Editor’s note: The Baltimore Sun is committed to making amends for a history of failing Black communities in its coverage and, as part of a public apology, has asked area leaders and scholars to suggest a path forward. We will run the responses as an occasional series.

The Baltimore Sun editorial board’s apology is laudable for its intent, but only half the story was told. As a result, the full scope of The Sun’s role in constructing Baltimore apartheid was obscured and minimized. In fact, this is precisely emblematic of the ongoing problem with The Sun as a media institution — it rarely tells the whole story.

Throughout its 185 year history, The Sun intentionally crafted dominant narratives that deeply damaged Black Lives and Black neighborhoods. The Sun maliciously deployed white supremacist propaganda while actively participating in slave trading at the Inner Harbor through advertisements, demonizing Black political representation and voting rights, and provoking white homeowners to block homebuying while Black. In an Aug. 24, 1924, article, The Sun glorified a new Ku Klux Klan church near Havre de Grace in Harford County. The Sun beamed: “It was the most gorgeous religious spectacle [the region] ever had seen.”

In the their book “Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America,” editors Sid Bedingfield and Kathy Roberts Forde articulate how white-owned newspapers such as The Baltimore Sun functioned politically in their cities:

Many white editors and publishers in the Jim Crow South were straight out political actors, deeply entrenched in Democratic Party campaigns, machines, and policymaking. They used their positions and their newspapers to unite white publics in support of Black disenfranchisement and economic exploitation; to build and sustain punitive penal systems that criminalized Blackness and stole the labor and lives of Black men, women, and children; to defend and foment lynching and other forms of racial terror used to enforce white supremacy.

The Baltimore Sun committed all of these devilish deeds throughout its history. In fact, according to my research, The Sun was the No. 1 paper in America in using rabidly racist terms such as “Cash for Negroes,” “Negro Domination,” and “Negro Invasion” repeatedly. An empirical examination of the Sun’s vicious use of racist rhetoric helps to illustrate this point.

According to newspaper.com, from 1837 to 1971:

The Sun used “Cash for Negroes” 795 times.

The Sun used “Negro Domination” 525 times.

The Sun used “Negro Invasion” 276 times.

As this statistical enumeration reveals, The Sun was no mere handmaiden in the construction of Baltimore apartheid. The Sun was the No. 1 ranked newspaper in the use of each of these three white supremacist phrases — and it was number one by far. Indeed, it can be stated that from a quantitative perspective, The Sun is the most racist newspaper in American history.

Telling the whole story means that The Baltimore Sun would recognize and take responsibility for serving as the media Air Force that softened the ground for the shock troops for slavery, white supremacist politics, a Klan church, and pro segregation lobbyists. The Sun proudly unleashed destructive and dominant narratives that split the city in two: a white L and Black Butterfly.

In the final analysis, justice advocates Liz Ogbu and Charlene Carruthers are right: Incomplete stories lead to incomplete solutions.

Baltimore City deserves the whole story to foster a full and flourishing process of making Black lives and Black neighborhoods matter. Tell the whole story. The Baltimore Sun has been a straight-out political actor whose dominant narratives informed and influenced Baltimore City’s policies, practices, systems and budgets.

The Baltimore Sun editorial board’s half-apology forestalls a real reckoning and thereby forecloses the large-scale and transformational policies, practices, systems and budgets that must be undertaken, passed and funded to repair and restore Baltimore’s Black Butterfly neighborhoods.

Lawrence Brown (lawrence.brown@morgan.edu) is a research scientist and the author of “The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America.”