Lincoln Didn't Include Baltimore in the Emancipation Proclamation

 President Lincoln didn't include Maryland and other border states in his Emancipation proclamation. It took a third Maryland constitution years later to free the slaves. That interesting fact is useful here because it is part of the problem of displaced former slaves after the war thrown into homelessness en mass usually without a legal right to inhabit their former plantations. As a northerner during school before college long ago learning technical details of mass black homelessness after the civil war didn't occur. There were few blacks in the Pacific Northwest until the Second World War. School kids learned generalities of U.S. history and state history (Washington state for my experience). I took a world civilization course too. Three history course at a high school level is pretty shallow actually.

William Grose was the first black businessman in Seattle. Yet it wasn't until the federal government needed military support personnel in the war with Japan that many blacks moved to the Pacific Northwest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Grose_(black_Seattle_pioneer)

The two small cities I grew up in had no blacks not because of segregation-simply because none had moved in large numbers that far from the south, and race riots didn't exist even until after the Vietnam War by which time there was a substantial black population in large cities. Researching the black city migrations and rioting development as a topic would need to wait until opportunity arose for graduate research.

Since I am dead reckoning history here I will say that I am interested in the mass relocation of former slaves after the war. It is well known that many went on an exodus to northern cities creating the problem persisting to this time of mostly black urban ghettos and/or aka challenged neighborhoods and educational facilities, and in some a legacy of neo-apartheid with legally segregated housing such as in Baltimore that persisted for some time.

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_Proclamation

In my opinion the entire phenomenon could have been nipped in the bud immediately after the war if the vast plantations that formerly sheltered black slaves were cut up into chunks of a few acres and redistributed to the former slaves who certainly had a fair claim to own the land rather than their former masters- or at least equally. It is one of the sad missed opportunities of history that many slaves after the war were legally landless people. Homelessness can be very challenging to get out of.

Apparently some plantation owners did give some land to the former slaves. Some of that was sharecropping that wasn't too far removed from slavery. Yet much land did remain with the families of plantation slavers; and that stimulated movements such as the clan seeking to perpetuate race-based economic advantages across the south with logical inertia.

If all of the former slaves were given 5 acres of real estate to own at the in 1866 it is possible that development and race relations of the United States would have been quite different.