De-segregating the Map: Intraracial Spatial Politics in Early 1900s Baltimore

• In Event: Housing and American Political Development

Abstract

Scholarship on persistent patterns of race and class segregation in American cities points to Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC) residential security maps as among the most successful state-sponsored tools used by mid-twentieth century realtors, loan officers, and other real-estate professionals to shut African Americans and poor whites out of the housing market and its corresponding wealth- and power-building benefits. Nearly a century later, the patterns of segregation established by HOLC maps continue to explain ongoing segregation and disinvestment in so-called high-risk urban neighborhoods. While the power of HOLC maps to explain residential patterns since the mid-twentieth century is undeniable, focusing only on these maps obfuscates the spatial patterns and preferences of African Americans and other marginalized groups. In doing so, political scientists ignore policy alternatives and preferences described by intraracial spatial politics.

Underexplored is the countermap, which has not made it into the archives either because it was never printed in the first place or because it did not demonstrate the cartographical values of the HOLC map’s creators. In this paper, I will use oral histories housed in the Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage Project at the University of Baltimore and ArcGIS to produce countermaps using the words of African American and ethnic minorities that will challenge the cartographic vision of HOLC maps. In so doing, I will highlight how marginalized communities produce their space, challenge state-sponsored spatial formation, and subvert the printed map. Scholars use countermaps to explore the unrecorded agency inherent in those who occupy the margins of society. The project is inspired both by countermapping projects in critical geography and by the methodological call made by Jamila Michener, Mallory SoRelle, and Chloe Thurston to take a bottom-up approach to scholarship of the state (2020). My database of spatial locations, definitions, and preferences expressed by interviewees in the Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage Project at the University of Baltimore will produce a countermap of Baltimore in 1910, 1920, and 1930, dates that correspond to when the Federal Housing Administration collaborated with sociologists at the University of Chicago and the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation to produce the eponymous maps.

This project takes seriously the theme of the 2024 Annual Conference, “Democracy: Retrenchment, Renovation, and Reimagination” by drawing on scholarship in critical geography that explores how power from above is never complete. Highlighting how residents shaped their space from the ground up despite state efforts to minimize their spatial power suggests methods of reimagination in our current age of retrenchment. A countermap poses alternatives to state-sponsored spatial formations that also happens to highlight the intraracial and ethnic spatial formations that printed maps ignore (Peluso 1995). Countermapping is a method used in critical geography, anthropology, and sociology that decenters the researcher and the state, contributing to a broader understanding of intraracial space. Because our current understanding of the power of maps in residential segregation emanates from the state itself, I present a complementary alternative. These countermaps contribute to a comprehensive understanding of residential segregation that is cognizant of the lived experiences of its most marginalized victims.

This paper will proceed in three parts. First, I will explore how students of residential segregation have used HOLC maps. Second, I will draw from literature in critical geography to explore how state-sponsored maps obfuscate the spatial realities of those at the margins. Third, I will summarize the political terrain of Baltimore in the 1910s, 20s and 30s. Finally, I will present my countermap, which will graphically explain the spatial preferences of Baltimore’s most marginalized communities, with particular emphasis on the intraracial spatial politics of early twentieth century Baltimore.

Author

• Sally F Lawton, West Chester University