Brown in Baltimore: School Desegregation and the Limits of Liberalism

Howell S. Baum's Brown in Baltimore provides a history of school segregation in Baltimore from the Civil War through the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision that ended de jure segregation, to the early 1980s when desegregating the City of Baltimore was deemed a lost cause. In remarkable detail, Baum recounts Baltimore's consistent pursuit of liberal ideals that placed individual freedoms high above racial equality. What resulted was a failed desegregation effort. Baum's attention to context is the most impressive aspect of Brown in Baltimore. He places this story of education policymaking in Baltimore's political, geographic, and social settings to explain why these events unfolded as they did. Readers of Brown in Baltimore will learn a great deal about modern American history, urban society, city government, and education policy. As such, the text is well suited for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses on these subjects. Additionally, it will be of great benefit to anyone working to understand the current struggles in American urban education, as the book tells the story of one of many failed educational reforms that preceded current efforts. Surely, Baum's history of school segregation in Baltimore contributes a great deal to our understanding of why efforts to desegregate have failed and, in turn, why desegregation has done little to reform American education. -Journal of Urban Affairs

Baum captures as no other historian has Baltimore city leaders' abiding faith in the power of liberalism to promote civic equality. . . . Their 'raceless attack on segregation,' Baum argues, was doomed to failure. . . . His book successfully indicts liberalism on its own terms, laying bare the devastating if unintended consequences of free-choice public schooling. -Robert S. Wolff, Journal of American History (September 2011)

Baum's excellent book populates an account about broad social forces with portraits of very human individuals, most well intentioned, many heroic, all making concrete decisions based on partial information. . . . Baum portrays the real roots of Baltimore's failures as running deeper and developing earlier than the anger over the post-assassination riots. The city's decline into helplessness in coping with race was not a hairpin turn but a slow-moving glacier, more or less predestined by political culture, ideology, and habits that Baum wraps up into the concept of liberalism. Liberalism, as he conceives it, buttressed the city's allegiance to individualism, freedom, and choice: all values that helped to support a readiness to toss aside formal segregation, but which created blind spots about more systemic forms of racial privilege, clashed with proposals to use government power to authoritatively intervene in pursuit of integration, and made it easy for the leaders to misguage political reactions rooted in collective identities, hopes, and resentments tied to race. Above all else, Baltimore was unwilling-possibly unable-to talk about race. -Jeffrey R. Henig, City & Community

As an account of school desegregation at the policymaking level, Brown in Baltimore is an important book. While the author offers the reader plenty of detail about various policies and administrative issues, he does not lose sight of the larger currents affecting education in the city. Baum provides an excellent account of Baltimore school desegregation which analyzes school policy at the intersection of major forces in American life, especially institutional racism and political liberalism. -Jared Leighton, H-1960s, H-Net Reviews

The usual story emphasizes the influence of demographic change, federal urban policy, venal blockbusters, deindustrialization, and the politics of race and class. In his powerful account of the abject failure of desegregation in the schools of Baltimore, Howell S. Baum, professor of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Maryland, does not deny the importance of any of these factors. His history includes all of them. But he digs deeper. Underlying the usual culprits, Baum finds American liberalism with its fixation on individual freedom and preference for markets over governments. . . . Baum's account rests on a thorough canvas of primary sources, including valuable interviews with key participants in the events. . . . Baum's book joins exceptional scholarship with keen political insight and a moral sensibility which never loses track of what is at stake. -Journal of Social History