The History We All Live With
Norman Rockwell’s iconic painting “The Problem We All Live With” was on my mind as I started out to write this post. You know the one. It depicts six year-old Ruby Bridges, escorted by US Marshals as she arrived at the formerly all-white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, Louisiana. Rockwell explained the structural injustice of public school segregation through a harrowingly intimate depiction of Bridges, schoolbooks in hand, dodging tomatoes and racist slurs. Rockwell framed her humanity and the inhumanity of those who aimed to keep her out with the figures of federal officials charged with enforcing the hard-won reforms of the civil rights movement.
This past week, our community faced its own story of how realizing civil rights-era reforms still requires courageous vigilance. Our colleagues Dr. Shani Mott and Dr. Nathan Connolly spoke with the New York Times about their 2021 encounter with anti-Black racism. No, they were not targeted by tomatoes. Nor was there a report of ugly slurs hurled. Still, the two explained, the same illness — American racism — meant that their Baltimore City home was grossly undervalued by an appraiser, someone brought on to facilitate the refinancing of their house in the Homewood neighborhood.
Dr. Mott and Dr. Connolly know the history of housing discrimination in the United States well. He is the author of the award-winning A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida, which explains how “between the early 1900s and the 1960s, property ownership helped set the terms of Jim Crow segregation” through “dynamics between property management firms, landlords, tenants, government officials, and suburban homeowners.” And, as Debra Kamin explained to Times readers, even today “The impact of redlining, a racist Depression-era housing policy, continues to drive down home values in Black neighborhoods and deprive resources for communities of color.”
Dr. Mott and Dr. Connolly posed for Shan Wallace in front of their two-story brick home, another intimate scene that permits us to confront how structural racism has and continues to shape their lives and all our lives today. We are fortunate to have on our shelves at Hard Histories recent books that explain how we got here and especially recommend from Dr. Lawrence Brown, The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America, which analyzes the “ongoing historical trauma caused by a combination of policies, practices, systems, and budgets … at the root of uprisings and crises in hypersegregated cities around the country,” and from Dr. Paige Glotzer, How the Suburbs Were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing, 1890-1960, which charts the emergence of Baltimore’s Roland Park Company.
We are also fortunate to have Dr. Mott and Dr. Connolly as members of our community. We thank them for generously sharing a hard lesson about how, in Baltimore, the history we all live with includes that of housing discrimination. And how that hard past remains our difficult present.
— MSJ.
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