A Brotherhood of Liberty: Black Reconstruction and Its Legacies in Baltimore, 1865–1920 by Dennis Patrick Halpin (review)

In the fall of 1864, voters in the state of Maryland ratified, by a slim margin, a new constitution that, among other things, abolished slavery. The vast majority of the black population of the state’s largest city, Baltimore, had been free well before then, but the end of slavery in the state, along with emancipation in neighboring states, brought a mass migration of newly emancipated men, women, and children into the city. The black population of the city, already the largest urban black population in antebellum America, grew dramatically in the immediate postbellum period. As in similarly booming cities and towns across the South, African Americans moved to Baltimore to escape white domination and to find economic opportunities denied them in the countryside. As was the case across the South, in Baltimore African Americans found a black community that could be a source of protection and aid, but they also found a hostile white majority, which was in control of the local government. In the face of this hostile majority, and building on a robust antebellum tradition of protest, black Baltimoreans fought to secure for themselves the fruits of full citizenship. This history has received surprisingly little attention from historians, a fact that Dennis Patrick Halpin ably remedies.

The struggle of black Marylanders to “define freedom” took place in a significantly different political environment than similar efforts by black southerners elsewhere. While in many states freedmen were able to make common cause with some whites in a successful Republican political coalition, in Unionist Maryland Democrats were back in control shortly after the war’s conclusion. Some black Marylanders looked to the federal government to intervene on their behalf, but as Halpin notes, “Congress and the courts were content to let white Marylanders figure out the state’s postwar future with minimal interference” (17). Largely denied this avenue for pushing reform, African Americans in Baltimore were compelled to develop a robust movement connecting “labor, economics, and social equality” (37). In Halpin’s account, a critical element of this movement was its willingness to break with the Republican Party. Black activists increasingly saw the vote as one of the most important tools in their efforts to secure access to education, equal accommodation on public transit, and criminal justice reform. Frustrated by state and local Republicans’ lack of commitment to the cause of black equality, they demonstrated a marked independence at the ballot box—for example, joining with white Republicans and Democrats in 1882 to elect an independent judiciary ticket.

Black Baltimoreans were not content, however, to confine their activism to the ballot. In one of the most compelling portions of the book, Halpin documents the founding of the Mutual United Brotherhood of Liberty in 1885. This pioneering, independent civil rights organization coordinated protests and lawsuits as a means of ensuring that the state of Maryland and the city of Baltimore guaranteed the rights enshrined in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. It put together a capable legal team in order to implement its strategy in the courts, and it helped coordinate and build on the resources of the city’s black churches and black press in order to further its cause elsewhere. Halpin argues not only that this organization was important to the local fight for black civil rights, but also that it was an important forerunner of and inspiration for later better-known successors, such as the Afro-American League and the Niagara Movement.

Much of Halpin’s story will have resonance for the present day. In the late nineteenth century, in response to African American successes in claiming the rights enshrined in the Reconstruction Amendments, white Baltimore increasingly turned to the criminal justice system to curtail black rights. White newspapers, such as the Baltimore Sun, stoked fears of inherent black criminality and, in doing so, helped local Democrats regain political power by linking...