Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America's Children by Gerald Markowitz & David Rosner

Author:Gerald Markowitz & David Rosner
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Health Policy, Medical
ISBN: 9780520273252
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2013-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

BALTIMORE AND THE LEGACY OF RACE

A growing port city, Baltimore in the nineteenth century had, up until the 1870s when it was overtaken by Washington, D.C. in this respect, the largest African American population of any city in the country.21 Located below the Mason-Dixon Line, Maryland was a slave state, but nevertheless home to a large free black population, the vast majority of whom lived in Baltimore. On the eve of the Civil War (Maryland remained in the Union), less than 10 percent of Baltimore’s African Americans were slaves.22 As Samuel K. Roberts relates in his impressive history of tuberculosis in Baltimore, in the decades between the Civil War and World War II the population of “Afro-Baltimoreans” increased from 53,000 to 166,000, while this group’s proportion of the city’s total population remained relatively constant, fluctuating between 15 and 20 percent.23

The history of housing in Baltimore was shaped by the evolving class and racial relationships that marked what Roberts calls “a distinctly southern feature,” segregation in virtually every aspect of peoples’ lives and poverty for the vast majority of African Americans. The Druid Hill neighborhood of northwest Baltimore, for example, had two very different [Page 150] kinds of housing, segregated by class and race. Along the avenues were large, three-story single-family houses “occupied by working class whites (often German) and middle class blacks.” In the “alleys” between the avenues, “poorer blacks . . . resided in one- or two-story houses.”24 The vast majority of both the avenue and alley housing were rentals. According to a 1913 survey, Roberts notes, Baltimore, despite its large black middle-class population, ranked next to last of seventy-three cities in percentage of black home ownership.25 By the 1950s, the vast majority of the black population was segregated in the poor, largely neglected neighborhoods of Druid Hill and an area of northeast Baltimore just north of Johns Hopkins University and hospital, where the housing stock was old, run-down, and covered with decades of lead paint.26 These were the two neighborhoods from which virtually all the families and children would be drawn into the KKI study.

While the study was being planned, Baltimore was confronting its most serious housing crisis in decades. Nationally, there had been a profound decline in federal support for the construction of new public housing. After World War II, Washington had committed itself to providing housing to millions of returning veterans and their families. It had also provided monies to many cities to build public projects as part of a massive program to rebuild cities whose poor populations still lived in nineteenth-century tenements. The lack of investment in new housing during the Depression and World War II years had created tremendous housing shortages for the working and middle classes. New York, among other cities, took advantage of the new federal funds to “clear its slums,” replacing them with high-rise public housing projects. However problematic these “urban renewal projects” were—as populations were sometimes displaced and communities destroyed, forcing poor residents into overcrowded conditions in other areas of

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