Quote of the Day (Paige Glotzer, on the Real Origins of Baltimore’s Struggles)

“Going back to the 19th century, there’s a long history of Baltimore officials trying to cordon off what areas of the city black people could live in. A lot of policies grew out of that, like where roads, highways and schools were built….Housing segregation set Baltimore up to be one of the hardest hit cities in the subprime housing crisis. That was because a lot of the lending that spurred the crisis was predatory, based in long-time policies of housing segregation. That meant cities such as Baltimore had many areas that had very high foreclosure rates. Especially after the recession, the city really did lose a lot of its tax base and people not only lost their jobs like so many others across the country, but also lost their homes. We’re still dealing with the impact on having so many people, especially African Americans, have their wealth wiped out through foreclosure and housing segregation.”— Paige Glotzer, a former Baltimore resident and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, quoted in Mahita Gajanan, “Long Before Trump's Tweets, Baltimore Had Become a 'Target.' Here's How Segregation Helped Create Its Problems,” Time, July 29, 2019 

For any reader who might nod in agreement with Donald Trump about Baltimore being a rodent- and crime-ridden city, even being the Democrats are fools to rush to the city’s defense, you might want to start by understanding how the city got to this sorry point, through a little bit of history—a subject I suspect the President never has studied much. Paige Glotzer’s reflections are an excellent place to begin.

After that, you might be interested in seeing which other cities are rat-infested. Guess what? Quite a number are in red states the President won in 2016—though it is unlikely you’ll ever hear him allude to this.

Finally, you might want to know about at least one force responsible for the rodent problem: son-in-law Jared Kushner’s own company.

Surprise, surprise!

Quote of the Day (John Marshall Harlan, on the Supreme Court’s “Brutal” Assault on Civil Rights)

“In my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case. It was adjudged in that case that the descendants of Africans who were imported into this country and sold as slaves were not included nor intended to be included under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and could not claim any of the rights and privileges which that instrument provided for and secured to citizens of the United States;… The recent [Thirteenth Through Fifteenth] amendments of the Constitution, it was supposed, had eradicated these principles from our institutions. But it seems that we have yet, in some of the States, a dominant race -- a superior class of citizens, which assumes to regulate the enjoyment of civil rights, common to all citizens, upon the basis of race. The present decision, it may well be apprehended, will not only stimulate aggressions, more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens, but will encourage the belief that it is possible, by means of state enactments, to defeat the beneficent purposes which the people of the United States had in view when they adopted the recent amendments of the Constitution, by one of which the blacks of this country were made citizens of the United States and of the States in which they respectively reside, and whose privileges and immunities, as citizens, the States are forbidden to abridge. Sixty millions of whites are in no danger from the presence here of eight millions of blacks. The destinies of the two races in this country are indissolubly linked together, and the interests of both require that the common government of all shall not permit the seeds of race hate to be planted under the sanction of law. What can more certainly arouse race hate, what more certainly create and perpetuate a feeling of distrust between these races, than state enactments which, in fact, proceed on the ground that colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens. That, as all will admit, is the real meaning of such legislation as was enacted in Louisiana.”—Justice John Marshall Harlan, dissenting opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

Another section of this opinion delivered on this date 115 years ago today by John Marshall Harlan, associate justice of the Supreme Court, is far better known to posterity: "our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.'' But this section above is far more prophetic, and deserves to be better known, both for its deep understanding of the high court’s problematic history in preserving the rights of America’s most marginalized citizens and in foreseeing the possibilities for mischief in laying down dangerous new precedents that ignore the intentions underlying constitutional amendments.

At first glance, Harlan, the son of a Kentucky slaveowner, might be the last person one would expect to deliver one of the most ringing calls for racial equality from any American court. Yet he appears to have been one of the few jurists of that era comfortable with socializing with African-Americans--or, for that matter, Hispanics or Chinese.

Harlan is known to the great mass of American high school and college students (if he is at all) for his lonely, courageous dissent from the Supreme Court’s 8-1 finding that segregation could be justified on “separate but equal” grounds. He deserves to be even better known. Apart from his decisions, he was, simply, quite a character. As what colleague Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. called the last "tobacco chomping justice," he loved bourbon, golf, baseball, and colorful clothing.

Harlan was appointed to the court by Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877, as the nation began its long, dark retreat from Reconstruction. But the court's unwillingness to preserve civil rights cannot be blamed on him. He rendered 24 years of distinguished service to the highest court of appeals, and a half century later a more sympathetic set of justices would find his reasoning in Plessy compelling enough to begin overturning American apartheid.

This Day in American History

March 9, 1892—Early in the morning, a white mob seized three African-American prisoners from a Memphis jail, took them to a rail yard and shot them, in retaliation for their alleged part in the wounding of three white sheriff’s deputies.

The murdered prisoners, owners of the black-owned People’s Grocery Company, had been friends of a 30-year-old former schoolteacher. But the young woman, Ida B. Wells, was now a journalist, and the death of her friend launched her on a decades-long crusade to document and destroy domestic terrorism against African-Americans in the Jim Crow era of southern segregation.

Lynchings, the particular focus of Wells’ work, were open murders of individuals often suspected of criminal activity, usually carried out spontaneously by mobs, and perpetrated publicly as a warning to others. The origins of the practice have been traced to Ireland and to colonial-era North and South Carolina.

At their worst, lynchings involved not just hangings and shootings, but also burning at the stake, maiming, dismemberment, castration, and other brutal methods of physical torture.

As heinous as the crimes themselves was their routine nature. Nearly five thousand Americans were lynched between 1882 and 1951, an average of more than one a week, according to the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. (That number included 1,200 whites who were murdered in the South for voting Republican or for being sympathetic to blacks.)

Though whites cited sexual crimes—overwhelmingly trumped-up charges—as justification for twisting the law for their own purposes, the lynching involving the People’s Grocery Company illustrated another motivation: blacks’ assertion of political or socioeconomic rights. The People’s Grocery had dared to compete against a white company that had previously enjoyed a monopoly of blacks’ business in an area on the edge of Memphis then known as “The Curve” (named for the arc made by streetcars).

Daily white-black arguments led to threats against the People’s Grocery. Their plea for police protection was met with a that’s-not-in-our-jurisdiction response (the grocery was right outside city limits) and a suggestion that the owners use guns to protect themselves. The shooting of three whites then resulted. The owners—Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart—seemed to be safe, at least momentarily, in jail. But when a black contingent guarding them decided after three days that they needed no further protection, the white mob abducted and lynched the black businessmen.

As co-editor and part owner of the Memphis Free Speech, Wells swung into action. A blistering series of articles chronicled the extent of lynching as local social control (eight lynching cases in the Memphis area in just one month of 1892), contended that a Winchester rifle should have a “place of honor in every black home,” and advised readers of their last resort: “save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.”

Eventually Wells was run out of town over a particularly pointed editorial noted that, contrary to the notion that lynchings were often justified as defenses against the rape of white womanhood, some involved black men who had engaged in consensual sex with white women. But she merely continued her crusade elsewhere.

In Britain, Wells delivered 102 lectures in an attempt to bring international pressure to bear on the United States to enact anti-lynching legislation. In Chicago, she married an attorney who sold her his shares of the Chicago Conservator, enabling her to become full owner of the city’s first African-American newspaper.

As fearless as she was indefatigable, Wells tangled with not only racists but also with other advocates for women’s or civil rights. She upbraided Frances Willard when the head of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, in an attempt to recruit southern women, accepted the rape myth and condoned lynching and the color line. And, in a low point in an otherwise often-brilliant career, W.E.B. DuBois bragged about marginalizing her influence within the NAACP, an organization that she (along with him) was instrumental in establishing.

In a time when reporters have devolved into gotcha pestering of Presidential candidates when they’re not chasing celebrities on their way in or out of rehab, it’s important to recall an era when journalists made a difference in the lives of others.

Shakespeare wrote that some men “are born great, others achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.” The daughter of slave parents, Wells assuredly was not born great. It was the unfortunate times in which she lived—a true dark age for African-Americans—that thrust greatness upon her. But she also continually achieved greatness over and over again. Her life and work stand as monuments to what one person can do armed only with facts and courage.

This Day in American History

March 9, 1892—Early in the morning, a white mob seized three African-American prisoners from a Memphis jail, took them to a rail yard and shot them, in retaliation for their alleged part in the wounding of three white sheriff’s deputies.

The murdered prisoners, owners of the black-owned People’s Grocery Company, had been friends of a 30-year-old former schoolteacher. But the young woman, Ida B. Wells, was now a journalist, and the death of her friend launched her on a decades-long crusade to document and destroy domestic terrorism against African-Americans in the Jim Crow era of southern segregation.

Lynchings, the particular focus of Wells’ work, were open murders of individuals often suspected of criminal activity, usually carried out spontaneously by mobs, and perpetrated publicly as a warning to others. The origins of the practice have been traced to Ireland and to colonial-era North and South Carolina.

At their worst, lynchings involved not just hangings and shootings, but also burning at the stake, maiming, dismemberment, castration, and other brutal methods of physical torture.

As heinous as the crimes themselves was their routine nature. Nearly five thousand Americans were lynched between 1882 and 1951, an average of more than one a week, according to the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. (That number included 1,200 whites who were murdered in the South for voting Republican or for being sympathetic to blacks.)

Though whites cited sexual crimes—overwhelmingly trumped-up charges—as justification for twisting the law for their own purposes, the lynching involving the People’s Grocery Company illustrated another motivation: blacks’ assertion of political or socioeconomic rights. The People’s Grocery had dared to compete against a white company that had previously enjoyed a monopoly of blacks’ business in an area on the edge of Memphis then known as “The Curve” (named for the arc made by streetcars).

Daily white-black arguments led to threats against the People’s Grocery. Their plea for police protection was met with a that’s-not-in-our-jurisdiction response (the grocery was right outside city limits) and a suggestion that the owners use guns to protect themselves. The shooting of three whites then resulted. The owners—Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart—seemed to be safe, at least momentarily, in jail. But when a black contingent guarding them decided after three days that they needed no further protection, the white mob abducted and lynched the black businessmen.

As co-editor and part owner of the Memphis Free Speech, Wells swung into action. A blistering series of articles chronicled the extent of lynching as local social control (eight lynching cases in the Memphis area in just one month of 1892), contended that a Winchester rifle should have a “place of honor in every black home,” and advised readers of their last resort: “save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.”

Eventually Wells was run out of town over a particularly pointed editorial noted that, contrary to the notion that lynchings were often justified as defenses against the rape of white womanhood, some involved black men who had engaged in consensual sex with white women. But she merely continued her crusade elsewhere.

In Britain, Wells delivered 102 lectures in an attempt to bring international pressure to bear on the United States to enact anti-lynching legislation. In Chicago, she married an attorney who sold her his shares of the Chicago Conservator, enabling her to become full owner of the city’s first African-American newspaper.

As fearless as she was indefatigable, Wells tangled with not only racists but also with other advocates for women’s or civil rights. She upbraided Frances Willard when the head of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, in an attempt to recruit southern women, accepted the rape myth and condoned lynching and the color line. And, in a low point in an otherwise often-brilliant career, W.E.B. DuBois bragged about marginalizing her influence within the NAACP, an organization that she (along with him) was instrumental in establishing.

In a time when reporters have devolved into gotcha pestering of Presidential candidates when they’re not chasing celebrities on their way in or out of rehab, it’s important to recall an era when journalists made a difference in the lives of others.

Shakespeare wrote that some men “are born great, others achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.” The daughter of slave parents, Wells assuredly was not born great. It was the unfortunate times in which she lived—a true dark age for African-Americans—that thrust greatness upon her. But she also continually achieved greatness over and over again. Her life and work stand as monuments to what one person can do armed only with facts and courage.