The Structural Poverty in Baltimore Has Racial Ramifications
By Ralph E. Moore, Jr.
Delivered to The Greater Baltimore Committee Leadership Class
April 7, 2006

From the “It’s what’s not said that can kill you” file…. I’m reminded of the story of a man and his wife who were having some problems and giving each other the silent treatment. The man realized that he’d need his wife to wake him the next morning at 5:00 AM for an early flight to Chicago.

Not wanting to be the first to break the silence, ho wrote on a piece of paper and left it for her, “Please wake me at 5:00 AM.”

The next morning, the man woke up only to discover it was 9:00 AM and that he had missed his flight. Furious, he was about to go and see why his wife hadn’t woken him when he noticed a piece of paper left for him by the bed.

The paper said, “It is 5:00 AM. Wake up.”

Poverty exists in the city of Baltimore and remains in place like a monument to our shortcomings as a local society: failing schools,  historically low wages,  limited physical mobility for poor folks due to an embarrassingly awful public transportation system, bad housing on top of bad housing in declining neighborhoods or unaffordable rents, easy access to addictive drugs and drink, ineffectual government at all levels and all covered in a blanket of silence, interwoven with ignorance, apathy, fear and frustration from the rest of us… 

Nobody talks about eliminating poverty in Baltimore, because it embarrasses us with its stubbornness.  Nobody wants to pull the drunken, beastly bum off of our nice, neat front yards for fear we must become engaged.   Nobody knows what to do, because we just don’t want to talk about it… maybe he’ll just go away… maybe we’ll wake up one day and find Mr. Poverty is gone… off to the suburbs to live happily ever after and happily out of our sight… But the poor, weary man cannot get up by his own steam.  He’s worn out from wandering in his own desert, while actually walking in place.  He’s fatigued from his lofty position at the top of the “human scrap heap”.  Weighed down by the ironclad, existential futility of being poor, Black and in real trouble (as the local author, Jerome Dyson Wright, once said)…  He carries the weight of the poverty game like a leaden I.D. card in his otherwise empty pockets:  It reads,  (as the song from the musical, “The Wiz”, goes) “You can’t win, you can’t get even and you can’t get out of the game.”

Let’s break the silence for a few minutes… let’s talk about the structural poverty in Baltimore.  We slowly built it (over decades) as a society with our policies, our fear and our indifference.  We can only demolish it if we make an attempt to talk about it and make an honest effort to do something about it… the silence is leading to our decline as a decent and free Baltimore society; and the black and white faith healer’s slogan and signs are merely limited.  Let’s begin the process of really saving our city… recognizing, in the words of the noted author, James Baldwin, that “Not everything that is faced can be changed.  But nothing can be changed until it is faced…”

Defining poverty:  According to a 2004 Job Opportunities Task Force report, “Connecting Low income Families to Jobs”, ‘Since 1959, the federal government has calculated “poverty thresholds” that establish the minimum annual income needed to support families of various sizes.  For 2001, the thresholds establish the “poverty line” at $9,214 for a single person and $17,960 for a family of two parents and two children- throughout the 48 contiguous states.

In the case of a single mother raising a preschooler and one school aged child, the federal government poverty thresholds’ minimum income for such a family is $14,269 throughout the 48 states.

Families with incomes below these levels are considered to be living in poverty.’

High unemployment: 200,000 city residents (half the adult population) do not have jobs. [Baltimore Sun, March 28, 2004]… it reminds me of something Samuel Yette quoted in his 1971 book, The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival in America.

…Describing a 1966 group of poverty stricken demonstrators in Lafayette Park, across from the White House, the then Secretary of Labor under Lyndon Johnson, W. Willard Wirtz, said…’they were obsolete people, a human scrap heap… We are piling up a human scrap heap of between 250,000 and 500,000 people a year, many of whom never appear in unemployment statistics.  They are often not counted among the unemployed because they have given up looking for work and thus count themselves out of the labor market. 

The human scrap heap is comprised of persons who, as a consequence of technological development, of their own educational failures (and society’s—I might add), of environments of poverty and other causes that disqualify them for employment in a skilled economy, cannot and will not find work without special help.

Low wages:

The minimum wage, set nationally at $5.15 an hour, has declined 24 percent since 1979 when adjusted for inflation (so $5.15 has become $3.92 in spending power)… the minimum wage hasn’t changed since 1997.  It did change by a lousy buck here in Maryland…. The Senate just passed a bill raising it, Bobby Governor vetoed it…and the House and Senate override his veto. 

Many wages are not living wages (about a couple of years ago, SEIU released a study (called Putting Baltimore’s People First) that suggested that a self-sufficiency wage of $17.41 per hour or $36,200 annually is what their research found it takes to support a family of 3 in Baltimore).  Most jobs in the city are service jobs nowadays:  Johns Hopkins Hospital employs about 8,000 people whereas Beth Steel’s plant in Sparrows Point employed 35,000 workers at its peak in 1959.  The difference, according to the study, is that the lowest paid steelworker earned a homeowners wage, while the cooks, cleaners, nurse’s aides, and other service workers at Hopkins do not…

Flight of the Black Middle Class

Exacerbating conditions was the subsequent flight from the City of middle-class African-Americans.  Increasingly, Baltimore’s black middle class followed white Baltimoreans who had fled to the suburbs before them.  Between 1990 and 2000, the number of African-Americans living in the City declined for the first time, while the most recent census report shows a decline in Baltimore’s black population roughly equal to that of its white population.13  Now, after decades of population drain, the characteristic that defines the City’s polarization from the suburbs is not race, but economic class.

Rise of the Service Sector

With the decline of manufacturing, the service sector came to be the dominant base of employment for Baltimore City residents.  Today, service-providing jobs account for over 90% of all jobs in Baltimore City.14  Such jobs have a heavily minority workforce; one study found that in 1990, 71% of low-wage service workers in Baltimore were African-American, though African-Americans represented only 59% of the City’s population.15  

In many positions, the majority of workers are women; according to the same report, women filled 83% of administrative support positions and 84% of personal services positions.  Three-quarters of the women included in the survey who supported a family were the sole source of income for that household.  Service industries such as hospitals, nursing homes, and tourism had become the primary source of employment for poor and minority workers.

Service jobs are largely characterized by low pay, high turnover rates, irregular or part-time schedules, lack of benefits, job insecurity, and lack of union representation.  Few offer vocational training or skills-building opportunities for advancement.  Low pay forces many service workers to work second jobs, increasing their weekly work hours to more than 60 in some cases.  Also, many workplaces are located far from the neighborhoods where service workers live, adding to transportation and childcare costs for working families.

In a city of an increasingly poor and minority population, the low-wage service sector has became the principal determinant of the economic status of Baltimore City residents.  The growing concentration of urban poverty and the rise of low-wage service economy have at once reinforced one another and exacerbated poor living conditions for urban workers.

Poor education: 50%-- 76 % high school dropout rates…   In the school system overall, the high schools lose about 45 percent of their students between 9th and 12 grades, but in the neighborhood high schools, the dropout rate is 71% according to BCPSS’s Blueprint for Baltimore’s High Schools.  An entering 9th grade class with 700 students will drop to 200 graduates at the end of 12th grade.  The Baltimore City public schools are the political football of the day.  The Erhlich-Grasmick team’s grabbing politics masking as frustrated concern and the O’Malley-Copeland team’s late and slow action feigning as progress.    For the course of this ugly game of tackle and block, the children sit in the stands waiting for something, anything to really cheer about…

Bad housing and the segregated housing pattern:  

Estimates say there are 3,000 men, women and children who are homeless in Baltimore City on any given night.  Most of them are Black.

Of the region’s 137,000 poor blacks, almost three quarters (72 percent) live in poor neighborhoods—almost 32 percent live in neighborhoods of extreme poverty.  By contrast, of the region’s 90,000 poor whites, only one in four (24 percent) live in poor neighborhoods [ according to the ten year old study, Baltimore Unbound: A Strategy for Regional Renewal by David Rusk, 1996]

Crime:

100,000 arrests each year…  Approximately 15,000 men and women, including mandatory releases and parolees, exit Maryland’s prisons each year.  59% of Maryland prison releases return to Baltimore City, 30% returning to just six of Baltimore’s 55 communities.  Baltimore’s ex-offenders have little more than a 6th grade education.

There are 60,000 drug addicts in the city or 1 out of every 8 or 9 residents.

1 out of every three children lives below the poverty line in the city of Baltimore.  Why do we have so many poor children in Baltimore?  Anyone?... anyone?

38% of adults cannot read above the 5th grade level (48% of Marylanders cannot read beyond the eighth grade level… Help Baltimore Reads-Ripken Learning Center… with money & advocacy…

Transportation: In 2003, Sixty percent of Baltimore City workers drove to work alone, 12 percent carpooled, 18 % took public transportation and 8 percent used other means. The remaining 2% worked at home.  Average commute time, 29 minutes.

Public transportation leaves much to be desired… 

According to a 2001 report done by the Jacob France Institute entitled, Job Accessibility in Baltimore City: Nearly all minority, poor and lower income Baltimore City residents reside within a reasonable distance (1/4 mile or less) to a bus route. Thus the mass transit system reaches most persons and jobs in Baltimore City and the inner suburban areas, but does not reach the outer suburban employment centers where employment growth is most rapid and job opportunities the greatest. 

MTA schedules are for the traditional rush hours…and reduced during the non-rush hour, evening & weekend hours required by many low skilled jobs…

35% of the entry level jobs in the Baltimore region cannot be reached by public transportation.

Now, some final numbers…

Black population            66%                  poverty 24%   =            14.5%

White population            31%                  poverty 24%   =            7.44%

Other population            3%                   poverty 24%   =               .7%

24% of the city population in poverty means 156,000 Baltimoreans, most of whom are Black. 

It is the fact that most of the poor are Black poor and that fact helps keep them in place:  If the Baltimore City public schools were still majority white instead of overwhelmingly black, they’d have been fixed a long time ago.  If white folks lived in most of the dilapidated housing in Baltimore, we’d have declared our bad neighborhoods federal, state or municipal disaster areas by now.  If suddenly, mostly whites had to work at low wages for generations, with few to no real benefits we’d be developing progressive living wage ordinances faster than you could say, “Work has to work for the workers.”

Poverty is perceived to be a problem of color.  Whites who suffer under it, seem to be experiencing merely collateral damage.  Now more than ever, it’s the colored people who ride the buses so we don’t have to fix public transportation… it is the darker brothers who lurk in the creases of our city, unemployed and forgotten… it is white officers who arrest Black youth in alarming numbers… mostly whites who enter training classes for the Fire Department… and no African Americans who make the opening day roster for the Baltimore Orioles—this year or last year (forget I said this).

Race is with us, folks.  In 1950, there were 950,000 residents in the city of Baltimore (compared to 640,000 now).  Then the Supreme Court issued the Brown decision of 1954, outlawing segregation in schools and in other aspects of society by implication.   That, my friends, is when the white flight began… the run to the outer hiding places and away from the darker sisters and brothers…  But whites find a way to come back here to work, to enjoy a ballgame, a museum or a good restaurant… some come through the city simply to collect their rents… some U turn in across the city line and back long enough to buy their drugs…

According to Mohandas Gandhi, “Poverty is one of the worst forms of violence.” 

All of those children without food for their bellies, art & beauty for their eyes or good education for their minds, might as well be imprisoned.  All of those discouraged workers, some addicted or drunken, many just plain discouraged just as well be incarcerated… all of those elderly, fixed by their very limited incomes living as prisoners in their own homes (waiting for this summer’s 72 % increases in utility and having to decide if they’ll rather risk dying from heat exhaustion than pay the cost of running a fan or air conditioner.  The poverty is violence, the violence is in silence but the pain is real to some of us and the threat is great to the rest of us.   “36 million Americans live in poverty today, which is 13 million more than 30 years ago… the problem grows locally and nationally.   We need jobs not jails… living wages for workers and healthcare for all.  More and better public transportation… fix the schools quickly for real… increase access to decent affordable housing and save our neighborhoods.

We need to treat the growing poverty like the emergency that it is.  We need to get busy… find out what individuals need and get it to them (individual poverty exit plans…).   Let’s learn to get along across racial lines long enough to do what’s best for all of us—our destinies are inter-twined.  We can succeed—together!