In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

3 Introduction Baltimore is a city where change would have national significance because of its proximity to Washingtonandbecauseitisabordercityreflectingtheevilsofbothsouthernandnorthernforms of segregation and discrimination. —WilliamL.HankinstoMartinLutherKing,May9,19671 Baltimore, Maryland, has been seen as a “town of contradictions” attributed to its geography and its unusual history in the United States narrative . Maryland was the only Catholic colony at the time of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and as a border state it came to link the industrializing North with the slave-owning South. Before the Civil War, Baltimore was a major industrial city that contained slaves while the south and east of Maryland was traditional southern rural slave territory. Baltimore was the fourth largest city in the Union by 1860 with 212,418 residents; New Orleans was the only other southern city that could compare to it. Its border status made Maryland a vital aspect of President Abraham Lincoln ’s fight to reunite the country in 1861 and for the Civil War not to be seen as purely a war on slavery. While Kentucky may have been an important state in Lincoln’s propaganda strategy to unite the slave South and the free labor North, it was Maryland that was essential in securing the capitol, Washington, DC, from being engulfed physically by the Confederate nation, and requiring a withdrawal of Union power to the North. This would have proved a profound psychological blow to Lincoln’s aims of representing the entire nation and not simply Northern interests.2 This borderland status has made Baltimore a complex state to discuss when it comes to race relations. Elizabeth Moss, an editor of the Baltimore Afro-American, proclaimed that “we’ve made progress [in civil rights] because there have been people of good will of both races who have 4 Introduction been willing to work together.” Yet this was a hard won battle that involved persistence and tenacity by individuals and civil rights minded organizations in Baltimore; the city was not always renowned for its cordial race relations in the twentieth century. Clarence Mitchell, a legal adviser to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), claimed, “It is not trite to say that we in Maryland have been lulled into a false sense of complacence because the scare-head stories of injustices have largely been written about happenings in distant places [in the Deep South].” Indeed, Baltimore was often portrayed as being of the South but not sharing the worst excesses of the region, being seen as tempered with a Northern influence. This is certainly the point that the English writer Charles Dickens made during a literary tour to the U.S. in 1842, when he visited Baltimore, and noted the institution of slavery for the first time on his journey: “The institution exists, perhaps, in its least repulsive and most mitigated form in such a town as this.” Yet Dickens observed that “it is still slavery; and though I was, with respect to it, an innocent man, its presence filled me with a sense of shame and self-reproach.”3 As a port city with heavy industry, Baltimore, like many American cities, was home to a large number of ethnic immigrant groups and to African American migrants leaving the Deep South. Such ethnic groupings came to dominate inner-city housing districts and racial segregation became a social and cultural pattern which became legalized apartheid. Baltimore had its Little Italy. According to MarshaRose Joyner, one of the first people to desegregate Baltimore schools in 1954, “The Irish lived with the Irish; the Polish with the Poles, the Jews lived with the Jews and the Blacks lived in three very different and distinct neighborhoods. And the poor whites at Fells Point.” Middle-class African Americans lived in northwest Baltimore while the black working classes resided in east and south Baltimore. While some of the black families of northwest Baltimore might not always be considered wealthy they had class pretensions and heritage that gave them social status in the African American community, and a large number had attended college and had white-collar occupations . South Baltimore was near the docks where black shipyard workers lived, while east Baltimore was where the working-class African American community lived, those who worked in retail stores and as domestics.4 Segregation existed, however, for all African Americans, despite class distinctions. The department stores in Baltimore before the Second World War reflected issues of race and class and became an early arena...

Share