This flower-dotted suburb with good shopping and clean sidewalks marks 30 years as a planned community–planned for people of different races to live together.
And, by most accounts, Columbia is still working, at a time when some people are saying the entrenched segregation elsewhere in America may be the best we can do.
“Familiarity breeds acceptance, so it’s living together and working together that helps us,” said Helaine Jeffreys, 61, a white woman who moved to Columbia 30 years ago from nearby Baltimore, where racism was a fact of life in the 1960s.
“If you know nobody that’s African-American, everybody looks like a stranger,” she said recently, “and if you do, everyone else looks like someone you love and know.”
Columbia, a city of 85,000 people, began to take shape in 1967 on 14,000 acres of farmland in Howard County, Md., about midway between Baltimore and Washington, D.C.
It was the dreamchild of Jim Rouse, a pioneer developer best known for resurrecting urban areas with projects such as Baltimore’s Harbortown, Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace and South Street Seaport in New York.
Inspired by the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and ’60s, Rouse–who died last year at age 81–pulled together some of the country’s leading social thinkers to plan an ideally integrated community. He called it Columbia, he once said, because it sounded like “hallelujah.”
Columbia is a series of neighborhoods, each with its own grade school, shopping area and a mix of housing, from $1.2 million homes to government-subsidized apartments that rent for $410 per month. The housing pattern is designed to prevent the creation of any ghettos.
The city and its real estate agents market Columbia’s integration.
“Jim Rouse was a good businessman. He knew what he was doing. He was an investment banker with ideas,” said resident Mike Brown, 55, a black man who moved to Columbia with his white wife, Diane, in 1967.
Columbia is not a perfect community, and circumstances have wrought change from Rouse’s vision.
The city has evolved into several worlds–one of self-described “old timers” who arrived in the 1960s and 1970s to experience integration, another of up-and-coming black families who came because few other suburbs would sell to blacks, and a third of recent arrivals who may not even know Columbia’s history, but were lured by its good schools and convenient location.
“People’s reasons for moving here are different,” said Diane Brown, 55. “A lot of people now don’t come to Columbia for its philosophies and that’s what’s changed Columbia.”
“The world is changing,” said Jeffreys, “and Columbia just happens to be part of the world.”
The Columbia Association, the local civic organization, boasts that every block in the community still is racially mixed. There are also four interfaith centers where various denominations hold their services, encouraging people of different religions to mingle.
Some Columbians make a point to have friends of all races, while others socialize mostly with those in their own income or racial group. Columbians acknowledge their town is not a racial nirvana–interracial fights have erupted at one of the high schools–but they say it seems to be the best method America has found so far for bringing people together.
“I think planned communities do help break down racial barriers, although the people who agree to move into such communities are, quite likely, disposed to accept an interracial environment,” said Reynolds Farley, a University of Michigan demographer who is considered a leading expert on segregation.
Diane Brown was among the people drawn by Columbia’s integration, for the sake of three children.
“Although I was reared in segregated Baltimore, I thought it was an unkind way to raise children,” said Brown. “We thought, `Wow, hey, what an idea–to move to a place that offered more than integration–integration of all religions, economics, races.’ “
Brown said that because of their Columbia environment, her children don’t understand racism.
“They don’t get it,” she said, “and I’m so glad they don’t.”
Ngai (pronounced Guy) Patters is a black man who grew up in Columbia. He and his wife, Christina, who is white and was raised nearby, moved two years ago to an apartment in the city. One big reason was their 2-year-old daughter, Tabatha Lynn.
“I just want her to have the same opportunities that I did,” Patters said, pushing his daughter in a swing at one of Columbia’s playgrounds. “I hope that she’ll just get the best of both worlds.
“We had toyed with the idea of moving to the Midwest, but my wife is leery because she’s never experienced that kind of brutal racism,” Patters said.
He said he doesn’t feel comfortable associating with only blacks or only whites.
“I’m into people for their individual worth. I tend to be open with someone until there’s a reason not to be,” he said.
Not everyone thinks, however, that the uncomplicated exposure to different people offered by Columbia and places like it is the ultimate solution to the nation’s racial divide.
“I think it depends on who’s doing the planning and what the basic objectives are,” said Bill Beckham, president of the New Detroit race relations coalition and a Columbia resident from 1970-73, when he worked for former U.S. Sen. Phil Hart of Michigan.
Somehow, people always seem to revert to old living patterns, even in places like Columbia, Beckham said.
“No matter how you plan it, if you’re not able to impact the economic conditions so you get the mixture, it doesn’t work,” Beckham said. “What you get in a planned community is a middle- to upper-class community with scatterings of low-income.”
For sociologist Juliet Saltman, an integrated community will stay that way only with amenities to attract and keep residents, support from city government, public housing that is spread throughout the city, and high-quality, integrated schools.
“There is always white flight,” said Saltman, who lives in San Diego. “The question is, what can you do to market the neighborhood to white families?”
Saltman is the author of “A Fragile Movement: The Struggle for Neighborhood Stabilization,” a study of 15 U.S. communities where residents were trying to maintain a racial mix.
In the 1990 report, she gave “successful” grades to Park Hill in Denver, Belmont-Hillsboro in Nashville, West Mt. Airy in Philadelphia, Oak Park near Chicago, Shaker Heights near Cleveland, Teaneck, N.J., the 19th Ward in Rochester, N.Y., Sherman Park in Milwaukee and Butler-Tarkington in Indianapolis.
Harriett and William Tootle came to Columbia 29 years ago because of its commitment to open housing. The black couple–she’s a nurse practitioner, he’s a Navy engineer–lived in Washington for three years but wanted to raise their sons in a better environment.
The Tootles, who grew up in the segregated South, socialize mainly with other black families in Columbia, but appreciate the exposure to other races that living in Columbia gave their two sons.
“In the real world, you’re going to encounter all kinds of people, so why not give them the best opportunity when they start?” said Harriett Tootle, 56.
People like the Tootles and other Columbia residents say living in its mixed setting has changed them, all for the better, in large part by knocking down the stereotypes they brought to town.
“We are changed because we moved here,” said Helaine Jeffreys.
