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Article Excerpt
From birth in a colored ward to burial in a colored cemetery, Negroes
lived an almost entirely separate existence bounded on all sides by racial discrimination. --Edgar Jones and Jack Levin, [1960] 2003
Situated on 170 acres of former industrial land approximately 2 miles southwest of the Inner Harbor of Baltimore, Maryland, Carroll Park is a historically significant public space. In theory at least, the park has been open to all visitors, regardless of race or ethnicity, since its establishment in 1890. In reality, sections of the park have a long history of segregation. The park's golf course, located on the western end of the property, serves as an important example. As the first such facility in Baltimore to admit African American players, Carroll Park took center stage in the movement to desegregate all of the city's municipal golf courses. Perhaps more important, desegregation of the city's public golf courses eventually led to the abolishment of restrictions at other recreational facilities, including ball fields, playgrounds, public swimming pools, and city beaches.
In this article we use original minutes of Baltimore's Board of Public Park Commissioners (BPPC) meetings, newspapers--including a prominent African American weekly--and other historical sources to explore how access to Carroll Park was shaped by issues of race and ethnicity during the first half of the twentieth century, placing special emphasis on the role the park played in the struggle to desegregate the city's golf courses. (1) In a recent article Jennifer Wolch, John Wilson, and Jed Fehrenbach point out that America's urban parks are still coming to terms with a past marked by segregation and racial violence (2005). We hope that our research will provide a better understanding of present-day patterns of park use and, further, that an examination of Carroll Park's past will assist resource managers in their restoration and historical interpretation efforts, both in Baltimore and elsewhere.
PARKS AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
Social scientists have urged us to rethink the concept of public space (see, for example, Mitchell 1995, 2003; Low 2000; Low and Smith 2006). Whether it is the social and cultural boundaries that influence our movements, the limitations on use imposed by increased surveillance and policing, the growing trend toward privatization, or the marginalization or exclusion of particular groups, such as the homeless, it is clear that not everyone is afforded equal or equitable access to our "public" spaces. In a parallel development, the roots of which can be traced to the mid-1980s, scholars of twentieth-century African American history have cast aside the "ghetto-synthesis" approach to the study of the urban black population in favor of an "agency" model that stresses the importance of community and resistance among African Americans (see, for example, McDougall 1993; Goings and Mohl 1996; Hirsch 2000; Trotter 2004). Increasingly dissatisfied with the former approach, which often portrayed African Americans as "passive or powerless" victims of white racism, practitioners of the "new" African American urban history seek to convey "a sense of active involvement, of people empowered, engaged in struggle, living their lives in dignity and shaping their own futures" (Goings and Mohl 1996, 3).
Meanwhile, recent scholarship in the environmental justice field has shifted the spotlight from an almost exclusive preoccupation with disamenities--the siting of landfills, toxic-waste facilities, power plants, and so on--to an emphasis on the location and distribution of amenities, such as public parks and street trees (Jensen and others 2004; Perkins, Heynen, and Wilson 2004; Pastor, Morello-Frosch, and Sadd 2005; Sandler and Pezzullo 2007). Rising obesity levels in the Western world have prompted the public health community to frame the lack of recreational spaces for exercise as an environmental justice issue (Bedimo-Rung and others 2005; Roemmich and others 2006). Laura Pulido's groundbreaking work on environmental justice in Los Angeles highlights the need to comprehend the dynamics of "white privilege" and the uneven power relations and landscapes it creates (2000). Rather than focusing entirely on discriminatory siting of polluting facilities, which in most cases is difficult to establish firmly, tracking the ability of whites to keep disamenities out of their neighborhoods and attract a disproportionate share of amenities can go a long way in helping to unravel the dynamics of environmental justice.
A goal shared by many scholars conducting environmental justice research is to connect patterns of inequity with the processes that create them. Increasingly sophisticated spatial analyses have greatly added to our understanding of patterns of inequity, but it is shortsighted to believe that a snapshot in time, or even cross-sections in time, can explain how those patterns came to be. Recent calls to uncover the processes that produce the patterns we see--process equity as opposed to outcome equity--underscore the significance and value of adopting a historical approach to environmental justice research (Hurley 1997; Bolin and others 2002; Boone 2002, 2005; Colten 2002, 2005; Bolin, Grineski, and Collins 2005; Saha and Mohai 2005; Ueland and Warf 2006). As Wolch, Wilson, and Fehrenbach point out, current environmental inequities are often "rooted in past histories of racial oppression and discriminatory service delivery patterns" (2005, 4), yet our understanding of these processes is often vague and incomplete.
Fusing these conceptual frameworks together, we endeavor to contribute to the environmental justice literature in at least three ways. First, we use a historical approach to link shifting patterns of inequity with the dynamic processes that shaped them, paying especially close attention to the tactics employed by Baltimore's BPPC to ensure "protection" of white neighborhoods. Second, we show that proximity and access do not necessarily go hand in hand. Just because African Americans had "access" to a local park or recreational facility does not mean they could take full advantage of all that a given park had to offer. Our study shows that, in some instances, the city barred African Americans altogether from participating in certain activities. In other cases, their access to park grounds was restricted either spatially or temporally. And third, by illuminating the history of a particular park as contested space, we highlight the role that African Americans--both individually and collectively--played in challenging the segregationist practices of the BPPC.
ORIGINS OF CARROLL PARK
In 1919, fifteen years after a disastrous fire gutted its downtown and just one year removed from the cessation of hostilities in Europe, Baltimore found itself, once again, an important player in the national economy. It had a thriving steel industry, a bustling port, and, thanks to a recent annexation, ample space for a growing population. In addition, it possessed a plan for park expansion and development that city officials hoped would serve as a blueprint for decades to come. As World War I drew to a close, Baltimoreans had good reason to be sanguine about the city's future.
Not all of Baltimore's residents shared in the prosperity, however. Like other large cities, Baltimore was sharply divided along racial lines (McDougall 1993; Orser 1994; Olson 1997). Although racial segregation had always existed in Baltimore, by the early years of the twentieth century the pattern of "street-and-alley segregation" that had predominated during the nineteenth century gave way "to sizeable hemmed-in ghettos in East Baltimore, West Baltimore, and South Baltimore" (Olson 1997, 372). As a growing number of white residents took advantage of the annexation to move to the suburbs just beyond the city center, the black community remained "locked in." According to Sherry Olson, "a Jim Crow space was coalescing, growing larger and more formidable.... Its space expanded grudgingly, explosively, block by block and year by year" (1997, 372).
As these changes were taking place, Baltimore, following the lead of cities such as Boston and New York, shifted its approach to park development from a model grounded in the contemplative ideals of the Romantic Era to one that reflected the rationalistic designs of the City Beautiful movement (Peterson 1976; Cranz 1982; Wilson 1989). (2) In an effort to insure that the verdant hills beyond the city's center retained their rural character in the face of suburban migration and to better provide for the recreational needs of the city's residents, Baltimore's Municipal Art Society hired Olmsted Brothers, a landscape-architecture firm in Brookline, Massachusetts, to develop a plan for expanding the city's park system. Among other things, the Olmsted plan called for the creation of numerous small parks and playgrounds, the expansion of several existing parks, and the development of a network of parkways. Anticipating future suburban growth, the principal architect of the plan, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., also recommended that the city establish parks along the major stream valleys and set aside...
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