Blockbusting in Baltimore by W. Edward Orser

Author:W. Edward Orser [Orser, W. Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, Urban, Discrimination, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies, History, United States, State & Local, Middle Atlantic (DC; DE; MD; NJ; NY; PA)
ISBN: 9780813184050
Google: xkooEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-10-21T03:20:18+00:00

Response to Blockbusting

Edmondson Village whites may have been wrong in important respects about their new neighbors. And insofar as their own racial attitudes were a powerful motivation for their flight, they—like whites in numerous similar settings elsewhere—had only themselves to blame for the sense of loss and exploitation they felt in abruptly fleeing the settled and friendly environs of their neighborhood home. Clearly, there were other choices available to them as modes of response, both individual and collective; nevertheless, they were right in their perception that blockbusting unleashed forces beyond their control. Indeed, at the time few had any very systematic sense of just how complex those networks of responsibility were. While the blockbuster might be the visible agent of such forces, the web of economic, social, and political structures that undergirded the dual housing market and created the loophole that blockbusters exploited was tightly woven into the fabric of a segregated society. White residents may not have grasped such connections fully; what they did know was that they felt powerless to prevent what was happening to them. Since most were as unwilling to entertain the possibility of integration as the system was to permit it, their individual actions assumed collective proportions that contributed to the demise of their community as they had defined it.

Moreover, it was hard to argue with their intuitive sense and informed observation that racial change seldom meant integration but, rather, the inevitability of racial succession and resegregation. They had witnessed the process in urban neighborhoods many of them had inhabited in the past, and they could see its results quite clearly on the west side along the Edmondson Avenue corridor. Despite some important efforts at an alternative response, such as those in nearby Windsor Hills and Ashburton, the inevitability of racial succession and resegregation constituted a norm so ingrained in their observation and experience that it served as an article of faith. Many no doubt shared the sentiment of Nola Null that the advent of African American settlers meant that “the neighborhood was going to go.” Right as such perceptions may have been from the point of view of historical realism, ironically, they assured that the prophecy would be self-fulfilling.

Clearly, blockbusting manipulated whites’ fears, triggering unprecedented social panic. Just as clearly, it exploited the cracks in the dual housing system, seizing the economic advantage to be gained by violating the silent conspiracy. In its wake African Americans gained desperately needed new housing opportunities—but at a considerable economic and social cost.

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