Fair Housing Activism in Harford

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In December 1959, United States Army Reserve Captain Brennie Hackley had a housing issue. Captain Hackley held a Ph.D. in chemistry and worked in the chemistry division of the Army’s Edgewood Chemical Center (ECC), a satellite of the Aberdeen Proving Ground. He was also a person of color. And being a person of color meant that he could not purchase a house where he wanted to live. Captain Hackley and his wife hoped to live in Edgewood Meadows, a planned sub-division specifically under development to house Edgewood-area military personnel that would rely on the ECC’s water supply and sewage system. Meanwhile, the Army was forcing the Hackleys to leave their current apartment complex to bring in Army personnel over civilians.

Dr. Hackley’s wife – identified as “Mrs. Hackley” in the press  - was a chemist, a Howard University graduate, and also worked at the ECC. Edgewood Meadows’ Bel Air, MD-based developer Art Builders (along with the real estate agents Ward & Bosely, Co.) refused to sell the Hackleys a house because they were black. So, Captain Hackley filed suit to force the military to cut off Edgewood Meadows’ access to the ECC’s water and sewer on the grounds that its blatant racial discrimination was unconstitutional, given its government connection.

The Hackleys lost their lawsuit in federal district court not long after it was filed. However, their case kicked off a decade-long civil rights effort to end racial discrimination in Harford County housing. Harford County housing was segregated by custom, history, and the practice of homeowners and landlords at least until the passage of the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968.

A scan of the rental availability section of a local newspaper at the time would bring up listings for “apartments for colored families” and the like. The largest concentration of persons of color in the county was in Aberdeen, close to the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground (APG), by far the county’s largest employer in the 1960s, and home to thousands of soldiers and civilian employees. The town of Aberdeen remained very segregated from a housing perspective, despite the large number of African Americans who lived there. Civil rights activism against racism in housing began to pick up as part of the broader civil rights efforts locally in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

In 1965, Harford County’s Human Relations Commission (HRC) held a meeting “for consideration and assessment of equal opportunity in housing in Harford County.” The commission sought local solutions in the context of the federal efforts to end racist practices in housing going back to the Kennedy administration. At the meeting, a housing official from the Johnson administration (David Lawrence) pointed out that no new homes were available at the time to black people in Harford County and that available rental property was generally inadequate and “sub-standard.” A Maryland housing official (Parran J. Mitchell) talked about various integrated neighborhoods in Baltimore that existed without racial strife or alleged problems such as declining property values. Meeting participants also left with “Good Neighbor” pledge cards to sign and mail to the HRC.

In a 2016 oral history interview, longtime Aberdeen resident, educator, and civil rights leader Janice Grant recalled the connections between other civil rights movements such as school desegregation: “we marched in Aberdeen, Havre de Grace, Joppatowne, and Edgewood. And what were we marching for? For open housing, schools, equality, for teachers of color to be hired, promoted, to be put in central office, to . . . [be treated as equals].” In 1966, Grant wrote a letter to the Baltimore Sun newspaper lamenting persistent local opposition to open housing based on racist notions of “undesirables:” “It comes down to the realtors and the renters in this situation. Who is to say I will not care for my home?”

In August 1966, Grant contributed to a Baltimore Afro-American report on housing discrimination in Harford by pointing out that soldiers of color returning from Vietnam, Europe or otherwise assigned to APG found “decent housing non-existent.” Grant also suggested that local realtors overtly discriminated against black government employees, teachers, and others regardless of economic class. She also promoted a planned weekend protest for open housing supported by various civil rights groups (including Harford’s new Activists for Fair Housing) to take place across the county in Edgewood, Havre de Grace and Aberdeen.

In June 1967, the Sun reported that approximately 50% of housing unit owners around APG and Bainbridge Naval Training Center (Cecil County) had signed pledges of non-discrimination. The report came in the context of a new order from the Secretary of Defense which mandated military non-compliance with racial housing policies in housing units within three and half miles from military bases. The article also pointed out that there remained many “hard-nosed” landlords and that this contributed to a military housing shortage around APG, especially for “the Negro military family.”

The most focused open housing effort took place surrounding the Joppatowne community. Joppatowne is a large Levittown suburban development of separate and conjoined family homes and apartment buildings in Harford County built during the 1960s. The Joppatowne developers originally prohibited families of color from buying or renting their homes, something that increasingly raised the ire of local activists.

In Harford, the Activists for Fair Housing group and the local NAACP chapter targeted Joppatowne with on-site protests and other activities. These included a successful statement of opposition to a proposed new federal research facility in Joppatowne due to the community's racist practices. In the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Levitt & Sons. Inc. finally changed with regards to Joppatowne. In April 1968, the developer declared an ”action memorial” to Dr. King to end racial prohibitions on applications for new homes. The action came just before President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act, making racial restrictions on housing illegal across the nation.

The local struggle to integrate Joppatowne represented a strong and powerful component of the civil rights movement in Harford County. The movement connected to other local actions, finally seeking to break down racist barriers to full inclusion and equality across the county and in various sectors.