Home » 80-year-old segregation wall finally comes down in Baltimore

80-year-old segregation wall finally comes down in Baltimore

by NBC News

The wall was built along Hillen Road in front of the school’s entrance and stretching past Northwood Shopping Center in the early 1940s after years of debate and opposition. Residents and neighborhood associations in the predominantly white city already had qualms with the school when it moved to its current location in 1917, Wilson said. The state’s decision to change what was then Morgan College from a private institution into a public one in 1939 to help Black people only “exacerbated” the racial strife, Wilson said. It happened as Baltimore began to adopt restrictive racial covenants limiting where Black people could live — Baltimore was among the first cities to adopt such practices. 

The Baltimore Afro-American newspaper published articles chronicling the debate: College trustees called plans for the wall “discriminatory to Morgan College,” while Morris Macht, part of one of Maryland’s largest residential building companies at the time, denied that it had anything to do with race. Ultimately, a zoning board approved the wall, and construction began in 1942, according to the Afro-American. 

Construction workers demolish the “Spite Wall” at Morgan State University in Baltimore on Tuesday.Courtesy Morgan State University

“For the white community, this spite wall was to send a signal and to physically create a divider that would symbolize the segregation that they stood for,” said Dale Green, a professor and architectural historian at Morgan State. “They were not supportive of the integration of African Americans into the greater society. The wall was to fortify the whites from the Blacks.” 

The barrier remained for decades, even as Morgan State students fought for civil rights in the 1960s, staging one of the nation’s first anti-segregation sit-ins at the Northwood Shopping Center across the street from the campus. 

Destroying the wall is part of a major reconstruction and expansion at the university called “Morgan Momentum,” said…

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