Baltimore Heritage Open Tours

Upton and Old West Baltimore

Nov 2, 2012
23 minute read

This tour is based on a 2010 walking tour program developed in partnership with Dr. David Terry and substantially revised on November 2, 2012. Eli Pousson made substantial revisions to these notes in February 2016 based on related research for the Looking for Landmarks from the Movement research and documentation project. The revisions also borrowed material from the Black and Jewish Civil Rights Heritage by Bike tour.

Introduction

What is this tour about?

  • Understand the movement of African Americans into northwest Baltimore in the late 19th and early 20th century
  • Learn about Baltimore’s connections to the national Civil Rights movement through organizations like the NAACP and individuals like Thurgood Marshall
  • Learn about lesser-known local leaders in the Civil Rights movement, like Lillie Mae Carroll Jackson

Early history of South Baltimore

Many African Americans lived in South Baltimore and Pigtown.

1892, Baltimore News reported on:

“Open drains, great lots filled with high weeds, ashes and garbage accumulated in the alleyways, cellars filled with filthy water.“

Source: Deconstructing the Slums of Baltimore (2002), Garrett Power

  • 1890: Baltimore population doubled from 250,000 (1870) to 500,000 (1890)
  • Baltimore’s black middle-class sought better housing in northwest Baltimore, especially on Druid Hill Avenue
  • B&O Railroad displaced 100 black families to expand the railroad yards

Expansion of Old West Baltimore

  • “The Bottom” around Biddle Alley, bounded by Biddle Street, Argyle Avenue, Druid Hill Avenue, North Avenue, city’s 17th ward
  • By 1904, ½ of Baltimore’s black population lived in the neighborhood

Eutaw Place

  • 1853 March 19: Baltimore City accepts Eutaw Place as a gift Henry Tiffany, requiring Tiffany to build “not less than seven houses of not less than twenty five feet front and three stories high” in exchange for park improvements
  • 1876 May 23: Northern end of Eutaw Place moved from Laurens Street (limit of Tiffany property) to North Avenue, perimeter railing removed around this time (late 1870s)
  • 1883-1886: Woodrow Wilson, lived at 1208 Eutaw Place, while working on a Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University, later known for expanding segregation in the federal government

1888: John Thomas Scharf, who lived nearby in Lafayette Square, wrote in History of Baltimore City and County:

”Artistic gardening the highest character has exhausted its resources beautifying these squares and it may be said exaggeration that they form one of the most specimens of street parking to be found anywhere.”

Prince Hall Masonic Lodge

Origins as Temple Oheb Shalom

  • 1853: Founded as a middle of the road congregation between the Reform Har Sinai and Orthodox Baltimore Hebrew
  • 19th century: Congregation is led by Rabbi Benjamin Szold, father of Henrietta Szold, who supported Lincoln in Baltimore; became a leader in the Baltimore Association for the Education and Moral Improvement of Colored People after the Civil War; critics vilified and labeled him the Rabbi of “Timbuctoo”
  • 1893: Designed by local architect Joseph Evans Sperry for Temple Oheb Shalom, borrowing elements from the Great Synagogue of Florence; moved from S. Hanover Street (between Pratt and Lombard)

Purchased by Prince Hall Masons

  • 1784: Baltimore’s Prince Hall Lodge on Eutaw Street traces its origins to New England in, where Prince Hall, the father of black Masonry in the United States, is credited with making it possible for African Americans to become Masons.
  • 1960: Samuel T. Daniels takes over from Willard W. Allen as Grand Master, the Grand Lodge moved to Eutaw Place at Lanvale Street, Temple named after Allen1
  • 1964 October 31: Martin Luther King Jr. speaks at the Grand Lodge Source on behalf of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s election campaign

Samuel T. Daniels raised on Druid Hill Avenue, he was a 1940 graduate of Frederick Douglass High School and earned a bachelor’s degree in education from what is now Coppin State University. In 1958, he was named executive secretary of the Baltimore Community Relations Commission and simultaneously worked for Baltimore Municipal Employees Local 44 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Mr. Daniels paid travel expenses so that young civil rights advocates could attend the 1965 marches in Selma, Alabama. Daniels died in 2005, spent 20 years as executive director of the Baltimore Council for Equal Business Opportunity, a private organization that encouraged black participation in business, appointed to city school board in December 1968. 2

Source: Explore Baltimore Heritage

Lillie Mae Carroll Jackson House – 1320 Eutaw Place

  • Jackson grew up singing soprano in the choir of the Sharp Street Church
  • Lived on Eutaw for 20 years
  • She sponsored the City-Wide Young Peoples forum with her daughter Juanita in the leadership in the early 1930s. The forum conducted a campaign to end racial segregation beginning with the grassroots “Buy Where You Can Work” campaign of 1931. Jackson and her daughter Juanita along with the forums’ members encouraged African American residents of Baltimore to shop only at businesses where they could work, boycotting businesses with discriminatory hiring practices. The campaign’s success led to similar protests in other cities around the country.
  • At one forum gathering, Charles Hamilton Houston, informed the audience “we could sue Jim Crow out of Maryland.” Subsequently, Carl Murphy of the Afro-American newspaper suggested that Lillie join forces with the NAACP. That was the beginning of her thirty-five year tenure with the NAACP, in a role as president of the Baltimore branch in 1935, a position she held until retirement in 1970. 1934 saw the beginning of Thurgood Marshall’s employment with the Baltimore NAACP branch.
  • Ultimately, her efforts built the Baltimore NAACP into the largest branch of the organization in the United States with a peak membership of 17,600

Douglass Memorial

  • 1857: Madison Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church erected, designed by architect Thomas Balbirnie in a Greek Revival style
  • The “undercroft” designed to seat 600, sanctuary seats 1,000
  • 1925: Douglass Memorial Community Church split from Bethel AME Church to form its own congregation

Speaking about his involvement in the July 4, 1963 Gwynn Oak Park protests, Pastor Bascom stated:

“I am the one who said all along I will not go to jail, but I will help others who go. But this morning I said to myself, I have nothing to lose but my chains. So if I do not preach at my pulpit Sunday morning, it might be the most eloquent sermon I ever preached.”

Source

Segregation and McCulloh Street

Lafayette Avenue and McCulloh Street – direct the group to look north The relationship between racial transition and racial segregation is clear beginning in 1910 when Baltimore became the first city in the United States to enact a law requiring racial segregation.

  • In response to the attempt by George W. F. McMechen to move onto the 1800 block of McCulloh Street in 1910, Baltimore established a formal segregation ordinance which forbid black residents from moving to designated “white blocks” and white residents from moving to designated “colored blocks.”

December 20, 1910: Baltimore Mayor John Barry Mahool signed into law the West Segregation  Ordinance, named for sponsor Councilman Samuel L. West, which identified each block in the city according to the racial identity of the majority of each block’s residents in 1910.

While the West Segregation Ordinance was soon overturned as unconstitutional, its passage and the multiple subsequent attempts to enact a municipal law to enforce racial segregation reflected the deep resistance of white Baltimore residents to racial integration. As a consequence, the area of Old West Baltimore, including the neighborhoods of Harlem Park, Sandtown-Winchester, and Upton, became a predominantly African American community and together with a segregated area in East Baltimore some of the only areas open to African American residents.

About George W. F. McMechen

Born in Wheeling, West Virginia on October 29, 1871 to George and Mildred McMechen. Siblings included Mary L. and Ethel (Jones). In 1891 he enrolled in the first class of Morgan College, formerly the Centenary Biblical Institute. Graduating in 1895, he went on to study at Yale Law School, from which he received a degree in 1899.

Source: MSA

Western Female High School/Booker T. Washington Middle School

  • November 1, 1844: Western High School officially opened its doors for the first time in Armitage Hall at 100 North Paca Street in Baltimore. In two small rented rooms, Robert Kerr, first principal, taught 36 young women. Before Western was established, there had been no opportunity for Baltimore girls to get an education beyond grammar school.
  • 1896: New building designed by City Building Inspector erected on McCulloh Street, Annex completed in 1911
  • January 1928: Western High School moved to a new building at Pulaski Street and Gwynns Falls Parkway and the Coppin Normal School, Colored Junior High School, and offices for the Baltimore colored school administration moved into the building on McCulloh Street.

Source: Wikipedia

About Francis M. Woods

Born Barren County, Kentucky, 1878, Francis Wood was also president of the Kentucky Negro Educational Association (KNEA) for 10 years and of the Kentucky Negro Industrial Institute (now Kentucky State University) from May 1923 to June 1924.

  • 1925: Wood became supervisor and later director of the Baltimore Colored Schools.
  • 1934: Wood elected president of the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools and established a permanent office in Washington, D.C.

Source: BCPS, MSA

Baltimore Sun editorial on proposed switch for P.S. 103, framed their opposition in the context of Western Female High School proximity:

“It is a well-known fact that as soon as a colored family moves into a block white families begin to move away. The owners of the vacated houses deciding they cannot get white tenants are forced to take such as they can get. To rent to negroes means a reduction of rentals and a deterioration in the value of property… But perhaps even stronger than any question of values and revenues is another reason waged against the change of this school. That is the proximity to the Western Female High School, which is only two blocks distant. Every street leading to the high school would be filled morning and evening with throngs of negroes of both sexes and all ages up, perhaps, to 20 years. Morning and evening the young ladies attending the high school would encounter these negroes and it is not fair nor public spirited of the School Board to subject them to that. There is a growing disposition among negro men and boys all over the land to be unmannerly, insolent and violent to white women.”

Royal Theater

  • 1922: Theater opened as the black-owned Douglass Theatre, 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 - including the Apollo in Harlem, the Howard Theatre in Washington, D.C., the Regal Theatre in Chicago, and the Earl Theater in Philadelphia.
  • All of the biggest stars in black entertainment, including those in jazz and blues, performed at the Royal. Ethel Waters debuted there, as did Pearl Bailey, who sang in a chorus line. Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller worked as accompanists. Singer Louis Jordan, Duke Ellington, The Tympany Five, Etta James, Nat King Cole, The Platters, The Temptations, and The Supremes, as well as a 40-piece, all-female band touring with Count Basie called the Sweethearts of Rhythm, were all performers at the Royal.
  • 1971: Royal Theater demolished.
  • 2004: The Royal Theater Marquis Monument was said to be phase one of an ongoing series of projects that the Pennsylvania Avenue Redevelopment Collaborative (PARC) would lead. PARC and the Pennsylvania Avenue Committee worked closely with the Mayor’s Office, the Upton Planning Committee, and 14 community groups over seven years to erect the Royal Theater Monument

Billie Holliday Monument

Born in Philadelphia, Billie Holiday eventually spent her early childhood years in Baltimore City. At ten years old she was put in Catholic reform school, The House of the Good Shepherd, to help ease her troubled early development. After two years relatives and friends were able to remove her from the rigorous program, her mother then moving the family to New York City. By the time she was in her late teens Billie was working in Brothels and singing for tips.

Source: Monument City; Baltimore Sun, 2009

Renowned sculptor James Earl Reid was born at Stump Hope Farm in Princeton, North Carolina, on September 9, 1942. In 1970, Reid was awarded his master’s degree in sculpture from the University of Maryland College Park. While attending the University of Maryland, Reid worked as a graduate teaching assistant, and remained there after earning his M.A. degree, rising to become an assistant professor over the next eleven years. In 1979, Reid received his first major commission for a work of art when the City of Baltimore asked him to create a sculpture of jazz legend Billie Holiday, who spent her childhood there; the sculpture was unveiled in 1985 in the Druid Hill section of Baltimore.

Source

Public School 103

Division Street between Lanvale and Lafayette

  • 1877: School built on Division Street
  • 1910: Changed from serving white to black students when it was first used for students from nearby Public School No. 112.
  • March 1911: the school was officially designated Public School 103.
  • Later named for Henry Highland Garnet
  • Twelve makeshift classrooms, rooms separated by sliding doors when opened turned two or three classrooms into a auditorium

In 1913, Baltimore school commissioner Richard Biggs remarked:

“Stop at once the so-called high education that unfits Negroes for the lives that they are to lead and which makes them desire things they will never be able to reach.”

  • Academic year for black children 1 month shorter than the year for whites, with the expectation that children would find work, with many leaving school every spring to pick strawberries

Source: Baltimore Book

Thurgood Marshall (1908- 1993) attended the school from 1914-1920, his first six years of public school education. Originally named Thoroughgood

Thurgood sat in the first row, as his classmate Agnes Peterson later recalled:

“he was always playing, and so they had to keep right on top of him.”

When he began attending PS 103 at age 6, his family lived with his Uncle Fearless Mentor or Uncle Fee, Fearless at 1632 Division Street, worked as the personal attendant to the president of the B&O Railroad, wearing a suit and a bowtie to work daily, and home every afternoon to talk with Thurgood and his brother Aubrey, working next door at a Jewish-owned grocery

Marshall later attend the Colored High School opened in January 1901 at the northeast corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Dolphin Street occupying a building erected in 1891 for the English-German School No. 1 previously located on Druid Hill Avenue.

Sharp Street Church

508 Dolphin Street (at Etting Street)

Between 1892 and 1910, three African American churches moved from south or downtown Baltimore to the Druid Hill Avenue area, Sharp Street is the first of those three.

  • 1797: African Americans gathered at 112-116 Sharp Street, where the Maryland Society for the Abolition of Slavery had opened the Baltimore African Academy, the city’s first prominent day school for blacks. The Society later abandoned this project and sold the lot and building in 1802 to the black congregation, which then built a church on the property, first building occupied by the congregation.
  • 1846: Church hosted the first regional conference for black methodists, which resulted in the first appointment of black pastors and the creation of a black governing board.
  • 1867: Centenary Biblical Institute (now Morgan State University) established at the church, held classes there until 1872
  • 1898: Sharp Street Church moves to Dolphin and Etting Streets (site previously occupied by the 2nd Christian Church) and builds a new church designed by local architect Alphonsus Bieler. Bieler, lived at 1021 McCulloh, also designed church for Macedonian Baptist on Saratoga and Vincent Streets.
  • 1921: Arthur M. Segoin, a black architect, designed the adjacent Community House, the first of its kind in Baltimore.
  • July 1975: 1,200 people attended funeral for Lillie Carrol Jackson, another 300 stood outside, included Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP, Thurgood Marshall, Supreme Court Justice, Rep. Parren Mitchell
  • 1982: Designated as a CHAP landmark

Source: Baltimore City

  • Sharp Street Church manages Mt. Auburn Cemetery, one of the few early African American cemeteries in Baltimore, and where hundreds of prominent African Americans are buried including Dr. Lillie Carroll Jackson, William A. Hawkins, and John H. Murphy, founder of The Afro-American Newspapers.

Druid Hill Avenue

Union Baptist Church

1211 Druid Hill Avenue

  • Union Baptist Church moved located on Guilford Avenue between E. Lexington and E. Saratoga Streets. Union Baptist moved to Druid Hill Avenue in 1910.

  • 1852: Church is founded
  • 1892: Church withdrew from the Maryland Baptist Union Association because of its discrimination.
  • 1897: Rev. Dr. Harvey Johnson, Union Baptist Church’s 5th Pastor, was the minister who organized the Colored Baptist Convention.

**Reverend Dr. Harvey Johnson (1843-1923), pastor from 1872 to 1923

An early leader in the Civil Rights movement, Dr. Johnson was a founder of the Mutual United Brotherhood of Liberty of the United States of America, fought to defeat Jim Crow laws as they applied to transportation in Maryland, and advocated self-determination for African American organizations. His writing, preaching, and public speaking addressed a wide range of subjects. Under his direction, the Union Baptist congregation assumed an increasingly active role in the quest for social justice and civil rights in Baltimore, a tradition it has maintained to the present.

Johnson, a friend of W.E.B. DuBois, established the Niagara Movement, which was a prototype for the NAACP. He also filed a lawsuit to gain equal pay for black teachers and to make it possible for black lawyers to practice in the state of Maryland. The planning meetings preceding the Niagara Movement were at Union Baptist Church. Dr. Johnson also filed a lawsuit and won the first case in the U.S. striking down the identification of Negroes as cargo in interstate commerce.

1904-1906: Building erected, designed by New York architect Mr. William J. Beardsley

Constructed between April 1905 and February 1906 under the supervision of William J. Beardsley, its architect, and Reverend Dr. Harvey Johnson, its visionary pastor, Union Baptist Church was financed entirely by African Americans, was never owned by a white congregation, and was not a product of vernacular design, Also in contrast to many other large African American churches of the same period that were constructed over several years that sometimes extended even into decades due to the need to secure the requisite funding, Union Baptist Church, largely as anticipated, was completed in slightly less than a year’s time.

  • 1960s: Union Baptist Church energized by leadership of Dr. Vernon Dobson, who supported Baltimore’s participation in the 1963 March on Washington.
  • 1970s: Parren Mitchell, a leading civil rights leader and head of Johnson’s Model Cities Program began to work with Rev. Dobson and Parren Mitchell began to direct funds to Union Baptist.
  • October 3, 2010: Union Baptist Church’s main sanctuary building placed on the National Register of Historic Places by the United States National Parks Service, recognizing the significance of Rev. Dr. Harvey Johnson and the architect of the main sanctuary, Mr. William J. Beardsley.

Source: Wikipedia, National Register Form

Bethel AME Church (1868)

Druid Hill Avenue and Lanvale Street

  • late 18th century: Bethel AME Church congregation began when blacks (attending Lovely Lane Meeting House) withdrew from the parent Methodist Church in protest against racially segregated seating and lack of representation in church hierarchy. To exercise control over their own spiritual affairs, the dissenting blacks formed a “Free African Society,” congregating for prayers and meetings in private homes. They soon adopted the name “Bethel,” (a Hebrew word meaning house of God).
  • 1816: Organizing conference in Philadelphia formally established the national independent African Methodist Episcopal Church. Coker was elected the first bishop; he declined the post, however, and Richard Allen was appointed the following day. Fourteen of the former pastors of Bethel have gone on to become bishops of the Church. Bethel’s first pastor was Daniel Coker, an eminent orator and educator who later became the first recognized missionary of the Church when he joined the colonization party that went to Liberia in 1820.
  • 1817: Congregation their first church building, the old German Lutheran Church on Fish Street (now Saratoga).
  • 1868: St. Peter’s Protestant Episcopal Church erected, one of several designed in “Norman Gothic” style by the Baltimore architects N.H. Hutton and John Murdoch.
  • 1910: Congregation refuses to sell the church to Union Baptist
  • 1910: Bethel purchased the St. Peters Protestant Church on November 20, 1910 for $90,000 with $20,000 put down in cash. By moving to Druid Hill Avenue and Lanvale Street, it joined two other historic black congregations in the neighborhood: Union Baptist and Sharp Street Memorial.

January 8, 1911: Dedication service held at the new building:

“Old Bethel held its ground longer than the rest,” declared Mr. James P. Matthews, former reporter for the Baltimore American at the dedication, reflecting on the northwest move of black churches

John M. Murphy, Sr.

1882: Bethel member and Sunday school teacher John M. Murphy, Sr. purchased the Afro- American Newspaper. He turned the newspaper into a well respected weekly, and it was the most read black newspaper in the middle Atlantic State region. His father was choir director at Bethel for many years and is wife Martha Murphy was one of the co-founders of the first black YWCA in Baltimore in 1896.

Mount Royal

  • 1920s: the Mount Royal Protective Association boasted of their Efforts to secure and enforce racial covenants from local property owners, noting the group’s “greatest achievement… has been the subjecting of the property in its area to a restriction for white occupancy only.”
  • In the Mount Royal area, a group of 300 northwest Baltimore residents (led by the president of the Baltimore Bar Library and the neighborhood’s City Council representative, among others) responded to the changes on Bolton Street by signing racial covenants barring the sale or lease of their properties to African Americans.

McCulloh Homes

  • December 13, 1937: Housing Authority of Baltimore City established, shortly after the creation of the U.S. Housing Authority with the passage of the Housing Act of 1937 (Wagner-Steagall Act)
  • Mayor Howard Jackson appointed five men to the authority’s board of commissioners. And although the City Council rejected a resolution calling for the appointment of one African American to the commission, the mayor chose a member of one of Baltimore’s most prominent African American families in naming George Murphy, a retired school principal and vice chairman of the Urban League. The housing authority’s first executive director was Clarence W. Perkins, a former state senator and executive director of the Maryland Emergency Housing and Park Commission.
  • 1939: More than 2,500 black people applied for 434 apartments in McCulloh Homes

Fifth Regiment Armory

  • 1901: Fifth Regiment Armory built; a historic National Guard armory with a 200 foot by 300 foot drill hall, a mezzanine or “balcony” level, and a newer second level (reconstructed in 1933 after a fire) housing the trussed steel drill hall roof.
    • Designed by Wyatt & Nolting; partnership of James Bosley Noel Wyatt and William G. Nolting, also designed the Baltimore City Courthouse and the Garrett Building on Redwood Street Downtown.

In 1906, Colonel C. Baker Clotworthy, commander of the Fifth Regiment:

“I would be deeply interested in this improvement because it means so much more than simply tearing down some houses and opening a street. Everyone in the city is familiar with the steady decrease which has taken place in the value of property in this neighborhood for the last 20 years. All about Richmond Market, and extending north, there are hundreds of undesirable houses and, in many cases, huts. This sore is spreading rapidly. A great many negroes, not of the best class,  gradually tenant the houses on the edge of this district and immediately the white people move from the block invaded. If this continues no one knows where it will stop.”

State Center

Dr. Robert L. Jackson, only black member of the City Planning Commission, opposed the Armory site, noting that it would force 950 black families to move.

Mr. Jackson was born in the 200 block of W. Madison St. in Baltimore, where his father had a construction business. He was a 1935 graduate of Loyola High School. In 1939, he received a certificate in architectural construction from the University of Maryland. He began his building career by hand-carrying bricks to the union bricklayers. As a young man, he helped his father construct the Little Tavern chain, an early fast-food operation that sold 5-cent hamburgers on many city street corners. In 1953, he purchased the old Cecil Apartments on Eutaw Place and renovated the building for offices. It was best known as the home of the Governors Club, a restaurant and bar that flourished from the 1950s through the 1980s.

Source: Baltimore Sun

  • Richard L. Steiner, Director of BURHA figured room for 370 families, would not state how many available for black renters, “That’s in the hands of the redeveloper.”
  • 1953: Mt. Royal Improvement Association rallied over 200 people to support the location, calling it “best means of salvaging a run down area.”
  • NAACP, represented by W.A.C. Hughes opposed the development, Hughes office located there and his mother owned property in the area. Hughes volunteered with the NAACP as a lawyer from the 1930s through his death in 1966, Morgan State stadium named after him

Source: MSA

  1. Grand Lodge - http://www.mwphglmd.com/Grand-Lodge-History.html ↩

  2. Baltimore Sun ↩