YALE UNIVERSITY THREAT PERCEPTION, LEGITIMATION, AND THE 1911 BALTIMORE RACIAL ZONING ORDINANCE A SENIOR THESIS JOINTLY SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE PROGRAM AND THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE, MEDICINE, AND PUBLIC HEALTH PROGRAM IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF BACHELOR OF ARTS BY GRACE YI NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT APRIL 2017 “The greatest danger lies not in the so-called “problems” of race, but rather in the integrity of national thinking and in the ethics of national conduct. Du Bois, 1928 ii CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………………. 1 PIGTOWN AND ITS CONSEQUENCES: HISTORICAL AND COGNITIVE DIMENSIONS OF SOCIO-SPATIAL THREAT……………………………………………………………. 8 Cognitive Dimensions of Racial Experience………………………………………….
12 COGNITIVE FRAMEWORK OF THREAT PERCEPTION: SOCIO-CULTURAL CLIMATE BEFORE 1911. 21 LEGITIMATION FRAMEWORK ANALYSIS OF 1911 BALTIMORE ORDINANCE………. 30 CONCLUSION, MODERN PERSPECTIVES AND SPATIAL STIGMA: WHY IT MATTERS. 52 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank my thesis advisor, Professor Henry Cowles, for his support, feedback, and encouragement throughout this year.
His wealth of knowledge and insight as well as his seemingly unending patience and understanding were integral to my essay- writing process. I would also like to thank Professors Joshua Knobe and Mark Sheskin for their guidance and support throughout the thesis process, and for encouraging me to combine my interests in cognitive science and history to write a joint thesis for my double major. I would also like to thank Head David Evans, Dean Renita Miller, Andrew Dowe, and my residential college Commonplace Society, with whom I shared my work earlier this year. Their valuable feedback and thought-provoking questions inspired me to expand my thesis topic and explore different avenues of research.
Finally, I am so grateful to my friends and family, who have patiently supported me throughout this entire process, whether through editing, talking through concepts and ideas, or coffee deliveries. iv Threat Perception, Legitimation, and the 1911 Baltimore Racial Zoning Ordinance In 1910, an African-American lawyer named W. Ashbie Hawkins purchased a red brick, three-story rowhouse at 1834 McCulloh Street, in one of Baltimore’s majority-white neighborhoods1. Rather than in apartment houses as in other cities in the early 20th century, the majority of Baltimore residents lived in rowhouses.
The rowhouse that Hawkins purchased stretched three stories high, and was only 13 feet wide2. In a standard residential lease agreement, Hawkins then rented the residence to a young African-American man named George W. McMechen, a respected lawyer and graduate of Yale Law School, and his wife and three children3. In Baltimore in 1910, this seemingly mundane transaction was anything but.
Almost immediately, the white residents of McCulloh Street congregated and appealed to the Baltimore City Council to bar black residences in their neighborhood 4. Three weeks later, The Baltimore Sun released an article on this real estate transaction: that Hawkins was an African-American grew into a city-wide scandal, prompting a headline warning of a “negro invasion 5. Barry Mahool, the mayor of Baltimore, signed into law an ordinance for “preserving peace, preventing conflict and ill feeling between the white and colored races in Baltimore city, 1 Antero Pietila, Not in my neighborhood: How bigotry shaped a great American city, Rowman & Littlefield, 2012, p. 3 BALTIMORE TRIES DRASTIC PLAN OF RACE SEGREGATION.
New York Times (1857-1922) Retrieved from https://search.com/docview/97075778?accountid=15172 4 Antero Pietila, Not in my neighborhood: How bigotry shaped a great American city, p. 1 and promoting the general welfare of the city by providing… for the use of the separate blocks by white and colored people for residences, churches and schools6.” This Ordinance - Ordinance No. 610 – acted as city legislation to enforce racial separation, under the guise of “preserving order, securing property values and promoting the great interests and insuring the good government of Baltimore City7.” The ordinance banned blacks from moving onto a block where the majority of occupants were white, and also banned whites from moving onto a block where the majority of occupants were black8. Although this residential segregation ordinance was the first law in the United States that directly targeted African-Americans; several other cities in the Southern US followed suit shortly after 9.
Moreover, while the legal consequences of the Ordinance were transitory, as the US Supreme Court ruled a similar ordinance in Kentucky unconstitutional and disbanded the rest, the social implications of the Ordinance persisted 10. Indeed, by the early 20th century, African-Americans in the South (and across the country) were already familiar with such discrimination, especially with the advent of Jim Crow laws in the late 19th century11. In the wake of Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws were rooted in white supremacy; in theory, the laws were meant to create “separate but equal treatment” of whites and African-Americans, but in practice they “condemned black citizens to inferior treatment and facilities 12.” 6 Garrett Power, "Apartheid Baltimore style: The residential segregation ordinances of 1910-1913," Md. Mapping Residential Segregation.
Trinity College Digital Repository. 9 Garrett Power, "Apartheid Baltimore style: The residential segregation ordinances of 1910-1913," Md. 11 "The Progressive Era." The Progressive Era | Scholastic.com/browse/subarticle. "Progressive-Era Economics and the Legacy of Jim Crow.org/library/progressive-era-economics-and- legacy-jim-crow.
2 However, Baltimore was exceptional in passing an official statute – disguised as a social reform – that segregated the races and limited the spaces they could inhabit, which begs the questions: what are the lasting ramifications of having enacted an apartheid statute as a progressive social reform? What was the impact of legalizing segregation on shaping beliefs and behaviors of both individuals and larger society - consequences of which remain even today in a largely segregated Baltimore13? Through integrated cognitive science and historical analysis, this paper takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding historical events, using the intersection of the two fields to unravel a new dimension with which to comprehend and make sense of the historical and present experience of inequality. By applying cognitive science theory to history as told through newspaper articles and media sources, the paper seeks to contribute novel information to both fields: it offers a new means of analyzing historical sources – that of the application of cognitive science theory – and concurrently presents a historical foundation for the understanding of experiences described by theories in cognitive science. In terms of cognitive science theory, this paper uses two specific frameworks to evaluate and shed new light upon historical accounts. The first framework is one of threat perception, which seeks to identify the ways in which humans respond to an apparent social threat.
Existing literature posits that social threats activate authoritarian tendencies, generating increased conformity, submission to authority, and intolerance and punitiveness14. Under this framework, there is a strong attachment to the ingroup and a correlated rejection of the outgroup, a theme that plays out recurrently in early-20th century race relations in Baltimore City. 14 Stanley Feldman and Karen Stenner, "Perceived threat and authoritarianism," Political Psychology 18, no. 3 The second framework is one of legitimation, which describes how social and psychological processes enable certain beliefs to be justified as merely conforming to normative standards.
This framework encompasses three sub-structures that will be elaborated upon further in the paper: 1) aversive racism, where individuals endorse racial equality and also possess conflicting, often nonconscious, negative attitudes that promote racial bias, 2) social dominance theory, wherein societies tend to organize themselves into group-based social hierarchies where at least one group has greater social status than other groups 15, and 3) system-justification theory, in which social processes lead to individuals perceiving social inequality as both legitimate and also natural and necessary. The paper reframes the historical events surrounding the 1911 Ordinance in Baltimore through the lens of these two frameworks, and uses modern cognitive science theory to elucidate psychological processes that shaped and directed historical trajectories. To better understand the social and political contexts in which the 1911 Ordinance was passed, it is imperative to provide the larger historical background surrounding the event. A political deal in 1877 forced federal troops out of many southern states, prompting the old Confederacy to end Reconstruction16.
In the decades following the Civil War, there were new efforts to codify segregation in an age of ostensible freedom. State officials began to ban African-Americans from voting and impinged further upon the rights they had just been given. Racial segregation gained steam in many Northern states, and signs declaring “WHITES ONLY” or “NO BLACKS” enforced segregation in shops, restaurants, hospitals, and even drinking 15 Rui Costa‐Lopes, John F. Dovidio, Cícero Roberto Pereira, and John T.
Jost, "Social psychological perspectives on the legitimation of social inequality: Past, present and future,” European Journal of Social Psychology 43, no. 16 Antero, Pietila, “Not in my neighborhood: how bigotry shaped a great American city,” p. Media and popular culture further promoted segregationist policies. The fast- growing popularity of film accelerated racial tensions: novelty films like The Watermelon Eating Contest, Sambo, or Aunt Jemima enforced stereotypes and emphasized black inferiority18.
Soon thereafter, race tensions escalated into violence: from 1886 to 1935, over 3000 African- Americans were lynched 19. The political power of blacks was so insignificant at this time that historian Rayford W. Logan described this period as “the nadir of the Negro’s status in American society20.” Furthermore, the period between 1900 and 1920 oversaw the Progressive Era, a movement to cure American social ills 21. The Progressive Movement focused on developing housing for the poor, improving factory conditions, child labor and mental health care reform, and overall social change22.
However, despite constructive progressive reforms, the Progressive Era was also characterized by a rise in institutional racism, reversing much of the progress towards racial equality that had been achieved during Reconstruction 23. In the 1896 US Supreme Court case Plessy vs Ferguson, the federal government defended racial segregation so long as 17 Ibid, p. 18 Antero Pietila, “Not in my neighborhood: how bigotry shaped a great American city,” p. 21 In some ways, between 1900 and 1920, the Progressive agenda flourished.
See Anderson, “Progressive- Era Economics and the Legacy of Jim Crow”: “In 1913 alone, the government headed by Progressive Woodrow Wilson created the Federal Reserve System…The rise of regulatory agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration… further directed the US economy away from destructive laissez-faire and more towards a rational model. Likewise, reform-minded leaders sought to extend their vision of a just and rational order to all areas of society and some, indeed, to all reaches of the globe. City governments were transformed; social workers labored to improve slum housing, health, and education; and in many states reform movements democratized, purified, and humanized government. Mapping Residential Segregation.
Trinity College Digital Repository. Leonard, "Retrospectives: Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era," Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 5 African-Americans were provided with “separate but equal” facilities 24. Indeed, at the end of the 19th century, Southern governments and municipalities imposed a range of Jim Crow laws 25 on African-Americans that legalized segregation between blacks and whites, rationalized as a catalyst for a “more orderly, systematic electoral system and society26.” The Jim Crow laws represented the beginning of a new, darker era: the African-American experience was no longer characterized by implicit discrimination, but rather one in which segregation had been codified into official law.
During the Progressive Era, eugenic approaches to socioeconomic reform were ubiquitous and widely respected 27. Within the larger social movement of making implicit segregation explicit, the eugenics movement was rooted in the belief that heredity accounted for differences in human intelligence and character, and sought to improve human heredity through social human breeding 28,29. Progressives believed that eugenics could be a tool to subjugate ethnic groups that they deemed inferior; indeed, African-Americans were largely stripped of 24 "The Progressive Era." The Progressive Era | Scholastic.com/browse/subarticle. 25 The Progressive Era also oversaw a rise of institutional racism, known as Jim Crow laws.
See Anderson, “Progressive-Era Economics and the Legacy of Jim Crow”: “Jim Crow laws were an implementation of policies that exacerbated inequality at a time when intellectuals, journalists, and politicians were beating the drums of equality.