by guest blogger Greg Freidman
There once was a plan to build a major east-west expressway
through the middle of Baltimore City. The idea for such an expressway had been
around since at least 1917, but things really got going when Robert Moses came
up with a plan in the 40's. With the development of the interstate highway
system in the 1950s and the overwhelming
support of the business and political establishment the highway became a near
certainty. Had the expressway been built as planned , thousands of people would
have been displaced, Leakin Park would have an expressway running through it,
and neighborhoods such as Fells Point, Highlandtown, Canton, and Federal Hill
would have been permanently disfigured.
But as part of a nationwide movement that came to be known
as the freeway revolts regular people got together and fought back. In
Baltimore the main organization driving the effort against the expressway was
known as MAD or the Movement Against Destruction. The organization, essentially
a coalition of neighborhood groups and individuals, was most active in the late
60s and early 70s. and transcended barriers of geography, race, and class. It
was also for the most part (but not
completely) successful. Among those active in the freeway revolts was a
certain social worker turned City Councilwoman by the name of Barbara Mikulski.
Recently I had a chance to sit down with Art Cohen one of
the movers and shakers behind MAD to hear about how this amazing grassroots
movement got started and achieved its goals. For more information about MAD you can visit its online
archive which is hosted by the University of Baltimore Langsdale Libary right
here.
For a detailed explanation of the route the East-West
Expressway was to traverse you can check out Scott Kozel's Roads to the
Future website. And while I strongly disagree with some of its conclusions
another excellent article on the Expressway can be found here
(note that this is a PDF).
On how the idea of
the East-West Expressway came about:
... Robert
Moses came to town in the early 1940s. There had actually been talk about
having an expressway in Baltimore since 1917. But it didn’t really get steam
going until Moses came and he suggested an east west highway straight through
the middle of town. Of course it would have been totally unacceptable on the
east side of town because it would have gone straight through Hopkins
Hospital!... It sort of lay dormant for a number of years and then in the 50's
it came in again because under President Eisenhower, the interstate system came
into being...
On the founding and naming of MAD:
I came to Baltimore as a legal aid lawyer in September 1967.
I came from Washington DC. I was assigned to East Baltimore where I lived as
well as worked....So I was assigned to legal Aid East and that's where I worked
for [the next 16 months up through early 1969].In August of 1968 I was
approached by two people. One was Stu Wexler who had worked with CORE
locally and had been involved in a lot of local things and Jimmy Rouse (who's
the son of James Rouse).
They said there was a new coalition being formed to oppose the plans for the
East-West Expressway and because I had come here as lawyer, they said they need
a lawyer who would be willing to serve as their attorney. It was volunteer.
Everything in the group was volunteer. And I was interested in the issue and I
said sure. The fact that they'd asked meant something too. I had respect for
both of them...
The group as I remember it did not have a name for the first
couple of months...This one person came from West Baltimore he happened to be a
psychiatrist living and working there. He came for two meetings that's all, but
what he did was he gave us a great gift. He said “I've got a name for you. You
need a name. Here's what I'm suggesting, the Movement Against Destruction
(M.A.D).”... It was a great name it described how people felt about the expressway
coming through their neighborhoods.
On the uniqueness of MAD and what contributed to its
success:
The unique thing about M.A.D. It was the first time in
Baltimore that there was a coalition made up of neighborhood groups from across
the city of diverse income groupings, of diverse race (African -American and
White)... But just the fact that you could reach across between the white and
black communities was just sensational. It was very effective and people worked
together very well. And you could be a member of this group as a neighborhood
association or as a mini coalition of neighborhood associations. There was one
called S.C.A.R.
(also see here) (the Southeast
Council Against the Road). And there were some other ones across the city that
were organized sub-regionally. You could also be a member as an individual if
you wanted to.
The thing that made MAD unique was that it met every single
week. [The archdiocese] gave us the use of the Catholic Center downtown at the
southwest corner of Mulberry and Cathedral. And that was a great place. We'd
meet there at 7 o'clock on every Monday. We also were blessed by having people
in our group who had special skills. We had one person, Barbra King, who did
research andworked with the League of
Women Voters... Whenever we had an issue that needed some digging she could do
it for us and would. We had another person who was from the Church of the
Brethren who was assigned to Baltimore as a sort of missionary placement. His
name was Lin Butler and he had an incredible skill. He was our secretary for
most of the time that I was there, he would be at every meeting. And within a
day of the meeting a piece of paper would go to everybody that was on our list.
On one side of the piece of paper were the minutes for the previous day's
meeting and on the other side would be
the agenda for the next meeting. And it provided a high level of continuity
from meeting to meeting. That really helped us....
Our way of operating at MAD was by consensus. We didn't really need to vote.
And the people there were seen representatives of their neighborhood groups. So
if they were doing their jobs they did not arrogate to themselves any special
power. They would take issues back to their group, clear them with whomever they needed to clear
it, and then come back to us. So there was an accountability that was very
helpful.
On the damage that had been done from the condemnation
lines:
By the time I got into this in August 1968 the condemnation
lines had already been laid down. And in some ways a lot of the damage from the
expressway planning had been done... These were people who lived their whole
lives in Canton, Highlandtown, Fells Point, West Baltimore, South Baltimore
too. This was very, very disturbing for a lot of people and there were stories
of elderly people who died of broken
hearts from the idea of having to move from the neighborhoods that they had
lived in all their lives and to which they were deeply committed. What I'm
saying is there was some damage that was already done that could not be
reversed even by MAD. What MAD was able to do with the help of others was
prevent the building of the expressway.
On a very
interesting map:
One of our members, Jack Bond, who just died two years ago,
worked for a local car rental agency and he came to every meeting. I think he
lived in Roland Park. He came up with a wonderful suggestion once... Why don't
we design an expressway ourselves that only took six houses? The mayor's
(Thomas D'Alessandro III, the president of the City Council (William Donald
Schaefer) and, Joe Axelrod the highway
engineer, who lived in Annapolis (the other three homes taken by the map were
those of Greater Baltimore Committee head,William Boucher, Bernard Werner a
consultant to the State Roads Commision, and Dr. F. Pierce Linaweaver the city
public works director). So basically to make a long story short, we developed a
sketch of this expressway, and it
got picked up by a Sun reporter (scroll down to the fourth article). She
went around and interviewed everybody. Mayor Schaefer and all these other
people. It got a lot of attention. It was using ridicule to make a point, that
these people didn't have to get out of their houses. They were planning for
everybody else.
On flying a banner on a plane at the City Fair:
One time I worked on a banner...that was 220 ft wide. It was
about as wide as the expressway would have been with all 12 lanes. It said
“Stop The Mayor's Road”. We carried it into the city fair. This was the pride
and joy of the city officials... to have this downtown fair. And we walked on
there with this thing. And it took them 20 minutes to see what was going on and
they threw us out. The next year what we did was we rented an airplane. We each
kicked in $25 and we had it fly over the
city fair. And there was nothing they could do about that.
On the V.O.L.P.E. V. Volpe Lawsuit:
Richard Volpe was the head of the US Department of
Transportation. He was the defendant. The plaintiffs in that case were the
Volunteers Opposed to the Leakin Park Expressway (V.O.LP.E.) They came up with
that name on purpose. And in fact their lawyer I believe was pro bono from
Piper and Marbury at the time. He's now the city solicitor, George Nilson.
On an inspirational meeting at Edmondson High School and
MAD's turning point:
One of the big turning points for us I believe was in
1969. A public hearing was scheduled for
early in the summer. It was one of the first public hearings on on the 3A plan
and we got them to postpone it. This was because they were not following their
own federal regulations, which required that public hearings be preceded by
public informational meetings. We
insisted that they follow their own rules.
As a result, they first held this informational meeting at which they described what the issues
were. It was held in Edmondson High
School in June of 1969.
People from the community were invited to come and learn
about what the highway engineers planned to do. And Rosemont was a very
controversial area. [The highway] was coming down from Leakin Park. It would
have come down from Rosemont to join up with Franklin Mulberry. Rosemont was a
stable middle-class African-American neighborhood. Joe Wyles (a prominent African-American
activist) was from there and a number of other MAD people were too. They just
felt it was going to destroy their community and there were some alternative
routes for Rosemont, several different ones. And one of them involved going
through a cemetery south of Edmondson Highway which had generally white people
[buried in it].
Anyway Rosemont, was a middle class area. People had come to
this explanatory meeting and the
engineers were in the front [with] the planners... And you had these two groups
and they're sitting on opposite sides of the Edmondson High School auditorium.
One is white, generally younger and the other's black of all ages but somewhat
older. They were sitting on opposite ends of the auditorium and this young
white guy who was the spokesman for the white group gets up and says “we do not want this
highway to go through the cemetery and even though there are rules about
disenterring people and reenterring them we don't want these graves disturbed.
They mean a lot to us our kinfolk are there” and so and so. When he was
through, this elderly African-American man from Rosemont, he says “I've moved 3
times in the last thirteen years because of changes in these condemnation
lines. "Hey, sait a minute," he says, I'm alive now, you're talking
about dead people. I'm alive right now and I'm threatened by this road. And our
neighborhood is threatened by this road.” It was very eloquent. Anyway they
each made their point and then all of a sudden the young white guy gets up. He
didn't want to be played off against the African-American. He says “we're against
the road because it's going to mess up our cemetery with our dead loved ones.
You're against the road because you're living in this area. Let's get together
and fight it together. and you saw this group of people move together in that
auditorium. I imagine there were whites who had never sat in an auditorium with
blacks before and that was emblematic of the kinds of things that happened,
people pulling together.
Anyways 2 months later in August. they had the public
hearing, and it was big. It went on for
three days. 600 people attended. Most people testified against the road plans.
Everybody except for two groups: the Chamber of Commerce and the Greater
Baltimore Committee. And they did not speak in favor of the road. Instead, they just put in written
testimony. The hearing got well covered
in the press.
Conclusions
From my interview
with Art Cohen and my own research about MAD, several things stand out to me. The
first is that MAD was an organization made up of regular people and not just
elites. It was also a truly multiracial coalition where blacks from West
Baltimore worked together with whites from south and east sides. A remarkable
feat given the large scale white flight that was taking place at the time.
Another characteristic of MAD is that it was not dominated by any one person.
Of course it had leaders but it was clearly a group effort with no one person
taking all the credit for the work that was done. The third and final
observation I’d like to note, is that for all its successes MAD failed to stop
construction of the “Highway to Nowhere”. (Those interested in learning more
about the “Highway to Nowhere” and MAD’s fight to stop it should read Andrew
Giguere’s Masters Thesis on the subject). As painful as it may be it is
always important to learn from them so that they will not happen again.
I’m a big believer
that one cannot plan for the future unless they understand the past. Through
understanding both the successes and the challenges faced by MAD it is my hope
that those who wish to speak truth to power on transportation or any other
issue will be able to draw inspiration and guidance.
========================================================================