For most of a century, a racist eight-foot "spite wall" erected to divide a historically Black college from an adjoining White neighborhood stood in Baltimore — a reminder of a time when Jim Crow was embodied in bricks and mortar.

On Tuesday, the wall, which Morgan State University President David K. Wilson called "a loud symbol of hate in our community," came down.

"It feels great to get rid of hatred," he said in an interview. "To tear down that wall is the first step in removing a physical sign every single day of what our students and larger community had to go through — had to endure from an all-White neighborhood."

Founded in 1867, the school moved to its current location in 1917. White neighbors were quick to protest, convening a mass meeting of 275 people to fight any "invasion" of the "pure white community by a negro institution, colony or settlement of any kind," as the Baltimore Sun reported at the time. One resident said he "preferred to live near a community of ignorant and tractable negroes than one with 'educated' negroes," the paper said.

After a lawsuit tried to block the college's construction, alleging that it would bring down property values, a Maryland appeals court ruled in favor of what was then Morgan College. "It is clear that the improvement of land as a colored residential neighborhood is not of itself a public nuisance," a judge concluded in 1918.

The wall went up two decades later — a blocks-long barrier separating a White community from a state-funded school for Black students.

In 1941, according to the university magazine, a developer proposed building the wall and 20 garages that would obscure the school's entrance. Though denounced as a "spite wall" by Dwight Oliver Wendell Holmes, the college's first African American president, the barrier went up anyway — and outlasted the civil rights movement and the election of the nation's first Black president.

"Holmes was convinced that since the neighbors could not legally remove the college, they preferred not to see it," Wilson told Congress in 2022 while testifying about the rise in violence against minority institutions.

Morgan State has since grown closer to the community around it — investing in a nearby shopping center that had once been segregated. As the school expanded, opposition to the wall grew. Only after acquiring private property that included part of the wall and finding funding for demolition could the university act.

Bridgette Neal, president of the Hillen Road Improvement Association civic group, showed up to photograph the wall's demolition on Tuesday. The neighborhood is now diverse, she said, and no one she knew was in favor of letting the wall stand.

"It's a visual block," she said. "Opening up that space — it really lifted something in me."

Kim McCalla, Morgan State University's associate vice president of facilities, said a new border that defines the campus without dividing the university from the community will go up later this year.

"All feelings of what the wall meant to many people are being relieved now," she said. "They're being replaced with something thinking toward the future with openness."

Still, Wilson said, parts of the wall will remain as a reminder of the past.

"We don't cave into . . . the efforts of some to erase Black history, African American history, segregation and all of the associated atrocities from the history books," he said. "It's not going to happen at Morgan State."