Baltimore: The Whole Chain

by bam

A cited, high-school-and-up site course on one American city that holds every link of the housing-segregation chain within its own limits: racial zoning, restrictive covenants, redlining, and a highway driven through the middle of a Black neighborhood and then abandoned. Baltimore is uniquely useful because you do not have to leave town to see the whole sequence. Its two prerequisites, The Green Book: How to Read a Route and Indiana Avenue: A District and What Replaced It, teach the method and the idea of an instrument, a specific legal power exercised by a specific body under a specific statute leaving a specific document. This course lines up four such instruments as one lineage aimed at one end, and then does the harder thing: it tests whether the sequence is really as clean as it sounds. It is not. The ordinance was a chain of four laws, not one. The covenants ran alongside the zoning rather than after it. The redlining map's direct causal role is disputed by the historians who have read the lending records. Teaching that untidiness is the point, because a chain you can check is worth more than a story you cannot. You will read the ordinance, the covenant language, the map and the highway plan, walk the unfinished trench as an unusually legible absence, find the plan being written for that ground right now, look up a real Baltimore parcel in the state's own records, and write a piece of grounded nonfiction about one block. A 360 tour of the corridor is planned and will be added to the Now section when it is captured.