D.        Housing

Despite the defeat of the segregation ordinances in the early years of the twentieth
century, housing in Baltimore was very segregated. There were many reasons for this, including
the disparate economic circumstances of the races, the refusals of banks to lend or real estate
companies to show to members of one race properties in areas predominantly inhabited by
members of another race. The desire to associate with members of one's own race and the
distinctly unfriendly treatment offered by neighbors of another race also contributed to
segregated housing patterns. These barriers could be attacked by market forces and
determination, but one barrier to residential integration had the support of the law - the restrictive
covenant. Large scale developers, notably in the Roland Park and Guilford area, imposed
restrictive covenants on the subdivisions to prohibit use or occupancy by blacks or jews.

For example, in 1927, seventeen property owners on Barclay Street entered into an
agreement that none of the properties would be at any time occupied or used by persons of
African descent and that all property sales would be made subject to such restrictions. Frank
Berman purchased one of the specified properties in 1935. In 1936 he sold it to a negro named
Edward Meade. The owners of adjacent property then filed suit to enjoin Meade from using the
property and Berman from permitting him to use the property.

Meade hired W.A.C. Hughes to defend him. Hughes argued that the agreement was a
personal one that did not run with the land, that it was contrary to public policy, that there was no
privity of contract between the original covenantor and the covenantee's assignee, that the
covenant was an unreasonable restraint on alienation, that the reasons for the covenant no longer
existed because at least one other black family lived on the next block in a property not under the
agreement, and that enforcement of the covenant violated the fourteenth amendment. The Court
of Appeals, with one dissent, affirmed the issuance of an injunction by the trial court. Meade v.
Dennistone.130 The Court acknowledged that segregation ordinances were invalid, although it
said "It is not easy to explain the distinction between the decisions which say that segregation is
allowable on trains, in schools and in public places, and those which say that it cannot be done
with respect to residence in cities, in many of which it has become a problem, more social than
legal, of which to date there has been no satisfactory solution."

The large, almost sudden, emigration of negroes from the country to the cities,
with the consequent congestion in colored centers, has created a situation about
which all agree something ought to be done. In Baltimore City, with a population
of about 850,000, one-seventh is negro, occupying a relatively small portion of the
city's territory, though the colored area has been, in the last several years, rapidly
expanding. Since the decisions under the Fourteenth Amendment, supra, no
public action can be taken to solve what has become a problem, and property
owners have undertaken to regulate it by contract.131

The Court of Appeals noted that the fourteenth amendment was not violated. The

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