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MARYLAND LAW REVIEW

[VOL. 42

that the poor were carriers of tuberculosis, typhus, and other diseases
(all of which poor blacks had in disportionate numbers). The simplest
single explanation for segregation is that it represented an effort by the
healthy white majority to quarantine the unhealthy black minority, ,
When the segregation ordinances were conceived, racial Social
Darwinism was in vogue. This false teaching made the quarantine
seem an effective strategy. Blacks were viewed as a degenerating race
with a high mortality rate, low birth rate, and no future. Left to them-
selves, the Social Darwinists argued, Negroes would die out and with
them the threat of epidemic disease. Advances in public health, how-
ever, not racial quarantines, finally reduced the threat of contagion.

'  The black population, rather than disappearing, came to outnumber
whites in Baltimore City. The social engineers who propounded the
segregation ordinances were on the wrong track moving in the wrong
direction.

A third lesson we have gained, from Baltimore's history of housing
segregation is that we must discount the righteous rhetoric of reform.
Since the early twentieth century the Progressive Reform Movement
has advocated government intervention into the residential housing
market. But, if we observe closely the motives of the self-appointed
promoters of the public interest, the reformers plainly were not inter-
ested in improving the living conditions of those who suffered most
from the industrializing, urbanizing society. Instead, the reformers
supported housing segregation as a means for preventing contagion
and civil disturbance as it affected the white community. Similarly,
these reformers earnestly proposed and implemented slum clearance
without providing substitute housing opportunities for those whose

.   homes were destroyed. In their efforts to impose a quarantine on dis-
ease and crime, and to protect the value of their property, reformers
conveniently overlooked the devastating effect slum clearance and ra-

cial segregation had on black housing opportunities. Instead, reform-
ers salved their guilt by "blaming the victims" for the slum conditions
in which they lived.

Finally, this history of residential segregation in Baltimore docu-
ments the racist propensity of democratic rule. In an opinion sus-
taining the constitutionality of a law that required a majority vote at a
local referendum as a prerequisite to the siting of a low-income hous-
ing project, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black said: "Provisions
for referendums demonstrate devotion to democracy, not to bias, dis-
crimination, or prejudice."212 Our history suggests that Black's dichot-

212. Jam« v. Valtierra, 402 U.S. 137, 141 (1971).