APARTHEID BALTIMORE STYLE: THE RESIDENTIAL
SEGREGATION ORDINANCES OF 1910-1913*

GARRETT POWER**

• On May 15, 1911, Baltimore Mayor J. Barry Mahool, who was
known as an earnest advocate of good government, women's sufierage,
and social justice, signed into law "[a]n ordinance for preserving peace,
preventing conflict and ill feeling between the white and colored races
in Baltimore city, and promoting the general welfare of the city by pro-
viding, so far as practicable, for the use of separate blocks by white and
colored people for residences, churches and schools.1 Baltimore's seg-
regation law was the first such law to be aimed at blacks in the United
States, but it was not the last. Various southern cities in Georgia, South
Carolina, Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky enacted similar
laws.2	  
 The legal significance of housing segregation laws in the United
States was shortlived. In 1917 the United States Supreme Court struck
down the Louisville, Kentucky ordinance3 and thereby constitutionally
eviscerated the ordinances of other cities as well. But the historical significance of Baltimore's segregation ordinances remains.
 History remembers the Mahool administration for having placed
Baltimore in the forefront of municipal reform. The story of how the
Mahool government earnestly proposed and enacted an apartheid stat-
ute as a progressive social reform has a contemporary message: It cau-
tions us to discount the righteous rhetoric of reform; it reminds us of
the racist propensities of democratic rule; and it sets the stage for un-
derstanding the development of a covert conspiracy to enforce housing
segregation, the vestiges of which persist in Baltimore yet today.

Throughout the early nineteenth century Baltimore housing was
not racially segregated, and even following the Civil War, blacks lived

'© Copyright 1982, Garrett Power	
This article is the second chapter of a book in progress, A Chronicle of Twentieth
Century Land Controls in Greater Baltimore.   It was funded in part by a grant from
Resources for the Future.                                                                
**  Professor of Law, University of Maryland School of Law.         
   1. Baltimore, Md., Ordinance 692 (May 15, 1911).

2. C. JOHNSON, PATTERNS OF NEGRO SEGREGATION 173-75 (1943); Rice, Residential
Segregation by Law, 1910-1917, 34 J.S. HIST. 179, 181-82 (1968). The cities were: Atlanta,
Ga.; Greenville, S.C.; Ashland, Roanoke, Richmond, Norfolk, and Portsmouth, Ya.; Win-
ston-Salem, N.C.; and Louisville, Ky.	3. Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U.S. 60 (1917).	^~v,..'^- '    '.

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