I will miss them, but if certain members of the Harford County Board of Education want to skip today’s column — a condensed history of redlining in 20th century urban housing — I guess I’ll understand.

Five of the board members voted to scrap an AP African American Studies course because they found the elective class to be “politically oriented” and “divisive,” and there’s a lot of that going around these days. A lot of people, mainly white, have developed an aversion to American history that includes racism. The AP course approved by the College Board presents a panorama of African American life, but there’s no avoiding the horrific history, from slavery to Jim Crow to discrimination in housing. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable, and they regard dwelling on it a prescription for hard feelings.

But, to understand where we are today, it’s important to know how we got here.

So maybe the Harford students who had signed up for the now-canceled AP course will find this column of interest.

First, a definition of redlining, from the Federal Reserve: “The practice of denying people access to credit because of where they live, even if they are personally qualified for loans.”

There was a lot of this going around, in Baltimore and other cities, in the mid-20th century, and redlining had a distinctly ugly racial aspect. Researchers have produced books (see my list at the end of the column) and dozens of academic papers about the harm inflicted on American society by racial discrimination in mortgage lending.

Numerous references have been made to infamous “residential security” maps produced in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. That federally-backed corporation, faced with a massive foreclosure crisis, refinanced roughly a million mortgages to keep families in their houses.

During its relatively brief existence, the HOLC produced colorized maps that distinguished neighborhoods based on the quality of housing, their social and economic conditions, and the race and ethnicity of residents. The best neighborhoods were marked green, the worst red.

After the discovery of the HOLC maps in archives decades later, a narrative developed: That the maps were used to steer loans to mainly white neighborhoods, deprive poorer neighborhoods of badly needed capital and concentrate Black families there. Thus, redlining and segregation were seen as government creations.

And that is certainly true, but the HOLC maps were not in play, according to Alan Mallach, a senior fellow and researcher at the nonprofit Center for Community Progress and author of an Abell Foundation report on racial and economic trends in Baltimore.

For a recent research article on redlining, Mallach looked at what, if any, role the HOLC maps played in the changes that occurred in cities and the emerging suburbs during and after the Depression.

Oddly, he found, the HOLC did not produce the maps until nearly all of its work in restructuring mortgages was done.

Mallach’s conclusion: “Not only did the maps not influence the mortgage buying and restructuring activities of the HOLC, there is no evidence that they affected the lending activities of any other entity.”

That includes the Federal Housing Administration, also established in the 1930s, with the mission of insuring mortgages by private lenders. It’s the FHA that, according to research, engaged in red lining on a large scale, refusing to insure mortgages in or near Black neighborhoods and insisting that new suburban developments be all white.

Says Mallach: “While the HOLC shared their maps with the FHA, all the available evidence indicates that the FHA, which made its own maps, did not use them. All in all, there is no evidence that a single loan to any would-be homebuyer or anyone else was ever made or denied because of the [HOLC] maps.”

Besides, Mallach says, back then there was nothing to keep a bank from denying a mortgage to a Black customer. “If you’re a white male banker in the 30’s or the 40’s,” he says, “and there are no laws discouraging discrimination and there’s certainly no social pressure discouraging discrimination, do you need a government map to discriminate against a Black would-be homebuyer?”

Mallach’s tweak to this bit of history is important, but what’s most interesting is what he found in census data from Baltimore and six other cities: At the time the HOLC maps were created, the great majority of the residents of the redlined areas were white, most of them immigrants. Black families that had come north during the Great Migration also were concentrated in red areas and, Mallach found, their housing conditions were much worse than those in redlined areas that were predominantly white.

The most harm to the development of Black family wealth through homeownership came later, from 1940 to 1980. That’s when the FHA subsidized whites-only subdivisions, blocking Black families from new suburban homes and leaving them in cities in decline.

“During those years,” Mallach reports, “five million Black people fled southern segregation and racial violence for northern cities. During the same years, however, 15 million white people fled America’s cities for the suburbs and the Sunbelt. It was white flight, because racial discrimination by developers, private lenders and the FHA kept all but a handful of Black families from moving to the new housing being built in the suburbs.”

Further reading for students of history: “Not In My Backyard,” by Antero Pietila; “The Color of Law,” by Richard Rothstein; “The Black Butterfly,” by Lawrence Brown.