How we organized a South Baltimore Civil Rights walking tour for Digital Harbor High School
Last Friday, I put together a walking tour program for a group of students from Digital Harbor High School who are learning about the history of African Americans and the Civil Rights movement in South Baltimore as part of our ongoing educational outreach around this project. As a resource for anyone who might be interested in retracing our steps, we are publishing a copy of our notes here with plans to expand this post into a resource on how we’re approaching our school outreach this fall.
South Baltimore Civil Rights Walking Tour
- Around 1-2 hours
- Around 1.5 miles
Note: These notes were prepared by Eli Pousson for Baltimore Heritage to lead a 2015 November 20 walking tour for students from Digital Harbor High School in South Baltimore. The map for this tour is available in our Baltimore Heritage collection of GeoJSON map data.
Southern High School Site
- 1910: Souther High School built as the first of a new type; organizing grades seven, eight and nine together, then known as the “junior high school” (later reorganized and known as “middle schools” by the 1980s) and had a co-ed student body with both boys and girls for the first time in Baltimore
- 1926: Addition facing Warren Avenue at the intersection with Riverside Avenue built
- Originally located on the southeast corner of Warren Avenue and William Street, the building was constructed of brick with limestone trim in a Jacobean/English Tudor style architecture used for a number of Baltimore City and other American schools of that era.
- 1955: school had an enrollment of 1,800 students
- 1956: $2 million expansion project designed to accommodate 600 additional students completed; added eight more regular classrooms, a double classroom, five new art rooms, eight commercial classrooms for typing and business machines, three music rooms, a three shops for machine, print and auto mechanic instruction
- When was the building demolished?
Source: Southern High School – Wikipedia
On resistance to desegregation at Southern High School
On October 1, 1954, 500 white students gathered outside Southern High School protesting school integration with signs including “We Want Southern Back” and “Negroes Not Allowed.” After some of the 39 black students enrolled at the school are attacked, police intervene and arrest several white protestors.
On violence and housing segregation in South Baltimore:
On October 8, 1910, as the city wrestled the Baltimore Sun published an article under the loud headline, ”THEY BLOCKED INVASION / Residents Of Locust Point Quickly Solved Negro Problem. BY FORCE AND MORAL SUASION / Young Men Of Southeast Baltimore Always Ready To Protect The Female Sex From Discourtesies,” continuing:
As time passed negroes moved into Sharp street, in Southwest Baltimore, and some began to work in developing Locust Point water front. Some families evidenced a desire to live near their work. They were told by some of the Locust Point white men that if they moved into that section they would also die near their work. The white men meant it, the negroes realized it, and it is doubtful if there is a negro family in all Locust Point. On evening about six years ago a negro family moved into a house in Locust Point. The furniture arrived at 6 o’clock. At midnight the house was a total wreck. The doors had been torn from their hinges and the window frames smashed. At 7 o’clock the next morning the negroes had left. They never came back.
This Locust Point example illustrates the violence frequently used to enforce the boundaries of racially segregated housing.
Churchill Street Alley Houses - Federal Hill
At this time in early 1978 only a few blocks of the Federal Hill National Register district were in the process of being renovated—the 200 block of E. Montgomery Street and the 200 block of Churchill, the 800 block of William Street, and the 200 and 300 blocks of Warren Avenue—all addresses with harbor views of adjacent to Federal Hill Park. Some blocks south, Struever Bros. & Eccles had recently rehabbed four houses on the north side of E. Cross Street and four to the north along Grindall Street—with a community courtyard in between. A number of blocks at the north end of Federal Hill—parts of the east and west unit blocks of Montgomery Street, and the unit block of E. Hughes Street stood desolately vacant behind tall chain link fences. Houses in the 800 block of S. Charles Street were burned out shells and the 700 and 800 blocks of S. Hanover Street were also boarded and vacant. The houses on Montgomery Street, acquired by the city when plans were still afoot to stretch an expressway across the oldest part of Fells Point via a bridge over the harbor to the oldest parts of Federal Hill, sat empty after the defeat of “The Road” while HCD decided what to do with them. Eventually, these houses would be auctioned off to the highest bidders who could guarantee they had the money and expertise to renovate them. But in the meantime, they proved a gold mine of information to me.
Source: Federal Hill: Past, Present and Future by Dr. Mary Ellen Hayward
Christopher Phillips described the condition and location of free black housing in early 19th century Baltimore, writing:
In the decades following 1810 a perceptible shift of residential patterns for thousands of free blacks occurred in Baltimore. As the commercial core of the city became an area made up almost exclusively of affluent white families, black and white laborers were pushed toward the periphery of the city. Although as late as 1810 nearly half of the city’s free Negroes lived in the central wards, by 1830 less than 10 percent resided in that part of the city. The largest number moved to the western precincts, where developers had responded to the population boom by laying out new streets and erecting cheap tenement housing. The rest of the city’s displaced free blacks relocated east of the commercial core, either across from Jones’ Falls in Old Town, an area of the city where most were craftspeople and laborers, or into the narrow streets and alleys in and around Fells Point, where older, cheaper housing was merging with new row-house construction. [@phillips_freedoms_1997, 104-105]
Phillips continued to note the concentration of black Baltimoreans along alleys:
Unlike many cities in the Deep South, where high walls enclosed yards containing slave quarters (thus often precluding the incorporation of alleys into the municipal design), Baltimore had a maze of alleyways and court-yards in which most of the city’s free blacks soon came to make their homes. […] In 1820 such places as Happy Alley, Argyle Alley, Strawberry Alley, Petticoat Alley, Apple Alley in or near Fells Point; Union Alley and Liberty Alley in Old Town; Bottle Alley, Whiskey Alley, and Brandy Alley in the core city; and Welcome Alley, Waggon Alley, Dutch Alley, Sugar Alley, and Honey Alley just to the west of the central city and to the south of it in the Federal Hill area were lined with small row houses in which multiple free black and slave families lived.
Despite this concentration, the city was not wholly segregated, as Phillips noted:
While alleys early on became predominantly black areas of residence in Baltimore, the city as a whole did not so quickly exhibit such segregation. […] As in other southern cities, no legal segregation existed in antebellum Baltimore, and all residential streets (and even the alleys) had black family dwellings interspersed with those of laboring and poor whites.
Montgomery Street Houses
I learned that most of what became the neighborhood of Federal Hill once belonged to John Eager Howard, Revolutionary War hero and later Governor of Maryland, who first divided the land into lots and laid out streets in 1782. The frame house at 130 E. Montgomery Street was built in 1796 by Matthew Murray, a boatman or mariner; the fine brick house at 36 E. Montgomery, probably the oldest surviving brick house in Federal Hill, went up in 1795, built by a Philadelphia house carpenter named John Fisher. The two-and-a-half-story brick houses at 1-11 E. Montgomery—all undergoing renovation in 1978—were built in the first few years of the nineteenth century. Ford Barnes, a carter, built the three-bay-wide house at 9 E. Montgomery for himself in 1801 and the adjoining two-bay-wide house at 11 E. Montgomery for rental.
Source: Federal Hill: Past, Present and Future by Dr. Mary Ellen Hayward
Ebenezer AME Church
This is the oldest standing church built by an African American congregation, dating to 1865. It stands on the site of an earlier church building erected in 1848 by the same congregation, which may have formed as early as 1816. Several outstanding clergymen served the church, including Bishop Daniel A. Payne, who founded the nationâs oldest African American university.
In the year 1836, a group of worshipers met in a small paint shop in South Baltimore for the purpose of singing and praying. This group was the first membership of what is now known as Ebenezer A.M.E. Church.
The present property was purchased in 1839, but the church was not incorporated until 1848. The church has undergone many structural changes since its beginnings, but the love and support of the members have remained constant.
Seven of Ebenezer’s pastors were ordained bishops in the African Methodist Church. They were Daniel Payne, A.W. Wayman, Joseph A. Shorter, John M. Brown, James Campbell, James A. Hardy and Isaac N. Ross. Bishop Payne, who organized Ebenezer and served briefly as the pastor, became one of the leading educators of his time.
Ebenezer also played an important part in the education of black children. In 1839, the church took pride in operating a day school on the premise.
Source: Ebenezer AME Church
Ebenezer’s English Gothic design, its stained glass windows with geometric Victorian patterns, its pews and ceiling beams of Georgia pine, its marble pulpit and its electrified Bronze bell - which can be used to signal us to worship - are all representative of the sacrifices and accomplishments of dedicated, loyal and supportive people.
John Wesley Chapel
Prior to 1838, a “Watch Meeting” under Methodist principles was held in a carpenter’s shop on the corner of Sharp and Little Hughes streets. In 1838, the Methodist congregation purchased the shop and renamed it John Wesley Chapel in honor of the founder of the Methodist denomination.
Source: Baltimore National Heritage Area
Public School #126
Public School #126 was designed by J.J. Husband of Avery & Husband who created the prototypical models for grammar and primary schools for Baltimore. This school served the African American residents of South Baltimore in the neighborhood now known as Sharp Leadenhall.
Source: MIHP
Leadenhall Baptist Church
The Historic Leadenhall Baptist Church is an old established church located in Baltimore, Maryland. Baltimore is the 19th largest city in the United States with a population of approximately 630,000. Located in South Baltimore, the church was established in 1872 with the cornerstone laid on July 15, 1872 and the dedication held on May 12, 1873. The church is nestled between Baltimore’s two major stadiums and sits on prime real estate south of Baltimore’s famous harbor in the Sharp-Leadenhall Community.
Sharp-Leadenhall is an up and coming neighborhood surrounded on all sides by expensive property with the Otterbein neighborhood to the north, and the Federal Hill neighborhood to the east.
The church was organized with a total membership of eight under the name of Leadenhall Street Baptist Church by African-American Baptists of the Sharp-Leadenhall area with the help of the Maryland Baptist Union Association. It is the second oldest church building in Baltimore continuously occupied by the same African-American congregation and one of the earliest settlements of free African-Americans in the city. By 1874, the membership had grown to 146. The congregation is predominantly African American.
The church was designed and built by Joseph B. Thomas and Son, who owned and operated a planning mill on Leadenhall Street near Montgomery Street. Thomas, a Baptist, manufactured moldings, pews, pulpits, altar rails, Gothic windows, etc. from the 1860’s through the 19th century.
On May 27, 1887, a meeting was held to draw up the church’s charter to establish, by government standards, Leadenhall as a Christian place of worship with a governing body to administer the duties. The meeting included the pastor, the trustees, and selected church members. The charter was officially completed and sealed by the City of Baltimore on November 26, 1883. In attendance at the signing of the charter were the pastor, Reverend Ananias Brown, and five trustees. They were Levin I. Hughes, Richard H. Freeman, Richard Harris, Lawrence Carrington, and Oscar Bowen. One of the six original members, Richard H. Freeman has descendants who still attend the church. This makes the Freeman family one of the oldest families in attendance at Leadenhall.
