Revising Panther History in Baltimore

Judson L. Jeffries

In 1860, the state of Maryland accounted for nearly one-fifth of the free Blacks in the United States, and twenty-six thousand of them resided in Baltimore. "Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, race relations were relatively fluid, with a fair amount of intermingling between blacks and whites in public gathering places." The African American community grew steadily over the next several decades — so much so that many whites began to feel threatened by this proliferation. Consequently, by the early 1900s segregation was more pronounced in Maryland than in any other border state. By 1922 the city had established a zoning commission that effectively confined rowhouses, and by extension Baltimore's poorer residents, to poorer neighborhoods. Segregation was prominent, but there seemed to be peculiar variations of it. For example, in the 1930s, when legendary jazzman Chick Webb performed at the Hippodrome Theater, his mother and wife stood on stage to see him perform, yet Blacks were not allowed in the audience. The city's most popular spot for stage plays in the early 1950s, Fords' Theater in West Baltimore, required Blacks to sit in the second balcony, although Blacks could perform on stage. The Lyric at 128 West Mount Royal Avenue, Baltimore's main concert venue, did not allow Blacks to perform there, yet oddly had no seating restrictions for Black patrons.

As the number of Black residents in Baltimore increased, so did whites' determination to keep Blacks marginalized. Between World War II and 1960, the Black population of Baltimore increased from 194,000 to 326,000 as waves of southern Blacks were drawn by the industrial opportunities associated with the war. While the number of Black residents increased, Blacks' influence remained negligible to a large extent. Schemes by whites to keep Blacks politically, economically, and socially subjugated were largely successful. An early study commissioned by the Baltimore Urban League commented on the powerlessness of Blacks in the political process:

If ever the Negro population of Baltimore became aware of its political power, the ... governmental, economic and racial set-up of the community would undergo a profound change. The political seers have long been aware of the presence of this sleeping giant and have handled him successfully from time to time.

To those familiar with the city, it is not difficult to understand how the Urban League arrived at the conclusion it did. Baltimore is strangely unique; in many ways it is both a northern city and a southern city. Its winters can be as brutal as any city in the northeast corridor and its summers are often as humid and muggy as any in the Deep South. This peculiar characteristic of being a northern and southern city has no doubt impacted the role of civil rights there. Baltimore maintained legalized segregation until the passage of the 1964 Public Accommodations Act and was at times extremely resistant to changes in the power structure. Opponents of segregation often claimed that wholesale racism prevented integration in Baltimore, a typical southern argument. Curiously, Baltimore exhibited little in the way of a highly dramatic response to this oppression, perhaps because its political leadership and the general attitude of whites were arguably less hostile than those of a typical southern city. Like northern cities, though, Baltimore experienced an influx of Black immigrants who fled southern poverty and Jim Crow, seeking jobs and a better place to raise their children. Such interesting dynamics yielded a different local movement than that witnessed in the South generally, and the impact of these dynamics would prove to be far-reaching. For example, in 1970, Blacks constituted 46 percent of Baltimore's population, yet they were not able to convert these numbers into policy outcomes that redistributed services and goods more equitably to the Black community. In fact, it was not until 1987 that Black Baltimoreans were able to elect one of their own to the mayor's office, despite the early efforts of the Register-and-Vote campaign initiated by the Black Minister's Network that by 1957 was registering Black voters at the rate of one thousand per month. Cities like Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Oakland, and Philadelphia were able to vote Blacks into themayor's office long before Baltimore, even though Blacks did not constitute a majority in any of those cities. In truth, the lack of empowerment of Baltimore's Blacks was in part self-induced. For a time Baltimore's Black community was sharply divided between middle-class westside Blacks and lower-class eastside Blacks, a fissure that had been widening since the end of World War II. This socioeconomic division was accompanied by deep political differences. In the early 1960s, a number of middle-class Blacks were conservative, especially with regard to civil rights protests. One reverend commented that "middle-class black folk were just as conservative as middle-class white folks when it came to civil rights." Some middle-class Blacks on the west side were not so quick to challenge the status quo that had been, from an economic standpoint, relatively good to them.

These conservative elements notwithstanding, Baltimore has a long and storied history of Black grassroots political activism that has gone largely unnoticed by many historians and students of politics. This history dates back to as early as the late 1800s when the African American community mobilized around labor disputes with immigrants who were competing for jobs. Also at that time Rev. Dr. Harvey Johnson of Union Baptist Church and some of his closest Baptist colleagues were focused on the erosion of Reconstruction Era progress and what they could do about it. The result was the founding of the Mutual United Brotherhood of Liberty of the United States of America (MUBL). The MUBL pledged "to use all legal means within our power to procure and maintain our rights as citizens of this our common country." Others like John Locks, Dr. H. J. Brown, George Lane, and Councilmen Harry S. Cummings (elected in 1890) and Warner T. McGuinn worked tirelessly to bring about better educational and housing opportunities for Blacks. Fast-forward to the early 1930s, when religious leaders and secular luminaries organized the "Buy Where You...