Page 7 - Baltimore_Sun_Editorial

negroes from moving” into majority-white neighborhoods and vice versa — signed into law in
1910. The measure was drafted, one article claimed, after white residents in the northwest section
of the city decried “the encroachment of the negroes into white residential sections, lowering
property values and driving white people from the neighborhoods in which, previous to the black
invasion, they had liked to live.”

As Antero Pietila, a former Sun reporter, noted in his 2010 book, “Not in My Neighborhood:
How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City,” that particular ordinance paved the way for
residential segregation in America. Nothing else like it was on the books anywhere, and
legislation modeled after it soon sprung up in other regions of the country.

The ordinance was eventually struck down, as were others that followed, by a 1917 Supreme
Court ruling concerned that the measures limited the ability of white homeowners to sell to
whomever they wished. But The Sun remained a strong proponent of segregation — including
segregation contained within “voluntary” neighborhood covenants in which white residents
agreed not to sell to Black buyers (these, too, were eventually struck down by the high court, in
1948). And its writers complained of the “negro invasion” for nearly two decades.

In the 1930s, as the Democratic and
Republican parties began the slow
philosophy swap that would come
to represent them today, it appeared
as if The Sun had a moral
awakening. It gave front-page news
coverage to two horrific lynchings
on the Eastern Shore, and took
strong positions against them in
editorials. Sun columnist H.L.
Mencken wrote so derisively of
Salisbury’s white population and
town leaders, he was threatened Antero Pietila personally signs a copy of his book, “Not in My
with death should he show his face Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City,”
for a reader at the 10th Annual Words & Wine Benefit hosted
there. by the Friends of the Catonsville Library in 2015. (Nate
Pesce / For The Baltimore Sun Media Group)
But the coverage, as our editorial
page later noted in 2018, “deplored
the inhumanity of the perpetrators without ever really acknowledging the humanity of the
victims” or the community terrorized by their brutal deaths. The ire was directed at the “poor,
white trash” killers, as Mencken put it; there was no empathy for — or even real interest in —
the Black victims. (This was also the decade that the paper featured an offensive recipe column,
written insultingly and proudly by a white woman “in the vernacular of an ante-bellum
mammy.”)

And in the early 1950s, the editorial board bemoaned the banning of the decades-old pro-
Confederacy and pro-Ku Klux Klan film “The Birth of a Nation.” After Maryland’s Board of
Motion Picture Censors deemed the movie “morally bad and crime-inciting,” The Sun defended
it as simply trying to depict sentiments of the South during the Reconstruction era.

7