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Sunday, April 27, 2025
The Maryland Commission on Civil Rights 2025 Civil Rights Gala is on August 23rd
Bergen-Belsen Survivors Mark the 80th Anniversary of Camp’s Liberation
Survivors of the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen and their families have gathered at the site in northern Germany to officially commemorate the 80th anniversary of its liberation by British troops. Representatives of victims’ associations and the military took part in the ceremony along with the British deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner. During the second world war, Soviet prisoners of war and later Jewish prisoners were held at the camp under extremely hostile conditions. According to the foundation responsible for the upkeep of the camp as a memorial site, about 20,000 prisoners of war and at least 52,000 concentration camp prisoners died there, including Anne Frank, the Jewish diarist, and her sister, Margot.
Accompanying about 180 British Jews, including survivors and their relatives, the UK’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, read a psalm. Lola Hassid Angel, 88, from Greece, described the camp in an interview with the Guardian earlier this month as “an abomination that historians will one day refer to as a dark page but which we, as the last survivors, are duty-bound to describe”.
At the ceremony, another survivor, 100-year-old Albrecht Weinberg, from Germany, recalled being taken half-dead by train from Auschwitz to Belsen. “I found myself lying amid the dead and the living on a wagon in Bergen-Belsen. Our bodies were tipped out. Two days later, a tank drove in. I thought now I’ll finally be freed by death, but it was British soldiers coming to liberate us. They later told me I’d weighed 29kg [4st 8lb].”
At the time in April 1945, the Guardian (London) reported that a senior medical officer with the British army had witnessed thousands of typhus, typhoid, and tuberculosis cases on entering the camp, calling it “the most horrible, frightful place” he had ever seen.
“There was a pile - 60 to 80 yards long, 30 yards wide, and 4ft high - of the unclothed bodies of women all within sight of several hundred children. Gutters were filled with rotting dead and men had come to the gutters to die, using the curbstones as back rests,” the correspondent David Woodward wrote. Accounts from the camp by soldiers and journalists were spread around the world and proved more shocking in many ways than other discoveries of death camps to the east, such as Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz, as they had either been demolished to hide evidence of the crimes committed there, or emptied of their inmates, who, like Weinberg, were sent on death marches.
At Belsen, the camp construction and the evidence of what had occurred there remained intact. Some of the Nazi soldiers involved in the death machine were still on site. The large number of prisoners and the conditions at the camp led to mass outbreaks of dysentery, typhus, and malnutrition, leading to about 500 deaths a day, most during the final weeks of the war. A documented 14,000 survivors died by the end of June 1945, many of whose digestive systems had been unable to cope with the food they were given after the liberation of the camp.
Every year, about 250,000 people visit the Memorial and over 1,000 groups take part in guided tours, study days, and projects here.
Saturday, April 26, 2025
The Maryland Center for History and Culture has a Great Digital Collection of Exhibits - Including on Segregation - on its Website and Available in Balltimore
The Museum at the Maryland Center for History and Culture (in the Meyerhoff Courtyard at 610 Park Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21201. 410-685-3750.) has a great digital collection of audio and informational exhibits on its website and available in person. It is a statewide resource headquartered in f Baltimore’s Mount Vernon neighborhood cultural district, featuring over 1,000 objects on display in 15 permanent and rotating exhibition galleries and with a library housing 7 million books, documents, manuscripts, and photographs available for research and scholarship. The Center has a museum, library, holds educational programs, and publishes scholarly works on Maryland. Altogether, the Center houses one of the country’s largest collections of state heritage maintained by a private, nonprofit institution. Formerly the Maryland Historical Society, it was founded on March 1, 1844, and is the oldest cultural institution in Maryland.
There is a vast collection at the H. Furlong Baldwin Library. The online collection on segregation includes "Juanita Jackson Mitchell and Virginia Jackson Kiah interview, 1975 (1975-07-15)," Gwynn Oak Amusement Park protestors riding ‘Freedom Now’ bus (1963-07-04), and Paul Robeson and Dr. John E. T. Camper protesting Ford’s Theatre Jim Crow admission policy (1948-03). The online resources has Research Guides, Finding Aids, Educator Resources, and more. Highlights of museum collection include: Native American archaeological artifacts dating to 5,000 B.C.; the world’s largest assembly of paintings by members of the Peale family; nine portraits by artist Joshua Johnson—recognized as the first professional African American artist in the United States; and Maryland landscape painting by Francis Guy. Visit the Exhibitions page for more information about all of the current exhibitions.
The Center is a community partner of Preserve the Baltimore Uprising, a digital archive devoted to preserving and making accessible media created and captured by people and organizations involved in or witness to the protests following Freddie Gray's death in 2015. The 2016-2017 exhibit "What & Why: Collecting at the Maryland Historical Society" included items from the Preserve the Baltimore Uprising collections in a video installation.
To visit the Museum, due to hourly capacity limits it is strongly encouraged that you book your ticket in advance. The admission rates are $12 - Adults, $10 - Seniors $9 - Students, free - Members and Children under 2, free first Thursdays. The The museum and shop hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday (With extended hours the first Thursday of each month until 8:00 p.m.).
Plaque Honoring Housing Segregation Leader William L. Marbury Removed from Bolton Hill and Decommissioned by Baltimore
Baltimore's Board of Estimates has decommissioned and removed a raised plaque honoring a segregationist from public property in Bolton Hill and decommissioned by the city. The William L. Marbury Plaque was placed in the late 1930s at the south end of a wide median strip in the 1700 block of Park Avenue near the intersection of Park Avenue and Wilson Street by the Mt. Royal Garden Club, a predecessor of today’s Bolton Hill Garden Club where it remained for almost 90 years. It was installed to honor an attorney who lived in Bolton Hill in the early 1900s. After the November 2024 removal, there remains a hole in the ground Its removal from public property is consistent with the community’s wishes and the plaque has been given to the Marbury family, which was “willing and anxious” to receive it.The plaque was been removed in November 2024 from city-owned land in Bolton Hill and decommissioned by the city on Wednesday, January 8, 2025. The inscription on the plaque read: "William L. Marbury, Dec. 26, 1859 Oct. 26, 1935, Planted by Mt. Royal Garden Club."
He served as the U.S. Attorney for Maryland during the Grover Cleveland administration or as president of Maryland State Bar Association in 1910. He ran unsuccessfully for the U. S. Senate in 1913. The firm where he and his son worked for many years, then known as Marbury Miller and Evans, merged in 1952 with Piper, Watkins, Avirett & Egerton to create Piper & Marbury, now part of DLA Piper.
William Luke Marbury Sr. was also a segregationist - the founder in 1910 of the Mount Royal Protective Association, whose mission was “to halt African Americans from renting or purchasing property in the Mount Royal District, which included present-day Bolton Hill and Reservoir Hill.” Marbury had a record of promoting residential segregation.
“Marbury is credited with being the architect of redlining laws in Baltimore,” neighborhood resident and a past president of the Bolton Hill Community Association David Nyweide wrote in the December issue of The Bolton Hill Bulletin. “He actively tried to disenfranchise voters in Maryland with dark skin, even arguing, unsuccessfully, before the U. S. Supreme Court that the State of Maryland could legally strip their voting rights because Maryland never ratified the Fifteenth Amendment. He himself was a descendant of the plaintiff in Marbury v. Madison about a century earlier, the case which famously established the power of the Supreme Court to invalidate state laws and acts of Congress that contravene the Constitution.”
Historians also note that Marbury came from a family of plantation-owners in Southern Maryland who held slaves before moving to Baltimore in the 1870s. “Marbury helped draft several state bills designed to disenfranchise Black Marylanders’ voting rights from the late 1890s to 1911,” a 2020 report by the Bolton Hill committee. about Marbury. said. “As he told the Baltimore Sun in January 1910, ‘it is an anomalous condition that an inferior race should share the government with the superior one.’ “
By 1910, “Marbury had also become an advisor to members of the Baltimore City Council who were promoting residential segregation, and he help them draft a series of residential segregation laws between 1910 and 1917, among the earliest such urban statues in the country,” the report stated. “When they proved so conservative as to fail to pass constitutional muster in the Supreme Court, Marbury favored enforcement tools in the form of restrictive covenants and the Mount Royal Protective Association, which was founded with the explicit purpose to stop Black people from renting or purchasing homes in Bolton Hill.” In 1910, Baltimore was the first U.S. city to pass a residential segregation ordinance.
Marbury “did not…simply hold beliefs about racial segregation that were not uncommon for other white people of his time,” the committee stated in its report. “[H]e was instead a locally prominent white man who actively shaped the world of Jim Crow during the early twentieth century” and the plaque “memorializes a former resident of Bolton Hill who would not be honored today for his public, proactive efforts to disenfranchise Black people and inhibit them from living in the neighborhood.” Because of “the unverified reasons for the plaque’s placement but unequivocal knowledge of the revolting public reputation of the man honored by the plaque, the committee recommends removal,” the committee concluded, adding a suggestion that the plaque be given to “a Marbury descendant.” The garden club’s executive committee agreed with the recommendation to remove the plaque. The committee “considers the plaque to no longer represent the values of the garden club and the Bolton Hill neighborhood as it is a painful reminder to many of exclusionary and discriminatory times.”
Nyweide said in his article that there was some debate within the community about removing the plaque. “Reasonable, dissenting voices to removing the plaque were concerned that it would erase the odious history it signified, where dispensing with it would be a convenient means of ignoring the history of segregation in Bolton Hill,” he wrote. “Yet, that history remains despite the absence of the plaque on the Park Avenue median, and the public historic markers committee’s work was a means of drawing attention to it. As the committee concluded, the plaque was placed to honor a man whose legacy would not be honored with such a plaque today by the Bolton Hill Garden Club nor by the Bolton Hill Community Association. His former residence does not bear a Blue Plaque [marking the homes of noteworthy Bolton Hill residents who have died.] The Marbury plaque’s placement amid a grassy median on Park Avenue had become as incongruous as the man himself would be today.”
“To his descendants, the Marbury plaque is a familial artifact,” he wrote. “They had no say in inheriting the racist legacy of their forebearer, just as today’s residents of Bolton Hill did not live in the neighborhood of Marbury’s day. The Marbury plaque remains, just not where it was originally planted.”
U.S. Department of Justice Secures $360,000 Settlement in Sexual Harassment Lawsuit Against New Mexico Property Manager & Apartment Complex
The U.S. Department of Justice (USDOJ) has announced that the owners and former property manager of a federally subsidized apartment complex in Albuquerque, New Mexico have agreed to pay $360,000 to resolve a lawsuit alleging that the former property manager sexually harassed female tenants in violation of the Fair Housing Act.
The department’s lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico in March 2024, alleges that for over 10 years, property manager Ariel Solis Veleta (Solis) sexually harassed female tenants at St. Anthony Plaza Apartments, a Section 8 Project-Based Rental Assistance property with 160 units in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The suit alleges that Solis’s conduct included making unwelcome sexual comments to female tenants, touching female tenants without their consent, locking female tenants in his office to demand sex acts, and threatening to evict female tenants who did not give in to his sexual demands.
“A home should be a place of refuge, not fear,” said Deputy Assistant Attorney General Kathleen P. Wolfe of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “The Justice Department will hold property managers and landlords accountable when they target and exploit vulnerable tenants with sexual harassment.”
The department’s lawsuit also names as defendants the owners and operators of St. Anthony Plaza Apartments, PacifiCap Properties Group LLC, St. Anthony Limited Partnership, PacifiCap Holdings XXXVIII LLC, and PacifiCap Management, Inc. The lawsuit alleges that these defendants are vicariously liable for the sexual harassment of their agent, Solis. The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Inspector General participated in the investigation that uncovered the evidence leading to the lawsuit.
Under the consent decree, which must be approved by the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico, the defendants must pay $350,000 to tenants harmed by Solis’s harassment and a $10,000 civil penalty to the U.S. The consent decree permanently bars Solis from contacting tenants harmed by his harassment, permanently bars Solis from managing residential rental properties, and mandates training and the adoption of policies and procedures to prevent future discrimination at residential rental properties owned or managed by defendants.
If you are a victim of sexual harassment by another landlord or property manager or have suffered other forms of housing discrimination, call the USDOJ’s Housing Discrimination Tip Line at 1-800-896-7743, email the Department at fairhousing@usdoj.gov, or submit a report online. More information about the Civil Rights Division and the laws it enforces is available at www.justice.gov/crt.
U.S. Department of Justice (USDOJ) Files Proposed Settlement Agreements Regarding Accessibility Retrofits
The settlement agreements were filed on March 25 and 27, 2025, the at, respectively, The Kendrick, in Needham, Massachusetts, and Emerson at Edge on the Hudson, in Sleepy Hollow, New York. The complaint, which was filed on June 18, 2024, alleges that several Toll-related entities and others violated the Fair Housing Act by failing to design and construct residential properties in New York and elsewhere with the required accessibility features. The case was referred to the Department of Justice after the Department of Housing and Urban Development received a complaint, conducted an investigation, and issued a charge of discrimination. The complaint is also based on evidence obtained by the USDOJ's Fair Housing Testing Program.
On June 25, 2024, the court approved a consent decree between the U.S. and Defendant Lendlease Construction LMB Inc. The decree requires Lendlease not to discriminate in future design and construction, implement an educational program, and pay a $10,000 civil penalty. On July 28, 2024, the court approved a consent decree between the U.S. and Defendant GreenbergFarrow Architecture, Inc. The decree requires GreenbergFarrow not to discriminate in future design and construction, implement an educational program, and pay a $30,000 civil penalty.
On January 8, 2025, the U.S. Attorney’s Office filed a second amended complaint. On March 1, 2025, the court approved a settlement agreement regarding retrofits at Parc at Princeton Junction, in Princeton, New Jersey. On March 4, 2025, the court approved a proposed settlement agreement regarding retrofits at another property, The Morgan, in Jersey City, New Jersey.
Missouri GOP Close to Passing Bill Letting Landlords Discriminate Against Section 8 Renters
This week, the Missouri Senate passed legislation that if becomes law, the state will prevent municipalities in Missouri from enacting source of income discrimination bans, and will void bans already in place in St. Louis, Webster Groves, Columbia, and Clayton, along with a portion of Kansas City. Kansas City passed a source of income discrimination ban last year, though it was largely paused by the courts in February. Columbia, St. Louis, Webster Groves and Clayton have similar protections on the books. The laws make it illegal for landlords to discriminate based solely on the fact of renters’ lawful sources of income, including Section 8, veterans’ benefits and Social Security.
Source of income discrimination bans are designed to prevent landlords from refusing to rent to potential tenants based solely on the kind of income that they have available to them. Many landlords will only consider W-2 wages when evaluating potential tenants, but this helps to prevent many of the poorest from being able to access safe, stable housing. A single mother may have child support payments as her primary source of income, but a landlord is not bound to consider that when she applies for tenancy. A bus driver who has suffered repetitive stress injuries and now receives Social Security Disability Insurance may also struggle to find a landlord who is willing to rent to them.
The most common form of source of income discrimination is a refusal to accept Housing Choice Vouchers, also known as Section 8, a federal housing program that has been addressing homelessness in the U.S. since 1974. Despite being chronically underfunded by the federal government, these vouchers have proven to raise people out of poverty, improve mental and physical health outcomes, and decrease homelessness. 75% of HCV holders have extremely low incomes, defined as less than 30% of the federal poverty line (currently $32,150 for a family of four) or less than 30% of the local area median income. The Section 8 program allows these families to pay 30% of their income in rent while the government pays the balance.
The legislation, which has cleared the House and Senate in differing forms, would make it extremely difficult for these low-income renters, the majority of whom have already experienced chronic homelessness, to find housing. A 2018 study showed that over 67% of landlords refused to rent to voucher-holders in cities without source of income anti-discrimination laws. In comparison, less than 31% of landlords refused to rent to voucher holders in cities with source of income discrimination bans in place. This demonstrates that source of income discrimination bans are effective local public policy and should not be preempted by our state government.
This legislation is being framed as a protection for landlords, seeking to prevent them from being “forced” to participate in a federal program. They say that this is government infringement on the property rights of landlords. They say that it’s too hard to comply with government regulations for landlords who participate in the section 8 program. To participate as a landlord, property owners simply have to submit to an annual inspection and ensure that their rental rates are in compliance with federal Fair Market Rent standards, which are typically very generous. Inspection protocols have recently been revised to only consider key health and safety factors rather than cosmetic issues.
A Missouri Independent reporter said that in listening to Missouri legislative committee discussion on this issue over the last two years, it seems like the concerns of landlords are actually centered on a prejudiced belief that poor renters are bad tenants.
Federal data shows that renters using housing vouchers are actually excellent tenants who stay in a unit for an average of 7 to 8 years, despite the fact that landlords are free to evict them for breaking the terms of their rental agreement. This is because of the program’s smooth transitions in employment status of renters, adjusting the amount paid by the government based on fluctuations in the income of the renter. Voucher holders are also typically assigned a case manager that helps renters to understand the terms of their lease and comply with landlord regulations.
Over 86% of rental units in the country are owned by for-profit entities. If we allow these landlords to opt-out of renting to single parents living on child support, individuals with disabilities that prevent them from working full-time, and seniors and other low-income families utilizing these federal vouchers, where do we envision they will go?
Read the April 26, 2025 Missouri Independent article.
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