Hyattsville was at the forefront of a movement in the 1910s to impose racial segregation block-by-block in U.S. cities, an effort worth reflecting on this Martin Luther King Day.

Started in Baltimore in 1910, the housing segregation ordinances barred African Americans from moving into blocks with a majority of white residents, and whites from moving into majority Black blocks.

Research from the Mapping Racism project shows that Hyattsville followed suit in 1913, with city council member Guy Latimer proposing an ordinance based on Baltimore’s that was later adopted unanimously without discussion.

An article in the Sept. 4, 1913 Municipal Journal reported that Latimer proposed the ordinance after “certain property owners in Hyattsville” threatened to “rent their holdings to colored tenants” if the city imposed a special tax assessment on their properties.

Anyone found to violate the ordinance could be punished by a fine of $100 to $200 ($2,800 to $5,600 in today’s dollars) as well as 30 to 90 days in jail.

The housing segregation ordinances quickly spread to nearly two dozen cities, mostly in the South but including such major cities as St. Louis, Atlanta, Miami and Dallas.

The movement was short-lived, however. When Louisville, Ky., passed an ordinance, the local African American community formed a chapter of the NAACP and orchestrated a test case to challenge the law in court.

Rather than rest their arguments on the obvious racism of the law, the NAACP lawyers cleverly designed the case to argue that the white property owner who wanted to sell his home to a Black man was having his own property rights unconstitutionally limited.

It worked. They won in a unanimous decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1917, and ordinances across the country such as Hyattsville’s were thrown out.

Segregationists regrouped, though, moving onto new techniques such as restrictive property covenants which barred homeowners in certain neighborhoods in places like University Park and Hyattsville from selling to African Americans.

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