“Judged by any test other than color, they seem to be very desirable citizens.”
Other papers, like the Bridgeport Telegram, scent danger:
“If they are deprived of the right to build homes where they please which is accorded to the most degraded white man who lands upon these shores provided people will sell land to him, and robbed of the right to become skilled workmen, their situation will be a much graver one than that from which the Civil War delivered them.”
Dr. Henry Moskowitz, in the New York Evening Post, points to the Russian analogy and the Boston Globe also insists on the failure of the Ghetto idea:
“Segregation has never been a very successful solution of the race problem, as may be seen in the experience of European cities with ghettos and in Russia’s attempt to keep Jews confined within certain pales. The Baltimore city council, however, by a piece of special pleading in its report, tries to justify the ordinance by saying that its ‘underlying purpose is the maintenance of peace and good order and the avoidance of friction and irritation between the two races.’ The ordinance ‘aims to prevent the whites from becoming a disturbing element to the blacks and likewise to prevent the Negroes from becoming a disturbing element to the whites.’ Ahem!”
The New York Journal calls the experiment dangerous:
“It is true that the establishment of homes of colored people in neighborhoods hitherto unfrequented by them causes antagonism and may produce trouble and disturb real estate values. But it is also true that it is dangerous, unjust and unworthy of this century to revive the obsolete ghetto system, denying to certain human beings the right to live where they please and where they can.
“We suppose that a white man who owns a house has a legal right to sell it to a Negro if he pleases. And we suppose that the highest court in the country will sustain the right of a colored man to live in his own home, subject to the tax laws and regulations of his neighborhood.
“Probably the plan to compel a hundred thousand colored people in Baltimore to live all together in one neighborhood could not legally be enforced.”
On the legal side of the matter Charles J. Bonaparte, formerly United States Attorney-General, says to a Baltimore Sun reporter: