Zoning’s Racist Roots Still Bear Fruit
2nd April 2014
“Blacks,” said Mayor Barry Mahool, “should be quarantined in isolated slums in order to reduce the incidents of civil disturbance, to prevent the spread of communicable disease into the nearby White neighborhoods, and to protect property values among the White majority.”
Mahool was the mayor of Baltimore who, in 1910, signed into law a racial zoning ordinance. According to Christopher Silver’s The Racial Origins of Zoning in American Cities, he was also “a nationally recognized member of the ‘social justice’ wing of the Progressive movement.”
One of the problems with Low-Information Voters is that anything that happened before about, oh, last week, is off their radar. Democrats depend on this to sweep under the rug that their party has been the Party of Racism since the Civil War. Judging by the voting statistics, it’s worked, too — wonder why nobody cites that when they talk about racial disparity in IQ.