History of African Americans in Baltimore

The first black people to reside in what is now Baltimore city came in 1634 under Lord Baltimore's charter alongside the Englishmen, only fifteen years after the first Africans arrived in the Colony of Virginia in 1619. A Jesuit missionary named Andrew White brought two mixed-race indentured servants named Mathias de Sousa and Francisco. The brothers Frederick and Edward Wintour brought a enslaved african named John Prince.[11]

Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Upton, March 2012.

The first annual conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church was held in Baltimore in 1817.[12]

From the late 18th century into the 1820s Baltimore was a "city of transients," a fast-growing boom town attracting thousands of ex-slaves from the surrounding countryside. Slavery in Maryland declined steadily after the 1810s as the state's economy shifted away from plantation agriculture, as evangelicalism and a liberal manumission law encouraged slaveholders to free enslaved people held in bondage, and as other slaveholders practiced "term slavery," registering deeds of manumission but postponing the actual date of freedom for a decade or more. Baltimore's shrinking population of enslaved people often lived and worked alongside the city's growing free black population as "quasi-freedmen." With unskilled and semiskilled employment readily available in the shipyards and related industries, little friction with white workers occurred. Despite the overall poverty of the city's free black people, compared with the condition of those living in Philadelphia, Charleston, and New Orleans, Baltimore was a "city of refuge," where enslaved and free black people alike found an unusual amount of freedom. Churches, schools, and fraternal and benevolent associations provided a cushion against hardening white attitudes toward free people of color in the wake of Nat Turner's revolt in Virginia in 1831. But a flood of German and Irish immigrants swamped Baltimore's labor market after 1840, driving free black people deeper into poverty.[13]

The Maryland Chemical Works of Baltimore used a mix of free labor, hired slave labor, and enslaved people held by the corporation to work in its factory.[14] Since chemicals needed constant attention, the rapid turnover of free white labor encouraged the owner to use enslaved workers. While slave labor was about 20 percent cheaper, the company began to reduce its dependence on enslaved labor in 1829 when two slaves ran away and one died.[15]

The location of Baltimore in a border state created opportunities for enslaved people in the city to run away and find freedom in the north—as Frederick Douglass did. Therefore, slaveholders in Baltimore frequently turned to gradual manumission as a means to secure dependable and productive labor from slaves. In promising freedom after a fixed period of years, slaveholders intended to reduce the costs associated with lifetime servitude while providing slaves incentive for cooperation. Enslaved people tried to negotiate terms of manumission that were more advantageous, and the implicit threat of flight weighed significantly in slaveholders' calculations. The dramatic decrease in the enslaved population during 1850-60 indicates that slavery was no longer profitable in the city. Slaves were still used as expensive house servants: it was cheaper to hire a free worker by the day, with the option of dropping him or replacing him with a better worker, rather than run the expense of maintaining a slave month in and month out with little flexibility.[16]

On the eve of the Civil War, Baltimore had the largest free black community in the nation. About 15 schools for black people were operating, including Sabbath schools operated by Methodists, Presbyterians, and Quakers, along with several private academies. All black schools were self-sustaining, receiving no state or local government funds, and whites in Baltimore generally opposed educating the black population, continuing to tax black property holders to maintain schools from which black children were excluded by law. Baltimore's black community, nevertheless, was one of the largest and most divided in America due to this experience.[17]

Maryland was not subject to Reconstruction, but the end of slavery meant heightened racial tensions as free black people flocked to the city and many armed confrontations erupted between black people and whites. Rural black people who flocked to Baltimore created increased competition for skilled jobs and upset the prewar relationship between free black people and whites. As black migrants were relegated to unskilled work or no work at all, violent strikes erupted. Denied entry into the regular state militia, armed black people formed militias of their own. In the midst of this change, white Baltimoreans interpreted black discontent as disrespect for law and order, which justified police repression.[18]

Baltimore had a larger population of African Americans than any northern city. The new Maryland state constitution of 1864 ended slavery and provided for the education of all children, including black people. The Baltimore Association for the Moral and Educational Improvement of the Colored People established schools for black people that were taken over by the public school system, which then restricted education for black people beginning in 1867 when Democrats regained control of the city. Establishing an unequal system that prepared white students for citizenship while using education to reinforce black subjugation, Baltimore's postwar school system exposed the contradictions of race, education, and republicanism in an age when African Americans struggled to realize the ostensible freedoms gained by emancipation.[19] Thus black people found themselves forced to support Jim Crow legislation and urged that the "colored schools" be staffed only with black teachers. From 1867 to 1900 black schools grew from 10 to 27 and enrollment from 901 to 9,383. The Mechanical and Industrial Association achieved success only in 1892 with the opening of the Colored Manual Training School. Black leaders were convinced by the Rev. William Alexander and his newspaper, the Afro American, that economic advancement and first-class citizenship depended on equal access to schools.[17]

African-American women working on electrical wiring at a credit vocational school in Baltimore in the 1930s.

Baltimore lawyer Milton Dashiell advocated for an ordinance to bar African Americans from moving into the Eutaw Place neighborhood in northwest Baltimore. He proposed to recognize majority white residential blocks and majority black residential blocks, and to prevent people from moving into housing on such blocks where they would be a minority. The Baltimore Council passed the ordinance, and it became law on December 20, 1910, with Democratic Mayor J. Barry Mahool's signature.[20] The Baltimore segregation ordinance was the first of its kind in the United States. Many other southern cities followed with their own segregation ordinances, though the US Supreme Court ruled against them in Buchanan v. Warley (1917).[21]

By 1968, Baltimore was home to a local chapter of the Black Panther Party. The Black Panther Party struggled in Baltimore during the late 1960s and early 1970s due to campaigns of surveillance and harassment from the FBI and the Baltimore City Police Department. Between 1968 and 1972, the Baltimore Black Panthers used a number of different buildings to house meetings and other activities. Over a period of four years, the Party organized community activities and classes and conducted dozens of protests. The Party was initially organized informally at the Soul School on 522 North Fremont Avenue near the George P. Murphy Homes. The first formal headquarters for the Party was at a private residence at 1209 North Eden Street. Party members organized free breakfast and lunch programs at the St. Martin de Porres Recreation Hall at the former St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church (a building which is now home to Sweet Prospect Baptist Church). By 1970 the Black Panther Party headquarters was known as the “Black Community Information Center” and have moved into a rented residence at 1248 N. Gay Street. The largely white Baltimore Committee for Political Freedom was created due to fears that Baltimore police were planning to assassinate Black Panther Party leaders in Baltimore, with Reverend Chester Wickwire and the sociologist Peter H. Rossi playing a prominent role.[22]

Protesters demonstrating at the Baltimore Police Department's Western District building.

On April 12, 2015, outrage over the Death of Freddie Gray while under the custody of Baltimore Police Department officers lead to the 2015 Baltimore protests. On April 19, 2015, West Baltimore resident Freddie Gray died after being in a coma for a week. Gray, who had a record of arrests for petty criminal activity, had been taken into custody after running from police. Gray suffered spinal injuries while in police custody and fell into the coma. The cause of his injuries was disputed, with some claiming they were accidental, while others claiming they were the result of police brutality. Protests were initially nonviolent, with thousands of peaceful protesters filled the City Hall square. Protests against police brutality turned violent following Gray's funeral on April 27, as people burned police cruisers and buildings and damaged shops. The Governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan sent in the National Guard and imposed a curfew.[23] Six police officers were charged with crimes relating to Gray's death. One was acquitted, one trial ended in a hung jury, and four cases are on going as of June 12, 2016.

According to linguists, the accent and dialect of African American Baltimoreans are different from the "hon" variety that is popularized in the media as being spoken by white blue-collar Baltimoreans.[24] White working-class families who migrated out of Baltimore city along the Maryland Route 140 and Maryland Route 26 corridors brought local pronunciations with them, creating colloquialisms that make up the Baltimore accent, cementing the image of "Bawlmerese" as the "Baltimore accent". This white working-class dialect is not the only "Baltimore accent", as Black Baltimoreans have their own unique accent. For example, among Black speakers, Baltimore is pronounced more like "Baldamore," as compared to "Bawlmer." Other notable phonological characteristics include vowel centralization before /r/ (such that words such as "carry" and "parents" are often pronounced as "curry" or "purrents") and the mid-centralization of /ɑ/, particularly in the word "dog," often pronounced like "dug," and "frog," as "frug."[25] The accent and dialect of African-American Baltimoreans also share features of African American English.[25]

Black gay men at Baltimore Pride, June 2017.

In 2001, The Portal was established as a community center for LGBT African-Americans.[26] The now-defunct center was intended as a safe place for LGBT people of color and offered health and safety information including AIDS awareness.[27] The Portal's goal was to promote "stronger, more effective same gender loving communities of color through access to quality healthcare and economic and educational services" and they served men who have sex with men as well as women who have sex with women.[28][29]

Many black bisexual and black gay men in Baltimore are "on the down low." Men who are "down-low" identify as heterosexual, but also have sex with men. This is often due to homophobia in the African-American community. The taboo on acknowledging homosexuality and bisexuality can contribute to issues of infidelity and higher rates of HIV/AIDS. Black bisexual men may conceal their bisexuality while projecting an image of machismo. As part of his research into the "down-low" phenomena for his 2004 book On the Down Low, gay African-American author and HIV/AIDS activist J. L. King interviewed 2,500 men on the down-low, many of them from Baltimore.[30]

The Unity Fellowship Church of Baltimore, headed by Reverend Harris Thomas, is a church that serves LGBT African-American Christians and other LGBT Christians of color. Unity Fellowship is the local branch of a national movement that caters to LGBT Christians of color. Baltimore's Unity Fellowship Church is located on Old York Road and has a congregation of around 150 people. While homophobia exists within the African-American community, the majority of African Americans in Maryland are supportive of same-sex marriage.[31]

Club Bunns, a gay club near Lexington Market that attracted a gay black male clientele, closed in February 2019 after 30 years in business.[32]

Black Classic Press logo.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the Communist Party of Maryland ran a communist bookstore called the Frederick Douglass Bookshop, which was frequently monitored by FBI agents and informants. The Frederick Douglass Bookshop was described by the FBI as a “Communist Party literature distribution point in the Negro section of [West] Baltimore.” For a decade this black communist bookstore served as a central meeting place for Baltimore's Communist Party, hosting meetings for party officials and new members.[33]

William Paul Coates (father of Ta-Nehisi Coates) founded Black Classic Press (BCP) in 1978 in Baltimore, originally working from the basement of his house.[34][35] The company is one of the oldest independently owned Black publishers in operation in the United States.[36] BCP has published original titles by notable authors including Walter Mosley, John Henrik Clarke, E. Ethelbert Miller, Yosef Ben-Jochannan, and Dorothy B. Porter, as well as reissuing significant works by Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edward Blyden, Bobby Seale, J. A. Rogers, and others.

The Afro-American Building on North Charles St., April 2008

The Baltimore Afro-American, commonly known as The Afro, is a weekly newspaper published in the city. It is the flagship newspaper of the Afro-American chain and the longest-running African-American family-owned newspaper in the United States, established in 1892 by John H. Murphy Sr.[37][38]

The Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture is the premier experience and best resource for information and inspiration about the lives of African American Marylanders. The Lewis Museum's mission is to collect, preserve, interpret, document, and exhibit the rich contributions of African American Marylanders using its collection of over 11,000 documents and objects and resources drawn from across the country. The 82,000 square foot museum is located an easy two-block walk from Baltimore's Inner Harbor at 830 E. Pratt Street. Opened in 2005, the museum is an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, and was named after Reginald F. Lewis, the first African American to build a billion-dollar company, TLC Beatrice International Holdings.[39]

The National Great Blacks In Wax Museum is a wax museum located in the neighborhood of Oliver that features prominent African-American historical figures. It was established in 1983, in a downtown storefront on Saratoga Street. The museum is currently located on 1601 East North Avenue in a renovated firehouse, a Victorian Mansion, and two former apartment dwellings that provide nearly 30,000 square feet (3,000 m2) of exhibit and office space. The exhibits feature over 100 wax figures and scenes, a full model slave ship exhibit which portrays the 400-year history of the Atlantic Slave Trade, an exhibit on the role of youth in making history, and a Maryland room highlighting the contributions to African American history by notable Marylanders.[40]

The Royal Theatre, located at 1329 Pennsylvania Avenue in Baltimore, Maryland, first opened in 1922 as the black-owned Douglass Theatre. It was the most famous theater along West Baltimore City's Pennsylvania Avenue, one of a circuit of five such theaters for black entertainment in big cities. Its sister theaters were the Apollo in Harlem, the Howard Theatre in Washington, D.C., the Regal Theatre in Chicago, and the Earl Theater in Philadelphia.[41] As middle-class, white flight from Old West Baltimore continued during the 1960s and 1970s and accelerated after Pennsylvania Avenue was damaged during the civil rights riots, the entire community began a period of long decline. In 1971, the Royal Theater was demolished.[41]

The subject of young African-American dirt bike riders in Baltimore has been the subject of two documentaries and one fictional film. Debuting in 2001, 12 O'Clock Boyz was the first film to documentary the dirt bike scene in the city. In 2013, another documentary titled 12 O'Clock Boys was made focusing on the same subject of urban dirt bike culture.[42] The film Charm City Kings, starring Teyonah Parris and Meek Mill, is a feature film adaptation of the 2013 12 O'Clock Boys documentary.[43]

Orchard Street United Methodist Church, the oldest standing structure built by African Americans in the city of Baltimore, March 2012.

The Orchard Street United Methodist Church is the oldest standing structure built by African Americans in the city of Baltimore. The church was founded in 1825 by Truman Le Pratt, a West Indian former slave of Governor John Eager Howard. The building now houses offices for the National Urban League.[45]

Baltimore has a prominent and well-established African-American Roman Catholic community. St. Francis Xavier Church in the neighborhood of Oliver, claims to be the "first Catholic church in the United States for the use of an all-colored congregation", established in 1863. The church attracted the black elite of Baltimore. The founders of the church were Black Haitian refugees from Saint-Domingue, along with the Sulpician Fathers.[46][47] The second black parish to be established in Baltimore was St. Monica's in 1883, in the area where Camden Yards now stands.[46] By the early 20th century, Baltimore was home to two other Black Catholic parishes: St. Peter Claver and St. Barnabas.[47]

Baltimore is home to a small population of African-American Jews. Historically, there were strong links between African-American and Jewish-American communities in Baltimore and many white Jewish Baltimoreans were strong supporters of the civil rights movement. However, there has been tension between the two communities, with instances of anti-black racism from white Jews such as the 2010 Park Heights beating of a black teenager by white members of an Orthodox Jewish community patrol group.[48] In majority white Jewish spaces in Baltimore, white Jews are sometimes accepted while black Jews and other Jews of color may face skepticism and questioning of their identity. Congregation Beth HaShem on Collington Avenue was established as a synagogue for African-American Jews. Rabbi George McDaniel, founder of Beth HaShem, claims that white Ashkenazi Jews of Russian and Eastern European descent are not questioned about their Jewishness because they are white whereas "If you're black and you say I'm Jewish, now you have to prove your Jewishness...Sometimes people walk up to us and ask: are you Jewish?...You're questioned to the point of -- prove you're Jewish."[49] Black Jews in Baltimore experience both racism for being black and antisemitism for being Jewish, with some Black Jewish Baltimoreans reporting being called the slur "schvartze" by non-black Jews as well as being harassed by gentiles for wearing a kippah.[50]

Several hundred African Americans in Baltimore belong to black atheist groups.[51]

• Victorine Q. Adams, the first African-American woman to serve on the Baltimore City Council.
• Clarence H. Burns, a Democratic politician and first African American mayor of Baltimore in 1987.
• Cab Calloway, a jazz singer, dancer, and bandleader.
• Kevin Clash, a puppeteer, director and producer whose characters included Elmo, Clifford, Benny Rabbit, and Hoots the Owl.
• Marshall "Eddie" Conway, a leading member of the Baltimore chapter of the Black Panther Party who in 1971 was convicted of murder of a police officer a year earlier, in a trial with many irregularities.
• Carl Dix, a founding member and representative of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (RCP).
• Sheila Dixon, served as the forty-eighth mayor of Baltimore.
• Bea Gaddy, a Baltimore City Council member and a leading advocate for the poor and homeless known locally as the "Mother Teresa of Baltimore."
• Joe Gans, a professional boxer known as the "Old Master", the first African-American world boxing champion of the 20th century.
• L. S. Alexander Gumby, an archivist and historian whose collection of 300 scrapbooks documenting African-American history have been part of the collection of Columbia University.
• Ken Harris, a Democratic politician who served on the Baltimore City Council.
• William Ashbie Hawkins, one of Baltimore's first African American lawyers.
• Billie Holiday, a jazz singer with a career spanning nearly thirty years who had a seminal influence on jazz music and pop singing.
• Reginald Lewis, a businessman who was one of the richest African-American men in the 1980s, worth $400 million, and the first African American to build a billion-dollar company
• Lillie Mae Carroll Jackson, pioneer civil rights activist who was an organizer of the Baltimore branch of the NAACP.
• Angel McCoughtry, a professional basketball player for the Atlanta Dream of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA).
• DeRay Mckesson, a Black Lives Matter activist, podcaster, and former school administrator.
• Enolia McMillan, an African American educator, civil rights activist, and community leader and the first female national president of the NAACP.
• Sharon Green Middleton, a Democratic politician serving as the acting President of the Baltimore City Council during Jack Young's service as Acting Mayor of Baltimore.
• Abbie Mitchell, a soprano opera singer known for singing the role of "Clara" in the premier production of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess.
• Clarence Mitchell Jr., a civil rights activist who was the chief lobbyist for the NAACP for nearly 30 years.
• Clarence Mitchell III, a politician who served in the Maryland Senate and the Maryland House of Delegates.
• Keiffer Mitchell Jr., a politician who once served in the Maryland House of Delegates and the Baltimore City Council.
• Parren Mitchell, the first African American elected to Congress from Maryland.
• Wes Moore, a politician who has served as the first African-American governor of Maryland since 2023.
• Nick J. Mosby, a politician who is currently the chair of the Baltimore City Council and a former member of the Maryland House of Delegates from the 40th District.
• John H. Murphy Sr., an African-American newspaper publisher, born into slavery, best known as the founder of the Baltimore Afro-American.
• Pauli Murray, a civil rights activist who became a lawyer, a women's rights activist, an author, and the first African-American woman to be ordained as an Episcopal priest.
• Felicia "Snoop" Pearson, an actress and author who played "Snoop" on The Wire and wrote an autobiographical memoir titled Grace After Midnight.
• Catherine Pugh, a Democratic politician, who served as the 51st mayor of Baltimore from 2016 to 2019.
• Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, a politician and attorney who served as the 49th Mayor of Baltimore from 2010 to 2016.
• Oscar Requer, a former detective of the Baltimore Police Department.
• Gloria Richardson, the leader of the Cambridge Movement, a civil rights struggle in the early 1960s in Cambridge, Maryland.
• April Ryan, a journalist and author who has served as a White House correspondent since 1997.
• Kurt Schmoke, a politician and lawyer who served as the 46th mayor of Baltimore, the first African American to be elected mayor.
• Brandon Scott, the current mayor of the Baltimore since 2020.
• Serpentwithfeet, a Baltimore-born experimental musician based in Brooklyn, New York.
• Tupac Shakur, a rapper, writer, and actor considered by many to be one of the greatest rappers of all time.
• André De Shields, an actor, singer, director, dancer, novelist, choreographer, lyricist, composer, and professor.
• Breanna Sinclairé, a transgender singer who became the first transgender woman to sing the American national anthem at a professional sporting event.
• Jada Pinkett Smith an actress, singer-songwriter, and businesswoman. Will Smith is her husband.
• Rain Pryor, an actress and comedian who is the daughter of the late comedian Richard Pryor.
• Sonja Sohn, an actress and director best known for her roles as Detective Kima Greggs on the HBO drama The Wire.
• Carl Stokes, a politician who represents the 12th district on the Baltimore City Council.
• Melvin L. Stukes, a politician who represented the 44th legislative district in the Maryland House of Delegates.
• Mary L. Washington, a Democratic politician who was elected in 2018 to the Maryland Senate to represent the state's 43rd district.
• William A. White, an American-born Nova Scotian who was commissioned as the first black officer in the British army.
• Deniece Williams, a Grammy-winning singer, songwriter and producer who has been described as "one of the great soul voices" by the BBC.
• William Llewellyn Wilson, a conductor, musician, music critic, and music educator who was the first conductor of the first African American symphony in the city of Baltimore.
• Jack Young, a Democratic politician and the 52nd mayor of Baltimore from 2019 to 2020.

• List of The Wire characters