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11 Pivot in Perception The Impact of the 1968 Riots on Three Baltimore Business Districts elizabeth m. nix and Deborah r. Weiner t he events of April 1968 are often used as shorthand in Baltimore City. residents remember a Baltimore “before the riots,” in which the population was stable, race relations were better than in most cities, crime was low, and commercial life was thriving. they believe that “after the riots,” the city’s population declined rapidly, race relations deteriorated, crime skyrocketed, and businesses left for the suburbs. When the popular imagination assigns this major role to the riots, the city’s problems in 2010 of sixteen thousand vacant houses,1 one of the highest murder rates in the nation, and a dearth of retail become simpler to explain. However, the actual story of Baltimore in the 1960s is more nuanced. Widespread middle-class flight in residential and commercial areas had already begun. many were choosing to live and shop outside the city because of real and perceived urban ills, in addition to the temptations of suburbia. the proliferation of suburban shopping centers had taken a toll on the retail life of the city long before the disturbances occurred. Charles Center (opened in 1959) and the mechanic theater (opened in 1967) were only two of the highest-profile urban renewal efforts designed to “lure people back to downtown.”2 in 1967 city high school students were found with a variety of weapons, including guns.3 even before the streets filled with looters, fear of crime was the “all-encompassing excuse” that many city residents gave when they made the move to the suburbs.4 Pivot in Perception / 181 the population of Baltimore City peaked around 1950 and then dropped by ten thousand in the decade between 1950 and 1960, the firstever decline in the city’s history.5 in 1967 an urban planner wrote in an international journal, “By 1960, Baltimore had almost become a city of low- and low-middle-income people living in spacious apartments with high ceilings for $38 a month. this would have been fine were it not for the fact that upper-income families had moved off the city’s tax rolls.”6 in a 1967 interview, William Donald schaefer, then a city councilman, discussed people who were “staying in or coming back to the city. more are beginning to see the city advantages, but problems such as crime are significant deterrents.”7 As schaefer tried to bring middle-class residents back into the city, he also acknowledged the movement of middle-class blacks within the city. in the same interview schaefer remarked, “today a negro in the market for a home can buy one in almost any section of the city if he has the money.” the racial desegregation of the city led to increasing concentrations of poverty in the segregated neighborhoods that middle-class blacks left behind, leaving many areas more poverty stricken than they were before desegregation. As a result they were ripe for riot. in 1961 the Baltimore Health and Welfare Council identified “high crime and unemployment rates, social alienation, low level of communication and language skills, poor nutritional and health standards, and limited access to facilities for self-help” as concerns in inner-city neighborhoods.8 Well before 1968 city leaders had predicted urban unrest and were taking measures to prevent it.9 Just as the economic health and population stability of Baltimore before the riots has been exaggerated in the popular imagination, the role of the uprising in the economic downturn the city experienced in the 1970s has also been inflated. looters and arsonists went to work in fifteen business districts across the city, but they did not destroy the commercial life of those areas. While certain businesses were damaged beyond hope of recovery and never reopened after April 1968, dozens of other stores cleaned up the glass, filed insurance claims, and ordered new inventory. many of those businesses survived for a number of years until an event such as a fire, a business downturn, or generational succession caused the owners to make the decision to close. statistics and contemporary news accounts indicate that the riots merely accelerated trends that were already under way and that their tangible effects were not as dire as popular imagination might indicate. nevertheless, the events of April 1968 played a major role in changing perceptions about the city. Contemporary accounts and later oral histories testify to the impact the violence had on the...

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