Page 8 - Baltimore_Sun_Editorial

‘Painful to many Marylanders’

And as court rulings began to reveal the lie in the notion of “separate but equal” education, The
Sun was reluctant to endorse the obvious. In 1952, when Baltimore Polytechnic Institute high
school allowed 10 academically qualified Black students to enter its accelerated “A course”
program, after determining that a separate program would not provide equal educational
opportunity, The Sun congratulated the school board on its “conscientiousness and restraint” in
handling the matter, but failed to note the historic nature of the integration or even the
appropriateness of the decision.

When two years later, the U.S. Supreme Court, struck down the separate but equal doctrine and
outlawed segregation in its Brown v. Board of Education ruling, The Sun, while acknowledging
that the decision must be accepted and was “inevitable,” editorialized that it also would be
“painful to many Marylanders.” The bright side, the writers found? It might decrease the ”
criminal activity to which too many of the Negro race are given.”

At that time, The Sun was still choosing to identify Black people by race in its coverage — and
only Black people — placing the tag “Negro” after individual names, even though many other
newspapers had long since stopped similar practices. When a Westminster minister and seminary
professor asked the paper to discard “this discriminatory practice” in 1955, according to an
article in The Afro-American, the editor-in-chief flat out refused, self-righteously declaring that
“the Sunpapers will not be a party to such suppression” of fact and that “the matter of what it is
now fashionable to call ‘pigmentation’ is important from both the white and the Negro point of
view.”

He didn’t spell out what, exactly, was so important. But he did mention crime and Black
responsibility for it, so we’d venture a guess that the significance was in perpetuating a
stereotype of Black people as dangerous and to be feared. At the time, Baltimore’s population
was about 24% Black, and white fear of “the other” was strong. Several years would pass, and a
new editor-in-chief would ascend, before the paper eliminated the automatic race tags, in 1961,
under pressure from readers who were sick of them.

As the civil rights movement grew throughout the 1960s, so did The Sun’s conscience. In 1964, a
decade after the Brown v. Board decision, editorial writers produced a fiery piece denouncing
Alabama’s segregationist governor, George Wallace, and decrying school segregation as a “caste
system that has kept Negroes in a position of inferiority.” The same editorial embraced the Civil
Rights Bill of 1964 working its way through Congress as a “national commitment to sweep away
the inequities which racial discrimination has imposed on a large body of citizens” that is “right
and inevitable.” And when the bill passed in June of that year, editorial writers called it “a
mighty step” and “a reaffirmation of the principles of equality upon which our society was
founded.”

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