Conclusion

In 1988, Kurt Schmoke, Baltimore’s first elected African American mayor, made a bold proposal to the U.S. Conference of Mayors and then to a House Committee of the U.S. Senate. The wars on crime and drugs were clearly not working, he noted. As a result, he urged that the nation face up to the failure of drug prohibition policies and decriminalize the possession of narcotics. “We have spent nearly 75 years and untold billions of dollars trying to square the circle, and inevitably we have failed,” he observed, referring to the period since the nation first passed federal antinarcotic legislation. But prohibition had reduced neither crime nor addiction. To shift gears, drug addiction should be treated as a medical rather than a law-enforcement problem, Schmoke reasoned, and he advocated for “a measured and carefully implemented program of drug decriminalization.” The response to his proposal was not the rigorous debate he had hoped for. In a context in which Republicans had wielded dog-whistle claims about urban crime for decades to win political power and in which their “soft-on-crime” taunts kept many Democrats on the defensive, meaningful consideration of alternative approaches to dealing with crime and addiction was not an option. As the New York Times reported at the time, the likelihood of his proposal meeting with success was “nil.”¹ So Schmoke took the “small steps” he could in Baltimore to implement “drug medicalization.”²

Schmoke was not the only person in Baltimore with innovative ideas about how to try and solve some of the city’s most pressing problems. During the 1990s, in response to concerns raised by economically strapped, though employed, city residents, members of the community- and faith-based organization Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD) launched a campaign to compel the major players in the city’s downtown tourism industry to pay their workers a living wage. Many of the employers were the recipients of considerable subsidies from the federal, state, and local governments, and BUILD members believed such largesse should at least be met with jobs that elevated workers out of poverty.³ AFSCME joined and strongly supported the campaign. The effort pitted predominantly African American activists, such as Blacka Wright, a hotel housekeeper, against Schmoke, who, despite his bold stance against the War on Drugs, was continuing former mayor William Donald Schaefer’s efforts to revitalize the city’s troubled economy with tourism.⁴

Meanwhile, AFSCME officials and the other city activists were also alarmed by the ongoing privatization of municipal services. Unionized public-sector jobs were disappearing, but the new private-sector positions that sometimes replaced them often paid less than and lacked the security and benefits of government posts. Valerie Bell, who worked as a cleaner in a Baltimore public school—but who received her paycheck from a private company that contracted with the city—called the situation “plain old city-sponsored poverty.”⁵ Bell was involved in the newly formed Solidarity Sponsoring Committee, which was attempting to bring the concerns of low-wage service workers to the city’s attention. Ultimately, the activists, while maintaining pressure on the city on multiple fronts, targeted their living-wage efforts at securing an ordinance that would apply specifically to companies with municipal contracts. As AFSCME area director Kimberlee Keller argued, “This is the new American workforce—contingent, temporary, part-time, low-wage workers doing what in many cases used to be decent jobs. This is the most direct possible way to address the problem of poverty in the city.”⁶

The nascent efforts in Baltimore anticipated the increasingly important role public-sector unions, often working in partnership with faith-based and other community organizations, came to play in battles over economic justice in the twenty-first century. And successes in some of those battles help to explain why government unions nationwide became the target of intensifying conservative animosity. Baltimore’s workers played an important role. In 1994, their campaign for an ordinance met with success, and Baltimore became the first city in the nation with a living-wage law. The city’s low-wage workers had struck a blow against privatization. Like Schmoke’s efforts to treat drug addiction as a medical issue, the living-wage law was a small step; it applied only to a subset of the city’s workers. But its supporters considered it a step in the right direction.⁷ What is more, the Baltimore activists’ success sparked living-wage movements in other cities—and eventually also on the state level. Such was the case in Maryland, which in 2007 became the first state in the nation to require a living wage for those employed under state contracts.⁸

Efforts in Baltimore to interrupt the crisis of mass incarceration, compassionately respond to addiction, meaningfully raise the wages of those in the working poor, and resist the contracting out of public-service provisions cut against the grain of much national policy-making during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. During the 1970s and 1980s, elected officials on the federal level had introduced a range of macroeconomic and domestic policies that produced a momentum that proved hard to stop. And in the wake of the Reagan revolution, not only did most Republicans remain staunchly tough on crime and firmly hostile to redistributive antipoverty efforts, the supposedly bloated public sector, and government unions, Democrats increasingly took similar stances as well. To be sure, concern with crime, welfare, the size of the government, and collective bargaining in the public sector had multiple sources. Nevertheless, they were all inextricably connected to discourses that emerged or gained prominence during the late 1960s and 1970s, linked Blackness with criminality, and rendered African American working people invisible or suspect. In an effort to win political power after decades of Democratic dominance—and also to roll back civil rights legislation—Republican politicians and strategists had fomented and courted racism. The rhetoric they used to discredit liberalism described struggling cities like Baltimore as overpopulated with African American “thugs,” “welfare queens,” and incompetent civil servants who were represented by greedy union officials. Conservative discourse identified those groups as culpable in the nation’s economic woes and charged them with driving up the tax burdens of an entirely separate group: the “hardworking” Americans, who were presumed to be white. The message proved persuasive to many voters and helped to turn the tide in American politics away from Democrats, who in turn grew more conservative, and toward Republicans, who also grew more conservative.

Democrats had hardly been mere bystanders as struggling cities and their populations were denigrated. Even in Democratic strongholds, showdowns with public-sector unions and calls for smaller government often had proven politically popular—but pitted Democratic voters against those most in need of public services and also against government employees. Meanwhile, on the federal level, the party certainly had played a role in the construction of the carceral state. And Democrats and Republicans alike had acceded to conservative and elite pressure and pursued policies that largely institutionalized the logic of neoliberalism within the governing structures of the national and global economies. Members of both parties had also presided over the financialization of the American economy. Policy-making during the 1970s and 1980s that favored Wall Street over Main Street, and even more so over Martin Luther King Boulevard, dealt a grave blow to American manufacturers at the cost of jobs and also tax revenue that could have alleviated fiscal crises. In addition, trickle-down economics, achieved in part through generous tax cuts for the wealthiest, starved governments of the revenue they needed to pay for public services and the workers who provided them. The age of austerity ensued and was felt particularly urgently in struggling cities with large populations of low-income residents that depended not only on locally generated tax revenue but also on aid from the state and the federal governments. But calls by urban residents for federal relief were rebuffed with logic crafted in the 1960s and 1970s—that poverty in cities was self-inflicted and often the consequence of supposed Black criminality. The dynamic continued into the twenty-first century with devastating implications for Baltimore.

Despite the changes, during the decades following the Reagan years, the public sector remained a critical, if vulnerable, job niche for African Americans and Black women in particular, in both Baltimore and the nation more generally.⁹ In the city in 2000, African American women made up 45 percent of residents who worked for the federal, state, or local government, a figure that had risen from 42 percent in 1980 and from 12 percent in 1950. Meanwhile, Black men composed 25 percent of government workers, a proportion that had hovered around that number since 1970 but that had been only 10 percent in 1950. At the new century’s dawn, African Americans made up about 65 percent of Baltimore’s population but 70 percent of its government workers. Even so, the persistence of Black workers’ public-sector job niche masked persistent problems. In 2000, almost eighteen thousand fewer Black women and nearly thirteen thousand fewer Black men who lived in Baltimore had government jobs than had been the case two decades earlier.¹⁰ In addition to government downsizing, some of which may have been justified by the shrinking size of the city’s population, the decline likely reflected Black flight from the city. During the 1990s, the number of Black Baltimore residents declined for the first time.¹¹ Despite the demographic changes, however, there was no disguising the steep price public-sector workers were paying for neoliberal forms of governance. But though downsizing cut deeply and discrimination persisted, Black workers’ ongoing overrepresentation in unionized government employment remained critical to the economic health of the city’s African American communities—a reason why AFSMCE and other local activists defended it so fiercely.

African Americans’ public-sector job niche and Black individuals’ rise within government workforces had not come easily, and the job gains had required vigilant monitoring. Civil rights advocates of the 1950s and 1960s had fought hard in Washington, D.C., and on the state and local levels to open government jobs to Black workers. African Americans’ public-sector job niche represents a critical, although largely unheralded, achievement of post–World War II civil rights activists as well as those who followed them and defended and built on their successes. In addition, Black women’s ongoing overrepresentation within the public sector—and prominence in humanservices agencies—helps to explain the vital economic roles that they have played in their families and communities and reflects the tremendous level of public service they have contributed to the nation.

Baltimore’s twenty-first-century public-sector unions also represent an enduring legacy of dedicated Black activists, who led and participated in both the Baltimore Teachers Union and AFSCME during the tumultuous 1960s, when the city granted the organizations recognition. And as indicated by AFSCME’s involvement in the city’s living-wage campaign, some public-sector unions rekindled their activist roots in the late twentieth century. In 1990, Glenard “Glen” S. Middleton Sr., the African American president of the largest AFSCME local in Baltimore, also became the executive director of the union in Maryland. Under his leadership, AFSCME expanded its focus well beyond its members’ bread-and-butter issues. During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the union partnered with BUILD, the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), and other activist groups to press for a range of progressive changes in the city.¹² On Middleton’s watch, in addition to defending its own member and their jobs, AFSCME has weighed in on national labor-law issues, attempted to organize part-time and low-wage private-sector workers, and endeavored to keep city residents’ attention focused on the steep price they pay for costly tax abatements for corporate interests.¹³ In a nation in which many continue to associate distressed cities such as Baltimore with crime, welfare, and dysfunction, Middleton paints a more accurate picture of much of Baltimore’s population: “We are the working poor.”¹⁴ And the BTU and its parent association, the American Federation of Teachers, have also remained involved in local and state politics, where they are fierce defenders of quality public education.¹⁵ The continuing vitality of the public-sector labor movement in Baltimore, even in the face of serious, ongoing attacks, reflects the energy and dedication of its leadership and largely female and predominantly African American rank and file. Moreover, the resilience of public-sector unions nationwide demonstrates the continuing faith many in the nation’s new working class have in the power of collective bargaining and the utility of unions in the quest for economic and social justice.

But even as African Americans’ public-sector jobs niche and public-sector unions symbolize simultaneously the achievements of past Black activism and the possibility of a brighter future, the challenges facing Baltimore remain both numerous and dire. Ironically, it has often fallen to Black elected officials to respond to the repercussions of decades of federal policies that have had devastating impacts on struggling cities. In Baltimore, by the late twentieth century, African Americans had significantly increased their political influence in municipal affairs. Since 1987, all but one of the city’s mayors have been Black, and although Martin O’Malley, the lone white mayor, ultimately served two terms, his initial 1999 victory surprised many. African Americans also increased their representation on the city council and have held many of the top posts in the municipal government, including within and at the helm of the Baltimore Police Department.¹⁶ Black leaders, in other words, took over the reins of local political, though not economic, power just in time to confront—and be blamed by conservatives for—serious urban problems that they may have contributed to perpetuating but certainly had not created. As a result, battle lines that had once pitted African American residents against white officials became more complicated, and class in addition to race increasingly divided city politics. Presiding over Baltimore during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has hardly been easy. The shrinking tax base could not cover the cost of needed public services, even though municipal tax rates remained far higher than elsewhere in the state, and poverty has deepened in the city’s poorest and highly segregated African American neighborhoods.¹⁷ As Schmoke learned when he proposed drug decriminalization, the ability of locally elected officials to innovate was limited by nationally elected politicians, who have pursued policies that are informed by and continued to reinforce the notion that urban poverty is the product of Black dysfunction and that African American city residents must be disciplined by either the criminal justice system or the rigors of the free market.

As scholars such as Michelle Alexander have argued, in the realm of criminal justice, American presidents of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries contributed to escalating the crisis of mass incarceration and perpetuating the criminalization of Black people.¹⁸ During the 1980s and 1990s, Republicans wielded “soft-on-crime” taunts like bludgeons to discredit their Democratic opponents.¹⁹ And Democrat Bill Clinton, who won the presidency in 1992, attempted to rebut the critique with the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which exacerbated the mass incarceration crisis.²⁰ Even Barack Obama, the nation’s first African American president, who expressed deep concern about the racially biased carceral state, found it difficult to interrupt the crisis and the ongoing criminalization of Black urban communities.²¹

While federal—and also state—policies were preconditions for the crisis of mass incarceration, local policing practices procured the bodies that filled the cells. During the late 1980s and 1990s, Schmoke, who served three terms as mayor, attempted to implement on a small scale his addiction medicalization plans. They proved no match, however, for the crack epidemic that exploded in the city and was concentrated in its poorest and most heavily policed neighborhoods. “It was like an entirely new economy had begun to replace the manufacturing one that was in tatters. This was the new economy,” explains journalist Sabrina Tavernise.²² The illicit drug trade became a source of needed employment for some and a source of escape for many others, and it remained so even after the crack epidemic eased. By the end of the twentieth century, residents’ fear of crime and drugs helped O’Malley win the mayor’s office. The candidate promised to bring New York City’s zero-tolerance policing strategy to Baltimore. The result was not what many in Black Baltimore had had in mind. “Let me think when they started arresting everybody. Well, I’m gonna say—how about in the late ’90s?” quipped city resident Davetta Parker, whose African American son was stopped by the police on multiple occasions.²³

During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) shouldered incredibly difficult responsibilities. In a city with an inadequate array of social services and in which the proliferation of low-wage jobs and unemployment remained major problems, police officers were tasked with more than crime control. Nevertheless, zero tolerance proved catastrophic. Unconstitutional policing in low-income, African American neighborhoods was hardly new, but it became fairly standard following the adoption of zero tolerance. As the U.S. Department of Justice later determined, “As part of this strategy, BPD leadership pressured officers to increase the number of arrests and to ‘clear corners,’ whether or not the officers observed criminal activity. The result was a massive increase in the quantity of arrests—but a corresponding decline in quality.”²⁴ The 2016 report confirmed what many Black city residents had long known—that they had been systematically detained, searched, and arrested—and in some cases brutalized or killed—by the police simply for being Black and in a particular neighborhood. Sheila Dixon, the first woman and second African American to be elected mayor of Baltimore, succeeded O’Malley and discontinued zero-tolerance policing.²⁵ Nevertheless, abusive policing practices persisted, and in 2006, the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP sued the BPD.²⁶ And according to many observers in Baltimore, the city’s history of unconstitutional policing is probably what led Freddie Gray to run from the police in 2015 during an encounter that ultimately led to his death.²⁷

Scholars and activists, including Alexander and those in Baltimore who protested the death of Freddie Gray, have met with success in drawing national attention to the crisis of mass incarceration and its implications for the voting rights, economic opportunities, and quality of life of the disproportionately African American men ensnared in the criminal justice system. In some states, including Maryland, the prison population is declining.²⁸ Nevertheless, the year Gray died, Baltimore had a larger percentage of its residents incarcerated than did such cities as New York and Philadelphia, and its inmate population was one of the largest in the nation.²⁹ Thirty years after Schmoke pointed out that the wars on drugs and crime had failed, the nation has yet to embrace an alternative response. The persistence of the destructive wars despite their devastating consequences reflects their continuing utility in justifying a broader racist, antiurban narrative that conservatives rely on to sustain the confidence of many white conservative voters in neoliberal economics and forms of governance.

Just as the wars on drugs and crime reinforced and perpetuated notions of Black criminality, federal welfare policies and the language elected officials used to discuss them did so as well. In 1996, Clinton ended welfare as Americans knew it when he signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act. Even the title of the legislation communicated the rebuke that mothers living in poverty lacked a work ethic. The law replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children, an entitlement that guaranteed qualifying recipients a cash benefit, with Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF), a block grant that sent federal funds to officials on the state level to disburse. As during the Reagan years, the method of distributing intergovernmental revenue limited the ability of representatives of low-income Baltimoreans to influence how the funds were used. Moreover, the legislation and welfare-related measures that followed during the administration of George W. Bush promoted remedies to poverty, such as marriage incentives, that perpetuated the notion that economic insecurity was principally the result of poor decision-making by individuals. And as had been the case for decades, the justification for reducing wealth redistribution was a presumed criminality and dysfunction on the part of the poor.³⁰ By the Obama years, such logic had been so firmly ingrained that Republicans introduced a new dog whistle: “Food Stamp president.” The descriptor was not a compliment intended to describe an elected official attempting to alleviate hunger and jump-start the economy during a severe economic downturn. Instead, it was an insult meant to communicate that the nation’s first Black president was dispersing “handouts” to undeserving African Americans.³¹

Ultimately, TANF compelled or enabled some women to move permanently into the labor force. But despite some constraints, the legislation also gave elected officials the authority to divert TANF revenue to purposes tangential to poverty relief. Within less than two decades, the erosion of the social safety net contributed to plunging millions, including one in five single mothers nationally, into dire poverty: existence on $2.00 or less per day.³² Meanwhile, “block granting” remained a strategy of choice among Republicans hoping to further shrink the welfare state. And though conservative efforts to turn programs such as Medicaid into block grants have not met with success, they have often kept Democrats on the defensive. In addition, block granting continues to pose a particularly pernicious threat to African Americans in Baltimore, whose electoral representation in the Maryland State House has continued to dwindle in accord with the city’s shrinking population.

Black women in Baltimore were among those who paid a steep price for the elimination of welfare. In Maryland, the number of people receiving public assistance dropped sharply following the adoption of TANF, although the decline was slower in the city than elsewhere.³³ Some women expressed gratitude that the legislation helped prepare them for entry into the mainstream economy.³⁴ But even for enthusiasts, Baltimore’s postindustrial job market hardly provided many with pathways for upward mobility, particularly for those who lacked a college degree. And that was a reality already well-known to many former AFDC recipients who, like most welfare recipients nationwide, had already been moving in and out of the labor force.³⁵ Many postindustrial jobs in Baltimore that were filled by city residents, as opposed to suburbanites, and by African Americans were service positions that did not pay a living wage. Between 1980 and 2007 in the Baltimore metropolitan region, job creation in low-wage industries rose by 63 percent, while job growth in middle-income and high- income industries increased by only 36 percent and 10 percent, respectively.³⁶ And according to a 2018 study commissioned by the Associated Black Charities, the region’s African Americans were “concentrated in low-wage industries and occupations.”³⁷ Patterns evident in the metropolitan area were even more pronounced when considering the city alone, where health care and education were major sources of employment. A report by the Baltimore Black Worker Center that was based on the 2010 Census found that while African American women made up 61 percent of the city’s female workforce, they filled 71 percent of female, low-wage jobs.³⁸ Former welfare recipients who exercised “personal responsibility” and secured a “work opportunity” nevertheless found it difficult to move out of poverty.

Meanwhile, marriage promotion smacked not only of patriarchy and heteronormativity but also of willed ignorance of the actual job prospects of low-income Black men in cities like Baltimore. In the early twenty-first century, the unionized heavy manufacturing sector, which had long been dominated by white men, was issuing death knells. The 2005 closure of Baltimore’s GM plant and the 2012 final shuttering of Bethlehem Steel at Sparrows Point were cases in point.³⁹ American presidents had failed to protect the nation’s industrial sector. Nor had they effectively used the power of the government to create meaningful alternative employment options and strengthen the hand of workers and unions.⁴⁰

The economic reorientation of the city’s economy had produced winners in addition to losers. The city’s financial industry was an obvious beneficiary. In fact, its executives, including those at the helm of such Baltimore-born firms as Legg Mason and T. Rowe Price, had worked hard over the years to make the city, Maryland, and the nation more business friendly.⁴¹ And some Black and white blue-collar workers enjoyed a bit of a surge as a result of liberalized global trade. Having been retooled to accommodate super-sized container ships that bring manufactured products and other goods to the United States from Asia, during the 2010s, Baltimore’s port became one of the busiest on the East Coast. The development boosted the fortunes of some of the area’s unionized longshoremen, who had seen their fortunes and numbers decline decades earlier.⁴² But while the profits to be made in asset, wealth, and investment management in glistening downtown skyscrapers may have boosted the foot traffic in new boutiques, coffeehouses, and luxury waterfront condominium complexes in downtown Baltimore, they provided limited relief to local unemployment. Moreover, few living in the shadows of the city’s abandoned factories could fully celebrate the tens of millions of tons of goods, including automobiles and steel, that passed through the expanded port—but had been manufactured somewhere else.

In Baltimore’s early twenty-first-century postindustrial labor market, Black men, like Black women, were overrepresented in low-wage jobs. In 2010, African American men were 51 percent of the city’s male workforce but 62 percent of its male low-wage workers. When combined with the figures for Black women, almost 55 percent of African American workers earned low wages as compared to 29 percent of whites.⁴³ Baltimore’s postindustrial economy relied on an army of low-wage workers, who were disproportionately Black and predominantly female. The statistics indicated that neoliberal solutions to poverty, which emphasized only work and marriage, were unrealistic paths to economic security. The contraction of the social safety net was a tactic of social control that provided area employers with low labor costs. And although the employment trends in Baltimore mirrored those evident in other struggling cities, they were the product of local urban planning in addition to federal policymaking. Their concentration in low-wage employment in combination with higher than average unemployment rates led to an African American median income in Baltimore that was 54 percent of that of whites, a figure that was worse than the differential had been during the mid-1950s in Jim Crow Baltimore.⁴⁴

As had long been the case, economic hardship took a particularly high toll on women, to whom the care of family members frequently fell. Food insecurity was one of multiple manifestations of poverty with gendered implications. A 2015 study of the city revealed that the mere act of food shopping remained a logistical challenge for many. One in four city residents—and one in three children—lived in a food desert. The statistics were brought to life by the many women who could regularly be seen lugging grocery bags or pushing shopping carts in Baltimore’s low-income neighborhoods. “It’s really hard to find good meals. The prices are so high. You really need to stretch your buck,” commented Bernice Matthews, who had a family of four to feed in a food desert. Reflective of the extent to which neoliberal solutions had come to dominate local problem-solving, the city’s mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, proposed offering tax breaks to grocery stores.⁴⁵ Meanwhile, life in substandard housing also remained a perennial source of labor for many low-income women compelled to stave off vermin and the cold to keep their families safe. And though the mayor sold some city-owned parking lots to secure the funds to address the problem, municipal parks had not seen many improvements since the 1960s and 1970s.⁴⁶

Black public-sector workers were hardly immune from or unaware of the problems facing other African Americans in Baltimore. And while unionization provided even low-wage Black government employees greater security than many of their private-sector counterparts, the threat of being downsized or privatized often loomed large. Despite the austere times, many workers continued to do their part to keep their agencies responsive to the needs of residents. Mindful that the city had rolled back social services but that residents still needed help, in the 2010s, Baltimore’s public librarians innovated. They used grant funding to bring in graduate students from the University of Maryland School of Social Work to assist patrons. The program met with early success. Within its first few weeks, one social worker had helped a woman she had found crying over a computer keyboard apply for disability assistance. And a graduate student was proud to report that she had found a homeless mother and child a place to stay.⁴⁷

Despite the important contributions of government workers, elected officials often spoke of them as if they were expendable. Republican Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Contract with America called for downsizing the federal government based on a presumption of waste and inefficiency. And a year into his presidency, Clinton bragged about having already decreased the number of federal workers by a hundred thousand—a declaration he felt no compunction to qualify with assurances that the cuts had been judicious.⁴⁸ Across party lines, candidates for national office and American presidents often curried favor with voters by pledging to shrink the federal workforce. On face value, the proposition was counterintuitive; as the nation’s population grew, the number of federal workers might reasonably have been expected to rise to accommodate increased demand for public services. That the promise of downsizing nevertheless remained popular signals the extent to which the narrative associating public-sector workers with inefficiency and waste continued to inform American politics. And although elected officials did not typically invoke race in their denigrations of government workers, the overrepresentation of African Americans in the public sector meant that they were disproportionately—and perhaps also conveniently—the targets of the dismissive rhetoric. By the late twentieth century, such rhetoric could be quite extreme. In 1995, conservative syndicated columnist George Will endorsed the notion that the nation’s wealth was being siphoned “to support vast bureaucracies of social-service providers.”⁴⁹ And in 2011, an editor of the National Review, a conservative publication, wrote of “public-sector cartels … choking off economic growth.”⁵⁰

In Baltimore, public-sector downsizing was not typically announced with the same level of glee that was evident in Washington. The municipal government remained a critical local employer, and AFSCME and other activist groups monitored privatization practices carefully. Although Clinton spoke enthusiastically of cutting tens of thousands of federal posts, activists in Baltimore worried about each municipal job loss—mindful of the person, family, and community that might be affected. But downsizing proved inevitable given the city’s shrinking population and tax base, national indifference to cities, and ongoing pressures to cultivate an inviting business climate. Within his first five years in office, Schmoke eliminated 4,000 city government jobs. He added to that total in 1993, when he closed the Urban Services Agency, the city’s antipoverty agency that had been formed in the 1970s when the Community Action Agency and Model Cities program had merged.⁵¹ By the late twentieth century, USA was only a shadow of the earlier activist agencies. Nevertheless, USA still had committed workers. Among those displaced by the closure were two employees who had forestalled 1,800 evictions the previous year in a city with a mounting eviction crisis.⁵² Government officials also continued to contract out public services. During the late 1990s, Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor, was tracking down so-called deadbeat dads in Baltimore. It was also lobbying the state legislature to win for itself, a private corporation, the authority to garner parents’ wages without a court order.⁵³ Downsizing and privatization continued into the twenty-first century, further imperiling both a job niche vital to African American workers and the quality of services available to city residents.

As they had since the 1970s, AFSCME and other public-sector unions fiercely defended their members, the vital services they provided, and the principle that the government had obligations to its citizens that should not be compromised by the introduction of the profit motive. An explicitly anti–public sector union campaign led by conservatives hampered their efforts. During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Democrats’ tepid support for federal legislation that might have revitalized the labor movement sometimes made it seem that they had lost sight of the importance of unions to their electoral successes. Republicans, however, had not. And many targeted government unions, which had grown in influence in the labor movement as the number of organized private-sector workers had declined.

Conservatives critiqued public-sector unions for driving up the cost of government, having undue influence over public policy, and serving as roadblocks to privatization efforts. The animosity had been building since the late 1960s, but it began making national headlines in the 2010s. During that decade, Republican governors in several states introduced legislation intended to roll back government unions’ collective-bargaining rights. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an influential conservative group composed of Republican lawmakers and business interests, spearheaded the efforts. In several states, the effort met with success, and a dramatic showdown in Wisconsin between Governor Scott Walker and public-sector unions, in particular, attracted considerable attention.⁵⁴ ALEC and the wealthy Koch brothers, who bankrolled many conservative campaigns, also backed an effort by the National Right to Work organization to use the courts to curtail the power of public-sector unions.⁵⁵ That effort met with success in 2018, when the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court reversed its own precedent and in the case Janus v. AFSCME Council 31 ruled that public-sector unions could not collect a fee from government workers who were nonunion members but who nevertheless benefited from collectively bargained contracts. The ruling had potentially grave implications for the coffers of government unions. “Powerful corporate interests,” argued one AFSCME official, were “out to eliminate unions from the American economic and political land-scape because they want to be able to call all the shots.”⁵⁶

The ramifications of the Janus decision in Maryland, which had labor laws that the ruling invalidated, were not immediately apparent. But public-sector labor leaders in Baltimore were precisely those whom conservative activists were hoping to disempower. The leaders were unapologetic advocates of economic justice who were willing to take on an adversary that AFSCME described as including “privatizers, deregulators, tax-cutters, people who want to turn back the clock on racial justice and women’s equality, and selfish people at the helm of corporations.”⁵⁷ Middleton of AFSCME had been in the fight for decades and had a lengthy track record of advocating on behalf of his members, other low-income workers, and progressive causes in the city. Meanwhile, “the radical teachers’ movement [had come] to Baltimore,” according to the Nation. A contingent within BTU had founded Baltimore Movement of Rank-and-File Educators, a group with counterparts in such cities as Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia that were intentionally attempting to use teachers’ unions to promote social justice causes. And the group was vying for increased influence within the BTU.⁵⁸ Conservatives’ concerns about public-sector workers and their unions were coming true.

Advocates of public-sector unions such as those in Baltimore counter their critics by defending the multiple and critical roles organized labor plays. While conservatives such as political scientist Daniel DiSalvo argue that public-sector workers have to join “the real world” and accept the deteriorating labor standards that increasingly define the private sector, public-sector union officials argue that they are fighting on behalf of all workers to maintain a high bar, one that Martin Luther King once described as preserving the dignity of labor.⁵⁹ And while critics such as political scientist Terry Moe argue that government unions gain too much power over public policy, public-sector union leaders describe themselves as defenders of democratic decision-making. The unions, advocates argue, protect the public from those who would commodify government-service provision and sell it in the private sector, where decisions are made behind closed doors.⁶⁰ As AFSCME officials explain, public-sector unions and their critics are locked in a “battle for the country’s soul, over its basic values,” and “the stakes are high.”⁶¹

The stakes were definitely high in Baltimore. For just as the city’s late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century labor market reflected the neoliberal orientation of the national and global economies, local patterns of governance did as well. Schmoke won his first bid for mayor in part on the critique that his predecessors had paid too much attention to downtown at the expense of neighborhood concerns. Nevertheless, he and his successors hardly abandoned and could ill afford to neglect the city’s tourism industry, other commercial revitalization efforts, and the neoliberal imperatives that mayors act like entrepreneurs. In a context characterized by intense national and global competition for investors, Baltimore’s elected officials had to keep the city attractive to businesses. Thus, like Schaefer, they sacrificed the health of the population for the economic health—as measured in metrics such as credit ratings—of the city. They also continued the practice of deal-making. During the 1970s, with federal and state support, Schaefer had incentivized investment in Baltimore’s renaissance with generous tax abatements, and developers continued to expect no less. The city continued to broker arrangements such as payment-in-lieu-of-taxes agreements, which forgave property-tax obligations, sometimes for twenty years, in exchange for a lower fee and which were intended to compensate developers simply for choosing Baltimore for their profit-making ventures. Although elected officials undertook redevelopment projects in neighborhoods, including in those with large low-income populations, downtown commercial ventures were far more numerous.⁶²

Schmoke also pursued and his successor secured from the state the authority to negotiate tax increment financing (TIF), a controversial and risky development strategy.⁶³ In typical TIF agreements, which were not necessarily tax relief but which were often negotiated along with abatements, municipalities agreed to float a bond—and thus take on financial risk—to fund infrastructure and site development on “blighted” land. The projected taxes to be garnered from the improved area minus the value of the taxes that the undeveloped area would have generated were supposed to cover the cost of the bond. In 1980, the Maryland General Assembly allowed its jurisdictions to negotiate TIF agreements. Schaefer, who was in the throes of the controversy surrounding his “shadow government” and its secretive redevelopment deal-making, had Baltimore excluded from the legislation. He believed that TIFs, which did not require voter approval, could become giveaways to developers. Moreover, he worried that TIFs would create conflict among neighborhoods because only some would benefit directly from the deals.⁶⁴ Despite Schaefer’s uncharacteristic caution—but largely because he had set the standard for Baltimore that job creation was enough and that any additional fiduciary obligations a developer might have to the city were negotiable—his successors sought to add to their toolbox the development-luring incentive.

During the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries, the Baltimore Development Corporation (BDC), a public-private body, brokered most of the city’s payment-in-lieu-of-taxes and TIF agreements and other development deals, which were then sent to the mayor and city council for approval. The product of the merger of the multiple public-private deal-making entities that Schaefer had created and older development-oriented boards, BDC was created in the wake of the shadow government controversy, when many were alarmed that critical decision-making regarding the city’s future was happening behind closed doors. Though the result of calls for greater transparency, BDC also shrouded its work in secrecy. In fact, it took a lawsuit that was settled in 2006 to compel the body to comply with Maryland’s open-meetings law. Even thereafter, BDC, which was regarded locally as an advocate for developers, continued to thwart public scrutiny of its deal-making.⁶⁵ In stark contrast to the days of the War on Poverty, when the federal government had mandated maximum community participation in decision-making, the minimal public involvement in deal-making that had become standard fare during the Schaefer years remained the norm in Baltimore.

City activists, however, including the leaders of local public-sector unions, grew increasingly frustrated with business as usual. Protest often followed the negotiations of TIFs and other incentive agreements, particularly those that further subsidized downtown.⁶⁶ In a city in which in 2000 nearly 40 percent of families with children lived at or below the poverty line, it seemed unconscionable that wealthy developers received tax breaks.⁶⁷ In 2016, the issue of corporate welfare came to a head. BDC had completed the negotiation of a TIF with the Sagamore Development Corporation, which was owned by Kevin Plank, who also owned the transnational apparel and footwear company Under Armour. Sagamore had proposed creating a massive multiuse complex in South Baltimore that would include housing, retail, and the global corporate headquarters of Under Armour, whose 2016 revenue was $4.8 billion.⁶⁸ In addition to the TIF, the deal was contingent on the receipt of tax credits valued at close to $760 million.⁶⁹ According to activists, the city’s mayor was “fast-tracking” the TIF, which at the time was valued at $658.6 million, a figure that far exceeded the city’s previous development deals.⁷⁰ “The swift process prevents and limits the opportunity of citizens to understand what this deal is all about and what its [financial] implications are for the long term,” charged Madeline Wright, the director of the Maryland Consumer Rights Coalition. She and the leaders of multiple other organizations, including AFSCME, the AFT, and BUILD held a rally in front of city hall to slow things down.⁷¹

Among the opponents of the Port Covington TIF, the American Civil Liberties Union was particularly vocal. The group called the project “financially and socially irresponsible” and argued that it would “further entrench segregation in an already hypersegregated city, and impose those costs on the predominantly African American residents and taxpayers of the City, while the benefits will largely accrue to a future workforce and population that is by design, predominantly white, affluent, and not currently residing in Baltimore City.”⁷² The argument resonated with many residents and set off a months-long, spirited debate about the ethics and utility of neoliberal urban planning in Baltimore. Ultimately, the pressure from activists produced some results. Sagamore entered into an agreement that promised an economic return to the predominantly African American neighborhoods that would be affected. The developer also negotiated with the activist organizations. The deliberations resulted in a Community Benefits Agreement, which included modest concessions on such issues as the construction of low-income housing and the hiring of city workers. Many of the TIF’s critics remained unwavering in their opposition. But perhaps motivated by pragmatism, BUILD endorsed the agreement, which its leaders described as “unprecedented.”⁷³ The influential group’s approval gave members of the city council cover to vote in favor of the TIF.⁷⁴

While the Community Benefits Agreement made the Port Covington TIF a better deal for city residents than the original proposal had been, even those activists who endorsed passage doubtlessly knew that it was not a meaningful solution to the city’s immediate and urgent problems. As they had for decades, residents largely shared the belief that commercial development was critical to the city’s revitalization. But as activist public-sector workers from the 1960s and 1970s—such as Parren Mitchell and his staff of antipoverty warriors and Maude Harvey and her staff of client advocates—had argued, physical renewal had to be paired with what they called at the time human renewal, which required wealth redistribution, job creation, democratic decision-making, quality public services, and affirmative action. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, as American presidents had forged a neoliberal future for the nation and shifted wealth up the economic ladder, they contracted the sources of revenue needed to fund human renewal. And they helped to justify subsequent cuts to the welfare state with the claim that redistributed aid that ended up in cities such as Baltimore had been squandered on the city’s African American population, which was supposedly made up largely of criminals and welfare queens and also of inefficient public-sector workers who were represented by tax-grubbing union officials. Federal-level policy-making during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries reinforced the logic that African American urban residents were the enemy. The false claims obscured the price that Black residents of cities like Baltimore paid in services, jobs, and opportunity for neoliberal policies that shifted wealth out of their neighborhoods and up the economic ladder.