Thirty-two years ago, Orlando Ridout IV organized the rescue of the Maynard-Burgess House in Annapolis as a form of reparations.

Known to many as Lanny, Ridout was a former state delegate who understood history. He was a descendant of a colonial officer who oversaw the sale of enslaved Africans and an architect of historic preservation in Annapolis.

Ridout was the force behind the $400,000 purchase of the old house on Duke of Gloucester. His vision was to turn it over to the city, then restore it to celebrate 143 years of Black family aspirations.

“The intention has been to represent it as a middle-class home of free Blacks who followed varied occupations as members of a large free Black community,“ said Mollie Ridout, daughter of the late historian.

Today, the city budget staff works out of the building. There is no exhibit. Still no celebration.

Reparations, even with the best of intentions, are hard.

This campaign season, I’m exploring problems that Annapolis’ next mayor and City Council will face when they take office in December — both leftover challenges from Mayor Gavin Buckley’s seven-plus years in office and new ones.

Voters should ask candidates how Annapolis should lead on reparations to address its injustices.

It will be an important question in 2026, when Gov. Wes Moore runs for a second term. Although Maryland’s first Black governor has publicly supported reparations, he vetoed a proposal in May to study them.

Black lawmakers hope to overturn his veto, and you can bet Moore will try to explain this during his reelection campaign.

Until then, the mayor and council elected this November will have the chance to set an example.

Annapolis was a racist city. There’s just no nice way to say that.

From its status as a port for enslaved people to segregation and lynchings, the city was the scene of centuries of oppression and hate. To examine the impact of racism, you can start with the old Fourth Ward and urban renewal.

In the 1950s and ’60s, the Annapolis Urban Renewal Authority oversaw the demolition of the most important Black neighborhood in Annapolis. People who lived through it, and their children and grandchildren, bitterly call it “urban removal.”

The goal was the creation of the state and county government complex that defines Annapolis today and better housing for some of the city’s poorest residents.

Many homes in the Old Fourth Ward were in horrible condition. Black community activists helped homeowners see it as an opportunity, promising a new start if they sold.

False promise, it turned out. Residents moved to isolated apartments and townhouses built around the city’s edge.

Cut off from transportation, jobs and support, the communities became open-air drug markets. White people were most often the buyers, but police and the courts targeted the Black community as the root of the problem.

Redlining and loan discrimination — practices that suppressed Black homeownership nationwide — reinforced the problem. But urban renewal was a seminal moment when being Black in Annapolis changed.

I don’t believe the survivors or their descendants should get checks. A city perennially struggling with the limits of its tax base can’t award enough money to change anything.

Yet other solutions won’t break the city, such as college and job training scholarships offered through public-private collaborations.

Growing Black homeownership will be harder but not impossible. There is some of this in the plan to redevelop public housing in Eastport, but even the outgoing mayor acknowledges it is unlikely to win a federal competition for funding.

Democratic primary voters will choose next month between Alderwoman Rhonda Pindell Charles and former Alderman Jared Littmann to succeed Buckley.

The winner will face Republican Bob O’Shea in November, but he’s a long shot. He lost two previous bids for office, and his party is so anemic that it is absent from all but one of the eight City Council races.

At a recent forum on restorative justice and reparations organized by the Coalition for Atonement & Repair, neither Charles nor Littman offered a clear vision for reparations.

They and candidates for council discussed ideas:

More housing. Better transportation. Rent control. Support for supporting Black-owned businesses.

Acknowledgement was present. Leadership was not.

Study, they said, debate. Follow the county and the state.

It was the same passive agreement that kept Maynard-Burgess from fulfilling Ridout’s vision. He used the nonprofit Port of Annapolis to save it.

Six successive mayors listed restoration in their plans. Sometimes they provided money; usually they didn’t.

Climb to the second floor today, and you see a project nearing a turning point, if not an end.

Early renovations focused on saving the building and what was left — heart-of-pine floorboards 16 inches wide, pit-sawed framing timbers and hand-cut iron nails. There are traces of 19th-century newspapers used as wallpaper, and 20th-century linoleum clinging to the floor.

“The rule of this house was, make it do,” said John Tower, a historic preservation officer with the city. “The defining feature of this building is that, when it was purchased, it was in very, very bad shape.”

Mayor Buckley’s administration opened the first floor as office space, part of the original plan. Next month, the city Heritage Commission will discuss what furniture and decorations, much of it donated by the Black community, should come out of storage.

When the house reopens to the public on a very limited basis, the second floor will provide a glimpse of how a Black family survived a racist city.

It’s Ridout’s reparation, a historian’s understanding of how to compensate for past wrongs. The cost so far — $1.4 million.

“The Maynard-Burgess House became a project of Port of Annapolis because it was dangerously compromised and was an important example of the under-represented free Black population that was a vital part of the Annapolis community,” Mollie Ridout said.

Reparations take time. They will cost more.

That doesn’t mean Annapolis can’t try harder.