A Racial Profile

Maryland in 2023

The swearing in of Wes Moore on January 18, 2023, Mayland’s first Black governor.

The Civil Rights Act of 1968 (also known as the Fair Housing Act) prohibited discrimination in the “sale, rental and financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin, sex and (as amended) handicap and family status.”

A year or so later, as a reporter for The Washington Post assigned to Prince George’s County just southeast of Washington, D.C., I was covering racial unrest at Bladensburg High School. I described this as “the new American front line where the inner city meets the suburb.”

What was happening at a striking pace was that Prince George’s County, which had been overwhelmingly white, had become integrated and would soon be a majority-Black county -- and in time the wealthiest majority-Black county in the entire United States. Palmer Park, a working-class neighborhood of small single-family houses near Bladensburg that later became known as the home of the boxing champion Sugar Ray Leonard, went from all-white to Black in about two years. In the 2020 census, the minority population of Prince George’s was almost 90 percent, mainly Black and Hispanic.

Most of Prince George’s County in the past had a distinctly southern vibe despite its mid-Atlantic location. It was considered much less prosperous in the conventional sense than Montgomery County to its north. It had tobacco fields, a sheriff’s department with a reputation for racism, and political leadership that was old-school in its governing standards. County Commissioner Jesse St. Clair Baggett ended up in federal prison for taking bribes from local land developers.

The culture was changing profoundly and fast, with the result, not really surprisingly, of racial tension and scattered violence. White flight was driving residents farther south in the state to Charles County, but over the years the demographic transformation would take a similar path. In 2020, Prince George’s was replaced by Charles County as America’s wealthiest Black-majority county.

This is a pattern that has happened around many major American cities. The Black middle class, intent on getting the best and most affordable housing, education, and surroundings for their families, were moving out of the inner cities, leaving behind the people unable or uninterested in following them. Problems of crime, drug use and dysfunction in daily life remained in the inner cities.

On the same day that I encountered the 2020 census figures in the Post, there were stories of gun killings and many wounded in Baltimore (Maryland’s largest city), Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, and elsewhere, always in the same general parts of the cities, where the population had dropped significantly, as those who could leave chose to do so. Baltimore had the largest population drop of all the larger cities in the country in the most recent census.

Another feature of the demographic shift has been that Black families often choose to live in neighborhoods that are largely Black. The student body at Bladensburg High School is now about 1 percent white, reflecting its surrounding area.

Almost twenty years ago, the Georgetown law professor Sheryll Cashin wrote a book for PublicAffairs called The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream, about what was happening in Prince George’s County. One point she made then was that shopping and recreation facilities in the county did not match what was possible in, say, Montgomery County. This seems to have changed for the better. A development called National Harbor near the District of Columbia line has upscale retail housing, convention, and entertainment venues that are impressive. Around the University of Maryland in College Park, all the amenities that support an institution of that scale have spread. The county seat in Upper Marlboro still has the façade of the rural courthouse of decades past but the county’s political and educational leadership, mainly Black, manages a sprawling suburban constituency of about one million people.

Another significant fact of 2023 is the election last year of Wes Moore as the first African American governor of the state. Moore, born in Maryland, educated at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, was the CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation in New York and a bestselling author when he decided to run for governor with about a 1 percent recognition rating in early polls. He is forty-four years old and has the charisma and savvy of other younger Black political figures like Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader of the House of Representatives, and the eloquence of Barack Obama, as this recent interview in The New Yorker clearly reflects.

The Democratic front-runner to fill an open U.S. Senate seat in 2024 is Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks, who has already been endorsed by, among others, Rep. Steny Hoyer, the former House majority leader, who has represented portions of Prince George’s County since 1981, when it was a very different place.

Maryland was a “slave” state prior to the Civil War (this Fresh Air interview with writer Rachel Swarns tells part of that history) but did not join the confederacy. Among  mid-Atlantic states, its culture straddles from the outer edge of Appalachia in the West to the counties in the Southeast that felt as though they were below the Mason-Dixon although geographically were not. In 2020, the state’s population of more than six million was about evenly divided between whites and minority groups, largely Black and Hispanic.

The racial profile of Maryland in 2023 reflects major changes– in many respects, similar to what has happened in other states across the country. And yet there are the festering conditions in the inner cities that resist improvement, while in those suburbs where the Black middle classes now live and on the whole thrive, they lean towards neighborhoods that are more racially separate than perhaps the idealists of integration would aspire to see.