A general note about the history of politics in Maryland is that under the 1867 constitution until Maryland Committee v. Tawes, 377 U.S. 656 (1964), both chambers of the state legislature were apportioned in such a way as to horribly cripple representation for the population centers in the state.
For instance, the 5 most populous Maryland counties (Baltimore City, Baltimore County, Anne Arundel, Montgomery, and Prince George's) in 1960 held 75%+ of the state's population but only about 35% of state senate seats and less than half of the seats in the House of Delegates.
In an even more egregious example, in 1920, the City of Baltimore comprised 51% of the population of the entire state of Maryland, but had functionally no power in the state legislature at all by nature of how seats were apportioned across counties.
This didn't even really get fixed until the 1972 state constitutional amendment that required senate and delegate districts to be apportioned based on equal population rules.
This was the basis of the apportionment scheme for seats in the Maryland House of Delegates from 1867 to the 1960s. The function of this scheme was to greatly empower the Eastern Shore and Southern Maryland gentry of racist right-wing freaks while denying representation to the metropolitan areas.
One way this imbalance played out was that the Maryland state legislature managed to keep Jim Crow laws in place well past the point of political viability absent the deck-stacking of the districts. E.g. voters rejected statewide referenda to disenfranchise Black voters in 1905, 1908, and 1910.
(ironically enough given this group's current politics, part of the reason that referenda and bills to disenfranchise Black voters failed repeatedly in Maryland is that immigrants especially in Little Italy opposed them, fearing that the same criteria would be used to deny them the franchise too)
one of the funniest things i learned about in college was the history of ethnic conflict for the dominance of baltimore between WASPs and Germans in the early 20th century, given that both groups basically disappeared from political and cultural relevance since.
There was a German language weekly newspaper in Baltimore as late as 1976! By 1868, 1/4 of the city's white population had been born in Germany and half of the rest were of German descent.
This is the United States. There is no "so far back that its not an anti-black thing." Anti-blackness is woven into the very foundations of this place.
