School desegregation in Prince George's County, Maryland, should have been easy. After all, the county did not have to cope with overt racism in both its citizens and its elected officials or about this racism turning into organized violence directed at the teenage would-be school integrators, as did the states of the Deep South. The task facing the Prince George's County board of education and Superintendent William Schmidt after the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, therefore, seemed to be fairly simple: eliminate the county's segregated dual school system and replace it with an integrated, unitary school system. Yet it was not until 1973, nearly 20 years after Brown, that the county finally implemented a desegregation plan comprehensive enough to please the federal courts and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. School integration in Prince George's County was complicated by covert racist attitudes, by segregated housing patterns, and by the "white flight" phenomenon of whites fleeing predominately black areas in and around cities for predominately white areas deeper in the suburbs.
From its beginnings, Maryland's attitudes towards African-Americans were vaguely hostile. The 1715 state constitution enforced slavery, although Maryland was never a large slave-holding state; racist attitudes continued into the 19th century, when Know-Nothingism took firm root in the state.[2] During the Civil War, Maryland was divided between its slave-holding, which naturally allied it with the Confederacy, and its proximity to Washington, DC, which made it remain in the Union. A local publication noted, however, that "most Prince George's loyalties were with the Confederacy" and that the County seat newspaper "was denied use of the U.S. mails because of its Southern leanings."[3] When a new State constitution that abolished slavery was sent to Maryland voters in 1864, the state as a whole only narrowly approved it; however, Prince...