Blockbusting in Baltimore
Subtitle: the Edmondson Village story
By: W. Edward Orser.
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 1994
Place of publication: Lexington, Ky
Language: eng
Number of pages: 241
Subjects: Demographic transition -- Maryland -- Baltimore; African Americans -- Housing -- Maryland -- Baltimore; African Americans -- Segregation -- Maryland -- Baltimore; Edmondson Village (Baltimore, Md.) -- Race relations; Baltimore (Md.) -- Race relations; Edmondson Village (Baltimore, Md.) -- Population; Baltimore (Md.) -- Population
Description: In Blockbusting in Baltimore W. Edward Orser examines Edmondson Village, a west Baltimore rowhouse community where an especially acute instance of blockbusting triggered white flight and racial change on a dramatic scale. Between 1955 and 1965, nearly twenty thousand white residents, who saw their secure world changing drastically, were replaced by blacks in search of the American dream.

By buying low and selling high, playing on fears of whites and needs of African Americans, blockbusters set off a series of events that Orser calls "a collective trauma whose significance for recent American social and cultural history is still insufficiently appreciated and understood.".

Blockbusting in Baltimore describes a widely experienced but little analyzed phenomenon of recent social history. Orser makes an important contribution to community and urban studies, race relations, and records of the African American experience.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [226]-233) and index.