The Baltimore City Council passed an ordinance requiring Black and white residents to live on separate blocks. Titled “an ordinance to prevent conflict and ill-feeling between the white and colored races in Baltimore City,” the law was one of a number of segregation ordinances passed that decade—and was part of the first city-wide effort in the country to create legally segregated neighborhoods.
According to newspaper reports, only one Black family lived on the Mosher Street Block in Baltimore at the time. On September 25, the same day the segregation ordinance was passed, a group of white men and boys “bombarded” the Black family’s home with stones and bricks for several hours.
The passage of the 1913 law formalized decades of de facto segregation enforced by violent attacks by white mobs on Black families in “white” neighborhoods, and helped Baltimore earn the reputation of the “national leader in residential segregation.” The racially discriminatory restrictions were later also applied to Jewish residents, many of whom lived in the Roland Park neighborhood in Baltimore.
In 1917, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Buchanan v. Warley that a Kentucky ordinance prohibiting Black and white people from buying homes in neighborhoods where they were racial minorities violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections for freedom of contract. Baltimore Mayor James H. Preston soon instructed city officials to charge anyone who rented or sold to Black people in predominantly white neighborhoods with code violations.