“The Struggle for Land and Liberty”: Segregation,Violence,and African American Resistance in Baltimore,1898-1918

On the afternoon of September 30, 1913, George Howe and his family were spending time at their new house on Harford Avenue, a “fashionable street” in north Baltimore. Then the chaos began. The angry shouts of men and the sounds of shattering glass pierced the evening’s tranquility. The violence began when a “large crowd” of white youths playing outside of Howe’s door “suggested bombarding his house.” Within moments, a crowd of fifty to two hundred men joined the fracas and, according to The Baltimore Sun, “in a twinkling the trouble was on.” ¹ Faced with these daunting odds, Howe, who was black, grabbed a shotgun to defend his family and property. From the second floor, Howe met bricks with bullets, wounding four white youths. Some in the crowd began to yell for his lynching. Finally the police arrived, setting about their work to disarm and arrest Howe. As they did so, the mob turned its attention toward James Nelson, an African American bystander who happened upon the scene at precisely the wrong moment. Both Howe and Nelson, whom the crowd severely beat, were lucky to escape with their lives. The only person the police arrested that night was George Howe. ²

The violence at Howe’s residence was a microcosm of the two decade-long controversy brewing in Baltimore’s residential districts between the late 1890s and 1918. At once, the confrontation demonstrated the precision with which segregationists sought to enforce Baltimore’s racial lines. In 1913, Harford Avenue was divided into racially exclusive sides: black residents occupied one side of the street and white residents the other. ³ Howe violated this arrangement when he moved to the all-white side of the block. The major players in this particular drama also enacted the roles they played in other disturbances throughout this period. Howe—like many African Americans at the time—sought better housing in Baltimore’s northwestern residential enclaves. White youths and men, frustrated by the city’s inability to halt what they termed the “negro invasion,” physically and verbally intimidated their would-be neighbors. The police served as the final arbiters, in most cases arresting the African American at the center of the controversy.

Historians have analyzed Progressive Era residential segregation from legal, governmental, and reform standpoints but have neglected the vantage point of the street where segregation actually occurred. This street-level history of housing segregation in Baltimore challenges existing Progressive Era historiography in four key ways. ⁴ First, this analysis uncovers a deeper story of the fight for housing segregation. The effort to maintain race exclusive blocks in Baltimore dates to the late 1890s and did not begin, as previous scholars contend, with the legislative controversies of the 1910s. The battles over racial segregation began on the streets before moving into city council meetings and courtrooms. Even after politicians became involved, the push for racial segregation was fought over, promulgated, resisted, and nourished at the grassroots. ⁵ Second, this examination emphasizes the roles that violence, white supremacy, and black resistance played in Progressive Era segregation efforts. The Progressive Era movement to segregate residential districts was not, as Michael McGerr argues, a sincere, but misguided, effort to forge a safer social order. ⁶ Instead segregationists hoped to institutionalize white supremacy, suppress African American political power, and limit black mobility by legally segregating residential districts. Third, a grassroots analysis of Baltimore’s racial frontiers highlights the expansive roles that African Americans played in defeating the West Segregation Ordinances and expands the definition of political activism in this period. African Americans made political statements when they purchased real estate in knowing violation of the law. They further imbued their actions with political meaning by publicly couching their aspirations in the universal language of middle-class striving. Many, when necessary, also defended their property (and that of others) with arms. Black Baltimoreans repeatedly defied the law throughout the 1910s and challenged the ordinances’ legality in the courts. By 1918, their resistance—and not the failed West Ordinances—did more to remake the city’s racial geography. Fourth, a street-level analysis makes apparent the legacy of residential segregation efforts. The laws failed to withstand legal challenges but their introduction fundamentally changed discussions of race, property, and social order in Baltimore and across the nation. Legislation like the West Ordinances, and similarly minded efforts modeled on them, legitimized segregationists’ conflation of African Americans with community degradation and plummeting property values. This pernicious association long outlived the ordinances themselves and continued to fuel efforts at restricting African Americans’ residential options well into the twentieth century. ⁷

The wave of violence that eventually crashed on George Howe’s doorstep had been building for years. Prior to emancipation, Baltimore’s free black population outnumbered slaves, a circumstance that shaped the city’s residential patterns. The extent to which neighborhoods were integrated was largely due to live-in servants and the domestic workers who resided in the shadows of their employers’ homes. Otherwise, African Americans and whites lived in separate sections of the city. This pattern of de facto segregation intensified following the Civil War. Following slavery’s demise, Baltimore’s black population exploded. Between 1860 and 1880, 25,000 black migrants moved to Baltimore. This influx not only doubled the city’s black population but also increased the percentage of African Americans to 16 percent of the entire population. These newcomers entered a city adjusting to post-Emancipation realities. Nowhere was racial tension in the city more apparent than in Baltimore’s workplaces. White workers’ racial hostility toward black laborers combined with manufacturers’ prejudice to effectively restrict African Americans’ occupational opportunities. Already by the end of the nineteenth century, many African Americans found their housing options limited by social custom and lack of employment options. ⁸

By the early years of the twentieth century, half of the city’s black population lived in the neighborhood known as Old West Baltimore. As migrants continued to flow in from the countryside, old color lines began to disintegrate. ⁹ The Very Reverend John R. Slattery, of St. Joseph’s Seminary in Baltimore, noted in the Catholic World that African Americans were moving into numerous parts of the city. Slattery remarked, “Wherever we turn we meet them dwelling on new streets.” White Baltimoreans noticed the changes, especially in the city’s northwest. “Whenever a negro moves into a street the whites flutter away, Slattery observed.” ¹⁰

In the waning days of the nineteenth century, some white residents decided to fight rather than simply “flutter away.” The first known incident of violent intimidation over residential space occurred in September 1899, when a fifty-five-year-old black construction worker named John Lang and his family moved into a house on Druid Hill Avenue. When Lang returned home from work the next day he found his family bunkered in the house behind locked doors. Lang’s wife reported that a group of boys and young men had broken nearly all of the windows in the rear of the house. The following day an angry crowd smashed more windows. It is not entirely clear what happened to Lang and his family. Lang, however, did remark to the Baltimore Sun that he was willing to move if his landlord returned the rent money. ¹¹

For the next several years, scattered controversies arose when African Americans breached, or attempted to breach, the city’s color line. When Union Baptist church attempted to buy a lot at Lanvale and McCulloh streets in 1901 to open a boarding school, residents raised the specter of the “black rapist” in their campaign against the purchase. ¹² In 1902, someone shattered windows and smeared tar across the front steps of the house where Fannie Williams lived. When contacted by the Baltimore Sun, Williams remarked, “This is not the first time the windows were broken. Once before—about six weeks ago—every pane in the parlor windows and two on the second floor were broken.” ¹³ In 1903, an African American congregation tried to purchase St. Paul’s English Lutheran Church on Druid Hill Avenue. After deliberation, St. Paul’s council refused the offer, publicly burning their mortgage to the applause of a white audience. The church also adopted a resolution never to sell property to African Americans. ¹⁴ Later that year, residents at Saratoga and Mount streets protested a proposed black school, fearing that parents of children attending the school would “have a tendency to move into [the] neighborhood.” ¹⁵

One of the early turning points in the battle of residential segregation occurred in early 1906 after the Colored Independent Methodist Church bought property on North Gilmor Street with the intentions of converting it into a “colored orphan society.” ¹⁶ Residents became so angry that they formed the Harlem Park Protective Association. Their protests seemingly worked: the sale was annulled and the property put up for auction. Much to segregationist’s chagrin, however, Harry S. Cummings, a leading black politician, purchased the house in the second auction. Cummings’ acquisition rankled the nascent protective association. Its secretary warned that they would “fight anything likely to degrade the neighborhood. Its not only for Gilmor street and the vicinity that we intend standing for, but it’s for the whole west end.” ¹⁷

The creation of the Harlem Park Protective Association was a watershed moment in the saga of Baltimore’s increasingly contested residential color line. Beginning in the 1880s, Baltimoreans formed numerous neighborhood associations. Initially, these organizations lobbied for structural improvements to their neighborhoods or sought to protect the property value of their enclaves. By the turn of the century, they became accepted cogs in the city’s political apparatus, working closely with politicians and city hall. But up to this moment, they had not been involved in segregation efforts. ¹⁸ Now residents had a group that not only united them around the issue of segregation but also pointedly took a confrontational stance. The Harlem Park Protective Association spearheaded a successful effort to block the sale of the house to the Colored Independent Methodist Church and then worked assiduously to stop black tenants from occupying the building after Cummings purchased it. For two years, the building sat unoccupied before Cummings finally sold it at a loss to a nearby resident. ¹⁹ Although the protective association won the first battle, shoring up the color line proved to be a more difficult feat.

Good housing remained a pressing issue in the early twentieth century for many African Americans. In 1903, the Baltimore Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor, alongside the Charity Organization Society, began an investigation of local housing conditions. By 1906, the two groups decided to focus on the “more congested and poorer quarters of the city.” Hiding behind the veneer of scientific inquiry, their report amounted to a voyeuristic tour of Baltimore’s immigrant and black neighborhoods. Janet E. Kemp, an experienced investigator who conducted a similar study in Washington, D.C., led readers on an itinerary that included damp and dilapidated houses that lacked modern amenities. In these dwellings, Kemp witnessed the “gregarious, light-hearted, shiftless, irresponsible alley dwellers.” She also documented high rates of tuberculosis that saddled a section of the primarily poor black neighborhood of Lower Druid Hill, located in the city’s northwest, with the derisive moniker of “the lung block.” In Kemp’s estimation, African Americans’ “low standards and absence of ideals” were at least partially to blame for the state of the neighborhood. ²⁰ While Kemp’s racial biases skewed her findings, her report demonstrated through photographs and descriptions the overcrowded and substandard housing that many African Americans occupied in the city.

Black Baltimoreans also voiced concerns about the state of Lower Druid Hill. In 1905, The Survey published an article, written by J. H. N. Waring, a physician and the principal of Baltimore’s Colored High and Training School. Waring’s investigation, like Kemp’s, explored some of Baltimore’s black communities. Waring identified six problems afflicting the black population: substandard schools, the “alley home,” saloons, “ill-advised arrests” of youths, reformatories that “do not reform,” and black children born into poverty and inequity. ²¹ Unlike Kemp however, Waring shifted blame away from the residents by chastising the owners of alley homes and the American people who allowed these conditions to exist in the first place. ²² In 1909, Booker T. Washington wrote that conditions in Lower Druid Hill were primarily the result of the white-owned saloons in the neighborhood and the police protection they received. Washington—who based his reporting on the ongoing investigation of Baltimore’s Colored Law and Order League—maintained that the city allowed “saloons and dens of vice which were not allowed to exist in other parts of the city . . . to take refuge in the districts where the masses of the colored people lived.” ²³ These charges gained wider publicity in Baltimore when the Colored Law and Order League, also headed by Waring, published its investigation. The report focused on the deleterious effects that poor living conditions had on children and women. It too leveled accusations of racial exploitation, official indifference, and police corruption by mapping the white-owned saloons that proliferated in black neighborhoods. It was the only report of its kind to identify root causes of the problems plaguing the neighborhood, offer a solution, and place housing into the wider realm of racial inequality. ²⁴

Black civic leaders found themselves in a difficult position when dealing with the housing crisis. Segregationists often equated substandard housing with personal failings and then used this association to contend that African Americans lowered property values. This was a key justification for segregation and it made it difficult for African Americans to publicly broach the issue. After the liquor board and police board ignored black churches’ complaints over conditions in Lower Druid Hill, Booker T. Washington explained,

There seems to have been a general feeling that colored people were either themselves so criminal, or so disposed to shield and protect criminals of their own race, that their protests against lawlessness and lawbreaking were not to be taken seriously. ²⁵

The exposes of Lower Druid Hill and the failures to exact reform surely compelled many African Americans to move to Upper Druid Hill and the environs just beyond. Although an incremental move geographically, white residents thought it monumental.

On the evening of September 27, 1907, nearly 100 white residents of northwest Baltimore gathered into Whatcoat Methodist Episcopal Church. It would be the most militant and belligerent meeting yet to take place over the issue of residential segregation in the city. At the gathering, Frederick C. Weber, a local businessman and civic leader, spoke to the audience about the challenges they faced. “Within the last few years,” Weber remarked, “an undesirable element has come into the neighborhood, and as a result our property is being woefully depreciated. It seems to me that the resident of northwest Baltimore is blessed,” Weber sarcastically quipped, “with a superabundance of negroes.” While whites had tolerated, even permitted, certain transgressions of “white” residential spaces in years past, they had always done so on their own terms. When African Americans occupied inferior domiciles or worked as domestics, whites remained confident in their superior social and political status. Now African Americans were moving into neighborhoods not as domestics, but as professionals and neighbors. ²⁶

Staring at the prospect of a “negro invasion,” residents formed The Neighborhood Improvement Association. ²⁷ In the coming months, Weber, along with representatives of similar neighborhood associations, ratcheted up their opposition to integration. At a meeting before the Harlem Improvement Association—which had its roots in the Harlem Park Protective Association—Weber hit upon common racialized fears when he asked, “Shall we allow our toddling tots to associate with negro children? Shall we let them suffer the contamination that ensues?” ²⁸ Then, in a letter published in the Baltimore Sun less than a week later, he invoked the trope of the black male rapist. “The hundreds of assaults upon weak and defenseless womanhood in recent years from Texas to Maryland by the negroes,” he remarked, “should cause any man to hesitate from coddling or truckling to these outcasts.” ²⁹

Weber’s remarks were just the tip of the rhetorical iceberg. Various popular and social scientific discourses converged in 1907 as white homeowners in northwest Baltimore attempted to arrest the African American “invasion.” An ideal of the home and its centrality to white male political, cultural, and social identity lay at the heart of these discussions. Advocates of segregation envisioned white space as pure and respectable, while seeing black space (and by inference African Americans themselves) as dangerous and uncouth. Several segregationists also tapped into discourses of civilization to portray African Americans as unworthy of the refinement offered by homes in some of the city’s residential districts. At one of the Harlem Improvement Association meetings, J. J. McNamara protested, “Negroes are but 400 years from savagery” compared with the 4,000 years accumulated by the “Aryan race.” ³⁰

Local political events further exacerbated racial tensions in Baltimore. In the early 1900s, segregationists failed to disfranchise African Americans and black political power was clearly a concern. ³¹ Before the meeting of the Neighborhood Improvement Association, Colonel Winfield Peters—a locally celebrated Confederate veteran—railed against the city government’s preference to “give the negro power over the white man.” Weber felt that a “negro-ridden” Baltimore spelled doom to city and state politics as blacks, buoyed by their success in securing the best housing in the city and reinforced by southern migrants, would drown out the voices of the white taxpayer. Another member of the organization, W. J. Bracken, chastised lawmakers who could have thwarted black mobility but instead “rested supinely in their easy chairs.” The words of Peters, Bracken, and Weber illuminated the perceived threats posed by black mobility. The three men felt that African Americans were slowly wresting control of politics from white males. With African Americans primarily clustered into the city’s seventeenth ward (in northwest Baltimore), black political power remained muted. If black Baltimoreans dispersed throughout the city, these men surmised, their political power could not be so easily contained. ³²

The perceived threats to white political hegemony, coupled with the specter of a “negro invasion” of white residential spaces, fueled racial antipathy in Baltimore. Segregationists began to openly speak of the duty that white property owners had to stand firm against the “negro invasion.” ³³ But, by 1910, it was apparent that segregationists had failed to disfranchise African Americans and halt black mobility. Despite calls on the part of protective associations to codify racial segregation, their protestations had not resulted in any remedial legislation. ³⁴ Baltimore’s northwest was now a powder keg waiting for a spark.

In 1910, the racial tensions caused by black mobility, poor housing, and white political frustration suddenly came to a head. In May, W. Ashbie Hawkins purchased a home in an all-white block on McCulloh Street in northwest Baltimore. Hawkins, for reasons that remain unclear, never occupied the house. Instead, he leased it to his business partner, an African American lawyer named George W. McMechen, who moved in that June. In short order, three more black families joined McMechen in integrating the neighborhood. ³⁵ Measured by distance, the move onto McCulloh Street by the four black families was not significant. McCulloh Street was just a block east of, and ran parallel to, the primarily black Druid Hill Avenue. Whites, however, envisioned Druid Hill Avenue as a boundary that separated the races. ³⁶

In the coming months, white residents in and around McCulloh Street welcomed their new neighbors with verbal and physical confrontations. ³⁷ On his first night in his new home, McMechen reported that someone broke “the front windows and flung a brick through my skylight.” Shortly thereafter, M. J. Hammen, the president of a local neighborhood protective organization, happened upon William B. Hamer, who was black, busily moving furniture into his new home on McCulloh Street. Approaching the man, Hammen asked his new neighbor why he did not buy a house on “Druid Hill avenue or in some other negro district?” “I thought he was foolin’ at first,” Hamer told one reporter, “but when I saw he was in earnest I sent him on his way.” Actually, after arguing with Hammen for a few moments, Hamer lost his patience and warned Hammen that he either move on or risk being “brain[ed]” by a nearby chair. ³⁸ After the incident involving Hamer and Hammen, the New York Times reported that there “ensued more or less lawlessness on the part of small boys and hoodlums in the neighborhood.” These “small boys and hoodlums” vandalized the homes of their new neighbors by pelting them with bricks and assorted projectiles. McMechen, Hamer, and Hamer’s brother-in-law (who had also recently moved to McCulloh Street) all had their windows broken. Hamer complained that between his and his brother-in-law’s house only three windows remained intact. ³⁹

Although intimidation worked in the past, the events on McCulloh Street in 1910 played out quite differently. W. Ashbie Hawkins, the purchaser of the home on McCulloh Street, was not just any buyer. Hawkins was well known by 1910 as a prominent civil rights activist. Hawkins began his career as a schoolteacher in Baltimore where he quickly became an advocate for better education funding for African Americans. In the course of his work, Hawkins met Harvey Johnson (the city’s leading civil rights activist in the late nineteenth century) and was one of the earliest beneficiaries of Johnson’s activism. Hawkins became one of the city’s first black attorneys in 1892, only seven years after Johnson opened up the bar to black applicants. Together with Johnson, Hawkins attended early meetings of the Niagara Movement, a forerunner to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); soon after he helped establish the Baltimore Branch of the NAACP, and throughout his life served tirelessly as an attorney and activist. Hawkins personified the political and social advances that black activists had so painstakingly fought for over the previous twenty-five plus years. ⁴⁰

With a firsthand knowledge of the city’s race relations, it is probable that Hawkins intended his purchase to force a legal confrontation over racial segregation. This prospect offered African Americans more protection than the streets and neighborhoods that left them exposed to violent reprisals and police corruption/indifference. ⁴¹ Black activists in Baltimore, like Johnson, used a similar strategy with great success throughout the 1880s and 1890s over inequitable public education, racial injustice, and segregation on public transportation. Segregationists must have found Hawkins’ purchase especially discomforting, perhaps knowing that it portended another battle for civil rights.

Hawkins’ purchase opened a new front in the fight over integration as grassroots pressure from both African Americans and segregationists moved into city hall and the courts. As an attorney with experience fighting inequality in the courtroom, Hawkins was well positioned to mount a legal challenge to residential segregation; but so were the white residents of northwest Baltimore. When the neighborhood associations began to fight racial integration, they already had years of experience working with the city government. ⁴² Segregationists also had other important connections. Chief among them were two attorneys (Milton Dashiell and William Marbury) who became instrumental in bringing the concerns of citizens on the streets into the formal halls of power. Both Dashiell and Marbury lived in northwest Baltimore. In fact, Dashiell resided just seven blocks away from the home that Hawkins purchased on McCulloh Street and a block away from the poor Biddle Alley district. Marbury lived on nearby Lanvale Avenue, a few blocks east of McCulloh Street. Both men also harbored personal reasons for wanting to keep African Americans from moving into the city’s northwest. Hawkins singled out Dashiell as a “rampant negro hater” and Marbury helped lead the failed disfranchisement effort of the early 1900s. ⁴³

Dashiell thought he found a way to stop integration. ⁴⁴ He cited Baltimore’s original charter, written in 1796, which enabled the city to use “police power” for “preserving order and securing property and persons from violence, danger and destruction.” Since, according to Dashiell, African Americans who encroached upon “white neighborhoods” both lowered property values and “tend[ed] to the disturbance and destruction of the peace to a marked degree,” the city was fully justified in legalizing residential segregation. ⁴⁵ The reliance upon “police power” has been overlooked in previous analyses of Baltimore’s segregation effort but its invocation had important ramifications on how citizens understood residential segregation. By referencing “police power,” segregationists further cemented the contention that African Americans—not angry whites who attacked black families—caused disorder and violence by their very presence. The West Ordinance effectively employed the police as foot soldiers in the fight against integration and identified black Baltimoreans as the threat to social order.

Using the city charter’s provision concerning police power, Dashiell drafted the bill that became known as the West Segregation Ordinance. In subsequent years, Marbury would assist Dashiell in crafting new versions of the law. Dashiell’s proposed law—that West introduced before the city council—was vague. It forbade African Americans from moving into white majority blocks and whites from moving into black majority blocks, proscribing a $100 (USD) fine for African Americans who violated it. Politicians and the Baltimore Sun publicly justified the legislation by claiming that it promised the best means of assuring peaceful relations among whites and blacks. The Sun, reported that “the preservation of peace and goodwill between the white and colored people” was the law’s most important benefit. ⁴⁶

Other supporters of government-sponsored apartheid, however, belied the notion that the law was proposed out of altruistic concerns for racial harmony. From the outset, it was clear that racial prejudice fueled concerns over integration. As early as 1909, the Baltimore Sun reported that the Harlem Improvement Association declared “the negro a menace to the neighborhood and his encroachment one of the most potent forces in the deterioration of property values.” Others demonstrated how entangled white privilege and property had become. As Edgar Allen Poe, city solicitor, ardent supporter of segregation, and grandnephew of the author, stated,

From my earliest recollection my feeling for the race has been one associated with affection; my old negro “mammy,” my little nurse-girl playmate, all are among my happiest recollections. But the idea of their assuming to live next door to me is abhorrent. ⁴⁷

Letter writers to the Baltimore Sun similarly contradicted claims that the ordinance was proposed out of a spirit of beneficence. A writer who signed his name, “1800 Block”—a reference to the site of the McCulloh Street disturbances—claimed that African Americans were now becoming the favored people in the city even though they have “certainly cost this country an immense amount of money and blood.” Another letter read, “Property in West Baltimore is not worth what it should be and solely on account of the negro invasion of white neighborhoods this time [in] the best of Baltimore.” One writer hinted at violence if something was not done to prevent African Americans from “invading” the northwest section of the city. “The negro should know by this time that every attempt on his part to force himself into places where he is not wanted will surely react upon his race,” the writer intoned, “and the more surely forge the fetters of doom which seem to be closing upon him.” ⁴⁸ Although government officials tried to sell the West Ordinance as a way to peacefully order the city, they could not control the message articulated by angry citizens living along the city’s racial frontiers.

From the outset, African Americans were not fooled by attempts to sell segregation as a benefit to both races. In September 1910, several segregationists, including Dashiell, appeared before the First Branch City Council to discuss the merits of the West Ordinance. After the hearing, the Afro-American Ledger excoriated the law’s supporters. The paper sarcastically described Dashiell as “apparently sicklied over with the pale cast of anti-Negro thought” because “he was a man of peace, who had the highest regard for the Negro (when he stays back in the alleys).” The paper categorized the West Ordinance itself as the “great measure which is to relieve the city of the great ‘scourge’ caused by thrifty, intelligent, law-abiding colored people getting better homes.” ⁴⁹ Black activists also predicted dire consequences if the law passed. Reverend A. L. Gans, a representative of the Ministerial Alliance, thought that the law would exacerbate tensions between whites and blacks; Sharp Street Memorial Church’s Reverend A. C. Hughes contended that the ordinance would do “incalculable harm”; and Trinity Baptist Church’s G. R. Waller invoked the horror of lynching. Finally, Dr. R. M. Hall pointedly compared the West Ordinance to Russia’s treatment of Jews, asking West at one hearing if he approved of Jewish segregation. ⁵⁰

Far from protecting both races, black Baltimoreans knew that the West Ordinance protected white power by communicating racial superiority. Domestic space was particularly important in this regard because it served as a stage where whites constructed and transmitted ideas about race. ⁵¹ Segregationists never desired strict separation but rather sought to control cross-racial interactions. This can most clearly be seen in the clause (which eventually appeared in all four versions of the ordinance) that allowed black servants to remain in “white” neighborhoods. At once a tacit admission of the importance of black labor in the functioning of the white household, the domestic exception also revealed white anxieties concerning the intersection of race and class. The authors of the West Segregation Ordinances made certain that whites could continue to display and communicate their power over black employees. This exemption also made certain that white children would continue to learn the lessons of race by witnessing the power dynamics at work in their parents’ interactions with domestic laborers. ⁵²

When middle-class African Americans like Hawkins, McMechen, and Hamer purchased houses in majority white neighborhoods, they undermined the visual cues of supposed white superiority and complicated attempts to portray African Americans as an inferior race. All three men held steady employment; Hawkins and McMechen owned a private law practice while Hamer had been employed for sixteen years at the Baltimore Post Office. Hamer and McMechen also expressed a desire for more comfortable living quarters. Hamer had been living on Druid Hill Avenue but decided to rent on McCulloh Street because he thought it was a better neighborhood. McMechen expressed similar sentiments when he noted, “We merely desired to live in more commodious and comfortable quarters.” When asked about her family’s move, Anne McMechen—George McMechen’s wife—universalized their aspirations by proclaiming, “We wanted to be more comfortable—a right I think everyone has to exercise.” ⁵³ The class and professional background of the Hawkins, McMechen, and Hamer families, along with their desire for a middle-class life, made it difficult for segregationists to fall back on their time-honored tropes of black inferiority, difference, and disorder. ⁵⁴

African Americans—and some white activists—immediately protested the proposed West Ordinances. At one city council meeting, activists railed against the proposal. Jacob M. Levy, who identified himself as a socialist, denounced the legislation for putting “property rights above human rights” while Charles Kemper, the secretary of the Socialist party, argued that segregating African Americans opened the door for similar efforts against other minority groups. J. H. Murphy, the publisher of the Afro-American Ledger, and Reverend G. R. Waller challenged segregationists’ specious claims that blacks lowered property values. ⁵⁵ The Afro-American Ledger also initiated a campaign against the ordinances. In a November editorial, the paper denounced the proposed acts as “anti-American.” ⁵⁶

Despite the controversies, on December 19, 1910, Baltimore’s Mayor J. Barry Mahool signed into law the first residential segregation ordinance in the country. ⁵⁷ Historians have since focused on the West Segregation Ordinance as a legal entity, largely ignoring the chaos it caused on the streets. Although precedent setting, the law was fraught with confusion, resistance, court challenges, and overall ineffectiveness that hampered segregationists’ efforts. ⁵⁸ A mere three weeks after its passage, the police arrested six people for violating its mandates. By the end of January, the Baltimore Sun reported, “About 20 cases of alleged violation of the ordinance have been sent to court and nearly every day the grand jury is acting on one or more of them.” Weeks later the Board of Police Commissioners ordered their patrolmen, due to the large number of arrests, to stop apprehending people based on West Ordinance violations. Then in May 1911, D. Tong, a Chinese laundryman, posed a perplexing problem for segregationists. Tong purchased a home on North Fremont Avenue in a majority white block. Soon his neighbors complained to the Harlem Improvement Association. The association was unsure what action—if any—they could take in the matter. While some argued that Wong could not possibly be white, the ordinances’ supporters admitted that they drew a binary color line and were uncertain what to do in Wong’s case. Between the years 1910 and 1913, the law also met with resistance from real estate agents who owned property in mixed race neighborhoods. ⁵⁹

Although legally ineffective, the West Ordinance did play an important role in ratcheting up racial tensions on the streets. By criminalizing the movement of African Americans into white neighborhoods, the law heightened and perhaps created panic among whites. White Baltimoreans viewed the impending moves of African Americans as more than mere threats; they perceived them as invasions that foretold disorder. The city government validated this notion by passing the West Ordinance. This, above all else, would serve as the law’s most notable impact. In their efforts to create a stable racial order, government officials confirmed segregationists’ unfounded claims that the arrival of African Americans caused neighborhood degradation, augured violence, and lowered property values. Paradoxically then, the law helped create the very violence it claimed it was trying to prevent. When the laws failed to stand up to legal challenges, racial tensions only increased. After Judge Thomas Elliott deemed the second version of the West Ordinance invalid in April 1913, alarmed white residents held a mass meeting to “protect their streets from what is thought to be a general invasion by negroes” and debate what actions could be taken to stop integration. ⁶⁰

As the city labored to create a legally valid version of the West Ordinance, segregationists fired off hostile letters to The Baltimore Sun and messages to Baltimore’s new mayor, James H. Preston. In these missives, one can sense increasing desperation in the tone of the writers as the laws failed to halt integration. One indignant letter writer sarcastically wrote the mayor exclaiming, “If this thing keeps up we will have a beautiful city, a lovely city, a picturesque city indeed. It will be our pleasure, our pride to show strangers what an attractive city we have, with its increasing dark spots.” In another letter, C. E. Stonebraker wrote Preston pleading with him to “lend your best efforts towards putting an end to this hideous negro invasion.” Then in July 1913 a writer named P. Donnelly reported to the Baltimore Sun that the failure of the laws to halt the progress of black Baltimoreans in the northwest led some to suggest that the city change its name to “Negromore.” Another Baltimore newspaper published a letter bringing these fears to their zenith when the writer warned that the city was in danger of becoming “a second Darkest Africa.” ⁶¹

In each of the letters, it is apparent that segregationists were growing frustrated waiting for effective legislation to “protect” their homes. Although none of the missives directly called for violence, the sense of indignation and anger was evident. For instance, J. L. Blake, who signed his screed as “A Property Owner and Sufferer,” wrote, “Too much valuable time has already been lost ‘waiting,’ a la Mr. West, for the ‘decision of the Court of Appeals.’” ⁶² There were other signs that racial tensions were escalating to dangerous levels. White Baltimoreans increasingly emphasized themes of invasion and doom when describing integration. One Baltimorean wrote Preston asking if there was anything to stop the city from being “engulfed by the moves of negroes now pouring in upon her?” A letter to the Baltimore Sun claimed that African Americans “are simply swarming over this city and country like the black plague of old, and if we do not heed the signs of the times will soon be in possession of this city and country.” ⁶³ At a meeting of the Harlem Improvement Association on June 12, 1913, the group noted, “The time has come when conditions are such as to result in disorders, breaches of the peace, and riots.” ⁶⁴ The letter proved to be prophetic.

The Baltimore Sun also did its part to drum up racial antipathy. Because the Maryland Court of Appeals did not release the text of their full judgment immediately, legislators decided to withhold the new version of the law so they could make the necessary corrections in accordance to the ruling. ⁶⁵ Throughout the summer of 1913, the newspaper published multiple stories concerning racial integration. For example, the Sun reported that a black caterer, Charles R. Shipley, moved into a house on Madison Avenue in “what is regarded as a plain attempt to defeat the principle of race segregation.” In another story, the paper told of an African American family moving into a house on Myrtle Avenue. When they could not detail actual “invasions,” the paper resorted to publishing rumors. They reported a “threatened negro invasion” on West Lexington Street after one black family took possession of a house; another story followed Milton Dashiell as he personally “investigated” claims of racial integration. ⁶⁶ All of these stories were in addition to the multiple sensationalist letters that either told of “negro invasions” or predicted dire consequences if a new segregation ordinance was not implemented. ⁶⁷

September 1913 turned out to be a violent and bloody month in northwest Baltimore. The Baltimore Sun reported that since

there is no law under which they can prevent further inroads, the white people openly declared that they will use their own methods in disposing of the unwelcome neighbors. They said they were tired of standing idly by and seeing their property depreciate in value because of the advent of the blacks.

On September 18, the first confrontation occurred when a group of “men and boys” pummeled a house on Stricker Street with a variety of brickbats. As in prior incidents, the attackers severely damaged the property before the police arrived. ⁶⁸ It was an ominous sign of things to come.

On September 25, 1913, Mayor Preston hurriedly signed the fourth version of the segregation ordinance in the vain hope that this would quell the passions of segregationists. Instead, it precipitated the greatest outbreak of violence yet. ⁶⁹ The next day, a group of young men and boys arrived at Mosher Street to bombard a house occupied by African Americans. Despite the presence of a police officer, the gang managed to break every window in the front of the dwelling. As the cops dealt with the disturbance on Mosher, the Baltimore Sun reported that a group of young African Americans seized the opportunity for revenge and began to pummel the houses of white residents. Whether this happened—the Afro-American Ledger did not report such an event—is open to speculation. It is entirely possible that it did occur but it is at least equally possible that the Sun fabricated the episode. What is certain is that African Americans in the neighborhood gathered to ensure that white youths would not continue their bombardment on Mosher Street. As the night wore on, the violence continued to spread over northwest Baltimore. At midnight, another gang of youths and young men returned to the house on Stricker Street and smashed several windows. By 12:45 a.m., blacks in the neighborhood had seen enough. According to the Baltimore Sun, a large number of African Americans gathered and “out of their midst four pistol shots were fired.” This finally caught the attention of the Baltimore Police, who dispatched twenty-five officers to quell the disturbances. In total they arrested three men, two white and one black, and reported that four people were injured. The Baltimore Sun claimed that African Americans caused all of the injuries, with the exception of one. ⁷⁰

As the week wore on, violence continued to spread across the city’s northwest, leaving behind a trail of wounded. A black woman, Carrie Green, was shot in the knee, allegedly by a drunken African American who was among a group of blacks confronting hostile whites; another African American, George Stapleton, was stabbed by an unknown assailant who successfully alluded the police; then George Snyder, who was white, claimed that an unknown African American cut him with a beer bottle after the two had engaged in an argument over segregation. That same evening, The Baltimore Sun reported that white youths pummeled six houses occupied by African Americans. The Sun stated that “at least eight more or less organized gangs of whites” had formulated a strategy to divide the attentions of the police. Among their intended targets was Lillian List who, while holding her nine-month-old child, narrowly missed being struck in the head by a brick lobbed at her doorway. ⁷¹ If there was any doubt before that this was a concerted campaign to force African Americans out of northwest Baltimore none remained now. Following the outbreaks of violence, “a committee representing those who live in the vicinity” offered to pay blacks to leave the area. ⁷²

By the summer of 1913, segregationists had taken matters into their own hands to stop integration. The failures of the law opened the floodgates, but waters in the city had been rising for some time. When the city government passed a new version of the West Ordinance in September 1913 it did little, if anything, to stem the oncoming deluge. In fact, it only served to precipitate more disorder by criminalizing black mobility and legitimizing the stigmatization of African Americans. This can clearly be seen in the near riot at George Howe’s residence on Harford Avenue. According to the extant evidence, Howe did nothing to provoke the attacks on his house other than move into a “white neighborhood.” Howe was the victim in this case; as the Afro-American Ledger pointed out, it was only “after his windows had been broken and the brickbats showered against his house, [that] Howe pulled the trigger on a double barreled shotgun.” ⁷³ According to the ordinance, however, Howe’s actions were criminal from the moment he purchased his home. Fearing a loss of their property value and disorder, segregationists decided they could not rely upon an ineffective law and took matters into their own hands.

The events of September 1913 galvanized Baltimore’s black community but also revealed a divergence in the strategies of middle-class black activists and those, like Howe, on the frontlines. For the middle-class and professional African American community, the fight against segregation emphasized respectability and peaceful solutions. From the outset, Hawkins advocated a legal remedy to segregation, calling for the black community to use the courts as a means of redress. ⁷⁴ Beginning in 1910, Hawkins defended multiple clients who violated the ordinances. Weeks after the law’s passage, he successfully defended Catherine Dixon who rented a house on a majority white block. ⁷⁵ Early the next year, the Suffrage League and the Maryland Progressive League hired Hawkins and “other attorneys” to direct the legal fight against the West Ordinances. Together with McMechen, Hawkins also defended the Gurry family who bought a house that they intended to use as a church. In 1911, police tried to stop Carrie Gurry, the church’s minister, from holding services on an all-white block of Laurens Street. While awaiting the fate of an injunction Hawkins’ filed on their behalf, John Gurry, Carrie’s husband, attempted to move into the home. He was promptly arrested and charged with violating the West Ordinance. Finally, in 1913, Hawkins defended George Howe in two separate trials in the aftermath of the race riot outside his home. ⁷⁶

The NAACP also took a keen interest in the fight against segregation in Baltimore. Like, Hawkins, the organization favored legal action and peaceful protests. By 1912, the organization retained Hawkins as legal counsel in Baltimore segregation cases. ⁷⁷ The next year, the NAACP held a rally during the wave of violence that engulfed the city’s northwest. Oswald Garrison Villard—the grandson of William Lloyd Garrison and editor of the New York Evening Post—and Mary White Ovington led a protest against segregation at Baltimore’s Bethel A.M.E. church. In front of an estimated 1,500 people, Villard called for a “peaceful rebellion” in the face of the violence of that summer. ⁷⁸ The Afro-American Ledger championed Villard’s plan. “Let us be careful to maintain peaceful lives and conduct,” an editorialist urged, “that can not be impeached.” ⁷⁹

While passive resistance and respectability were easy in the abstract, they proved more difficult to maintain in the face of aggression. Some black Baltimoreans refused to be intimidated, despite the risks to their well-being, and weathered the storm without striking back. Even months after repeated incidents at his house, McMechen remained at the same address and expressed no desire to leave. After segregationists stoned John Blanchard’s house, he told the Baltimore Sun that he liked the neighborhood and planned on staying as long as his white landlord would pay for repairs. William B. Hamer, who was the victim of repeated bombardments and threats, declared, “I expect to live here permanently” and “won’t move out for anybody.” ⁸⁰ But it should also be noted that George Howe’s decision to strike back at the mob was not unusual in Baltimore in the 1910s. In each of the 1913 confrontations, African Americans confronted segregationists in the streets, sometimes with arms.

Despite these schisms, African Americans supported the fight against segregation in numerous ways. By 1911, black Baltimoreans began boycotting white-owned businesses owned by merchants who did not oppose the West Ordinances. ⁸¹ Many others attended rallies organized by city churches. Sharp Street Church, Grace Presbyterian Church, and Asbury M.E. Church held mass meetings as activists geared up to challenge the legality of the ordinances in 1914. Sharp Street Church also collected money to help pay for legal council and the Baltimore Branch of the NAACP solicited funds from the public on a number of occasions. ⁸²

Many black Baltimoreans understood the battle against residential segregation as part of the wider fight for equality. This framing—especially by activists and the Afro-American Ledger—had roots in the first community efforts at housing reform in the early 1900s that linked the home environment to problems of vice, squalor, and disease. In subsequent years, African Americans continued to speak of the importance of housing to full political and social rights. When the Afro-American Ledger interviewed scholars, political officials, and religious leaders in 1913, each explicitly linked housing segregation to inequality. As one of the interviewees, Dr. C. V. Roman, the editor of the Journal of the National Medical Association, asserted, “The fight against segregation is not only a fight for liberty but a fight for life.” ⁸³ At a meeting in October 1913, Warner T. McGuinn, a leading black activist and attorney in Baltimore, remarked, “Physical slavery has been abolished, but its subtler forms are still here. Disfranchisement, ‘jim crowism’ and segregation are but the subtler forms of race slavery.” ⁸⁴

The Afro-American Ledger most clearly connected housing to equal rights in a series of illustrations published in 1913. The first of these cartoons appeared shortly after the 1913 race riot and just days before the melee at Howe’s residence. Titled “Civilization as It Is Understood in America,” the illustration depicted a crowd of angry whites pelting the “home of a colored citizen” with rocks as police officers casually ignored the events. Although whites often blamed the riots on the machinations of disreputable youths, the paper markedly depicted the instigators as middle-aged, respectably dressed white men. Then the paper went a step further in its condemnation. Around the side of the home, a white man is seen shooting an African American man at point blank range. On the other side of the building, the drawing illustrates another group of white males in the process of lynching a black man, hanging him from a nearby tree (see Figure 1). This illustration was followed the next week by “They Will Want His Shirt Next; Five to One—Might Makes Right” (see Figure 2). The editorial cartoon portrayed a “colored citizen” seated as Councilman West and two unnamed men pull away a house representing property rights, a hat that depicted voting rights, and a streetcar that represented the right to travel. In the background, a man (or possibly a woman, it is not entirely clear) is about to club the “colored citizen.” In the paper’s next issue, a drawing labeled, “Advertising Baltimore by the New Ad Club—City Council and Police Department; Mr. Business Man is this the best kind of Advertising for Baltimore?” showed a train—labeled “Jim Crowism Made in Baltimore”—moving across a map of the United States. Near Baltimore, numerous signs read “Mob Law Made in Baltimore” and “Segregation Made in Baltimore” (see Figure 3). Then two weeks later, another cartoon titled “He Will Eventually Break Loose and Reach the Top” depicted a white man (labeled “White Race”) standing at the bottom of a set of stairs denoted as the “Pit of Ignorance—Mob Rule-Segregation.” The white man is desperately holding onto the jacket of a black man (labeled “Colored Race”) as he struggles to ascend to the “Temple of Higher Intelligence” ⁸⁵ (see Figure 4).

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Figure 1.

Illustration from The Baltimore Afro-American Ledger, September 27, 1913.

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Figure 2.

The Baltimore Afro-American Ledger, October 4, 1913.

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Figure 3.

The Baltimore Afro-American Ledger, October 11, 1913.

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Figure 4.

Illustration from The Baltimore Afro-American Ledger, October 25, 1913.

The Afro-American Ledger’s cartoons stripped the West Ordinances of the niceties that segregationists had wrapped them in. By juxtaposing segregation with lynching, mob violence, the denial of equal rights, and oppression, the illustrations unequivocally shattered the notion that the laws were meant to protect African Americans or maintain racial harmony. Instead the illustrations exposed the violence, oppression, and racial prejudice at the center of these efforts. They also undermined the popular discourse that depicted blacks as the cause of disorder. In portraying whites as the sole violent aggressors, and the police department and city council as aiding and abetting their actions, the cartoons produced a counter-narrative about the violence inherent in the actions of these supposedly respectable men. In each of the drawings, segregation was the font from which disorder spouted. It is notable that the police are singled out for particular approbation. In many cases, the Baltimore Sun depicted the police as the arbiters of law and order; they either came to restore the peace or arrest the African American victim at the center of the controversy. The Afro-American Ledger’s cartoons paint a different picture. In “Civilization as It Is Understood in America,” the police are actively participating in the disorder. The patrolman in the foreground is “watching to keep negroes away” while segregationists commit murder and vandalism. In “Advertising Baltimore by the New Ad Club,” the police department is once again identified as not only the promoters of segregation but also of “mob law” in Baltimore. Although the West Segregation Ordinances could not stand up to challenges in the courts, the police played an active role in making sure segregation functioned on the streets of Baltimore’s racial frontiers.

Read in tandem, the illustrations underscored the ways that black activists framed the fight against housing segregation. African American reformers universalized the movement by demonstrating how it was intrinsically connected to other injustices. Even for blacks who could not afford to move to more affluent neighborhoods, the cause still warranted their support. It is difficult to precisely gauge the effectiveness of these messages; yet evidence suggests that the wider community was listening. For instance, the number of African Americans who gathered in defense of black homeowners was disproportionate to the population of black residents in northwest Baltimore neighborhoods and to those personally affected by the ordinances. The importance of the measure to the wider black community was also reflected in the size of the crowd attending Villard’s rally against segregation in October 1913. The approximately 1,500 people present far exceeded those personally affected by the ordinance.

In the years after 1913, Baltimore’s black community continued to disregard the West Ordinances but the violence that plagued the city also waned. It is unclear exactly why the bloodshed dissipated along the city’s racial frontiers. One of the reasons may have been that African Americans increasingly had trouble finding housing. White real estate agents who were initially willing to violate the ordinances had changed their tune by the mid-1910s. In 1915, the Afro-American Ledger discovered the reason for real estate agents’ sudden change of heart. The paper reported that African Americans were being charged “at least 20 per cent more rental than would be charged white families,” a situation made possible because the law artificially inflated real estate values by confining blacks to designated areas. ⁸⁶ By 1918, the Real Estate Board, most likely recognizing the profits to be made, began to actively support segregation. ⁸⁷

While the ordinances failed to halt black mobility on the streets, African American activists continued to ensure that they also failed to gain legal traction. From the outset, segregationists had reason for concern. When Hawkins and McMechens defended John H. Gurry before the city’s Criminal Court in October 1912, Judge Thomas Elliott remarked that the segregation ordinance, despite its stated purpose to preserve the peace, actually accomplished the opposite. “I can’t think of anything more calculated,” Judge Elliott said of the law, “to promote ill feeling than this ordinance.” The judge withheld his decision so he could consult the supporting documents offered by the attorneys. In April 1913, Elliott ruled that the ordinance was invalid—but not unconstitutional—because the legislation’s wording was vague in regard to what constituted “white” or “black” blocks. ⁸⁸ Almost immediately, Dashiell went to work on a fourth version of the law as the city appealed the decision to the Maryland Court of Appeals. In September 1914, Baltimore’s city government approved the final version of the law. ⁸⁹

African Americans continued to fight residential segregation in the courts. In April 1916, Thomas S. Jackson and Charles Morton stood trial for violating the fourth segregation law, known as the Curtis Segregation Ordinance, Jackson, who was black, rented a house from Morton, who was white. Hawkins represented Jackson in Criminal Court where Judge Henry Arthur Stump upheld the Curtis Segregation Ordinance. Almost immediately the decision was appealed to the Maryland Court of Appeals. In March 1916, that court could not render a unanimous decision, so it decided to wait on the Supreme Court’s ruling in Buchanan v. Warley, a case involving a Louisville, Kentucky, segregation ordinance modeled after the Baltimore law. ⁹⁰

In 1917, housing segregation as a legal reality ended when the Supreme Court struck down Louisville’s segregation ordinance. Even still, segregationists would not give up their dream of legalized segregation. Despite the court’s ruling, Baltimore’s City Solicitor, S. S. Field announced that segregation would continue to be enforced since the Supreme Court ruled on the Louisville law, not the Baltimore ordinance. Milton Dashiell immediately began drafting a new version of the legislation. In the meantime, at least two African Americans were arrested in Baltimore for violating the Curtis Ordinance. ⁹¹ After police arrested Dr. William T. Coleman, his attorney Warner T. McGuinn submitted a petition for a habeas corpus hearing. In December, a month after the Supreme Court decision, Judge John C. Rose of the U.S. District Court granted Coleman a writ of habeas corpus when he deemed that the ruling in Buchanan v. Warley applied to Baltimore. Then in March 1918, the Afro-American reported that the “local segregation law was given its last rites” after the Maryland Court of Appeals reversed the verdict in the case of Thomas S. Jackson. ⁹² After seven years, various court battles, outbreaks of violence, numerous protests and arrests, African Americans scored a legal victory over Jim Crow. Given the local power structure and the city’s persistence in enforcing residential segregation, this was a stunning turn of events.

Although the ordinances died a legal death, their impact outlasted their official life span. By pursuing legalized segregation, the city government legitimized segregationists and racist neighborhood improvement associations. The West Segregation Ordinances managed to effectively link African Americans with plummeting property values. Time after time, segregationists repeated this claim without proving its validity. Eventually, however, repetition made the contention true in the eyes of many in Baltimore. Politicians and newspapers (most notably the Sun) added a further patina of legitimacy. By consistently associating African Americans with a decrease in property values, the city, newspapers, and segregationists gave citizens added incentive to guard the color line vigilantly. Even if some white citizens felt little personal compunction about living next to blacks, the argument over property values conjured up fears that homeowners would lose their most valuable possession.

Nor did the legacy of the West Ordinances end at the Baltimore city line. Throughout the 1910s, various cities and real estate interests looked to Baltimore for guidance in crafting or maintaining their own forms of legalized segregation. In 1917, Harry A. Kahler, president of the New York Title and Mortgage Company, asked Preston for guidance in dealing with depreciation in real estate values created by the “rapid increase in the negro population.” ⁹³ The next year, Greenville, South Carolina’s mayor pro tem, Allen J. Graham sought Preston’s help in dealing with “trouble in regard to negroes building a house in a white block.” ⁹⁴ Similar requests flowed into the mayor’s office from Dallas, Roanoke, Virginia, and the National Democratic Association in Washington, D.C. ⁹⁵ In addition to Louisville, St. Louis and Richmond passed segregation ordinances after Baltimore paved the way for legalized segregation. ⁹⁶

Yet the legacies of the failed West Segregation Ordinances were not apparent at the end of the 1910s. While problems continued, the activism and resistance of black Baltimoreans arguably did more to reshape the city’s racial geography than any efforts of white segregationists. Certainly, the housing market remained circumscribed, but African Americans continued to push the boundaries of Baltimore’s racial frontier. Baltimore’s black activist community also left behind important legacies by scoring victories over segregationists who had sought to limit the franchise, circumscribe black mobility, and impose Jim Crow Laws on the city’s transportation system.