On Page 5 of the Oct. 31, 1909, morning edition of The Sun, in large type that spread across two columns, the paper made its case for why the “suffrage amendment” on the table that year, which would have required voters to pass a sort of writing test before being granted the right to cast a ballot, should be ratified. Unlike today’s efforts to disenfranchise minority voters, there is absolutely no attempt to code the language of the argument. It comes out swinging against Black Marylanders and never lets up, calling them ignorant, thriftless and a threat to “better political conditions.”

‘The encroachment of the negroes’

The next year, the paper wrote glowingly in its news pages of a segregation ordinance — “preventing negroes from moving” into majority-white neighborhoods and vice versa — signed into law in 1910. The measure was drafted, one article claimed, after white residents in the northwest section of the city decried “the encroachment of the negroes into white residential sections, lowering property values and driving white people from the neighborhoods in which, previous to the black invasion, they had liked to live.”

As Antero Pietila, a former Sun reporter, noted in his 2010 book, “Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City,” that particular ordinance paved the way for residential segregation in America. Nothing else like it was on the books anywhere, and legislation modeled after it soon sprung up in other regions of the country.

The ordinance was eventually struck down, as were others that followed, by a 1917 Supreme Court ruling concerned that the measures limited the ability of white homeowners to sell to whomever they wished. But The Sun remained a strong proponent of segregation — including segregation contained within “voluntary” neighborhood covenants in which white residents agreed not to sell to Black buyers (these, too, were eventually struck down by the high court, in 1948). And its writers complained of the “negro invasion” for nearly two decades.

But the coverage, as our editorial page later noted in 2018, “deplored the inhumanity of the perpetrators without ever really acknowledging the humanity of the victims” or the community terrorized by their brutal deaths. The ire was directed at the “poor, white trash” killers, as Mencken put it; there was no empathy for — or even real interest in — the Black victims. (This was also the decade that the paper featured an offensive recipe column, written insultingly and proudly by a white woman “in the vernacular of an ante-bellum mammy.”)

And in the early 1950s, the editorial board bemoaned the banning of the decades-old pro-Confederacy and pro-Ku Klux Klan film “The Birth of a Nation.” After Maryland’s Board of Motion Picture Censors deemed the movie “morally bad and crime-inciting,” The Sun defended it as simply trying to depict sentiments of the South during the Reconstruction era.

‘Painful to many Marylanders’

And as court rulings began to reveal the lie in the notion of “separate but equal” education, The Sun was reluctant to endorse the obvious. In 1952, when Baltimore Polytechnic Institute high school allowed 10 academically qualified Black students to enter its accelerated “A course” program, after determining that a separate program would not provide equal educational opportunity, The Sun congratulated the school board on its “conscientiousness and restraint” in handling the matter, but failed to note the historic nature of the integration or even the appropriateness of the decision.

When two years later, the U.S. Supreme Court, struck down the separate but equal doctrine and outlawed segregation in its Brown v. Board of Education ruling, The Sun, while acknowledging that the decision must be accepted and was “inevitable,” editorialized that it also would be “painful to many Marylanders.” The bright side, the writers found? It might decrease the ”criminal activity to which too many of the Negro race are given.”

At that time, The Sun was still choosing to identify Black people by race in its coverage — and only Black people — placing the tag “Negro” after individual names, even though many other newspapers had long since stopped similar practices. When a Westminster minister and seminary professor asked the paper to discard “this discriminatory practice” in 1955, according to an article in The Afro-American, the editor-in-chief flat out refused, self-righteously declaring that “the Sunpapers will not be a party to such suppression” of fact and that “the matter of what it is now fashionable to call ‘pigmentation’ is important from both the white and the Negro point of view.”

He didn’t spell out what, exactly, was so important. But he did mention crime and Black responsibility for it, so we’d venture a guess that the significance was in perpetuating a stereotype of Black people as dangerous and to be feared. At the time, Baltimore’s population was about 24% Black, and white fear of “the other” was strong. Several years would pass, and a new editor-in-chief would ascend, before the paper eliminated the automatic race tags, in 1961, under pressure from readers who were sick of them.

As the civil rights movement grew throughout the 1960s, so did The Sun’s conscience. In 1964, a decade after the Brown v. Board decision, editorial writers produced a fiery piece denouncing Alabama’s segregationist governor, George Wallace, and decrying school segregation as a “caste system that has kept Negroes in a position of inferiority.” The same editorial embraced the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 working its way through Congress as a “national commitment to sweep away the inequities which racial discrimination has imposed on a large body of citizens” that is “right and inevitable.” And when the bill passed in June of that year, editorial writers called it “a mighty step” and “a reaffirmation of the principles of equality upon which our society was founded.”

‘Voice of inspiration for millions’

Opinion writers also recognized the genius and dedication of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — to a point. They praised his clear plan and commitment to nonviolent civil rights advocacy, but chafed when he proposed action outside that realm, such as marching in support of home rule for Washington, D.C., or encouraging resistance to the Vietnam War draft. When King was assassinated April 4, 1968, the front pages of The Sun and The Evening Sun the next day underscored the significance, with headlines urging peace and proclaiming the “whole world stunned.” The editorial board called the assassination a “national tragedy,” noting that King was “the voice of inspiration for millions.” There was “none other of his stature,” they wrote. The editorial cartoon that day featured a headstone and King’s name, with the epitaph: “Killed in the cause of equality.”

Like the uprising in 2015 following Freddie Gray’s death, the 1968 unrest drove news coverage for months, as officials and media dug into the issues underlying it. But how much of an effect it had on Sun coverage going forward is hard to gauge. The newspaper’s opinions grew progressively more supportive of racial equality, though changes within the paper were subtle. The Sun hired its first Black female journalist in 1973, but the staff was — and still is — overwhelmingly white, compared with the makeup of the community; this is especially evident in The Sun’s leadership teams through the years.

By the 1980s, Sun editorials focused on issues of poverty, criminal justice and equal opportunity in hiring through a lens of race, but they still had an ivory tower quality to them of being written by someone largely disconnected from the topic. In a December 1981 editorial, writers decried strict welfare rules that hurt the working poor, but made a point of separating them from people “on the dole,” seemingly buying into the mythology of the “welfare queen” popularized by Ronald Reagan during his 1976 presidential campaign.

And in 1989, after the personal journals of H.L. Mencken were released, revealing deep-seated racism and antisemitism, Sun writers undertook great efforts to make excuses for the revered writer, even though Mencken had been dead for nearly 34 years. “The fact that the sage of Baltimore had unkind things to say on a broad range of topics can hardly come as a surprise to those familiar with his sharp and biting work,” wrote one columnist. “They make him a more complex figure, more difficult to decipher.”

Black Lives Matter

Shortly after the diary release, in 1991, the vicious beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers was recorded on video and broadcast across the country, and white Americans could no longer deny that Black people were being mistreated by law enforcement. Yet, The Sun would continue to take the word of local law enforcement over Baltimore residents in its reporting for decades to come, largely without question. It did this even as the city adopted a “zero tolerance” style of policing in the late ‘90s that the U.S. Department of Justice would later find “led to repeated violations of the constitutional and statutory rights” of community members.

Though people like state Sen. Jill P. Carter, who’s long been in the Baltimore political scene, had for years been raising alarms over police brutality and the need for reform, it wasn’t until 2014 that The Sun took an in-depth look at why it was that the city was paying out millions of dollars to settle dozens of lawsuits by Black residents who said police beat them up. That investigation won multiple awards for the paper, as good journalism has a way of doing, and was a prescient walk-up to the story that would dominate the paper the next year: Freddie Gray’s death.

The Sun’s coverage there earned it two Pulitzer Prize finalist honors, one for breaking news “reflecting the newsroom’s knowledge of the community and advancing the conversation about police violence” and one for the editorial board, for writing “that demanded accountability … while also offering guidance to a troubled city,” according to the prize committee.

 

Image on the wall of the Sandtown Conference Room at The Baltimore Sun. (Tricia Bishop/Baltimore Sun staff)

When The Sun moved offices to East Cromwell Street in 2018, we covered one wall with a photo from a protest in Gray’s Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood. It shows a sea of mostly Black faces crowded together, beneath “Black Lives Matter” and “Stop Police Terror” signs. It’s a better reminder of what we are here to do than the Mencken quote for various reasons, not the least of which is that it’s about the people we serve, rather than about us. But a quote or a picture doesn’t a paper make. Actions speak louder than words, even in the newspaper business.

We’re still grappling with improving diversity in our staff and our coverage. Reporting that arises directly from sources in the region’s Black communities has long been lacking in The Sun, largely because the connection is lacking. We’re not out there enough, and we’re not trusted enough. We are working on that, and looking into an impression some hold that The Sun is harder on Black officials than white. Unlike in years before, we’re talking about these issues — routinely — and how to address them.

To that end, we ask for your input, as readers and community members. How can we better connect? How can our reporting be more relevant? How can we better serve? What wrongs have we yet to right? Please share your thoughts on our past, present or future at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., with the word “apology” in the subject line. Some responses will be compiled for publication, but we will read and consider all of them.

We are your newspaper, and we want to serve your interests and that of the public good as a whole.