baltimore had not been obsessively focused on downtown development. It had also made a serious effort to retain and attract industrial firms; the Key Highway Shipyard was a case in point. The city promoted commercial development in its neighborhoods. His figures showed that between 1972 and 1987, the city had expended almost $62 million from its general funds budget and general obligation bonds on economic development, but only $4.3 million of that had gone for downtown redevelopment. Downtown development, of course, had been financed in large part by private corporations, generally reflecting corporate priorities. And Berkowitz’s table of city expenditures did not include a line for the city trustees. By 1986, their “bank” held $200 million. But he maintained that the city had tried to create a linkage between downtown development and jobs for Baltimoreans. Projects receiving city support were required to do their hiring through the mayor’s Manpower Program. Harborplace alone had generated 1,300 jobs; the Hyatt Regency, 320 more. Berkowitz acknowledged that poverty, unemployment, and blight remained, due in part to a national recession in the early 1980s, but the city had made “a tremendous effort and expenditure of resources to improve low- and moderate-income neighborhoods and to generate nondowntown economic development.”28 He did not report the results of this effort. His implicit point, perhaps, was that the Schaefer administration’s exertions may not have improved the city’s circumstances, but they may have prevented them from being much worse.
The evidence drew others to the same conclusion. Donald Norris commended the city’s pursuit of tourism because no other option seemed to promise as much economic growth. No declining smokestack city had succeeded at reindustrialization or recovered from residential abandonment. Retail sales had migrated to the suburbs and were unlikely to return. Though the city’s municipal, business, and academic elites had considered other avenues of economic renewal such as biotechnology and life sciences, none held as much promise for Baltimore’s needy residents as did out-of-town visitors with money.29
While Levine and Berkowitz sparred about the city’s recent economic performance, Peter Szanton speculated about what was to come. A local foundation had commissioned him to consult with a panel of local leaders, outline the objectives that Baltimore should pursue, and then chart a path that promised to reach them. Szanton’s assessment was grim. He declared the school system a disaster. “There are more guns than books in some of those schools.” Fewer than 30 percent of the students who made it through high school went on to college, and only a bare majority of the city’s students made it through high school. Szanton’s sole consolation was that the population and the economy of the city would continue to decline, but at a more gradual rate. The future of Baltimore politics seemed more uncertain. One of his informants told him that the “black community lacks glue.” “It is divided,” wrote Szanton, “by geography, and by church affiliation, and again by political loyalty.” But one phrase from Szanton’s report captured Baltimore’s collective memory more than any other: “the rot beneath the glitter.”30
Behind Harborplace and Charles Center, the city was dying or already dead. Desertion by the Baltimore Colts in 1984 seemed a symbolic commentary on the town’s future status. How could the perennial Super Bowl contenders continue to play ball in a city of losers? William Donald Schaefer was also about to depart. Pollsters reported that he was the most popular public officeholder in Maryland. It seemed only natural that he should become the state’s next governor. His chief competitor in the Democratic primary would be Stephen Sachs, Maryland’s attorney general. Schaefer defeated him easily and went on to carry the general election with 82 percent of the vote, a Maryland record.31
RACIAL UN-POLITICS
Schaefer’s victory in the gubernatorial election elevated Clarence Burns from the city council presidency to the mayor’s office. The governor-elect seems to have done little to help Burns prepare for his new responsibilities. Schaefer held on to the mayor’s office until the day he was inaugurated as governor. Perhaps Burns needed little preparation. He made it plain that he intended no significant departures from the policies of the Schaefer administration. But as the city’s first African American mayor, Burns represented a break with the past. Even more remarkable was that he became Baltimore’s first black mayor without making an issue of race. Elsewhere, black mayors had come to office as outsiders, challenging white political regimes. Unlike the first black mayors of Newark, Birmingham, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Chicago, Baltimore’s first black mayor was already a political insider.32
Burns’s next challenge was to become the city’s first elected black mayor. The Democratic primary came only eight months after his inauguration. He expected to face two significant Democratic opponents: Kurt Schmoke, the state’s attorney, and Robert Embry, former housing commissioner, who resigned as school board president to consider entering the race. If Schmoke and Burns split the black vote, Embry might be able to win on the strength of the white vote. But Embry eventually took himself out of consideration. “I felt it was not healthy for the city,” he said, “and not likely that I could win.”33
Baltimore, which had never elected a black mayor, was headed for a Democratic primary in which the two leading candidates were black. Yet they could hardly have been more different. Burns attended a high school in East Baltimore and spent 22 years handing out towels in the locker room of a high school in West Baltimore. His father, a one-time Republican who became a Democratic precinct worker in East Baltimore, had introduced young Du to politics. Long before he was old enough to vote, he was distributing campaign literature. He became a precinct worker himself and, in 1947, formed his own political club to round up votes for Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr. The job as locker room attendant was his reward. It took him 24 years to move up from precinct and locker room to district leadership; in 1971 he was elected to the city council.34 Schmoke was a graduate of Yale and Harvard Law School and had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. His talents were already evident when he attended high school at Baltimore City College. He was president of the student government and star quarterback on the football team, which won the state championship.
Early polls put Schmoke almost 30 percentage points ahead of Burns. Mayor Burns’s campaign had money problems and organizational problems. His campaign coordinator resigned when it came out that he had defaulted on a business loan from the city and was charged with fraud and malfeasance for diverting some loan funds to his personal use. The coordinator had been recruited because many of Burns’s backers in the Baltimore business community thought his campaign manager was not up to the job. Raymond Haysbert, CEO of Parks Sausage, was brought in to give the organization steady direction, but the campaign manager, a longtime Burns loyalist, refused to recognize his authority.35
Burns could not give full attention to the campaign for mayor because he was too busy being mayor. By most accounts, he put in a solid performance. The Sun commended the budget that he submitted to the board of estimates and city council. It showed that he was not just an extension of William Donald Schaefer. He shifted the emphasis from bricks, mortar, and economic development to “human needs and the provision of city services to its citizens.” He gave special emphasis to public education and police protection, and settled the question of “whether Mayor Burns is carrying on the Schaefer administration after it is gone. He is not. The priorities are his own.”36
Governor Schaefer occasionally created difficulties for Burns. In an uncharacteristic display of concern about Baltimore’s educational system, the governor summoned the mayor and city school officials to a meeting in Annapolis, with four hours notice, at which he offered to pay a team of outside experts $1.6 million to work on school problems for four years. His proposal, introduced on a Wednesday, took the school administrators by surprise, but he wanted the city’s response by Friday. The Baltimore officials balked. It seemed to them that the governor was telling the city how to run its schools. As mayor, Schaefer’s own handling of the school system had not earned any standing ovations. Burns and school superintendent Alice Pinderhughes proposed an alternative program under which state and local experts would conduct a study of the city’s school system. “They said they want autonomy,” huffed the snappish governor. “So I’m not going to spend any more of my efforts there.” Some of Burns’s Baltimore allies were even less helpful than the governor. First District councilman Dominic “Mimi” DiPietro asserted that Clarence Burns had “lived amongst the white people all his life and he knows what the poor people want.” “Kurt Schmoke,” he said, “lived amongst . . . the wealthy Jews up there in Jew Town . . . , in Mount Washington, up where all the rich Jews live . . . He don’t live with the people who work every day. He lives with the people who have factories, the fat cats.” Burns tried to distance himself from DiPietro’s remarks, but he could hardly repudiate the loyal Mimi.37
Schmoke apparently resolved to sit on his substantial lead in the polls and avoid saying anything that might alienate his supporters. Burns, by acting like a mayor, steadily gained support. By the closing weeks of the campaign, he had cut Schmoke’s lead to 10 percentage points and was still gaining. On election day, Schmoke won by only 3 percentage points, and Burns carried the city’s white voters by two to one.38
Baltimore had elevated its first black mayor and elected its second black mayor without making an issue of race. The issue was unlikely to arise, of course, when both mayoral candidates were black. Burns and Schmoke were not alone in the primary, but the four other would-be mayors, taken together, drew barely 2 percent of the vote. Had Robert Embry chosen to run, race might have become an issue. Embry said his “major reason” for not running was that he was “just not comfortable with the divisive aspects of it racially.” But he also mentioned that poll results had figured in his decision. In a survey completed not long before he announced his non-candidacy, less than 6 percent of voters interviewed supported Embry. In other words, Baltimore’s voters—including most of its white voters—were not searching for a white candidate. And no one anticipated that an Embry campaign would make an issue of race. Marie Henderson, Burns’s campaign manager, said, “I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Bob Embry for so many years, and would never have foreseen his candidacy as being divisive.” Schmoke’s campaign manager, Larry Gibson, agreed. He did not think that race would dominate the campaign “unless some candidate campaigned on the basis of race—and certainly Bob would not have.”39
Perhaps the candidates should have been talking about race. It was an issue that Baltimoreans had consistently sidestepped at least since the days of the African colonization movement, or perhaps as early as dissolution of the Maryland Abolition Society in 1800. By the late twentieth century, the issue acquired renewed urgency. The percentage of Baltimoreans who were black had increased, and as it grew, living circumstances in the city deteriorated compared with those experienced by Marylanders living outside the city limits—some of them former Baltimoreans, black and white, who could afford life in the suburbs. Baltimore’s decline, in other words, resulted in part from the departure of its more fortunate residents, not just from the immiseration of its remaining population. Discussion of race in city politics could not make much headway partly because some of the essential participants in the dialogue—whites and middle-class blacks—no longer lived in the city. Annexation might have brought them into the conversation. But the city had not annexed any suburban territories since 1918, and a state constitutional amendment approved in 1948 made annexation practically impossible by requiring that voters in the territory to be annexed must approve it. Like avoidance of the race issue, political subordination of the city to state policy had been a defining condition of Baltimore’s existence.