Polite society coughed and averted its eyes last year when Louis L. DePazzo described the inner city poor as the dregs of the community who needed to be "taught to take baths and not to steal."
At the time, Mr. DePazzo was a state delegate from Baltimore County and a Democratic candidate for the county council. He was explaining his opposition to a pilot program called Moving to Opportunity (MTO), in which 285 city families were to receive federal vouchers so the families could live in better neighborhoods throughout the metropolitan area.
"My concern about this program is much like Castro did when he opened the prisons and the mental institutions and sent us the AIDS patients," Mr. DePazzo said during a radio debate about MTO. "If I were mayor of Baltimore City, believe me, I think I would be derelict in my duty if I did not send out the worst of the worst."
Later in the broadcast, Mr. DePazzo warned that Baltimore County would be flooded with thousands of inner city people who would need "serious counseling . . . would need to be taught to take baths and not to steal."
Mr. DePazzo's diatribe against the hard-working families who would have qualified for the MTO program was, to put it politely, unfortunate. Nevertheless, Mr. DePazzo and others had voiced the concerns of many of his Dundalk-area constituents. And his political colleagues did not censure him; the campaign to stop MTO eventually was taken up by several prominent Baltimore County politicians.
Citizen opposition to the program grew so vocal that, in Congress, Maryland's Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski used her power as head of an appropriations subcommittee to eliminate future funding for MTO. Mr. DePazzo, meanwhile, was elected to the county council by a healthy margin.
The rapid and unceremonious rollback of the MTO program could be used as "Exhibit A" when the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland attempts to prove that government has forced tens of thousands of poor people in Baltimore into racially segregated "ghettoes," beginning in the early 1900s.
Last week, the ACLU charged in a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Baltimore that city and federal officials "deliberately created and perpetuated systematic racial segregation in Baltimore's family public housing." Officials "have repeatedly acquiesced to white opposition to placement of public housing projects in white neighborhoods," said the ACLU, and "if not halted by this court, will rebuild segregation for generations of public housing families to come."
Here are some thoughts about the ACLU's lawsuit. First, it may prove to be the most significant civil rights development to hit this area in decades. Similar cases in cities such as Chicago, Dallas, Cincinnati and Boston have led to the creation of desegregation programs that have succeeded dramatically in helping low-income families escape the trap of life in ghettoes.
Yet the suit here was brought by an organization with a predominantly white membership. And the action comes at a time when many are concerned that internal bickering and financial mismanagement may cripple the effectiveness of the nation's oldest civil rights group, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Thus, the case reminds us that no one group or organization is indispensable to the movement. If the NAACP cannot get its act together, other groups -- comprising both blacks and whites -- will take up the banner.
The case also highlights a bitter irony for the city. The ACLU alleges that a government headed by a black mayor for nearly eight years nevertheless "deliberately . . . perpetuated" the housing-segregation practices of past governments.
Does this mean today's city officials are racist?
No, just outnumbered. The backlash against the MTO program -- which was a modest and very timid attempt to decentralize the poor -- illustrates the fierce and sometimes ugly determination that exists in the suburbs to maintain the status quo.
The sentiments expressed by Mr. DePazzo and others are not very different from the beliefs that once led to the establishment of ghettoes here to begin with. The fight against such ignorance and fear continues -- this time in a federal courtroom.