Baltimore Invents Racial Zoning, Cities Across America Follow

Baltimore enacted the first racial residential segregation ordinance in the United States on December 20, 1910, prohibiting Black residents from moving onto majority-white blocks and vice versa. Louisville, Richmond, Atlanta, Dallas, and dozens of other cities quickly passed similar ordinances. The Supreme Court struck down Louisville's ordinance in Buchanan v. Warley (1917) as a violation of property rights — but cities responded by shifting to racially restrictive covenants in deeds, which were not struck down until Shelley v. Kraemer (1948). The legal architecture of residential segregation was thus constructed in this period.