CHAPTER 10

“There’s Tragedy on Both Sides of the Layoffs”: Privatization and the Urban Crisis

In March 1986, more than seventy workers from Baltimore’s Urban Services Agency and their union representatives marched on city hall to protest a decision by their agency’s head to lay off twenty-one employees. Although small in numbers, the layoffs followed a series of cuts that had already shrunk the antipoverty agency’s staff by a crippling two-thirds in five years. The March layoffs were also particularly poignant. Many of those who lost their jobs were African American women who were veterans of the city’s War on Poverty. They were low-level, direct-service providers, and some had grown up in the communities in which they worked. During their demonstration at city hall, the workers expressed concern about their clients’ uncertain futures. As one woman later explained about her program, which was being eliminated as a result of budget cuts, “We handle families that have multiple problems such as eviction proceedings, lack of food, truancy among young people, teenage pregnancy, a whole host of difficulties.… I don’t know what some of our clients are going to do once we close the cases.”¹ The workers had good cause to worry about their own futures as well. As Ronald “R. B.” Jones of the Afro-American reminded readers, “There is tragedy on both sides of … the layoffs.”² The women left unemployed by the cuts faced dismal job prospects in postindustrial Baltimore, and their clients, among the most vulnerable in the city, were left to provide themselves or do without services the state earlier guaranteed its citizens.

The implications of the Reagan revolution for African Americans in Baltimore were multiple and dire. For over a decade, Republican politicians had been recklessly touting dog-whistle claims that suggested that urban African Americans were prone to criminality and that cities with large Black populations were dangerous and corrupt. “Law-and-order” and “welfare queen” rhetoric, in combination with a revival of states’ rights and assaults on the public sector as bloated and inefficient, imperiled gains that Baltimore’s civil rights activists had worked decades to achieve. For much of the twentieth century, Black leaders in the city had pursued three important goals. To challenge white supremacy and enhance the lives of Black city residents, they sought to increase African Americans’ political influence, enhance the job prospects of Black workers, and improve the quality of services available to African American residents. Reagan’s agenda threatened gains that had been made on all three fronts. The Republican introduced his own version of New Federalism, which differed from Richard Nixon’s in that it involved the transfer of federal resources to elected officials at the state rather than the local level. The change shifted power over affairs in Baltimore away from African Americans and toward predominantly white, male officials in Annapolis. New Federalism meant that important decisions concerning Baltimore’s future would be made in the State House, where African Americans had considerably less political influence than they had in the city.

Reaganomics, meanwhile, did not bode well for Black public-sector workers, the mainstay of the city’s African American middle and working classes. By 1980, nearly 40 percent of employed Black women and close to 30 percent of employed Black men in Baltimore worked for the federal, state, or municipal government, and most of them worked for the city.³ Reagan’s neoliberal macroeconomic policies wreaked havoc on the public sector, shrinking a source of employment—and of influence over public policy—of vital importance to the economic health of Black communities. Moreover, the concentration of federal-level budget cuts in the human services hit hardest at those government agencies in which African American women had made the most substantial job gains.

Simultaneously, the president launched the War on Drugs. As humanservices workers watched their numbers and influence decrease, the fortunes of the predominantly white and male Baltimore Police Department increased. Arrest rates soared as officers cracked down on drug use in the city, and African American men were ensnared disproportionately, even though drug-use rates among Blacks and whites in Maryland were similar. The crisis of mass incarceration, long in the making, was under way. Meanwhile, reductions in funding for social welfare programs and public services rent holes in the social safety net that disproportionately impacted women, who bore gendered responsibilities for family caretaking. Women were forced to provide themselves, do without, or find alternative sources of services that recently had been available from the state. The president’s neoliberal policies, in other words, often required that women absorb into the domestic sphere—and provide without compensation—services the government had earlier paid for and thus implicitly acknowledged as economic activity. The savings to taxpayers were shifted up the economic ladder. During the 1980s, the policies of the Reagan administration entrenched an ongoing urban crisis in Baltimore that only two decades earlier had shown signs of easing.

“The States Proved Themselves Unfair in the Past”: Reagan and Black Political Power

Reagan’s reassertion of states’ rights while on the campaign trail angered and worried the nation’s and Baltimore’s African American leaders—for good reason. Once in office, the president’s adoption of New Federalism weakened Black political influence over policy-making. During the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, Black Baltimore had gained unprecedented influence in the municipal government as they secured jobs and leadership posts in the city government and positions on boards and advisory committees. The categorical grants the federal government sent to municipal agencies provided city employees, such as those waging the War on Poverty, an important level of independence from white elected officials. Conservatives had noticed and responded. In the name of restoring “local control,” Nixon used his version of New Federalism to shift influence over federal revenue streams from municipal agencies to elected officials, who in Baltimore remained predominantly white and male. Carter further eroded the power of African Americans within municipal agencies by cutting urban spending and subsidizing public-private partnerships. Over the years, however, African Americans increased their representation on the city council and secured municipal jobs outside of their historical base in antipoverty and human-services agencies. As their local power was growing, Reagan again moved power just beyond their grasp. In accord with his New Federalism, important decisions that affected the city’s future would be made not in municipal offices or even in city hall but instead in the statehouse. The city’s Black leaders identified the usurpation of power under way. And they anticipated its likely outcomes on government programs critical to the well-being of African Americans. As the editors of the Afro American, recalling Maryland’s long and not too distant history of Jim Crow, reminded their readers in a piece on New Federalism, “The states proved themselves inefficient and unfair in operating those programs in the past.”⁴

The change in the method the federal government used to distribute intergovernmental revenue occurred at a moment when Baltimore was already struggling to defend itself in Annapolis. Some Maryland suburbanites, inspired by the 1978 California tax revolt, favored imposing tax caps to limit government spending. Worried Baltimore officials calculated that if a measure like California’s Proposition 13 passed in Maryland, the city would lose close to $137 million in revenue. They kept close tabs on tax initiatives not only on the state level but also on the county level. They were particularly attentive to the political leanings of elected officials in the Maryland suburbs that bordered Washington, DC. Population numbers there were on the rise, while Baltimore’s was continuing to fall. As a result, voters in the D.C. suburbs were becoming the heavyweights in Maryland politics. Ultimately, a tax-cap initiative did pass in Prince George’s County, located just outside of the nation’s capital. Voters in neighboring Montgomery County defeated a similar measure, however, and fortunately for Baltimore, tax-revolt fever did not become contagious in Maryland.⁵

The task of Baltimore’s delegation to the State House nonetheless remained daunting. The representatives had to counter a white backlash against welfare expenditures as well as suburban and rural suspicions of urban profligacy. During the 1970s, under Schaefer’s crafty stewardship, Baltimore had done fairly well when making requests of state officials. At the end of the decade, however, the goodwill of representatives from nonurban jurisdictions had begun to wear thin. To promote literacy in the city, local boosters had dubbed Baltimore the “City That Reads.” A Montgomery County representative proposed the “city of greed” as a more suitable moniker.⁶ Although the D.C. suburbs had been growing in population for some time, it was only during the early 1980s that officials from these jurisdictions finally began to appreciate their ability to challenge legislation from the city. The Sun acknowledged the shift warily in an article that warned Baltimore residents that Montgomery County, for one, was “shed[ding] its weakling image in state politics” and “get[ting] rid of [its] ‘kick me’ sign.”⁷ To counter hostility toward the city from officials from elsewhere in the state, Janet Hoffman, Baltimore’s chief lobbyist in Annapolis, organized tours of the city for state legislators. Elected officials enjoyed a harbor cruise, which provided them with a stunning view of the city’s new aquarium, Harborplace mall, Hyatt Regency hotel, and other waterfront attractions. The delegation also visited a city housing project. Having shown the legislators both the productive uses to which the city put intergovernmental funding and the severe need for antipoverty relief, Baltimore officials hoped for sympathy votes in Annapolis.⁸

Baltimore’s need for allies increased significantly in 1983. Because of depopulation, the size of the delegation Baltimore sent to Annapolis had shrunk over the preceding decades. During the early 1980s, state-level reapportionment further reduced the number of elected officials city residents could send to the State House. In 1983, Baltimore residents voted into office six fewer delegates and three fewer senators than they had in the previous election. A worried city paper described the congressional delegation as “the weakest in recent memory” because of its small size.⁹ Yet the delegates and senators shouldered the weighty responsibility of defending Baltimore’s need for a disproportionate share of the state’s resources. And because of Reagan’s New Federalism and cuts to welfare and urban funding, the city’s dependency on its small delegation was tremendous. Baltimore’s status in Annapolis was not entirely bleak; the likelihood that Schaefer would win the state’s next governor’s race incentivized political support for his requests. Despite his gallant stand against Reaganomics in the halls of Congress, however, the mayor’s trickle-down revitalization priorities were inconsistent with the policy preferences of those who favored more direct responses to poverty, including many in the city’s human-services agencies. Their influence over decision-making in the city had declined considerably, however. A lot had changed since the optimistic days of the mid-1960s, when the federal government had boldly confronted racism and discrimination with civil rights legislation, launched a War on Poverty, sent federal aid earmarked for antipoverty efforts directly to those in the trenches, and mandated maximum feasible community participation in decision-making.¹⁰

“Residents Still Need Help Whether People Are Laid Off or Not”: Reagan and Job Losses

As Reagan’s New Federalism robbed city residents of influence over local agenda-setting, the president’s budget-cutting had a second major consequence in Baltimore. It compelled significant downsizing in the public sector. Building on public antipathy toward public-sector workers that Reagan also reinforced, cuts occurred at all levels of government. And since Baltimore was home to municipal, state, and federal employees, the pain was felt widely. City employees were the first to see their numbers decline. Staffing reductions in some agencies were already under way when Reagan took office. Then, between 1981 and 1986, the city’s grant revenue fell from $220 million to $124 million. Additional reductions in intergovernmental funding cut even more deeply. Overall, according to the Johns Hopkins Center for Metropolitan Planning and Research, the city lost $569 million in revenue for its 1982, 1983, and 1984 budgets collectively.¹¹ In a city in which poverty was on the rise, and only a third earned enough to pay taxes, the cuts were devastating. As they had for decades, Baltimore’s elected officials worried that a property tax increase to offset the revenue losses would only increase the movement of taxpaying residents out of the city. Instead, officials increased rates for many public services. Tuition went up at the community college, and officials even tried to raise money by increasing parking-meter fees. Ultimately, however, lawmakers had no option but to eliminate jobs and services. The loss of some positions was probably warranted. Like all bureaucracies, the Baltimore municipal government had its share of inefficiencies. But Reaganomics compelled dramatic cuts that hardly could be described as fat-trimming. Between 1980 and 1990, the city government reduced its workforce by 18,400 positions, a loss of 37 percent.¹²

Municipal job cuts took a toll on workers across the city government, but they had a particularly significant impact on African American women. By the early 1980s, African Americans as a group made up more than 55 percent of municipal employees. Black women alone were close to 40 percent of the total workforce, and as had been the case since the early 1970s, they outnumbered Black men, white men, and white women. They represented nearly 70 percent of the city’s minority employees and almost two-thirds of the female full-time classified workforce. And they were concentrated and had gained the most influence in the very agencies where Reagan’s budget reductions cut the most deeply.¹³ Ultimately, it is impossible to determine the precise number of Black women—or men—in the municipal workforce whose jobs were affected by Reaganomics. City officials used attrition in addition to layoffs to achieve staffing reductions; in many cases, they simply did not refill positions left vacant by employees’ departures. In such cases, job seekers rather than jobholders took the hit. Moreover, some lost government posts but became private-sector workers when their agencies or the services they provided were privatized and shifted out of the government. In such cases, workers may have lost fringe benefits associated with public-sector employment, but they at least kept their jobs. Other city workers, however, joined the ranks of the unemployed.

The first workers in Baltimore to feel the bite of federal cuts were those receiving jobs or training through CETA programs. Shortly after taking office, Reagan eliminated the jobs-creation mandate in CETA and cut overall funding for training. By October 1981, 2,531 workers in Baltimore had been laid off. The cuts also resulted in 1,300 fewer spots in general training programs and 6,500 fewer employment and training positions for young people in a city in which 43,000 adults and 25,000 youth were unemployed. The loss of the training and employment programs interrupted a record of accomplishment that had won the city’s CETA program a national reputation for quality.¹⁴ The terminations had additional implications. Some of those who lost their positions had provided critical services because of the strategic use to which Baltimore officials put some CETA funds; they had created jobs that not only eased unemployment but also alleviated urban problems. For the two years before she lost her job, African American former health department employee Pat Green had worked for the city inspecting houses for lead paint. She was one member of a larger army of city workers attempting to combat the very serious problem of lead-paint poisoning among children. Green was given a week’s notice before being laid off. She then collected unemployment insurance for as long as she could as she searched in vain for a new job. The $408 a month she received did not go far as she attempted to provide for four teenagers and a grandchild. “I knew there were going to be changes when the new administration took over,” she reflected about Reagan’s election, “but I never thought I’d see the day when I had to resort to feeding my family hot dogs and beans every day, and then having to explain why. I’m in debt way up over my head … my credit is bad … all thanks to President Reagan. He’s living in style and comfort, while I’m living in pure hell.”¹⁵ And CETA funding cuts did not impact program participants alone. By 1984, the Mayor’s Office of Manpower Resources, which coordinated CETA as well as other jobs-related programs and had a majority African American and female staff, had lost almost a thousand positions.¹⁶

Job losses at USA also cost residents critical services and jobs. Maxine Garland-Bey, an African American service provider, had been with the agency for seventeen years when she was laid off. Despite a decade of disinvestment in the War on Poverty, she remained committed to the cause. She had a reputation for working through lunch and for ending her workday by delivering surplus food to community centers that serviced the elderly. Evelina Ryce, who also lost her job, was also a dedicated antipoverty warrior. She had been nominated by the residents she served for “Baltimore Is Best” awards on multiple occasions and won twice before she was laid off. “It is with real regret that I must abolish your position,” the director of USA, Lenwood Ivey, wrote to her in 1983. “The need to do this is through no fault of your own, but is a direct result of reduced funding.”¹⁷ And as USA’s budget shrank through the 1980s, the job toll rose. By 1986, the agency had merely a third the number of employees it had had when Reagan entered office. And then came the cuts that prompted workers and their union officials to protest at city hall. Sallie Williams, an African American AFSCME official, was an organizer of the rally. A former nurse and an AFSCME member since 1968, she had moved full-time into the public-sector labor movement during the early 1970s and gained a reputation as a staunch defender of gender equity.¹⁸ In the face of layoffs compelled by budget cuts, however, there was little she could do.

Those who lost their jobs at USA expressed deep concern for the clients they would no longer be able to support. Although caricatured in conservative rhetoric as barely more trustworthy than the so-called “welfare queens” they served, antipoverty workers knew well the critical roles they played in their clients’ lives. As one worker explained, “We cut through the red tape that sometimes keeps people from getting help. We get a lot of referrals from other agencies because we really follow our cases through. Sometimes on our own time.”¹⁹ Some USA employees, such as Veronica Johnson, demonstrated their commitment even after they lost their jobs. “Even though I’m not working now I do some volunteer work to help some of my residents who are elderly or unable to get around well,” she explained. “The residents still need help whether people are laid off or not.”²⁰ Ultimately, funding cuts all but decimated USA. In addition to layoffs, the agency consolidated several day-care centers and closed some food distribution sites. By August 1986, Clarence Blount, an African American state legislator who had begun serving as the commissioner of the Community Action Agency in 1968 and who had continued his service as the director of the USA board into the 1980s, described with sadness and frustration the antipoverty agency’s utility in Baltimore following years of budget cuts. “Of course [USA] doesn’t do enough. It isn’t supposed to do a lot. It can’t do a lot. Urban Services is nothing more than a toothpick for a problem which requires a shovel. But what are you supposed to do? Throw out the toothpick?”²¹

While antipoverty and human-services providers took some of the hardest hits during the 1980s, few departments were spared the pain of staff reductions. Layoffs, however, were not the primary way that the city reduced its workforce. More often, city administrators simply abolished rather than filled vacant positions. Baltimore’s 1984 budget estimate included 125 layoffs but eliminated more than four times as many positions through attrition. Downsizing via attrition rarely made headlines and mercifully spared current employees the pain of a pink slip. It also, however, increased the workloads of those who remained and took a toll on service delivery.²² In 1984, when the city failed to fill positions previously held by workers who provided chore services for the elderly, for example, older residents simply lost the needed help. Downsizing through attrition was also alarming for the city’s large pool of job seekers. And although benevolent because it spared current employees their jobs, it was a very unsystematic method of achieving governmental efficiency—a supposed goal of the Reagan administration.

Baltimore’s elected officials also responded to fiscal pressures by privatizing city services. In 1982, for example, the city handed over the management of its public hospital to the Johns Hopkins Hospital, an arrangement made permanent in 1984. The move may have boded well for the quality of health care available to city residents; the hospital was internationally renowned. In the local Black community, however, it was known by many as “the Plantation.” Located in the midst of neighborhoods with predominantly African American and in many cases also low-income residents, the hospital had hardly been a model neighbor. Rumors that they might be abducted by hospital officials for experimental purposes had led some who grew up in the city to fear the institution.²³ Meanwhile, its growth over the years had displaced many locals, who complained of unkept promises of relocation assistance. The hospital’s record for minority hiring and promotion was also far from stellar. Four years after it acquired the public hospital, although about 40 percent of its workforce was African American, only about 15 percent of its managerial and professional staff was Black, according to the Baltimore Sun.²⁴ Raymond V. Haysbert, the African American chief executive of the Black-owned Parks Sausages Company, a local firm with $28 million in annual sales, believed the institution failed to do all it could to promote Black economic advancement. “As the largest private employer, Johns Hopkins could turn the whole damn city around,” he declared.²⁵ At the very least, he argued, the institution could hire more African Americans for influential positions and create some role models for the city’s youth.²⁶

From the perspective of hospital workers, the ramifications of the privatization deal were unclear. The city brokered an agreement with the hospital that guaranteed its employees their jobs—for six months. The workers were also to remain represented by their union, although some hospital employees were themselves unionized. Yet all of the employees of the city facility, including the 40 percent who were African American women, lost their status as municipal employees. The change was significant. As the demographics of the municipal government and hospital workforces demonstrate, Black political power was not as effective at combating discrimination in the private sector as it was in the public sector. As Afro-American reporter Gerald C. Horne cautioned, “Those who appoint or help set the standards for hiring public sector employees can be voted in and out of office. Those who appoint and set standards for private sector employees are voted in and out by shareholders and boards of directors—where Black representation is near nil.”²⁷

The contraction of the city government’s workforce by more than a third eliminated jobs that had been an important source of income for thousands of families in Baltimore. The job losses were particularly significant for African Americans. Certainly discrimination and inequities persisted in the municipal workforce. Female city employees earned considerably less than their male counterparts, and Black women held a disproportionate share of the city’s lowest-paid jobs. To protest ongoing discrimination, in 1983, the NAACP filed a complaint against the city with the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.²⁸ Yet despite persistent problems, African American women and men had made important strides in the public sector. And Hilda Ford, the city’s African American personnel director, defended the progress her department had made against critiques launched by political opponents of the mayor. During the 1970s, she had made significant changes among those responsible for doing the hiring for Baltimore, and African American and female representation had increased. Between 1976 and 1983, the percentage of the city’s workforce from historically underrepresented groups had increased from 45 percent to 56 percent. The change had come, Ford noted pointedly, despite an overall decline in the number of city employees. In addition, she observed, African Americans managed almost 50 percent of the city’s operating budget, and Black and white women as a group controlled a third of the budget. About 22 percent of the city’s female workforce earned $25,000 or more per year, which Ford compared favorably to the national figure of 8 percent. In addition, the gap between male and female earnings was lower in the municipal system than it was nationally. Municipal jobs offered other advantages as well. Unionized city employees earned health insurance, pensions, and additional fringe benefits that many private-sector employers in Baltimore did not provide. What is more, Ford, AFSCME, and the city’s other public-sector unions had improved the working conditions and promotional opportunities of city workers, including women.²⁹ The municipal civil service certainly had its problems, but there were real advantages to be had by working for the city as well. Reaganomics meant that city jobs were available to thousands fewer than had only recently been the case. Reagan’s budget cuts sliced deeply into Baltimore’s Black working- and middle-class communities.

Fear of Being “Reaganized”: State and Federal Employees Take a Hit

Municipal workers were not the only government employees in Baltimore affected by government downsizing. Employees of the state of Maryland, including many who lived in the city, also worried about being “Reaganized,” as the Afro-American dubbed the public-sector downsizing phenomenon.³⁰ Theoretically, the president’s New Federalism boded well for state-level public employees because administration officials shifted to them some government functions formerly performed elsewhere. State officials, however, had immediately recognized that they would nevertheless take a hit because of Reagan’s dramatic reductions in overall spending. “We’ve told [Governor Harry Hughes] the block grants mean that he gets more and more flexibility to do less and less,” Maryland official Bill Benton explained.³¹ After the president proposed his first budget, Maryland officials projected a $215 million reduction in federal funds for the state. In response, in June 1981, Maryland’s personnel secretary, Theodore Thornton Jr., announced the state was reducing its workforce by 1,800.³² As on the municipal level, some cuts to the public workforce may have been warranted. Funding reductions by the Reagan administration, however, were the consequence of the ideological conviction that all levels of government were bloated and thus did not reflect careful and measured consideration of the actual needs of Maryland residents and taxpayers.

The prospect of layoffs created anxiety among all state workers, but fear ran especially high in human-services agencies, where Reagan’s cuts were likely to strike the deepest. Welfare workers anticipated that they would be targets. Schaefer’s desire to eliminate rebels from the municipal civil service is one reason he had agreed to transfer the workers from the city’s to the state’s employ. In June 1981, more than 2,000 employees of the Department of Social Services met in Baltimore to discuss their prospects and plan their response. Defiantly, many refused to be divided. They took a tally, and a majority of the staff agreed that if proposed cuts came to pass, they would pursue a “shared lay-off” plan proposed by their director, George Musgrove. They decided to adopt a four-day work week and accept 20 percent reductions in pay, benefits, and leave time in order to prevent an estimated 255 of their fellow workers from being terminated.³³

Black state employees felt particularly vulnerable to job losses. Overall, African Americans were not as well represented in the state workforce as they were in the Baltimore city government. Nevertheless, a study by the Maryland Commission for Women, which did not include men, found that by the end of the 1970s, minority women, most of whom were African American, made up 20 percent of Maryland’s employees. They had offices not only in Annapolis but throughout the state, and many lived and worked in Baltimore. Black women were concentrated in the lowest job grades in the state civil service, and race- and gender-based discrimination help to explain why. By the late 1970s, African Americans as a group held 57 percent of the state’s service and maintenance jobs and 46 percent of paraprofessional positions but only 8 percent of administrative posts. Remarkably, however, given the state’s long record of discriminatory hiring, Black women were approaching income parity with white women. The earnings of both Black and white women, however, fell well below those of white men. Black women earned on average $600 less per year than white women, close to $1,700 less than Black men, and a staggering $5,000 less per year than white men. In 1983, at the same time that they took the city to task, frustration with salary discrepancies and the difficulties African Americans experienced when seeking promotions in the state system led the Baltimore NAACP to file a complaint with the U.S. Justice Department.³⁴ Despite ongoing concerns about inequities, however, Black leaders knew state jobs were critical to the economic health of many families and communities, and they were determined to prevent African American workers from suffering disproportionately from layoffs.

Pete Rawlings and John Douglass, African American state legislators from Baltimore, were among those who took the lead in a campaign to press Governor Hughes to consider equity issues when making decisions about job cuts. Shortly after Thornton announced the state’s decision to cut its workforce, a group of more than twenty African American legislators and community leaders met with the governor to offer proposals intended to save Black jobs. The leaders explained that many Black workers lacked seniority in the state system because of the legacy of employment discrimination. Rawlings and Douglass also explained that African American job losses would have tragic ripple effects in the state’s Black communities. As Afro-American reporter Sue Williams recounted, they “estimated that as much as $20 million could be lost, not only in terms of actual workdays missed, but in terms of the reduction of goods and services purchased by Blacks from Blacks.”³⁵ To prevent proposed employment reductions from reversing recent gains by African Americans and women, the leaders urged the governor to be proactive. Some proposed awarding African American employees credit for four extra years of service so that Black workers would not be penalized for past discriminatory hiring practices by layoff calculations that considered seniority. The governor pledged to establish guidelines concerning terminations and to send progress reports to the state’s Congressional Black Caucus. “We shall make every reasonable effort to protect the gains of our affirmative action programs against the threat posed by the Reagan cutbacks,” he promised.³⁶

Nevertheless, while the Maryland state workforce did not suffer the high staffing reductions experienced by the city, changes that did occur had worrisome implications for African Americans and women. In 1984, state officials announced that Maryland had lost a total of $825 million in federal support. Maryland ranked among the top ten states in the country that experienced the most severe cuts in funding for general education, special education, health resources, health services, urban mass transit, and several other programs. Job cuts were unavoidable. During the early 1980s, the state reduced its workforce by about 6 percent. Ultimately, the reductions did not prove permanent but did lead to worrisome employment trends. By 1987, however, the overall number of state workers had rebounded and was about 4,300 higher than it had been in 1982. The growth resulted, however, largely from the use of part-time workers, those who typically do not enjoy the security and fringe benefits associated with full-time employment. In 1987, the state employed 3,000 fewer full-time workers than it had five years earlier. Meanwhile, state workers employed in hospitals saw their numbers decline by more than 4,400, probably largely as the result of the Reagan administration’s effort to deinstitutionalize people with disabilities. One division of the state government did experience growth, however. Reflecting the law-and-order priorities of the Reagan administration, the number of corrections officers grew by more than 1,800. While education and health care suffered cuts, the jails and prisons were still hiring.³⁷

Job losses also impacted federal workers in Baltimore. The Social Security Administration’s headquarters and its satellite offices supplied the majority of Baltimore’s federal jobs. The agency long had been a source of coveted employment in the city’s African American communities, and civil rights activists had been monitoring its civil services practices for decades. By the 1980s, the agency was one of the state’s largest employers, and it remained a critical source of jobs for African Americans in Baltimore. Because the Reagan administration entered the White House pledging to shrink the federal workforce, employees of the agency had good cause to worry about the security of their jobs. Tensions mounted in late 1981, when the Baltimore Sun reported an alarming trend: “Minority group members and women who have attained high-paying administrative jobs in government are losing them at a high rate in President Reagan’s drive to reduce the size of the federal work force.”³⁸ And cuts did not affect only top-level employees. The Sun noted that across the board “minority group members are 50 percent more likely to lose their jobs than whites.”³⁹ Maryland representative Michael D. Barnes explained what many in Baltimore had feared: members of minority groups were experiencing particularly high job losses because they were concentrated in health, education, and welfare agencies. Lonis Ballard, of the national organization Blacks in Government, argued, “The Administration has shown, in its Economic Recovery Plan, little concern for the severe impact of the personnel reductions on the lives of Federal Employees.”⁴⁰ And Lynn Revo-Cohen, a representative from the organization Federally Employed Women, worried that the job losses would “decimate the gains by women and minorities.”⁴¹

Although early cuts in the federal workforce evoked sympathy from Baltimore residents, few felt the full reverberations of downsizing until 1985. It was then that the Reagan administration announced its determination to cut SSA’s national workforce of close to eighty thousand by about nineteen thousand jobs. Administration officials had concluded on the basis of a commissioned study that SSA had grown bloated. Moreover, they argued that agency staff made insufficient use of computer technology, the use of which could make redundant large numbers of employees. Others familiar with the internal organization of SSA adamantly disagreed that its staff was too large. It “sounds pretty ridiculous to me,” commented Robert Ball, who had been the commissioner of SSA from 1962 to 1973. He explained that the operating expenses for SSA came out of the payroll deduction tax and that only one-and-a-half cents of each dollar went for administrative costs. In fact, given how effectively SSA officials used limited resources, Ball argued, the government should actually increase the agency’s staff and make them more accessible to the public.⁴²

The American Federation of Government Employees, which represented many Social Security employees, also fiercely protested the proposed cuts. The largest local of the union in the country was in Baltimore, and its leadership played a leading role in fighting job losses.⁴³ They faced a formidable opponent in Reagan, who was hardly a fan of public-sector unions or organized labor more broadly. During his first year in office, he fired eleven thousand striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization and refused to allow any to be reemployed by the Federal Aviation Administration. The union members had been engaged in an illegal work stoppage and had also rebuffed earlier efforts by the administration to reach an agreement. Nevertheless, Reagan’s move was out of step with those of his predecessors in the White House, who also had been confronted by illegal strikes by federal workers and who had chosen to negotiate. Reagan’s forceful and unequivocal response to the strikers set the tone for his presidency. After his confrontation with the air traffic controllers union, he worked steadily to undermine the influence and past gains of federal unions.⁴⁴ In such a context, AFGE had limited success fighting the downsizing at SSA. The federation was able to save two thousand jobs, however, and they won an extension of the timeline during which the staffing reductions would occur.⁴⁵

As the negotiations between AFGE and the federal government played out, the SSA staff braced for painful changes. Prior to downsizing, about 70 percent of SSA’s national workforce was female, and minority women made up almost a third of SSA’s employees, the result of equal-opportunity battles that had increased their representation from 22 percent in 1970. In the Baltimore region, SSA employed about 20,000 workers, an invaluable contribution to the depressed local economy. In the end, staffing reductions shrank the national workforce of the SSA by 18 percent between 1983 and 1989, at a cost of 13,500 jobs. Headquarters suffered a disproportionate share of the agency’s national job losses. In the end, downsizing was achieved through attrition, which spared employees the pain of layoffs but further dimming the prospects of job seekers. Meanwhile, many remaining employees found their workloads increased as they compensated for short-staffing, which in turn doubtlessly frustrated those seeking the agency’s services. As in other agencies, downsizing eroded capacity, which the advocates of small government could use to further deride the public sector. Simultaneously, downsizing also imperiled the ability of the SSA to achieve its equal opportunity goals. As Barbara Sledge, the director of SSA’s equal opportunity office, explained in 1984, “The problems facing the EO [equal opportunity] program at SSA today are difficult ones. This agency is getting smaller, and we won’t have the opportunity to make the same rate of progress we made in the past, when the agency was growing.”⁴⁶

Job losses at Social Security in combination with those that occurred on the state and municipal levels jeopardized important economic gains African Americans, and particularly Black women, had secured over the previous two decades. Since the 1960s, public-sector jobs at all levels of government had helped many middle- and working-class African American families become homeowners and send children to college. Even as popular rhetoric suggested that most urban African Americans were unemployed and on welfare, unionized government jobs had provided for many Black workers some of the security that unionized industrial jobs had earlier extended to whites. The public-sector gains were especially important given the limited access many African Americans in Baltimore had to alternative opportunities for upward mobility. In other cities with large Black populations, particularly those with African American mayors, the sources of the Black middle class tended to be more diverse than was the case in Baltimore. Elected officials elsewhere were more intentional about opening opportunities for Black wealth creation than Schaefer had been.⁴⁷ In Baltimore, not only had the city not practiced affirmative action as early and as aggressively as it could have, but African Americans were also largely kept on the sidelines of the city’s commercial revitalization efforts. As the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded after conducting an investigation on the matter, “Minority economic development has not been a priority in Baltimore City.”⁴⁸ The neglect accounted for the “comparatively minimal level of minority participation in the city’s redevelopment.”⁴⁹ Stymied in significant ways from pursuing alternative paths to economic security, African Americans at least had created a refuge in government workforces. Then came Reaganomics, which contracted the very sector of the economy that had become critical to Black upward mobility and economic security.

The contraction of government workforces had additional implications. The public sector had also been important to city residents who did not pursue long-term careers in the government but instead used public-sector employment as a launching pad into the private sector. As a witness explained to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights during a hearing in Baltimore in 1981, the government workforce had become “very critical for minorities at the entry level.”⁵⁰ It enabled workers to establish an employment history and thus served as a stepping-stone to future jobs. Fewer government posts meant fewer stepping-stones into the mainstream economy.

The dramatic contraction of the public sector during the Reagan years worsened conditions that had already produced heart-wrenching scenes in Baltimore. In 1980, the SSA had listed openings for seventy-five entry-level positions. Twenty-six thousand people applied for the coveted spots. A year later, officials with the U.S. Post Office sparked a second avalanche of applications when they announced they would be offering an exam for mail handlers. Word spread like wildfire, and fifteen thousand people applied for a shot at the jobs. Journalists from the Afro-American described with clear sadness both demonstrations of the dim odds faced by the city’s job seekers. The paper also made a gloomy prediction. Thousands would likely again participate in yet another futile exercise in job-hunting; the Post Office was preparing to open several labor-custodial positions.⁵¹

The contraction of the public sector, and particularly of municipal human-services agencies, had another important ramification. From their posts in government offices, many African American women and men had played important roles in shaping public policy and improving the delivery of human services. By the mid-1970s, the influence of human-services workers over policy had begun to wane in response to shifts in federal urban policy. Nevertheless, through the decade, and especially as Schaefer attempted to mobilize city and federal resources behind Baltimore’s downtown commercial renaissance, many city and state human-services workers served as advocates of residents with low incomes within the government bureaucracy. They became the conscience of the city and limited the extent to which the champions of commercial redevelopment could neglect the concerns of the poor. Reaganomics contracted the size of agencies from which African Americans and others had historically attempted to call attention to pressing urban problems and serve as a counterweight to the advocates of trickle-down urban revitalization.

“If We Could Get These People Help”: The War on Drugs in Baltimore

In the wake of downsizing in municipal human-services departments and considerable investment in the War on Drugs, law enforcement officials increasingly became first responders to urban poverty. It was a job for which they were not trained nor, given their line of work, particularly well suited; despite past efforts at community policing, their relationship with many in Baltimore’s Black neighborhoods remained antagonistic. In 1982, following Reagan’s declaration of the war, the enforcement of drug laws became a local policing priority. During the mid-1980s, local officials estimated that there were about thirty thousand users of opiates in the city.⁵² And although crack cocaine use became a problem in a few large cities at that time, it was not yet particularly prevalent in Baltimore. Opiate abuse caused many of the city’s drug-related problems. Few users could afford their habits independently, so many turned to crime. Others, including children, who dealers began to recruit during the era because of the lighter sentencing they received in the criminal justice system, took up hustling in the drug trade in pursuit of cash. By 1988, about 55 percent of crime in the city was linked to drugs.⁵³

Given the clear relationship between drug use and crime, many in Baltimore, including some in law enforcement, identified addiction treatment as the most commonsensical response. “If we could get these people help, we’d be ahead of the game,” commented Captain Joseph Newman, the chief of the Baltimore Police Department’s Narcotics Task Force.⁵⁴ But help was frustratingly hard to find. A year after the president launched the War on Drugs, budget cuts had cost spots in local treatment centers, and stints on waiting lists could last from weeks to months. There were sixteen state-funded programs for drug addiction, and all were full beyond capacity.⁵⁵ Due to increasing demand over the years that followed, by the late 1980s, drug treatment had become “big business,” according to one official in Maryland—but only for those with means or who had good health insurance.⁵⁶ A two-tiered system had emerged. “There’s one tier for those with money, and a second tier for those without,” the official explained.⁵⁷ And those on the second tier had a hard time getting help; funding for treatment had not kept up with increases in enforcement.

The city did engage in drug-use prevention and education. In 1983, the Narcotics Task Force had a staff of three dedicated to the task, and they averaged about forty presentations a month. One officer minced no words, especially when talking to youth, who were vulnerable to recruitment efforts by drug dealers. “A lot of you are going to end up in jail. Some of you are going to wind up dead,” Detective Charlie Smith stated bluntly to a group of junior high school students.⁵⁸ For years, the Baltimore Police Department had been dispatching “Officer Friendly” to elementary school classrooms to improve community–police relations, and the practice continued during the 1980s. But following two decades of law-and-order criminal justice policies and in the wake of the increasing scourge of addiction and its attendant problem of crime, some determined that by middle school, children needed tough love. Meanwhile, community groups also engaged in drug-use prevention and education. “People are tired of having their neighborhoods taken over,” explained social worker Addie Key, who was a cofounder of Neighborhood Action Coalition.⁵⁹ The group encouraged parent groups and community organizations to sponsor recreational activities for young people. The city’s provision of such services had declined precipitously over the past decade, so residents had to fill in.⁶⁰

Ultimately, waiting lists for treatment and community education proved an inadequate defense against the city’s burgeoning drug market, which in some instances was becoming a source of needed employment for those left out of or unwanted in the mainstream economy. And treatment and prevention were local rather than federal priorities. Two decades of wars on crime and drugs had already provided considerable infrastructure and some of the manpower that were preconditions for the crisis of mass incarceration. Reagan increased federal resources for policing and also imposed mandatory sentencing requirements that were marred by racial bias. In 1983, police were responding to drug use in the city with three times the number of resources they had had two years earlier, and the city’s arrest rates quickly rose. Between 1984 and 1988, arrests involving heroin or cocaine more than doubled.⁶¹ And although Black and white drug-use rates were reportedly similar in Maryland, African American men were arrested at a much higher rate than white men. The police targeted open-air drug markets rather than fraternity parties or other private venues where white drug use was more prevalent. Ultimately, between 1979 and 2003, the Black male prison population in the state increased by more than 370 percent.⁶² And though it was too soon to see that long-term trend in the late 1980s, it was not too hard to predict it. Since the civil rights era, conservatives had been drumming up fears of Black criminality to roll back civil rights gains and later also to discredit the welfare state. The crisis of mass incarceration was the culmination of those efforts.

“Watching Their Children’s Every Move”: Reaganomics and Gendered Caretaking

The crisis of mass incarceration unfolded in Baltimore at the same time that the Reagan administration was tightening eligibility requirements for entitlement benefits and reducing spending on social welfare. The ramifications for Black women, particularly those with low incomes and among the working poor, were perilous. By the early 1980s, Baltimore had one of the highest percentages of residents living in poverty in the nation, and the numbers were growing.⁶³ Because women often served as the caretakers of their families, it typically fell to them to manage and attempt to compensate for economic insecurity. In the wake of Reaganomics, many intensified their own care-taking work to stretch family budgets and meet pressing needs. During the War on Poverty, the federal government had funded a range of programs—in nutrition, health care, recreation, and sanitation, for example—that eased the responsibilities women bore for caring for their families. During the 1970s and 1980s, federal funding for the programs diminished, leaving women with the option of stepping up to fill the void or watching their families do without.

Cuts to entitlement benefits and public housing had devastating implications for many in Baltimore. In November 1981, about 18,000 city residents were eliminated from the AFDC rolls, and almost 16,500 had their monthly benefits reduced. In addition, 10,000 were dropped from the Food Stamp Program, and 69,500 learned they would be receiving smaller allotments. Meanwhile, although Baltimore had 45,000 residents on waiting lists for public housing and the projected wait time was five years, the city’s funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development was also cut. As a consequence, the city’s 58,000 recipients of subsidized housing were required to pay 30 percent rather than 25 percent of their incomes for housing. John A. McCauley, the city’s deputy commissioner for public housing, expressed alarm at the change. “People will simply use the income that used to go to buy food, clothing or medicine and pay the extra rent. While 5 percent doesn’t sound like much, to a family on welfare, an extra $10 to $15 makes all the difference,” he worried.⁶⁴ Simultaneously, Maryland’s funding for unemployment insurance dropped by $10 million even as the Volcker recession increased the numbers of the jobless.⁶⁵ Although Congress later restored some of the lost benefits, the cuts intensified economic insecurity and hardship.

The Reagan administration also reduced federal funding for social service programs provided by states and localities. Title XX of the Social Security Act, from which Maryland received 70 percent of its funds for social services, was cut by 20 percent. The reduction affected both income maintenance programs and other vital services. Although reverberations would be felt throughout the state, “Baltimore’s poor will bear the brunt of the cutbacks,” a newspaper reporter predicted.⁶⁶ Allotments for fuel assistance plummeted by $7.5 million. In December 1981, as city residents braced for winter, Richard Aull, the head of Baltimore’s weatherization program, reported that his agency would be serving only half the number of residents it normally helped. What is more, he would no longer be offering furnace-cleaning and related services. Simultaneously, funds to support the community-services activities sponsored by antipoverty agencies dropped by $200,000. Among the consequences providers anticipated was longer waits for day-care service. The reductions in welfare and social services spending compounded problems caused by cuts in federal funding for education, health, urban mass transit, legal aid, jobs and training, and other vital programs. At the start of the 1980s, Baltimore depended for more than half of its budget on intergovernmental sources of revenue. By November 1981, Reagan’s budget cuts had already cost the city $70 million. By 1983, the city had not only eliminated jobs but had also cut municipal services by 25 percent, and by 1989, Baltimore’s expenditures per year were 36 percent lower than they had been in 1975.⁶⁷ To be sure, the population of the city had continued to decline, which reduced some need for services. Yet the persistence and worsening of some urban problems—and the expensive infrastructure obligations in commercially revitalized portions of the city—carried big price tags.

Women paid a particularly high cost for budget cuts because of the effort it took to compensate for the lost services. Reduced spending on weatherization and nutrition programs, for example, exacerbated hardship that had already worsened for many during the Carter years, when mothers such as Elrae Singletary and Mary Turner had taken to feeding their families a handful of inexpensive staples. Cuts in the Food Stamp Program, on which one in four Baltimore residents depended in 1981, and nutrition programs, which provided ninety thousand students with lunch every school day, intensified women’s struggles to feed their families. When the school year started in September, increases in the cost of subsidized lunches had pushed six thousand children out of the program.⁶⁸ The funding cuts sent increasing numbers of women to food pantries and soup kitchens, increasing the time, effort, and stress associated with food preparation. The cuts were particularly devastating for those who had jobs that paid wages that did not lift them out of poverty. Food charities staggered under the weight of increased need. “Soup kitchens are overcrowded. And those who administer the programs are having trouble doing their jobs because of layoffs, low morale and high turnover,” the Baltimore Sun reported in December.⁶⁹ The end of the recession eased hardship for some but did not restore benefits and services.

Cuts to other service programs also increased women’s gendered care-taking responsibilities. Poverty continued to limit many to the city’s most dilapidated housing. Reductions in funding for public housing and housing-related programs, fuel assistance, sanitation services, and municipal rat and other pest-eradication efforts intensified the challenges women faced as they tried to keep their families healthy and safe. Many found that even the most diligent housekeeping could not prevent windows from leaking, lead paint from peeling, and germs and illness from spreading. Decreased spending on housing sometimes led to tragedy. In 1983, Bob Cheeks, the executive director of the Welfare Rights Organization, told Mayor Schaefer that a broken elevator in a public housing high-rise had delayed a mother who was rushing to seek medical attention for her sick infant. The delay, Cheeks charged, cost the child his life. He blamed Schaefer for the death because the mayor’s “single-minded focus to build hotels, restaurant, shops, and housing for the rich” had come at the expense of “the concerns of the poor.”⁷⁰ Schaefer had certainly prioritized downtown development. But two years earlier, Reagan had halved federal spending on public housing, which may also have accounted for the broken elevator.⁷¹

While most mothers who faced health care emergencies did not suffer the tremendous loss experienced by the high-rise resident, federal cuts in spending on health compelled women to attempt to compensate at home. The Reagan administration’s decision to tighten eligibility requirements for Medicaid only worsened the problem. Meanwhile, CETA layoffs cost many health providers their jobs and service recipients needed help. The cuts imperiled the ongoing efforts of the city’s public health nurses and aides in the Department of Health to battle not only lead-paint poisoning but other serious health problems. With fewer public health programs available, women with limited means often had no choice but to assume responsibilities for caring for ill family members who would have been better served by professional health care providers. The task of tending to the sick could prove particularly challenging when women provided care for elderly relatives. During the early 1980s, the poverty rate in the United States among African American elderly was triple that for whites in the same age group. Conditions for the elderly had actually improved in Baltimore during the 1960s and 1970s, due in large part to the efforts of activists and social service providers. Reaganomics jeopardized the gains. In 1981, an elderly African American man attending a small rally in Annapolis to protest budget cuts, whispered his concern to a reporter. “Things had been getting better for old folks for a while. Now I’m afraid that everything will go back to the way it was,” he said.⁷²

Meanwhile, locally provided subsidized day-care services, which had never been adequate, became more expensive and harder to access. One day-care center in northwestern Baltimore saw its fees more than triple. Staff and family members responded to the cuts by helping children served by the agency write protest letters to both Reagan and Maryland’s governor.⁷³ Reagan’s policies also reduced funding available for municipal parks, recreation programs, libraries, and museums, making child care all the more difficult.⁷⁴ By January 1984, the Department of Parks and Recreation was laying off employees for the fourth time in two years and seeking volunteers to mow grass and trim bushes. Funds for special services for teenagers and money for summer camps were also cut.⁷⁵ Fewer public spaces and programs were available to young people just as conditions in many neighborhoods deteriorated due to lost services and the burgeoning drug trade, rendering them increasingly unfit for play and increasing the need for adult supervision. The city’s inadequate provision of recreational spaces was a grave concern for Shelia Rhyne. In a letter to the Baltimore Afro-American she explained, “My youngest son has been hospitalized with a torn tendon in his hand from glass in the yard surrounding the building. Why do the low to middle class people have to live in projects where they must watch their children’s every move because they don’t know whether their children will be killed, raped or God knows what else?”⁷⁶

Women protested the cuts in ways other than letter-writing but encountered significant obstacles. One woman who sought a legal remedy to her concerns turned to Legal Aid—but then learned that the agency’s staff had been shrunk from 125 to 107 lawyers. As a result, she received nothing more than sympathetic advice, which included the suggestion that she take a course to learn her rights. Women also worked collectively to protest the economic changes under way. In 1981, the Baltimore Welfare Rights Organization filed a successful class-action suit against the state for terminating AFDC benefits without providing recipients sufficient warning. But the victory only restored benefits for a single month.⁷⁷ High-rise public-housing residents also worked together. Following the death of the infant whose mother had been stymied by the broken elevator on her way to the hospital, a group founded MOM, an organization of mothers united to “Save Our Children from High Rise Housing.”⁷⁸ Even collectively, however, it was impossible for women with low incomes to repair the damage to the social safety net wrought by Reaganomics.