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4. Born to Dream
- University Press of Mississippi
- Chapter
- Additional Information
26 4 BORN TO DREAM Baltimore molded many giants in the freedom movement, including that great “quarterback” of the civil rights team, Thurgood Marshall, and my first mentor, Carl Murphy, crusading publisher of the Afro-American newspapers . I never want it forgotten that I was born there, although I grew up in Youngstown, Ohio. In 1917, the year before I was born, my father, Simeon S. (“S. S.”) Booker, General Secretary of the Colored Branch of the Baltimore YMCA, was tasked with raising funds for a new building, after a recent segregation ordinance required the organization to abandon its site at McCulloh and Dolphin Streets. The Crisis, the NAACP’s historic chronicle of Negro life, reported in December that property on Druid Hill Avenue had been secured and “a four-story building will be erected at a cost of 100,000.” The figure was important because it meant the Y had met the requirement for a grant from Julius Rosenwald, the leading Jewish philanthropist of the time. Rosenwald believed in the social mission of the YMCA, and didn’t quarrel with its practice of bowing to local customs when it came to racial segregation . The YMCA established whites-only and black Y’s in many cities, even though the national organization officially opposed segregation. Rosenwald helped to build both, including about two dozen “colored” YMCA buildings , by offering the sum of 25,000 to communities that raised 75,000. The black Y’s brought many opportunities to blacks that they would not have received from any other source. The Druid Hill branch of the Y, for example, was the first facility in Baltimore with an indoor pool available to the black community. (After forming a lasting friendship with black educator Booker T. Washington, whom he met at a YMCA dinner in Chicago in 1911, Rosenwald also provided seed grants to build almost 5,000 Negro schools in the South, based on a model on which he and the Tuskegee Institute founder collaborated.)1 My maternal grandfather, Dr. James Henry Nelson Waring, a medical doctor as well as a renowned educator, was involved in YMCA work during Born to Dream 27 World War I. He wrote my mother in May 1918 (four months before I was born) of his visit to Boston’s Soldiers Welfare Club, a colored women’s group, to arrange for their presentation of a flag to the YMCA unit of which he was a member at Camp Devens, a temporary cantonment established in 1917 for training soldiers for battle. The Y had moved in immediately, constructing fourteen buildings, including an administrative center, an auditorium, and nine “huts,” long, single-story buildings, spread out throughout the camp to serve as church, theatre, and fraternal meeting place for young soldiers. Normally, the Y would have respected local custom and designated the huts by race, but my grandfather wrote that “on account of the scattering of the colored soldiers around different parts of the cantonment,” the team’s leaders had abandoned the idea of having a separate hut for black soldiers and decided instead to admit them to all huts on the grounds. The members of Dr. Waring’s staff (that is, the Y unit’s Negro staff members) were to be assigned one to a hut in “neighborhoods” where there were colored troops, and he had been asked to be the Camp Supervisor of the colored work. Such a decision was novel and not without risks, so he had sent to Jesse Moorland, the Y’s General Secretary and coordinator of colored units, for approval of this departure from the norm, which he realized was a pretty big deal. As Dr. Waring wrote my mother: Putting a colored man on a regular staff and admitting colored men to all huts, if we can get the colored men to take advantage of this, is of course the biggest thing yet and puts the work on a fine theoretical basis—democratic and American. Camp Devens was also the site of the base hospital for the Division of the Northeast, and housed about 50,000 men in August 1918 when an influenza epidemic broke out, developing rapidly and stalling all routine work at the encampment, as well as prohibiting all assemblages of soldiers, who were dying at an average rate of 100 a day. Ironically, a white doctor wrote a friend, the darkening of the victim’s facial skin caused by the infectious disease “made it hard to...