PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News
Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore.
Antero Pietila worked for The Baltimore Sun
for 35 years. He retired in 2004, after which
he wrote the book Not in My Neighborhood,
which tells the story of how one of America's
great American cities, and in fact many American
cities, were shaped by quite systemic racism.
Now joining us to talk about all of this is
Antero Pietila. Thanks for joining us.
ANTERO PIETILA: Thank you.
JAY: So when I drive around Baltimore now--and
it still seems very much an apartheid city.
There's certain areas that seem racially diverse
(is the word people use), but by and large,
you go into one neighborhood and you see mostly
black people, and you go into another and
you see almost all white people. So is that
true? Is that still the case?
PIETILA: Well, that is true, but it is also
true about many other American cities. Hyper-segregation
in residential neighborhoods is a standard
rather than exception.
JAY: So you dug into how that took place in
Baltimore, 'cause it's not just by chance
or just by sort of some vague ideological
or cultural reasons. There was some real planning
behind all of this. Tell us the story, how
we got to an apartheid Baltimore.
PIETILA: Well, in a very peculiar way, Baltimore
became a laboratory for residential segregation.
Baltimore in 1910 was the first American city
that enacted a city council law requiring
that its residential neighborhood be segregated.
About 40 other cities copied Baltimore's law,
mostly in the old confederacy. And then, in
1917, the Supreme Court said this approach
is a wrong one. By that time, restrictive
covenants had become the standard--homeowners
joining together and saying there are certain
people we don't want as our neighbors. They
concluded a legally binding agreement. And
that is how residential segregation was handled
in most American cities.
JAY: And the binding agreement is you agree
not to sell your house to someone who isn't
white.
PIETILA: That's correct, or Jewish, or--.
JAY: But that's the other thing about your
research is that this was about Jews. It wasn't
just about blacks.
PIETILA: Absolutely. And all this kind of
tied together to what then was the prevailing
social philosophy, eugenics, which classified
certain races and nationalities as better
than some other ones.
JAY: One of the real estate developers you
quote in your book is talking about it's okay
to have a black neighborhood, it's okay to
have a white neighborhood, it's okay to have
a Jewish one; just never the--should--I don't
know what--it's not Twain [incompr.] And so
it was quite overt and quite deliberate.
PIETILA: It was quite deliberate. And homeowners
subscribe to these kinds of agreements. And
once you signed it, then the next buyer would
have to sign the same covenant. And the real
estate industry basically honored these covenants.
And many of the real estate boards, not only
in Baltimore but in other cities, actually
thought that it was illegal, against their
own guidelines and bylaws, to bring in inharmonious
elements, as the [crosstalk]
JAY: So it's against the bylaws to break the
covenants.
PIETILA: That's right, and for real estate
brokers to sell houses to people who were
seen as inharmonious.
JAY: Now, this starts to change. And I don't
know if I'm jumping ahead, but I think that
at some point, some especially white working
class areas, it starts to change. And how
does that happen, and why?
PIETILA: Well, the big change comes, and it
does not come instantly, but the big change
comes in 1948, when the Supreme Court rules
that covenants are unconstitutional. Covenants,
per se, if we want to pass a covenant against
dogs running in our neighborhoods, that's
fine. If you want to bar from your neighborhood
a Finn, like myself, you can do it. What you
cannot do under the Supreme Court ruling is
you cannot ask a court to enforce that covenant.
And so this was the big change in 1948 was
that these covenants no longer could be enforced.
JAY: So it requires voluntary participation.
But that was still okay after that Supreme
Court decision. As long as everybody agreed
to do it, it was still okay.
PIETILA: Well, I cite a startling--to me,
a startling observation that even in the early
1970s, a couple of years after I first came
to Baltimore, there were actually two separate
multiple lists in Baltimore. There was the
real estate board's multiple list that listed
neighborhoods in white areas, and then there
was a separate multiple list that listed properties
in suburban areas that accepted Jews.
JAY: And was there a list for black areas
as a separate [crosstalk]
PIETILA: Well, I mean, there was no need to
have that kind of a list, because--.
JAY: 'Cause white people wouldn't move into
those areas.
PIETILA: White people would not move in there,
and blockbusting was expanding areas that
were open to blacks. And so there really wasn't
any need at that point.
JAY: Now, in your book, you talk about the
role of local newspapers in kind of creating
the environment that kind of facilitated all
this. Can you speak about that?
PIETILA: Well, my former employer, The Baltimore
Sun, when I first came to Baltimore, joining
The Sun in 1969, still listed properties according
to race: houses white, houses colored.
JAY: This is in '69, even--this is after the
Fair Housing Act.
PIETILA: Sixty-nine.
JAY: Sixty-eight's the Fair Housing Act.
PIETILA: Sixty-nine. And then there were also--and
this practice was on the wane by that time,
but there was still an occasional ad that
said "restricted". And everybody knew what
"restricted" meant: no Jews, no blacks.
JAY: So talk a little bit more about the role
of the papers in giving people the sense that
they had to protect all of this because otherwise
the real estate values would go down. You
speak about how the papers fed this whole
idea. Was that a bit of a self-fulfilling
prophecy in some sense?
PIETILA: Well, the papers fed it. And it's
kind of interesting. When I was researching
the book and asking about this policy, some
of the old-time executives told me that the
classifications persisted as long as they
did because the buyers, the market, wanted
it that way.
JAY: But is it just a question of classifications?
'Cause I think you refer to some articles
from The Sun where they would do sort of analysis
showing how property values would collapse
if even one black person moved into a neighborhood.
I mean, how much is the press helping cause
this, rather than just reporting on it?
PIETILA: You asked about pricing. Why did
property values go down? Well, property values
went down because until the 1960s, late 1960s,
there was little or no conventional financing
available to black buyers. So if you were
living in a white neighborhood, you wanted
to sell your house, unless you finance that
sale, you could not do it in a free market
situation. So the only recourse for you, because
the black buyer could not get financing, was
to use a middle man, known as a blockbuster,
who would give a pittance to you for that
house and then flip it and sell it onward
to a black buyer. And these blockbusters,
the reason why they were able to do this was
that in a market where there was no conventional
financing available, they had investors who
would provide 100 percent financing to the
black buyer.
JAY: Okay. So in the next segment of our interview,
let's dig into blockbusting. And this is where
white working class neighborhoods are deliberately--black
families are moved in deliberately by real
estate speculators who want to first drive
down prices and then drive them up again.
And we'll dig into all that in the second
part of our interview series on The Real News
Network.
