Life in a Black Community : Striving for Equal Citizenship in Annapolis, Maryland, 1902-1952 9780739183465, 9780739183458

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Life in a Black Community

Life in a Black Community Striving for Equal Citizenship in Annapolis, Maryland, 1902–1952 Hannah Jopling

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2015 by Hannah Jopling All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jopling, Hannah, 1942Life in a black community : striving for equal citizenship in Annapolis, Maryland, 1902-1952 / Hannah Jopling. pages cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-8345-8 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-7391-8346-5 (electronic) 1. African Americans--Maryland--Annapolis--Politics and government--20th century. 2. African Americans--Civil rights--Maryland--Annapolis--History--20th century. 3. African Americans--Maryland--Annapolis--Social conditions--20th century. 4. Racism--Maryland--Annapolis--History--20th century. 5. Annapolis (Md.)--Race relations--History--20th century. 6. Annapolis (Md.)--Social conditions--20th century. I. Title. F189.A6N44 2015 305.896'0730752560904--dc23 2015009954 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction Publisher’s Note

vii ix xi xxix

I

1 1

Encounter, A Baseball Game, 1902

2

Bird’s-Eye View, 1902–1905

3

Struggles, 1902–1905

19

Own Worlds, 1902–1905

35 51

5

Encounter, A Hanging, 1917–1919

53

6

Bird’s-Eye View, 1905–1919

77

7

Struggles, 1905–1919

87

4 II

8 III 9

3 9

Own Worlds, 1905–1919

109 127

Encounter, A Lawsuit, 1938–1940

129

10 Bird’s-Eye View, 1919–1940

145

11 Struggles, 1919–1940

159

12 Own Worlds, 1919–1940 IV

183 203

13 An Encounter, A Parade, 1949

205

14 Bird’s-Eye View, 1940–1949

213

15 Struggles, 1940–1949

225

16 Own Worlds, 1940–1949 V

251 267

17 Encounter, A Demolition, 1952

269

18 Bird’s-Eye View, 1949–1952

277

19 Struggles, 1949–1952

285

20 Own Worlds, 1949–1952

303 v

vi

21 Conclusion Bibliography Index About the Author

Contents

319 327 337 351

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1

Map of Annapolis, 1902

9

Fig. 6.1

Map of Annapolis, 1919

77

Fig. 10.1

Map of Annapolis, 1938

145

Fig. 14.1

Map of Annapolis, 1949

213

Fig. 18.1

Map of Annapolis, 1952

277

vii

Acknowledgements

Many contributed to this book. The most important were the people in Annapolis who were willing to share with me their recollections and insights about their lives in Annapolis during the first half of the twentieth century. They were: Faye Allen, Martha Alsop, James Beans, Leonard Berman, Godfrey Blackstone, Edna Booth, James Booth, Dorothy Booze, Rev. Leroy Bowman, Morris Blum, Philip L. Brown, Rachel Brown, Cmdr. Wesley A. Brown, Robert Campbell, Ernestine Carter, R. Allen and Matilda Chase, Eva Dove, Genevieve Dyson, Julia Feldman, Alice Ford, Mary Galloway, Marjorie Gibson, Mary Hamilton, Electa and Henry Holland, Alfred Hopkins, Louis Hyatt, Ersey Jacobs, Elizabeth Johnson, Beatrice Jones, Edward Legum, William McPherson, Ann Mitchell, Doris Moses, Delores Nichols, Romaine Parker, Emily Peake, Howard W. Pindell, Nancy Queen, Lois Randall, Dorothy Ross, Norvain Sharps, Rev. Floyd Snowden, Thelma Sparks, Bertha Takeall, Flora Taylor, Gladys Thompson, Flossie Turner, Jean Tyler, Vivian Walker, Marion Wenn, Jenner Woods, Martha Woods, Rosa Wright, and Beverly Zaino. There are many others who enriched my material at church suppers and club meetings. Participants of the Archaeology in Annapolis projects helped launch and then encouraged my research for the dissertation I wrote for a Ph.D. in anthropology from City University of New York on which this book is based. I am grateful to Barbara Jackson Nash, Chris Matthews, Paul Mullins, Mark Warner, Barbara Little, Paul Shackel, Lynn Jones, Marian Creveling, Liz Kreider-Reid, Jessica Neuwirth, and George Logan. Members of the Annapolis History Consortium—Jane McWilliams, Jean Russo, the late Joan Scurlock, Mame Warren, Janice Hayes-Williams, and Robert Worden—have also been helpful, as have the staffs at the Maryland State Archives and the Maryland Room at College Park Library. Marvin Hightower of the Harvard University Archives offered me important guidance. Mary Sies of the American Studies Department at the University of Maryland helped me fine-tune my view of the landscape. Richard Furno has patiently created outstanding maps, and Abby Tannenbaum has carefully proofed the dissertation. I thank them for their assistance. I would like to thank my fellow CUNY students Jonathan Shannon, the late Pauline Herrmann, and Telma Camargo da Silva for encouragement and guidance. I appreciate the attentive editing of my dissertation ix

x

Acknowledgements

exam committee, Leith Mullings, Vincent Crapanzano, Shirley Lindenbaum, and Mark Edelman, that resulted in my receiving a Wenner-Gren Foundation grant, for which I am also grateful. Their insightful research advice guided me over the years. The dissertation itself benefited from the patient and indulgent readings of my committee, particularly Leith Mullings and Vincent Crapanzano, who read hundreds of messy pages and directed my revisions. David Harvey and Mark Leone both influenced the dissertation through their writings and valuable recommendations. Mark Leone has also carefully read the book and made important suggestions for improvements. Shirley Carswell thoroughly edited the book manuscript. My editor at Lexington Books, Amy King and her assistant Francinia Willliams, have provided patient guidance throughout the preparation of the manuscript. Many friends and family have been part of this long journey without whom it would have been harder, or maybe impossible, to complete. I benefitted from thoughtful conversations with numerous friends including Kate Blackwell and Eluned Schweitzer. Louise Smith and Tom Powers were willing to read early chapters that were much too dense. Joan Goldfrank read one chapter. I am grateful for their instructive comments. After reading the entire manuscript, Anne Yarbrough gave me excellent suggestions on how to cut it. Zoe Pagnamenta kindly guided me through the publishing world. My husband, Bob Kaiser, patiently read the manuscript twice to help me cut down material I had a hard time letting go. His help has been invaluable. My daughters, Charlotte and Emily, and my sons-in-law, Nick Peterson and Josh Thelin, have offered up much encouragement. I am a lucky person.

Introduction

This book is based on the dissertation I wrote for a PhD in anthropology at City University in New York. I have tried to tell a historical story informed by the tools of anthropology. It is a product of my long interest in family life in black communities. I explored the conflicts in Annapolis, Maryland, over what it meant to be a citizen of a democracy. My research questions related first to struggles between blacks and whites from 1902 to 1952: how whites denied blacks equality; how blacks responded to white supremacist practices; how they survived and advanced themselves in spite of white oppression; and how these relationships changed over time. Second, I wanted to know what these relationships looked like on the Annapolis landscape. Based on an analysis of fifty years of newspaper articles, archival and census records, city directories, maps, and the memories of dozens of Annapolis residents, I show how whites in this border-state town implemented their racist view of democracy. Like whites in the South, they instituted a number of discriminatory laws and practices to constrain blacks as much as possible, maintain their unequal citizenship, and keep them in an inferior place to control and exploit them. But the blacks of Annapolis fought back. They challenged white oppression in numerous ways to gain specific rights, struggling to realize their idea of a democracy in which they were equal citizens. To illuminate the complex nature of these struggles, I depict the relationships between blacks and whites on the landscape, and describe how each side used the landscape to advance its position in this border-state town. Maryland has been described as “America in miniature” because of its diverse population and landscape, which is mountainous, coastal, urban, and rural. Its temperament is mixed—Northern and Southern, conservative and progressive, a “curious moderation,” as H. L. Mencken, a Maryland social commentator and columnist, described it. Conservative elites dominated the rural Eastern Shore and Southern Maryland. Conflicting groups of laborers, industrialists, farmers, and professionals composed the western mountainous region. Ethnically and socially mixed, Baltimore was the most powerful part of the state, but rural Marylanders “never submitted slavishly to it.” Compared with other states, Maryland tended “to gravitate toward a safe middle place” in population, manufacturing, numbers of Catholics, etc., according to Mencken. 1 xi

xii

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This was a time of immigration, the Progressive Movement, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the NAACP, the Harlem Renaissance, lynching, women’s suffrage, the Great Depression, the Great Migration, two world wars, slum clearance, and suburbanization—all events that influenced life in Annapolis. Relations between blacks and whites were framed by Jim Crow segregation, which the Supreme Court legalized in 1896, then declared unconstitutional in public schools in 1954. Not until 1964 were Jim Crow practices declared illegal in public accommodations by the Civil Rights Act. The first half of the twentieth century might appear to some to be a time of black acquiescence to white domination, but in fact this time was a period of black social protest for legal and legislative reform. The relationship between blacks and whites during the half century covered here was a constant yet changing struggle; it was not absolute or fixed. Though white supremacy was at times violent, oppressive, and intractable, blacks managed to erode or alter some aspects of the racial hierarchy. Pressure from blacks and their self-propelled advancement, civil rights developments around the country, American policies during the Cold War, and the changing opinions of some white individuals in the town influenced the small shifts that occurred. 2 This book concentrates on black residents’ side of this struggle. I gathered data from my sources on the everyday lives of blacks as they experienced and responded to discrimination. My research on whites centered on their segregationist policies, their views about and relationships with blacks, and their recollections of segregation. This study demonstrates the persistent and tenacious efforts of blacks to gain equal citizenship during this difficult time of white supremacy, a time that is sometimes overlooked. Not unlike enslaved Africans, whom historian Barbara J. Fields suggests took advantage of the military situation in the Civil War to become the “prime movers in securing their own liberty,” blacks in Annapolis during these years were the “prime movers” in challenging Jim Crow segregation and racial inequality. As one of my principal informants, Philip L. Brown, explained, “We made room” for ourselves. Again and again, blacks took the initiative. I demonstrate that the black struggle for equality was “a varying, uneven, and frequently tenuous process,” again extending Fields’s description of the destruction of slavery. One gain did not necessarily lead to another; indeed, it was often quite the opposite. Whites had strewn the path to equal citizenship with many obstacles and erected new barriers along the way. 3 Although whites attempted to limit blacks’ life chances, I document some of the ways in which blacks imagined themselves in and achieved better positions, with less demeaning constraints and greater opportunities. In their imaginings, blacks “took advantage of small opportunities and enlarged them,” in the words of Doris Moses, the granddaughter of

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xiii

Dr. William Bishop, a member of one of the town’s wealthiest families, which happened to be black. 4 Blacks fought sometimes Sisyphus-like campaigns that reflected their aspirations for equal citizenship. Some of these efforts succeeded, usually after years of struggle; others failed. Over time, some blacks gained certain rights that whites had denied them. Yet life for many may have seemed relatively unchanged. In his analysis of how “ordinary people assert their rights through repertoires of public contention” with “power holders,” Charles Tilly, a European historian, writes that “these performances are collective, political, interactive, cultural and historical.” Tilly offers a comprehensive way to identify the tactics an oppressed group utilizes over time to confront its oppressor. In my research, I made note of blacks’ “repertoires of public contention,” which consisted of such strategies as boycotts, writing letters, filing petitions, fighting in brawls, filing lawsuits, and collaborating with white citizens. As Tilly states, these “claim-making performances” change over time, depending on the success and failure of different strategies. I discuss such changes in this book. 5 The black collectives that challenged aspects of white supremacy were nascent, narrowly focused, fragmented, and short-lived. Most were organized around a single issue and did not broaden or coalesce with other interest groups. Drawing on David Harvey, I consider these efforts “militant particularisms,” a particular group organizing itself at a particular moment for particular reasons in a particular place. These groups are made up of people who want to accomplish some goal. They “tend not to be about social change,” Harvey asserts. The most successful voluntary groups, or social movements, he argues, are aligned with and supported by resources such as religious or political organizations. The small groups blacks were forming in Annapolis were at the early stages of coalescing into a “community,” which Harvey describes as “a process of coming together, not a thing.” 6 Blacks in Annapolis with whom I spoke recollected that they tried to overcome racial barriers in the Jim Crow era by challenging laws and social practices, but they showed no interest in changing the economic system that “gives rise to the racial struggle.” They did not acknowledge that relations between blacks and whites were a “product of class domination . . . a structure rooted in white supremacy, economic exploitation and social privilege,” an aspect of the transformational view identified by Manning Marable and Leith Mullings. 7 I argue that blacks “wanted what they saw that whites had”—good homes, education, cars, and white-collar jobs. This was a point Philip L. Brown emphasized in our numerous interviews. At the same time, offended and constrained by compulsory segregation, blacks nevertheless felt ambivalent about integration because they wanted, as John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., suggest, “to preserve a sense of cultural

xiv

Introduction

identity and racial pride and unity,” which they developed in the separate worlds they created for themselves. Here they gained some recognition and enjoyment within their own groups. 8 Blacks responded to white discrimination and oppression in Annapolis by developing their own institutions in what became known as the Fourth Ward, the predominantly black neighborhood. Life in these alternative worlds revolved around a number of “axes of life . . . staying alive; having a good time; praising God; getting ahead; and advancing the race,” in the words of St. Clair Drake, who studied the black community in Chicago in the 1940s. So blacks were engaged in building up their churches, schools, homes, businesses, and social lives. These were dynamic institutions, particularly the churches, which chose to respond to the changing situation and needs of their congregations. 9 My research indicates that “advancing the race,” or “community work” required strenuous effort. According to Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, “community work” entailed “all tasks contained in strategies to combat racial oppression and to strengthen African American social, economic and political institutions in order to foster group survival, growth and advancement. . . . Racial oppression takes up more time and creates extra work, or more ‘bundles of tasks,’ for members of a victimized group.” 10 My data show that the “task” of family advancement, or survival, required that several members of the household hold jobs. Many households recruited boarders or made room for other family members. Others relied on or supported members of their extended family. As a result, blacks often experienced multiple family types and connections with family members in different parts of town, not unlike the strategies of the many black families that Herbert Gutman analyzed in Harlem and Richmond. 11 Over this fifty-year period, the black worlds became more elaborate and differentiated, changes I document. The social distinctions, initially less dependent on income or occupation, became more apparent. Demeanor, family ties, and skin color were also important. Where one lived counted as well. Annapolis black worlds also had their share of bootleggers, prostitutes, numbers runners, and drunks. This was not a completely harmonious community. People disagreed over many things. Fights and shootings were not uncommon. 12 “Community work,” “axes of life,” and the struggles between blacks and whites are evident on the Annapolis landscape, an important aspect of my research. I trace these relationships and strategies that are apparent on the landscape, as well as the changes of how whites and blacks used the built environment. I depict the spaces blacks chose to frequent; the spaces whites claimed and dominated; what different places meant to blacks and to whites; the boundaries that separated them; and how they transgressed boundaries. I concentrate largely on the movement of blacks—where they encountered whites, and where they retreated into

Introduction

xv

their own worlds. I portray these movements and relationships from a bird’s-eye view. The bird’s-eye view “denotes a lofty and encompassing perspective that was able to fit all life below into the framework of a picture or view.” One sees the movements of blacks and whites and the relations between them as they inscribe them on the streets—where they got along, where they separated, where they fought, and where one group excluded the other. One sees not only changes in their landscapes, but also the development of a diverse black community and white takeover of certain spaces. 13 My interpretations of the bird’s-eye view of the landscape follow the work of Rhys Isaac, who describes different understandings of the Virginia landscape in the eighteenth century. He writes, “A society necessarily leaves marks of use upon the terrain it occupies. These marks are meaningful signs not only of the particular relations of a people to the environment but also of the distribution and control of access to essential resources. Incised upon a society’s living space appears a text for the inhabitant—whom he who runs may read—of social relations in their world.” Enslaved Africans maintained an “alternative territorial system,” or “places with associations arising from the opportunities the slaves seized within a system that denied them the right to possess.” Isaac calls this “slave opportunism.” 14 Like Isaac, I document the ways in which blacks thought of and used the landscape differently than whites, who were not necessarily aware of the alternative black definitions of place. While dominant white spatial interpretations and laws could keep blacks in their “place” in Annapolis, blacks also took advantage of such places for their own benefit. In overt and covert, subtle and clandestine ways, they were able to claim their territorial domains. 15 Similarly anthropologists Margaret Rodman and Henrietta Moore document the multiple meanings and uses of space. I show how blacks utilized the landscape—in the streets on parade, for instance—to claim equal citizenship. They also used their own spaces, such as the churches and societies, to have a sense of authority, control, and self-reliance. 16 I show that, like Jim Crow practices, the segregated landscape was not absolute. Blacks asserted themselves in public spaces, thereby challenging the established spatial order of white supremacy. As James Duncan argues in his study of representation, power, and landscape in the Kandyan Kingdom in nineteenth-century Sri Lanka, the landscape of the city is not just a place where struggles take place, but it “becomes the means whereby each party attempts to defeat the other.” Blacks’ use of the landscape also fostered some changes over time. The changes show how blacks “made room” for themselves in the landscape, as Brown told me. 17 I also demonstrate how white claims on the territory maintained and in some instances strengthened the racial hierarchy. As David Sibley as-

xvi

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serts, “Power is expressed in the monopolization of space and the relegation of weaker groups in society to less desirable environments.” Likewise, Harvey argues, “Dominant organizations and institutions make use of space hierarchically and symbolically . . . and space is generally manipulated to reflect status and prestige.” I argue that changes in the landscape over this period both reflected and influenced relations between the two populations. 18 I examine blacks’ interpretations and memories of their own landscape, views that tended to foster and perpetuate social prejudice among them. Addresses could mean different things to different people at different times, depending on who lived on certain streets and what types of activities the residents engaged in. Some residents had family connections on different streets—perhaps the “better streets”—thus confounding their identity with a particular street that was associated with “lowclass” people, “a multilocality.” Some blacks who lived in alley houses felt stigmatized, but they also formed close associations among themselves, creating an alternative world. These were modest houses often built in unpaved, narrow side streets or in empty lots behind main streets. Whites and other blacks viewed alleys as places of deviance and avoided them. 19 Alley communities were a part of the American urban landscape. Built to house working-class immigrant, free black, or enslaved families near their jobs, these alley residences were out of sight. I wanted to know “who are places for, whom do they exclude and how are these prohibitions maintained in practice,” questions that Sibley suggests. 20 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY In my research, I followed John and Jean Commaroff’s suggestions for a historical ethnography. “As anthropologists we must work both in and outside the official record, both with and beyond guardians of memory in the societies we study.” My principal sources were the archives and Annapolis residents’ memories. My archival information is drawn from fifty years of two newspapers, the Evening Capital and the Afro-American; minutes of monthly city council meetings; census records; city directories; Sanborn Insurance Maps; Anne Arundel County Board of Education minutes; tax records; and church records. 21 My fieldwork included participant observation of some aspects of black life in Annapolis. I attended many services and social functions at the town’s five principal black churches—Asbury Methodist Episcopal Church, Mt. Moriah African Methodist Episcopal Church, St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, First Baptist Church, and Second Baptist Church—to develop rapport with members of the black community and to appreciate church life. I joined several organizations, including the Senior Boosters

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xvii

Club, made up of older black women, and the Friends of the BannekerDouglass Museum, a museum devoted to black life in Annapolis. I attended their monthly meetings and participated in fundraising and social events. I organized two discussion groups called “Memory Hour” at two different senior centers, where I chatted with a dozen people about their childhoods in Annapolis, at first weekly and then monthly for two years. At church suppers and social events, I conducted informal interviews with some of the guests. I formally interviewed fifty-one people, thirty-nine blacks of diverse backgrounds and statuses and twelve whites, including employers, merchants, and neighbors. I met a number of the white participants in connection with the oral history project I supervised for the University of Maryland. Mame Warren, who conducted extensive oral history interviews for her book, Then Again . . . Annapolis, 1900–1965, recommended a number of people. All but three of the twelve whites—seven men and five women—had grown up in Annapolis with blacks as neighbors, and three of the men had played with black boys when they were children. Eleven of the blacks I interviewed were men. All but nine of the blacks were born in Annapolis. Of the total, I interviewed fourteen extensively. Some I visited a half a dozen times or so. Others I visited regularly for several years and compiled life histories. The four oldest informants could remember events from about 1914 onward. A slightly younger group recalled the late 1920s, and the youngest remembered from the late 1930s. The response among the blacks I met varied. Some were cordial, but refused to talk with me. Some thought I was stealing their history, or were certain that I would make money at their expense. At churches, when I described my work, I was sometimes applauded. Some of my respondents saw me as their pupil, whom they instructed in Jim Crow segregation. Some were careful about what they told me, wanting to give me an accurate account of life during their childhoods. Some wanted to hide things. Still others liked to reminisce and tell me their histories. Some viewed me as a recordkeeper of a time unfamiliar to and unappreciated by the younger generation. My reaction to their stories also varied. Sometimes I was so overcome by the contrast between the unjust hardships in their lives and my own life, which was full of opportunities, that I could hardly come up with the next question. At other moments, I marveled at their grit, inventiveness, and resilience. My research stretched out over nearly eight years. I conducted my first interviews with black Annapolitans in 1992 in conjunction with an exhibit at the Banneker-Douglass Museum, called “The Maryland Black Experience as Understood through Archaeology.” The University of Maryland Department of Anthropology and Historic Annapolis sponsored the exhibit. At the time I was completing a master’s degree in anthropology at the university, and the interviews were part of my final research

xviii

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project. For the next three summers, I supervised University of Maryland students, who conducted interviews with Annapolis residents for an Oral History Field School that I taught. I maintained contact informally with members of the black community until I began my fieldwork in the fall of 1996. For the next three years, I commuted from my home in Washington, DC, to Annapolis three or four times a week for interviews, meetings, and church services. When I began to organize and write up my material in 2000, I still visited some informants periodically and went to special events. Dependence on newspaper accounts and oral histories of people’s experiences is problematic. Neither is considered as reliable as primary source documents for re-creating historic events. But for my purposes, memories and newspaper accounts were both revealing. The Evening Capital and the Afro-American reflected the perspectives and biases of their readerships—white Annapolitans in the case of the Capital, and the black community in the Afro. The two papers offered sometimes contradictory but useful interpretations of events. 22 City council minutes not only recorded what took place at meetings, but also revealed the disdain, condescension, and indifference that white aldermen directed at the blacks who appeared before them. Again, I could see how these attitudes changed over time. I was careful, as Brian Keith Axel recommends, “to regard documents not as repositories of facts of the past but as complexly constituted instances of discourse that produce their objects as real, that is, as existing prior to and outside of discourse.” Ann L. Stoler reminds me to think of “archiving as a process rather than archives as things—by looking at archives as epistemological sites rather than as sources and at colonial archives as cross-sections of contested knowledge, and therefore most importantly, as technologies of rule in themselves.” Garth Green suggests that “historical anthropology necessarily includes discussions of both the politics of representations and struggles over land, power and autonomy,” a suggestion which I have tried to follow. 23 From maps, census records, city directories, and newspapers, I could chart the relationship between blacks and whites on the landscape from a bird’s-eye view. I kept track of the location of social, political, educational, religious, health, and criminal activities, primarily of blacks. I also tracked white intrusion into black spaces and white domination of certain places in the town. I recorded the addresses of business enterprises, housing developments, and the homes of families, from prominent to impoverished, to chart alterations and social relations in the black community. Data from interviews provided everyday accounts and attitudes about negotiating the landscape. The interviews provided other narratives. I was not looking for substantiation of what I learned in the newspapers or city archives. In only a few instances did I ask someone to help me re-create historic events.

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xix

Rather, I asked questions about and heard many stories of their daily lives in their neighborhoods; their strategies to deal with discrimination and poverty; their involvement in churches, clubs, schools, and other institutions; their support networks; and their contacts with whites. I collected family and life histories to learn how they tried to advance themselves. I listened to recollections about their childhood landscapes— where their neighbors, extended families, and friends lived; where they shopped and went on weekends; where different socioeconomic classes concentrated; and where they encountered white prejudice. Life experiences influence their reminiscences, because memories are not passive or consistent. As Alessandro Portelli asserts, any changes “wrought by memory . . . reveal narrators’ effort to make sense of the past and to view a form to their lives.” Moreover, Vincent Crapanzano writes: “How they are framed, interpreted, and integrated has to be seen . . . in terms of the power of hegemonic understandings, individual desire, and the resistance of the originating event. . . . We know how distorting memory can be.” 24 In discussions about the past, members of a group often shared or reinforced each other’s memories because they wanted to promote and commemorate these specific recollections. Some of the carefully constructed narratives I heard felt as though their authors all had agreed in advance on what to tell me. Many portrayed themselves as survivors, respectable people, and, sometimes, members of a close-knit family, who helped each other out. They commemorated themselves the way they think they really were, the way they are, and the way they want to be remembered, all in contrast to the way whites made them feel at the time. They also drew contrasts to the present, when they think “drug dealers” and some irresponsible “welfare mothers” are tarnishing the reputation of their neighborhood. As Jonathan Boyarin explains, “Memory . . . is the constitution of both group ‘membership’ and individual ‘identity’ out of a dynamically chosen selection of memories, and the constant reshaping, reinvention and reinforcement of those memories as members contest and create the boundaries and links among themselves.” Some of the blacks’ recollections convey a nostalgia for what is lost—their childhoods, their homes, their sense of community—all in contrast to their accounts of the present in their neighborhoods, including unsupervised children and strangers on corners. This was similar to Mullings’s experience listening to memories of Harlem residents. She recounts the “widespread nostalgia for a ‘Harlem Past’ that came across in interviews.” Their reminiscences imply, as Mullings puts it, “a loss of history and hence agency.” 25 At the same time, blacks in Annapolis consciously omitted certain events that would have spoiled their story. Portelli suggests, “Information [from interviews] can come from what they hide and in the fact that they do hide it, rather than in what they tell.” With these omissions, I

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suggest they created “countermemories,” collective narratives that contradict other locally held memories, or negative white views reported in the newspaper. They want to set the record straight by projecting a certain image of themselves. As Portelli states, “They challenge the social order of the past and the present.” David W. Blight explains: “The history of memory might therefore be defined as the study of cultural struggle, of contested truths, of moments, events or even texts in history that thresh out rival versions of the past which are in turn put to the service of the present. . . . Hence, we create and recreate narratives in response to everchanging political and social circumstances.” 26 Some revealed secrets—stories that other members of the group knew but thought would undermine the impression they wanted to convey. The secrets sometimes revealed how hard life really was under Jim Crow—so hard that some people were driven to drink, fight, gamble, even murder. In some cases, these were narratives of the underside of survival. Some told secret stories of discomfort and deprivation, conditions that were hard to overcome and that still affect them. They wanted to share these hardships with me, but out of earshot of their group. They were recollecting a time of humiliation and frustration, a time not familiar to their children or grandchildren, who showed little interest in knowing about or appreciating their struggles. 27 STUDIES ABOUT THE BLACK COMMUNITY As an “historical ethnography” written from archival, spatial, and historical perspectives, this study is an attempt to expand anthropological and urban historical literature about black community life. My book extends the discussion of black communities in terms of time period, location, topic, and treatment of space. 28 Most ethnographies are contemporaneous studies based on several years of fieldwork. These studies offer portraits of the lives of blacks at different historical moments. As other ethnographers have done, I revisit not just a particular culture, but a particular time period of a particular culture studied by earlier anthropologists. I examine the time from the early to the mid-twentieth century, when some of these scholars conducted their fieldwork of black life. Several of these scholars also include a discussion of the broader historical and economic context of the lives of blacks they study at specific moments in the Jim Crow era. Several recent studies have also included a discussion of the history of the community. Following the tradition of such historical ethnographies of a community as Anthony F. C. Wallace’s, I advance these studies by documenting the situation for blacks over half a century rather than at a specific moment. 29 My study adds a new location to the sites where scholars have studied black communities. Most anthropologists have worked in black commu-

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nities in large northern cities. Several other scholars conducted fieldwork in the South. My study of a border-state town, and not a city, provides a basis for comparison of black life with these other ethnographies. 30 Anthropological studies of black urban communities cover a broad spectrum of topics. To depict multifaceted black life under Jim Crow discrimination, I adopt the holistic approach of the early scholars. But my work differs in several respects. I attempt to show that the interactions between blacks and whites were dynamic and changing. Moreover, I describe how social institutions served the black community. I seek to analyze black citizens’ attempts to gain equal rights as they build their own community—struggles that were an integral part of everyday life. 31 Narrower in focus and responding to cultural explanations of black poverty, anthropological studies of black communities that appeared in 1960s and 1970s provide important data about the resiliency and survival strategies of primarily low-income blacks. Building on their example, I portray survival strategies of black men and women of all economic levels, not just the poor. At the same time, I have attempted to expand upon these scholars’ research by documenting the many constraints blacks of different classes faced during Jim Crow segregation and their attempts to confront discrimination. 32 Later scholars situate their communities in larger political, social, and economic contexts as they focus on a particular topic. They have increasingly demonstrated how race, class, and gender discrimination influences the choices blacks can make. My study advances the anthropological literature to include an examination of the smaller, less collective initiatives of blacks in the pre-Civil Rights Movement era. 33 Most of the previous ethnographies treat space as simply the setting of the study. I show how white domination and segregation affected black residents’ use of spaces and establishment of alternative places. Another aspect of spatial relations in an urban setting is the meaning people ascribe to different places and the residents in them. A number of studies evaluate the connection between social and spatial hierarchy. I further this discussion with an examination of the imposition of and transgression of boundaries on the landscape, and point out alterations and stagnation of the relationships between blacks and whites on the landscape. As part of their studies, scholars have mapped black neighborhoods to illustrate social hierarchy and social conditions. I have also mapped the black neighborhoods at five different moments to illustrate the changes in the built environment that occurred during this period. To further illuminate that the landscape is not just a setting, but a territory exploited by both sides to advance their interests, I describe these struggles from a bird’s-eye view, as mentioned previously, a viewpoint that can extend the anthropological perspective of black communities. 34 Recent studies by archaeologists of the Annapolis black community are relevant to my work. My book extends these discussions through the

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depiction of the separate worlds blacks were able to construct for themselves in response to Jim Crow segregation and discrimination and through the documentation of their assertions for equal citizenship. Other books on Annapolis have tended to focus on the history of the white community and the Naval Academy. Mame Warren compiled a more inclusive oral and photographic history of Annapolis from 1900 to 1965. Jane McWilliams has written a comprehensive history of the city. Philip L. Brown has published a history of the black community from 1900 to 1950. 35 My study also advances the work of urban historians. Early studies describe the emergence of the black ghetto in the cities of New York, Cleveland, and Chicago respectively—the consequence of the migration of blacks into northern cities and white discrimination. Other scholars broaden our understanding of black urban life with their examinations of the formation of a black working class in the industrialized cities of Milwaukee and Pittsburgh during the first half of the twentieth century. While blacks became more concentrated in one area of Annapolis, Annapolis experienced neither an influx of migrants nor industrialization. The principal sources of black employment were the U.S. Naval Academy and the Chesapeake Bay. Others looked at certain aspects of relations between blacks and whites in the South, an approach I have broadened. 36 Recent historians have enriched our knowledge further about residential patterns, city planning, migration and coping patterns, diversity, popular culture, growing black identity, and role of the churches within black communities. I advance the work of these authors in my more holistic portrayal of everyday life in a black community along with a depiction of black struggle for equal citizenship and, as I have said, a description of how the contentious black-white relationship played out on the landscape of a town, as opposed to a city, in a border-state instead of in the North, South, Midwest, or West. 37 Mullings argues, “Anthropologically informed and ethnographically sensitive studies can potentially illuminate the ways in which contemporary institutions, policies, and structures reproduce racial inequality.” While she is speaking of the present day, my book attempts to illustrate the ways in which whites continued to maintain racial inequality during the first fifty years of the twentieth century, which may shed light on the current situation. I also address blacks’ reaction to this racism and their attempts to gain equal citizenship. As Mullings writes, “The enduring duality of race lies in the complicated fact that race is simultaneously imposed from above and experienced from below,” a duality which I attempt to recount about the Jim Crow segregation period in a borderstate town and portray on the landscape. 38

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ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK Robert Emerson, Rachel Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw recommend writing ethnographies as “tales.” From one’s notes and observations, the ethnographer builds “a narrative that will interest an outside audience.” A common form of ethnography, they explain, is a “thematic narrative” or “fragmented narrative,” which is “nonlinear, rearranging and presenting everyday events” in, quoting Paul Atkinson, “atemporal paradigmatic relationships.” I have constructed my book as a “chronological narrative,” which provides a linear “extended chronicle of events,” based on what I have learned from newspapers, archival records, and oral history interviews. 39 Because the story is so rich and complex, I divide it into four parallel narratives. Each portrays a different aspect of this history. The purpose of the first narrative, called “Encounters,” is to convey the dynamic relationship between whites and blacks through the telling of five engagements that took place between them. These five encounters—a baseball game, a hanging, a lawsuit, a parade, and a demolition—divide the book into different time periods—from 1902 to 1905, 1905 to 1919, 1919 to 1940, 1940 to 1949, and 1949 to 1952. The encounters are discussed in chapters 1, 5, 9, 13, and 17. The second narrative is the “Bird’s-Eye View,” in which I portray my version of the anthropological “setting” that begins many ethnographies, when the anthropologist sketches the physical landscape of the people she is studying. My “setting” is more dynamic and evocative. The “Bird’s-Eye View” chapters take the reader on an imagined aerial tour of the town on the first day of each of the five encounters. They describe relations between blacks and whites as if seen from above the town since the last encounter, providing a stage setting for each of these five acts. The narrative of the bird’s-eye view of the landscape appears in chapters 2, 6, 10, 14, and 18. The third narrative answers two questions: How did whites establish and maintain Jim Crow segregation? How did blacks respond to this unjust system and begin to dismantle it? This narrative that I call “Struggles” explains the challenges blacks faced in education, politics, health, housing, criminal justice, and other realms. It documents their persistent efforts and the variety of strategies they used to make themselves equal. It also shows how they started to make room for themselves in the white world that tried to exclude them. The “Struggles” narrative is told in chapters 3, 7, 11, 15, and 19. In the fourth narrative, “Own Worlds,” I describe the rich, varied worlds blacks made for themselves over these fifty years. I also recount how these worlds diversified and how blacks became more self-reliant. It took perseverance to survive and thrive, another point of this narrative. I document the strategies of different households based on census records

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and my discussions of childhood experiences with thirty-one individuals who grew up in Annapolis during that time. The narrative appears in chapters 4, 8, 12, 16, and 20. NOTES 1. Chapelle et al, Maryland: A History of Its People, xi; Brugger, Maryland: A Middle Temperament, 427; Callcott Maryland and America, 1–27. 2. Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, vi–xi; Franklin and Moss, From Slavery to Freedom; Harvey, Spaces of Capital, 55. A number of historians disagree about the dates and location of the Civil Rights Movement. Some argue that it began in the 1930s and 1940s and ended in the 1980s and occurred in the North as well as the South, and label it the Long Civil Rights Movement, as opposed to others who situate the movement in the mid-1950s to mid-1970s. Jacqueline Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” 1233–63; Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in recent Black Freedom Studies,” 265–85. The first half of the twentieth century I characterize the black struggle in Annapolis for equal citizenship as just that, or as “militant particularism” as Harvey describes. Harvey, Spaces of Capital, 192. 3. Brown, interview; Fields, “The Destruction of Slavery,” 5–6. 4. Moses, interview. 5. Tilly, “Afterword,” 241–66. 6. Harvey, Spaces of Capital, 192. 7. Marable and Mullings, Let Nobody Turn Us Around, xvii–xxv. 8. Brown, interview; Franklin and Moss. 9. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 385. 10. Gilkes, “Building in Many Places,” 53–76. 11. Gutman, Black Family in Slavery and Freedom. 12. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color. 13. Pinney, “Moral Topophilia,” 81. Michel de Certeau suggests that the “city is left prey to contradictory movements that counter balance and combine themselves outside the reach of panoptic power . . . beneath the discourses that ideologize the city, the ruses and combinations of powers that have no readable identity proliferate; without a point where one can take hold of them, without rational transparency, they are impossible to administer.” My vision, or bird’s-eye view, is not panoptic in the sense of power, but an observational one, not of an idealized utopia, but of a changing landscape where movement of people of different origins both changes and stays the same. That combination of stagnation and alteration reveals—subtly—successes and failures of efforts to reduce the inequality between the two groups. For de Certeau, the panorama city is a “‘theoretical’ (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices.” I disagree; by gaining a bird’s-eye view, much becomes visible. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 94–96. 14. Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 19. Isaac further states, “Moving more slowly, anthropologists for present societies, and historical ethnographers for past ones, must seek to interpret such texts—both understand the relations of production inscribed upon the land and to decipher as much as they can of the meanings that such relations assumed for those who were part of them.” 52–53. 15. Isaac, 53. 16. Margaret Rodman, drawing on her research in Melanesia, argues, “Space is socially constructed, and contested.” A landscape, she writes, can be “multilocal in the sense that it shapes and expresses polysemic meanings of place for different users. This is more accurately a multivocal dimension of place, but multilocality conveys the idea that a single place may be experienced quite differently.” Rodman, “Empowering

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Place: Multilocality and Multivocality,” 641–42. Henrietta Moore similarly describes how the daily arrangement and use of space strengthens male dominance among the Marakwet of Kenya. She argues that the meanings of spatial organization are not fixed, however—as I also found in my research. Women used their spaces to assure some power, according to Moore, who claims, “The meaning of space is extremely negotiable and almost entirely context dependent.” She writes, “The ability to make strategic interpretations of the organization of space, and the possibility of changing social and economic conditions, are the factors which allow for the possibility of social change.” Moore, Space, Text and Gender, 191. 17. Duncan, “Representing Power,” 232–33; Brown, interview. 18. Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion, 2; Harvey, Spaces of Capital, 85. 19. Moore, 191, 195; Rodman, 640–57; Sibley, x. 20. Alley houses were built in the late eighteenth century in Philadelphia. By the middle of the nineteenth century, they were common in Boston, Washington, DC, Charleston, and Cincinnati, among other cities. Warner, The Private City; Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants 1790–1880; Curry, The Free Black in Urban America; Borchert, Alley Life in Washington; Sibley, x. 21. Comaroff and Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, 34. 22. The prejudice evident in the Capital helped me understand white views of blacks, and to follow changes in white opinions, an important aspect of my research. The paucity of news about blacks also showed what the Capital’s staff thought warranted coverage. The Afro informed me of achievements of blacks that it trumpeted in its pages, revealing to me what it considered newsworthy. It also published valuable stories about social life in Annapolis. 23. Axel, “Introduction: Historical Anthropology and Its Vicissitudes,” 16; Stoler, “Developing Historical Negatives,”157–58; Green, “The Turn of History,” 815. 24. Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, 15, 52; Crapanzano, Tuhami; Crapanzano, “Life Histories,” 953–60. 25. Boyarin, Remapping Memories, 26; Mullings, “After Drugs,” 173–74. Crapanzano calls the “performative nature of memory . . . memorialization when it refers to individual recollection and commemoration when it is collective.” He argues, “All memories have a memorializing effect, even if it is trivial.” Crapanzano, Imaginative Horizons, 158–59. 26. Portelli, 63, 53; Blight, “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Struggle for American Historical Memory,” 46–52. 27. Nooter, Secrecy, 23–33. 28. Commaroff and Commaroff, 34. 29. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro; Johnson, The Negro in Chicago; Frazier, The Negro Family in Chicago; Powdermaker, After Freedom; Davis, Gardner, and Gardner. Deep South; Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis; Liebow, Talley’s Corner; Hannerz, Soulside; Stack, All Our Kin; Melvin Williams, On the Street Where I Live; Brett Williams, Upscaling Downtown; Mullings and Wali, Stress and Resilience; Du Bois, Johnson, and Drake provide the historical context for their studies. Steven Gregory documents the making of the Corona, Queens, black community from the beginning of the twentieth century, but concentrates on its political activism from the 1960s through the 1990s. In his historical ethnography of a multiethnic part of Queens that included blacks, Roger Sanjek recounts the racial and ethnic developments and relations in the borough from the 1960s. Pem D. Buck has conducted a historical study of relations between blacks and whites over 300 years in two Kentucky counties, one rural and the other more populated and industrialized. Gregory, Black Corona; Sanjek, Future of Us All; Buck, Worked to the Bone. Annette Weiner revisited and wrote about the Trobriand islanders, Women of Value, Men of Renown; Wallace, Rockdale. 30. DuBois was in Philadelphia. Johnson, Frazier, and Drake and Cayton studied Chicago, while Melvin Williams was in Pittsburgh. Carol Stack lived in St. Louis, and Bettylou Valentine was in the northern city of ‘Blackston.” Powdermaker lived in Indianola, Mississippi. Davis and the Gardners studied Natchez, Mississippi. Elliot

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Liebow, Ulf Hannerz, and Brett Williams did fieldwork in Washington, DC. Buck analyzed developments in two Kentucky counties. 31. The early scholars approach the black, urban community as a work in progress. Du Bois and Drake document the political, economic, and social history of the black community in Philadelphia and Chicago, respectively, describe the internal life of the community and examine the influence of racial discrimination on blacks. Other early scholars analyze the black community as an isolated unit, overlooking the political and economic forces that contributed to the conditions they found. Johnson, Frazier, and Powdermaker examine black acculturation into the discriminatory white world. Davis analyzes black-white relations as a fixed caste system. 32. Liebow discusses several dozen street corner men, the job discrimination they faced, and the survival strategies they adopted. Hannerz and Melvin Williams delineate the non-“mainstream” behavior of the people who lived on a street and in a neighborhood, respectively. Stack depicts the tactics of low-income women on welfare, such as creating kin-support networks. Valentine describes the survival strategies of welfare, work, and hustling of three impoverished families. 33. Brett Williams explores the relationships between different socioeconomic and ethnic groups in a neighborhood undergoing uneven gentrification. She describes community formation and misunderstandings in this increasingly ethnically mixed neighborhood. Gregory attempts to present a more complex and dynamic depiction of the “black ghetto,” which he argues is not disorganized, but is a place where political activism and community identities are continually occurring and forming. Sanjek recounts the impact of real estate policies and investment, the global economy, and immigration on an increasingly multiethnic Queens neighborhood, and the formation of complex community identities. Leith Mullings and Alaka Wali describe the “social, economic and political influences on maternal health during pregnancy” for women in Harlem. Buck depicts how white elites promoted and enforced racial difference to divide working poor blacks and whites to maintain a pool of cheap labor for their capitalist enterprises. 34. Among them are those by Du Bois, Johnson, Powdermaker, Davis et al., Drake, Liebow, Hannerz, Valentine, Stack, and Melvin Williams. A few ethnographers go further. Williams depicts a changing Washington, DC, neighborhood and the attitudes and habits of its diverse residents. Sanjek and Gregory examine a Queens neighborhood as a site for formation of community identities and political struggles in response to economic trends and city policies. Mullings and Wali enumerate the environmental assets and sources of stress on the health of women, who struggled to improve the quality of their lives in the 1990s. Harvey, Social Justice and the City, Spaces of Capital; Isaac; Moore; Duncan; Sibley. A number of studies evaluate the connection between social and spatial hierarchy. Davis explains which streets were associated with which social status; Williams relates the views of renters and owners in one neighborhood; Gregory describes the efforts of black women to combat negative images of their housing project; and Sanjek documents the changing views of different parts of Queens as new ethnic groups move into them. Rodman; Sibley; Ferguson and Gupta, “Beyond ‘Culture.’” Among the scholars who have mapped social conditions are Du Bois, Johnson, Frazier, Drake, Brett Williams, and Sanjek. 35. Paul Mullins analyzes “the relationship between race and materialism by investigating African-American consumption between 1850 and 1930.” He argues, “Black consumers fashioned a distinctive array of tactics to secure a share of affluence and condemn or circumvent racism.” In his comprehensive analysis of twenty-five years of archaeological excavations in Annapolis, Mark Leone discusses some findings related to a number of black sites. Clusters, or “caches” of artifacts, such as crystals and pierced coins, Leone claims, reveal that some enslaved Africans, and later blacks, practiced forms of African spirit traditions. These rituals and beliefs, Leone suggests, “offered a critique of capitalism” and “ways of living so as to avoid its worse impact.” The practitioners could have a “separate identity.” Mullins, Race and Affluence, vi–vii; Leone, The Archaeology of Liberty in an American Capital 244–47. Jackson, Annapolis;

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Stevens, Annapolis: Anne Arundel’s Town; Riley, “The Ancient City”; Warren, Then Again; McWilliams, Annapolis: City on the Severn. 36. Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem; Kenneth L. Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape; Alan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Ghetto; Joe William Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee; Peter Gottleib, Making Their Own Way; William H. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom; Borchert. 37. Thomas W. Hanchett writes about the changing residential patterns of blacks and whites in Charlotte, North Carolina. Charles E. Connerly discusses city planning and the civil rights struggle in Birmingham, Alabama. Luther Adams describes the migration of blacks to Louisville and their coping strategies and struggles against residential segregation and economic inequality. Karen Ferguson shows that the black community of Atlanta was not a monolith. She points out that some sectors of this diverse population were able to take advantage of the New Deal and advance themselves. Leslie Brown also depicts a diverse and developing black community in Durham, North Carolina. With its own class and gender conflicts, the community struggled within itself as it tried to gain civil rights. James B. Bennett explains the role of the Methodist Episcopal and Roman Catholic churches in the racial separation that occurred in New Orleans between 1877 and 1920. Davarian L. Baldwin and Adam Green offer rich cultural histories of Chicago’s black community and describe the important role of black popular culture in forging the “New Negro” identity and black consciousness. Christopher Robert Reed describes the vibrant “Black Metropolis” that emerged after World War I, while Clare Corbould documents the emerging African American identity in Harlem during the two world wars. Finally, Douglas Flamming takes us out west to Los Angeles. In his study of the city’s black community from the end of the nineteenth century until the Second World War, he depicts a complicated struggle between blacks and whites. Blacks made gains and experienced defeats at the same time. Hanchett, Sorting Out the New South City; Connerly, “The Most Segregated City in America”; Adams, Way Up North in Louisville; Ferguson, Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta; Leslie Brown, Upbuilding Black Durham; James B. Bennett, Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans; Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes; Adam Green, Selling the Race; Reed, The Rise of Chicago’s Black Metropolis; Corbould, Becoming African Americans; Flamming, Bound for Freedom. Adams and Wright have written about the border-state city Louisville, Kentucky. Wright describes “polite racism” in the city during a period of widespread violence against blacks in the state. Unlike Wright, I did not assess the racial violence throughout the state. Whites in Annapolis could be cordial to blacks, but that conduct was just one point on a spectrum of racist treatment of blacks from polite to violent. Adams describes the struggle of southern migrant blacks settling in Louisville. Annapolis did not experience a great influx of black migrants from states further south. 38. Mullings, “Interrogating Racism,” 682, 679. 39. Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw, Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, 170, 231; Atkinson, The Ethnographic Imagination, 126.

Publisher’s Note

The interviews used as supplemental research in this text were all conducted with the participants’ knowledge and agreement that these interviews would be used in a later publication.

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I

“There was so much due us.” —Rev. Leroy Bowman

1

ONE Encounter, A Baseball Game, 1902

In the early 1900s, the Harvard baseball team typically went south during spring vacation to compete with several colleges. The Harvard players usually stayed for a week in Annapolis, Maryland, on the western edge of the Chesapeake Bay. After a day or two of practice on the Naval Academy’s fields, the team would go to Washington, stay in its private train car in the railroad yard, and compete against the University of Virginia and sometimes Georgetown University. When it returned to Annapolis, the Harvard nine would play two games against the academy’s ballplayers. 1 As the Harvard squad of twenty-two departed from Boston for Annapolis on April 11, 1902, the Baltimore Sun told its readers that one of the players was establishing an “unexpected precedent” at Harvard. He was William Clarence Matthews, “a negro of no uncertain hue.” As a gifted athlete and agreeable person, he was becoming “one of the most popular men in the crimson university.” While students already admired Matthews for “his agility and speed as a quarterback,” he was likely “to be one of the fastest shortstops Harvard has ever had.” He was “a natural player, a hard thrower, sure at the bat and fast of the bases.” But, according to the Sun, people wondered whether the southern college teams would play against the Harvard team with Matthews as its shortstop. 2 In Annapolis, the players stayed at the Maryland Hotel, an eighteenth-century brick building shaped like a flatiron at the top of Main Street. Like the other hotels in the town that catered to whites, the Maryland Hotel did not permit blacks to stay as guests; they worked there as waiters, maids, and cooks. The hotel waived some of its rules for Matthews. The Baltimore Sun reported, “Matthews eats at the same table, lounges about the hotel and enjoys all the privileges of any other guest,” with one exception. Because the management did not allow Matthews in 3

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the public dining room, the Harvard team ate its meals with Matthews in a private room. 3 The Sun’s reporter noted with surprise that the white members of the team “not only played with him on the ball field, but ate at the same table and associated with him on intimate terms,” something that would not occur among blacks and whites in Annapolis. The Sun claimed, “A revelation to Southern people was the sight of Matthews, a negro, cavorting around the field with a white college team. It never was seen here before.” The Evening Capital, the Annapolis paper, reprinted the story. It remarked on the equality among the players, a relationship not shared between blacks and whites in the town. “His team mates call him ‘Matt,’ and he in turn calls them by their first names, ‘Henry,’ ‘Edward’ or ‘Billy,’ as the case may be. Absolutely no distinction is made. On the ball field it was not unusual to see him with his arms across the shoulders of one of the other Harvard boys.” 4 On the other hand, Matthews adhered to certain rules of etiquette that whites expected of blacks in Annapolis: “He was a quiet, well-behaved fellow and seemed to defer to public sentiment, in that he kept to his own quarters and was only occasionally seen in the hotel lobby.” According to the reporter, Matthews was “an active, stockily built, kinky-haired, darkskinned negro with brains and an unusual ability as a ball player.” Pictures of him in his yearbook reveal a thoughtful, handsome young man. 5 Black and white citizens reacted differently to his presence on the Harvard team, according to the Annapolis newspaper. “The colored people here wondered, gaped and admired the dusky wearer of the crimson suit, while the blood of the Southern element of the town boiled with wrath and the association was declared repulsive. The cadets took it quietly and concealed their feelings.” The press recounted, “Matthews was an object of great admiration to the colored population. The waiters rivaled each other in waiting on him at meals, and large crowds of them gathered each day at the Naval Academy to see him practice.” 6 While the two papers reported that Matthews was “a native of Alabama and a former pupil of Booker T. Washington,” they did not inform their readers of the rest of his interesting biography. Twenty-five years old in 1902, Matthews had been a student at Tuskegee Institute from 1893 to 1897, the practical vocational school for blacks that Washington founded in 1881 in Tuskegee, Alabama. Washington, the most influential black person at the time, helped get Matthews admitted to Phillips Andover Academy, one of the country’s most exclusive prep schools, which he attended from 1897 to 1901. The only black student at Andover, he played three sports, was elected the first black captain of the baseball team, and was considered “one of the best-liked men in the school.” Washington also supported Matthews’ application to Harvard and hoped that Matthews would return to Tuskegee to teach after he graduated. 7

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5

Matthews was one of several black students at Harvard, which had admitted at least one black in every class since 1865. Matthew’s classmates included the son of Charles W. Chesnutt, an admired fiction writer, and the grandson of Frederick Douglass. Alain Locke, who was to become one of the voices of the Harlem Renaissance, overlapped with Matthews at Harvard. W. E. B. Du Bois, an outspoken activist and rival of Booker T. Washington, received his PhD from Harvard in 1895. 8 On the day of the Harvard-Navy game, fifteen hundred people came to watch, wondering if Matthews would play. According to the papers, half the crowd would have left in protest if he had. Matthews was in uniform, but Dr. E. H. Nichols, the Harvard coach, kept him on the bench. Dr. Nichols explained to the press, “Matthews is a ballplayer from the ground up and his color is a matter that does not appeal to us as important. Before we started on this trip, however, we realized that there was one sentiment concerning the color question in the North and an altogether different one in the South.” 9 “When we came here to Annapolis we intended playing Matthews against the cadets. At first we would have done so, but when we found there were four or five Southern men on the team I advised against it, and he has not played.” Nichols indicated that “these Southern fellows, however . . . have said not a single word about his playing one way or the other. Their feelings may have been against it, but even then I do not think they would have indicated them or refused to play had Matthews been in the game.” 10 According to the coach, Matthews “accepted the situation like the ‘brick’ that he is. It was explained to him before we started and he agreed. He knew, of course, the prejudice existing in the Southern States against his race, and when it was decided not to play him below Mason and Dixon’s line, he quietly acquiesced.” However, Nichols asserted, “he will play at Harvard and any team that won’t play against him there, will not play at all. He is a good ball player and a good fellow.” 11 Harvard won the first game, thirteen to seven. During the second game between Harvard and the academy, Matthews again sat “quietly on the Harvard players’ bench,” but this time out of uniform. Harvard won again, seventeen to five. 12 The papers also interviewed the Navy coach, William Clarke, who stated that the Middies did not want to play with Matthews in the game. He claimed, “There are some Southern boys on the team to whom it would have been objectionable. They were not, of course, in a position to make an open kick, and what transpired among the players I am not at liberty to say. They would have played, however, if the Harvard team had seen fit to insist on Matthews. Harvard saw the sentiment and he has not played here.” 13 Clarke continued, “There are in the academy and on the team sons of Southern gentlemen who have the instinct that the Negro is not to be

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placed on an equality with the white man. It would have been a bitter dose had Harvard determined to play Matthews here, and the pleasant recollections of the Harvard visit would have been conspicuous by their absence.” 14 The Sun explained in a story reprinted in the Evening Capital: “Under a discipline that made it impossible for them to openly express their opinions the feeling was still made plain, and considerable gratitude was felt by the cadets at the delicacy and the tact of the Harvard team, which relieved them of a most embarrassing situation.” After the Harvard team had left town, both papers reported, “Relief was expressed at a social gathering of Naval officers in the academy at the passing of the Harvard team without friction.” 15 The black community in Annapolis did not see Matthews again. The next spring he had come as far south as Washington with his Harvard teammates, but the evening before the squad went to Annapolis, he had to leave for New York City to look after an ill brother. In 1904, he remained at Harvard, joining the team at West Point on its return North. “He decided not to embarrass the team by insisting on going on the trip south. . . . The Harvard men would have stood by Matthews, even to the extent of canceling the games with Annapolis and Georgetown and the University of Virginia, but, as he was unwilling to be the cause of any trouble in the color question, they decided to let him have his way,” the Capital told its Annapolis readers. 16 The Washington Post criticized the Harvard team for going south without him. “What we do not understand, however, is Harvard’s willingness to suppress the colored brother when it goes forth upon the round of Southern colleges. Surely this is a matter of principle. Much more surely if the colored brother is good enough to play in Massachusetts he is good enough to play in Virginia or Carolina.” It went on to scold, “It cannot be possible that descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers, scions of the high-born aristocrats who ‘came over in the Mayflower,’ and representatives of the only perfect culture of the western hemisphere—it cannot be that these divinely appointed leaders of American thought and custom will abate the very smallest item of their philosophy in deference to the prejudices of some trumpery Southern community.” 17 In 1905, when it drew up its schedule for the southern trip, the Harvard baseball team dropped Georgetown from the list of teams it planned to play, but did not remove the Naval Academy, despite the academy’s objection to Matthews playing. Three days before the game, Harvard’s management decided not to take the trip south after all and cancelled the games with the Naval Academy without any explanation. “There was disappointment at the Naval Academy,” according to the Capital, that the midshipmen would not be playing Harvard’s baseball team. Undoubtedly, there was a different disappointment in the black community that Matthews would not be coming to Annapolis. 18

Encounter, A Baseball Game, 1902

7

Matthews’s brief presence in Annapolis challenged the practices of Jim Crow segregation that were taking hold in Maryland at the time. Whites bent some rules and customs to accommodate the Harvard star, while strictly adhering to others. The academy let him practice baseball with his Harvard teammates on the grounds of the Naval Academy, but did not want him in the game. The management of the Maryland Hotel let Matthews stay in the hotel, which must have been an exception, but upheld its exclusion of blacks from the dining room. Permitting him to eat in private with his teammates enabled the hotel to avoid acknowledging publicly that Matthews had the same status as white guests, something it clearly did not believe or want to promote. Quite the opposite, the hotel owners, like the Capital reporter, must have seen Matthews as inferior, less than an equal citizen. Matthews’s presence in Annapolis called into question white assumptions about the low intelligence and achievement of blacks. 19 For the blacks in town, a small number of whom were college graduates themselves or aspired to college education for their children, Matthews must have exemplified the most effective way a black could advance himself—by attending the best white schools in the country. With that education, more doors would be open. The fact that he, a black Harvard student, could stay in the Maryland Hotel also showed them that Jim Crow barriers could be broken down. 20 As my Annapolis story begins, whites were trying to disfranchise blacks, limit their education to a few months a year, segregate them on trains, and exclude pregnant women from delivering their babies in the small, newly opened hospital. Blacks organized voter campaigns, raised funds to keep their schools open, and boycotted segregated trains. This was the early stage of their extensive attempts to gain equal citizenship during these fifty years. Blacks had already built four churches, opened small businesses, and formed social clubs and fraternal organizations. They were well on their way to developing a lively community for themselves. NOTES 1. Washington Post, Washington, DC, hereafter WP, April 2, 1902; New York Times, New York, NY, hereafter NYT, November 16, 1902. 2. Baltimore Sun, Baltimore, MD, hereafter BS, April 11, 1902. Baseball was a segregated sport in the emerging professional leagues. In 1867, the white National Association of Base Ball Players ruled that blacks could not play on its teams. The organization did not last long, and in the 1870s and 1880s, a few blacks played on white teams. The 1889 season was the last season a black played on a white team. Peterson, Only the Ball Was White, 3–53. 3. BS, April 18, 1902. 4. BS, April 18, 1902; Evening Capital, Annapolis, MD, hereafter EC, April 19, 1902. 5. EC, April 19, 1902; William Clarence Matthews Folder (UAIII 15.88.10), Harvard University Archives, Pusey Library.

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6. BS, April 18, 1902; EC, April 19, 1902. 7. Harvard Crimson, October 8, 1901; BS, December 27, 1904; Lindholm, “William Clarence Matthews,” 58–59; William Clarence Matthews Folder. 8. Sollars, Titcomb, and Underwood, Blacks at Harvard, 3; Wrinn, “Baseball Hall of Fame Highlights Harvard Shortstop”; Peterson, 3–53. 9. BS, April 18, 1902. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. BS, April 16, 1902; April 18, 1902; EC, April 19, 1902. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. EC, April 15, 1904. 17. Ibid. 18. NYT, January 28, 1905; BS, April 16, 1905; EC, April 17, 1905; BS, April 4, 1928. 19. Brugger, Maryland, A Middle Temperament, 406–20. 20. Matthews’s history is worth mentioning. After graduating from Harvard, where he was very popular and elected chairman of the Class Day Committee in 1905, Matthews played professional baseball in the Negro Northern League that summer. But he returned to Boston and studied law at Boston University while supporting himself as an athletic coach at three high schools. After passing the bar in 1908, he began his practice with William H. Lewis, another black graduate of Harvard and an attorney. In 1912, he became special assistant to the U.S. district attorney in Boston, again with the help of Booker T. Washington. Eight years later, he became legal counsel for Marcus Garvey in the United Negro Improvement Association. After the 1924 election, as a reward for his work as chief organizer of the black vote in the presidential campaign of Calvin Coolidge, Matthews was appointed assistant U.S. attorney assigned to Washington, DC, Lincoln, Nebraska, and then San Francisco, California. He died in 1928 of a perforated ulcer. The Boston Globe said he was “one of the most prominent colored men of the bar.” Lindholm, 25–42; William Clarence Matthews Folder.

TWO Bird’s-Eye View, 1902–1905

If a visitor to Annapolis in 1902 could have looked down on the town from atop the capitol dome, she would have seen a community spread out on a peninsula surrounded by Spa Creek to the south, the Severn River to the east, and Severn Creek to the north (see Figure 2.1). The town was laid out in a baroque plan that Governor Francis Nicholson designed for the new seat of Maryland government in 1694. The plan consisted of streets radiating irregularly from two circles. The Anglican Church stood

Figure 2.1. Map of Annapolis, 1902

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in the smaller of these, the capitol in the larger. By 1902, new streets confused the baroque order as they ran down from the capitol like rivulets to the market area that developed at the waterfront. Streets filled in other parts of the peninsula as well. When the U.S. Naval Academy was established in 1845, the town gave up space to the east for the school. By 1902, the academy consumed almost half of the peninsula. Visitors entered the town by ferry, by horse-drawn carriage along West Street, or by trains that had been coming into Annapolis since the 1840s from the west and north. 1 In the eighteenth century, the town had flourished as a commercial, political, and social center. This was the “Golden Age” for Annapolis as the seat of government for the Maryland colony and a prosperous port, where the white elite entertained themselves at balls and the theater. Wealthy white landowners and slave-holding families including the Carrolls, Brices, Randalls, Pacas, and Hammonds built the large, stately Georgian homes. But after the Revolution, trade declined as merchants left the town for Baltimore, a growing port with a deeper harbor and access to inland trade. Annapolis became more of a regional market town. 2 As early as 1696, Annapolis participated in the slave trade. Ships brought blacks from the Caribbean and Africa to be sold in the town. By 1755, enslaved African Americans constituted one-third of the town’s population of about 1,000. One hundred years later, there were as many free blacks as enslaved living in Annapolis, and by the onset of the Civil War, the majority of the black population—by then 31 percent of the 4,529 residents—had gained their freedom, while the number of slaves declined to 11 percent of the town’s total population. In 1900, the population of Annapolis was 8,525, including 3,002 blacks. Most Annapolitans were native Marylanders. Fewer than 500 whites were foreign-born. 3 At the time of the Harvard baseball team’s visit, Annapolis was an isolated, sleepy town, where naval officers retired and descendants of the old aristocracy still lived. The biggest economic enterprise was the thriving Chesapeake Bay fishery, which offered jobs in fishing, oyster dredging, shucking, and canning. Bottle making and, for a while, a shirt factory also provided jobs, but Annapolis’s principal employer was the Naval Academy. 4 An observer atop the capitol dome would have noticed those large, elegant Georgian homes, as well as more modest brick or wooden dwellings, Victorian townhouses, and strings of small wooden clapboard houses and tenements. The smaller homes of white merchants dotted both main and side streets. Wooden tenements for poorer whites and blacks ran along the side streets near the market and waterfront, near the Naval Academy, off West and Clay streets, and beside the railroad tracks near St. John’s College which was founded in the eighteenth century and now offered a mixture of liberal arts, engineering, and military training. 5

Bird’s-Eye View, 1902–1905

11

Alley dwellings were filling in the empty spaces behind some of the town’s streets. Developers had bought the land in the middle of spacious blocks and constructed short rows of small clapboard houses to rent to working-class tenants near the waterfront, near St. Mary’s Catholic Church on Duke of Gloucester Street, and in the triangular block off Church Circle behind the courthouse. 6 A large hotel called Carvel Hall was going up in the back of the Paca family mansion on Prince George Street. The post office on Church Circle opened in 1901. The next year, the Colonial Theatre opened on Conduit Street, and construction began on the State Court of Appeals building. Had the observer remained in a comfortable perch atop the capitol dome from the time of Matthews’s visit in 1902 until the spring of his senior year in 1905, when his team did not go south, she would have noticed that the Naval Academy was “replacing the old school with an academy of imperial proportions,” historian Robert J. Brugger wrote. By 1901, the graduating class had grown from twenty-five to sixty-one. To house the growing number of midshipmen, the academy constructed a new fourstory residence, Bancroft Hall, which looked like the Hotel des Invalides in Paris, eventually had four and a half miles of corridors, and occupied thirty acres. Work would begin on the academy’s grand chapel in December 1904. 7 The academy separated itself from the rest of the town by constructing a wall along King George Street. The Navy tore down 140 modest working-class homes between King George and Hanover streets, which were considered expendable for the sake of the expansion of a federal institution on which many of the town’s merchants and residents depended for their livelihoods. Most of the displaced residents were black. Builders constructed new homes for them near the railroad tracks at the edge of the town, away from most of the white residents. Developers, including some blacks, were buying up empty lots on streets such as Clay, East, Calvert, and Pleasant to construct more homes for blacks. 8 It would be obvious to an observer that in some places whites and blacks lived near each other, while on other streets they lived separately (see Figure 2.1). On many streets the social classes jumbled together. Blacks clustered around their churches, in the side streets near their jobs, or in the small but growing black community in the Clay Street area. 9 In the mornings, the two populations saw each other on their way to work. Black and white fishermen and oystermen left in their boats from the docks at the bottom of Main Street. Ferryboats deposited black and white passengers and produce from Baltimore and the Eastern Shore. Mostly blacks arrived to work at the wooden pavilions between the city dock and Prince George Street and at the bottom of King George Street. They stood all day shucking oysters, the Chesapeake’s most prolific resource. Two black businessmen entered oyster houses they owned and

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operated. A third black man ran the Market Restaurant coffeehouse down by the fish market. 10 By 1903, a number of black women and men worked as cooks, maids, and waiters at the new Carvel Hall Hotel, where black guests were unwelcome. Others walked to Maryland Avenue, another commercial street, which was lined with predominantly white-owned tailor shops and other small establishments where blacks performed the menial jobs of sweeping the floor, delivering purchases, or stocking the shelves. One exception was a black barber, who had a shop at number 47. State Circle bustled in the morning, particularly when the legislature was in session for ninety days starting the first Wednesday in January in even numbered years. Along with white senators and delegates, their staffs, and the people doing business with them, messengers and black and white shoe shiners showed up for work. At the governor’s mansion nearby, blacks did the cooking and cleaning. Other blacks and whites walked to jobs down some of the other streets that radiated off State Circle. 11 Black and white workers and proprietors walked down Main Street, a principal commercial artery that began at Church Circle and descended to Market Place next to the dock. At the top was the Maryland Hotel, where the Harvard baseball team stayed. White civil servants, and the white mayor and sheriff went to the city hall on Duke of Gloucester street where the “lock up” and a fire station were also located. Nearby, a black businessman worked at his nurseries behind his house on Market Street. Whites and blacks attended to legal matters at the courthouse on Church Circle at the other end of Duke of Gloucester. At the corner of South and Cathedral streets, Wiley H. Bates, the prominent black businessman, went to work at his grocery and Dr. William Bishop, a well-regarded black doctor, treated his patients at the new Emergency Hospital that opened in a converted house in 1904. West Street, off Church Circle, was another commercial street of Annapolis, where blacks and whites passed each other in the mornings on the way to work, including a black hotel owner and one of town’s five black attorneys. The Annapolis Washington Baltimore Railroad station and several coal and lumberyards employed many black laborers. Bootblacks and luggage carriers mingled about the station looking for work. 12 The nascent black commercial section ran along Calvert, Washington, and Clay streets. Blacks operated an undertaking business, several groceries, a notions shop, and a saloon. A lawyer, a number of barbers and dressmakers operated small enterprises in their homes in the neighborhood. Some whites, most of whom were Jewish, also ran businesses in the neighborhood. One block away, black and white laborers unloaded the trains at the freight depots of the Baltimore-Annapolis Line, also known as the “Short Line.” 13

Bird’s-Eye View, 1902–1905

13

Black groundskeepers, maintenance workers, cooks, and cleaners— but only white students and professors—arrived at St. John’s College. Its old buildings and new halls spread out spaciously along College Avenue. 14 Black women, who scrubbed the floors, cleaned the homes, prepared the meals, washed the dishes, and looked after children for white families, went in other directions. Early every morning, they left their modest dwellings “downtown” near the docks or “uptown” around Clay Street, and walked to white homes around town, returning home in the evenings, except Thursdays and Sundays, when they worked half a day. Other women worked as dressmakers or took in laundry and stayed at home. Black and white workers entered the Naval Academy through the gates at Maryland Avenue, blacks to work as groundskeepers, cooks, and messmen. Black women cleaned the naval officers’ homes and took care of their children. An observer would also see children and teachers heading off to school in the morning. White and black children, who might have played together in the afternoons and on Saturdays, fanned out from their neighborhoods to their different destinations. White schoolchildren and teachers went downtown to the elementary and high school buildings on Green Street. Blacks went uptown to Stanton School, near the end of Washington Street. There was no black high school. Fifty to sixty black children whose parents could afford the nominal fee walked to the Colored Catholic School. Set back from Duke of Gloucester Street next to the larger St. Mary’s Catholic school for white pupils, the two-room wooden structure built in 1891 had been refurbished in 1903 by the Catholic Church. 15 In the evenings and on weekends, the two groups would encounter each other while shopping along West and Main streets and at Market Place. On Saturdays, black and white farmers sold their produce in the side streets, or down at the market. They also came to shop in the stores, and to visit with friends and family living in town. 16 On Sundays, whites and blacks spread out over the town to attend church. Whites went to St. Anne’s Episcopal Church, the First Methodist Episcopal Church, St. Martin’s Lutheran German Church, the Presbyterian Church, St. Mary’s Catholic Church on Duke of Gloucester, or St. Luke’s Mission Chapel. Some black worshippers attended St. Mary’s Catholic Church, where they sat in the back, or the Presbyterian Church, where they sat in the balcony. Other black Presbyterians went to their own services in the Salvation Army building. Most blacks went to the Asbury M.E. Church, Mt. Moriah A.M.E. Church, St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, or the black Baptist Church. Some church parishioners went home for Sunday dinner, then went back to church for an evening service. Black women, who worked as domestics in white homes, had to work half a day on Sundays, preparing, serving, and washing up after

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their employers’ Sunday dinners. They attended the evening services at eight o’clock. Members of the small Jewish community of about eighty attended services on Saturdays at the home of Moses and Hannah Goodman. 17 An observer would have seen a variety of encounters between blacks and whites—both friendly and antagonistic, on equal footing and unequal footing. This range reflected the shifts in an uneven relationship and the permeability of the strict color line that whites sought to impose and blacks struggled against. Whites even entered the spaces blacks considered most distinctly their own, their churches. At the handsome brick Mt. Moriah A.M.E. Church, whites attended the evening concert, “You’s Just a Little Nigger, Still You’s Mine, All Mine,” in September 1904. By including plantation songs on the program, the parishioners knew they would attract a white audience and earn money for the church. In fact, the whites asked if some of the songs could be repeated at the next night’s concert. Acknowledging the racial hierarchy, but also treating them as they would any guests, the congregation seated the whites up front, near the choir. Whites occasionally attended the funeral of a black servant. A number were present at the services of Sarah Weems, familiarly known as “Aunt Sarah.” 18 Some whites walked down the streets where blacks lived. Landlords went to collect rent, insurance salesmen walked door to door selling policies, peddlers offered to sharpen knives, and farmers and fishermen sold their produce. Dr. John Ridout, a white physician and member of one of the town’s most prominent early families, visited sick black patients in their homes. They appreciated his kind treatment. White policemen came to raid crap games, break up fights, arrest bootleggers and drunks, and investigate shootings. 19 Blacks also came into white spaces. Black men of prominence had integrated some white institutions after Emancipation. T. A. Thompson was the third black man elected alderman from the Third, or “Negro” Ward. He attended the monthly meetings of the mayor and aldermen at the city hall on Duke of Gloucester Street. Blacks came into white neighborhoods to deliver packages, or sometimes dropped by white homes to ask for work or to beg. They also came to commit crimes. One man stole a chicken from his employer “in day light” and cut off its head. His employer managed to grab him until the police came and escorted him to the court “followed by a crowd of people and his employer with the chicken bringing up the rear.” 20 The two populations frequented the elegant Assembly Rooms located upstairs in the city hall for special—but segregated—affairs. One evening, the black Old Sea Going Club gave a promenade and alphabetical cakewalk. “Notaries of the colored society” attended in colonial, “dashing modern,” and “grotesque garb.” White residents came to watch the competition. 21

Bird’s-Eye View, 1902–1905

15

In the early fall, blacks displayed themselves throughout the town. “From early morning until the steamer pushed out at 10:30, there was a constant procession of colored people, young and old, wending their way to the wharf.” More than 1,400 blacks took in the trip that the Union Club sponsored. Some summers, the streets filled with black excursionists visiting Annapolis. The steamer Jane Mosely brought 1,200 people from Baltimore. 22 Both groups sometimes were segregated for popular minstrel shows at the Colonial Theatre and the Opera House. For one performance, the entire balcony of the Colonial Theatre was “reserved for the colored people” for the “colored musical comedy The Policy Players. . . . One of the leading colored organizations of the country.” The two populations assembled to watch each other’s parades, for example on Decoration Day, when the whites marched in the morning and the blacks “presented a very fine appearance” in the afternoon, an order that reflected and reinforced the racial hierarchy. 23 Blacks and whites assembled together in late January 1905 to watch the hanging of “Tots” Cooper, who had been convicted of murdering George Harris. Rev. J. H. Simmons of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church entered the jail with three members of the possibly white Ladies Guild of St. Anne’s. “Large numbers of people on outside clamored for admittance” to view the hanging in the jail yard. “Cooper walked erect and with a firm tread and head held high. . . . when the scaffold was reached he mounted without a tremor.” 24 Blacks and whites came together for illicit purposes as well. They patronized a “disorderly house” on East Street, which a white man owned. The police arrested “two negresses” and held as witnesses several black and white men who were in the house. 25 From a bird’s-eye view, occasional physical confrontations between blacks and whites would have been visible. Two or three times a year, blacks and whites could be seen fighting each other. Some encounters were simple assaults, such as when a black boy threw bricks at the white son of a judge. 26 In January 1903, a group of black men helped prevent a more serious incident when they patrolled the area around the jail all night to protect Lloyd Boyd, a black prisoner, from a possible lynching. Boyd had been accused of murdering a white seaman. A number of black men “did not go about under cover, but plainly made known their intentions. These colored men were fully armed.” During their watch, their wives and sisters gave them hot coffee and sandwiches. A mob of armed white sailors and Marines assembled at St. John’s College, but the police and county officers dispersed them. The next morning the sheriff smuggled Boyd on a train to Baltimore to avoid future trouble. 27 Big brawls also broke out. One took place at midnight one Saturday in May 1903 on West Street where a drunken black man and some whites

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got into a shoving match, and the whites went inside a barbershop. Within a short time, about two hundred blacks gathered and tried to go in the shop. The whites came outside, and fighting ensued, a brawl that showed that blacks were willing to defend their own. A week later, blacks and whites clashed again. Again, a crowd of blacks and whites passed each other on the street and traded insults, which led to fighting, then shooting with pistols. An observer might have thought that the townspeople were on edge. 28 Watching from above, an observer would have seen how whites in Annapolis were trying to maintain their upper hand as blacks tried to gain their equality. But if whites maintained their dominance in the stores, in the workplaces, in the legislature and city hall, blacks could go to their churches, clubs, certain streets, and their homes. In these places, they had some control over their everyday lives, or experienced some sense of power. Despite their tribulations, blacks were managing to “stay alive, have a good time, praise God, get ahead, and advance the race,” as will be seen in the forthcoming chapters. 29 NOTES 1. Mumford, The Culture of Cities, 399–409; Reps, Tidewater Towns, 121–40; Warren and Warren, The Train’s Done Been and Gone, 11, 87. 2. Shackel, Mullins, and Warner, Annapolis Pasts, xx; Leone, “A Historical Archaeology of Capitalism,” 1–18; Leone, The Archaeology of Liberty; Ives, “Black Community Development in Annapolis,” 29–149. 3. This rise in the numbers of free blacks occurred elsewhere in Maryland as well. Between 1790 and 1810, Maryland’s slave population increased by one-tenth while its free black population quadrupled. Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middleground; Mullins; Matthews, An Archaeology of History and Tradition, 72; Leone, The Archaeology of Liberty, 20; U.S. Department of Interior, Twelfth Census of the United States. Population, Part I, 619; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940; Census Population of 1940, vol. 2, Characteristics of the Population, Part 3, Kansas–Michigan, 9; Brugger, Maryland, 420. 4. Brugger, 435–36; Stevens, 227–31; Mullins, 104; Matthews, 21. 5. Map of the City of Annapolis, Maryland, 1903 (hereafter cited as Sanborn). 6. Sanborn, 1877; Sanborn, 1885; Sanborn, 1891; Sanborn, 1897; Sanborn, 1903; Annapolis Mayor and Aldermen (hereafter cited as AMA), “Building Permit Applications,” 1901–1907, MSA (Maryland State Archives) M57 M91-1; Larsen, Phase III Investigations for the Banneker-Douglass Museum, 26. 7. Warren and Warren, 11; Brugger, 435; Jackson, Annapolis, 105; Communication from the United States Naval Academy Public Affairs Office, July 8, 2013. 8. Sanborn, 1897; Sanborn, 1903, AMA “Proceedings, 1901–1905,” MSA 49-16, April 14, 1902; November 10, 1902; April 11, 1904, MSA M49–17, 435; Warren and Warren, 11; Jackson, 105. 9. This material is based on the U.S. Department of Interior, Bureau of Census, Twelfth Census of the United States, Population Schedules, Anne Arundel County, City of Annapolis; Sanborn, 1897; Sanborn, 1903. 10. Washington Bee, Washington, DC, hereafter cited as WB, January 8, 1898. 11. Department of Legislative Services, Under the Dome, 630; Radoff and White, Maryland Manual, 772; EC, February 16, 1904.

Bird’s-Eye View, 1902–1905

17

12. WB, January 8, 1898; Johnsons’ Annapolis Directory 1896–1897, 65. 13. Goldstein, “Surviving Together.” 14. Warren, Then Again . . . Annapolis, 60. 15. Brown, The Stanton Elementary School Story, 3; Worden, Saint Mary’s Church in Annapolis, 85–86, 131. According to Worden, a Catholic-run “colored” school may have existed from about 1866 or possibly earlier, but its location is unknown. Worden, 66. 16. Oral history interview, hereafter cited as OHI, by author with several people. 17. Sanborn, 1903, Goldstein, 6; Johnsons’ Annapolis Directory. 18. EC, September 28, 1904; June 29, 1903. 19. EC, September 15, 1904; OHI. 20. EC, January 13, 1905. 21. EC, October 21, 1903. The cakewalk dated from the mid-nineteenth century when slaveholders permitted their slaves to dress up and mock white dancing in a competition for a cake. Walker, “Introduction,” 36–37. 22. EC, September 12, 1904; EC, August 9, 1904; September 13, 1904. 23. EC, February 20, 1905; Afro American (Baltimore) hereafter cited as AA, June 4, 1904. 24. EC, January 27, 1905. 25. EC, December 7, 1903. 26. EC, April 4, 1905. That was the number of incidents reported in the Capital. 27. AA, January 24, 1903; BS, January 18, 1903. Lynching of blacks was a common occurrence then; eighty-four blacks were reportedly lynched in other parts of the country in 1903. Bennett, Before the Mayflower, 513 (the Evening Capital is missing for this time). 28. EC, May 25, 1903; June 1, 1903. 29. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 385.

THREE Struggles, 1902–1905

As the new century began, most of the 3,002 blacks in Annapolis were unskilled laborers, washerwomen, domestics, and watermen. Many were illiterate. Seven were in jail. You could count on one hand the number of black lawyers in Annapolis in 1902—five—and on one finger the number of black doctors. Schoolteachers numbered fourteen; ministers and local pastors totaled eleven. Those running their own small businesses—some in the front rooms of their homes—included seven barbers, four dressmakers, five merchants, two undertakers, three shoemakers, one saloon keeper, two junk dealers, and eleven farmers. Seventy-one blacks owned their own homes. 1 Whatever places each held in their society, black residents of Annapolis shared one inescapable fate: they faced prejudice and injustice nearly every day. Even before the new century began, whites barred them from hotels and restaurants, limited their educational and employment opportunities, and restricted their right to fair trials, decent housing, and adequate health care. As early as the seventeenth century, the Maryland General Assembly had passed laws that regulated aspects of blacks’ relations with whites; for example, a 1661 law prohibited marriage between members of the two groups. The legislature made no provision for the education of blacks until after the Civil War. By 1868, the Maryland Code stipulated that taxes paid by blacks and any donations that could be collected would finance their schools under the supervision of the white county school commissioners. In 1872, the legislature amended the code to require counties to establish a school in each election district, which it financed with an appropriation of $50,000, an amount that was doubled after sixteen years. White schools received as much as four times more. The legislature left it to the counties to decide whether they wanted to 19

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supplement state funding for black schools. In 1895, Anne Arundel County, where Annapolis is located, was one of seven in the state that spent no county money on black education. No Maryland county had a high school for blacks, and very few options for higher education existed. Morgan College, founded in 1867, and its outpost, Princess Anne Academy, as well as Baltimore and Bowie Normal Schools for Colored Teachers, were among the few academic institutions for blacks in Maryland. Public transportation was largely integrated throughout the nineteenth century. That changed with Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court decision in 1896 that determined that states could require racial segregation of facilities that were “separate but equal.” 2 As the Harvard team came south to Annapolis in 1902, whites in Maryland were trying not only to further segregate blacks, but to disfranchise them as well. Mistreatment was pervasive and constant, but the blacks of Annapolis never accepted the inferior status that whites intended for them. Blacks asserted their rights in numerous ways. Discrimination could be as blatant as “whites only” segregation or as ugly as the portrayal of blacks in the minstrel shows so popular at the time. Blacks must have been troubled by some of the performances that depicted them as oversexualized fools, and extolled the glories of slavery days. Performers such as “high chiefs of burnt cork Quinlan & Wall,” in blackface and plantation costumes, paraded these negative stereotypes before the townspeople and reinforced the racial hierarchy. 3 Local white groups also staged minstrels, sometimes training children to enact the offensive black roles, assuring that the next generation would think of blacks as second-rate. White children played “darkies” and “Little Topsies” at the St. Mary’s Catholic Church annual fair, for instance. A fundraiser for the newly established Emergency Hospital consisted of a minstrel show put on by white schoolboys. One of the numbers was a “Nigger Court Room Sketch.” These were institutions that also served the black population, so black residents had good reason to wonder about the treatment they would get from organizations that promoted their inferiority. 4 Members of the black community who read the local paper, the Evening Capital, regularly encountered depictions of themselves as bumblers, criminals, or faithful servants. Like a town crier, the paper informed its readers about the doings of blacks in Annapolis. Some stories were a source of entertainment and curiosity for white readers. Editorials and news accounts made clear whites’ limited expectations for blacks. Other stories reprinted from papers around the country reminded the black audience what whites could do to them if they got out of line—and also warned the white community of the potential dangers posed by blacks. Often the Capital’s stories about everyday events such as school graduations or church activities during the Christmas or Easter holidays omitted activities of blacks, as though they were invisible, of no account. Blacks

Struggles, 1902–1905

21

may have submitted some news items about church bazaars, school meetings, club affairs, and the like that did appear in the Capital. These notices informed white and black residents of their accomplishments. Many references to blacks were negative: “Negro on Rampage,” read a typical headline. Bulletins of court action informed Annapolis residents of black criminal conduct. One reported on an alleged young thief and hinted at police interrogation tactics. A “light fingered” fifteen-year-old black boy was locked up for his “over-weaning desire to secure the property of others.” He allegedly “took a box with coins and bills . . . the sheriff . . . put him through a course of the sprouts with a final threat of a visit to the ‘sweatbox,’” and the boy confessed. 5 News stories fairly dripped with ridicule. A typical example reported that an older black woman was “in a critical condition the result of having drunk a quantity of concentrated lye this morning” from a tin can that she thought was beer. Blacks appeared in the Capital as quixotic oddballs: “Colored employees of the Naval Academy have a habit of throwing broken dishes out of the windows . . . often nearly hitting workers nearby,” one story revealed. A frequent topic was how much blacks fought among themselves, such as the account of a woman who was bitten by a man whose wife she was helping. 6 Other stories sent different messages to blacks and whites. An editorial about a lynching, which the paper did not condone, reminded black readers how whites could brutally punish them and reminded white readers of the power they had over blacks. The paper described a lynching in Ohio of an alleged murderer who was black and who was “shot, hung up on a tree and riddled with bullets. . . . The crowd regarded it like a picnic. . . . Then [the] Negro was quartered, set on fire.” 7 White residents of Annapolis thought of blacks as their servants, clerks, laborers, and waiters. The Capital wrote that blacks became “misfits” if they were overeducated. They did not need “ologies.” They “need manual training, rather than literature . . . need to be trained in homes, workshops and fields.” 8 In the Capital, whites mourned the passing of earlier times, when black servants were at their beck and call. That nostalgia was evident, for example, in the obituary of Priscilla Kennard, a former enslaved woman, who had been “a faithful servant” for three decades. The paper commented that servants like “Aunt Pris are not to be found in these times.” 9 While the majority of blacks in Annapolis had menial jobs, some were undeterred by their limited employment choices. They trained themselves, worked a number of jobs, sought election to public office, or left town. Some efforts at advancement were individual, some collective. In 1900, St. Philip’s Episcopal Church reorganized the curriculum of its parochial school for black students to include industrial training on Fridays and Saturdays. Students were taught cooking, serving food, care of dining and bed rooms, plain sewing, and dressmaking. But if the

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school catered to white demands for black servants, it also trained black women in skills they could use while working at home as dressmakers and seamstresses, jobs that gave them greater flexibility to care for their children. 10 A few blacks imagined themselves in more professional jobs and worked to attain them. The career path of Wiley H. Bates suggests what it took to become a black grocer at the time of white supremacy. Born a slave in North Carolina in 1859, Bates came to Annapolis with his mother in 1872. At fifteen, he made his living as an oysterman. During periods of bad weather and in the summer, when oysters were not harvested, he carried hod or worked on farms for forty cents a day, sleeping in a hayloft at night. He joined Asbury M.E. Church on West Street. Though he had little formal education, Bates formed the Lyceum Debating Society at the church, where “important questions were generally discussed, which enabled him to get a thorough knowledge of how to study men.” 11 One summer he worked at a hotel at Old Point Comfort, Virginia, where he once waited on Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. In his self-published autobiography, Bates recalled that when he “saw all the preparations being made for this great man, and all of the honor shown him,” he thought, “I shall not always dance behind the white man’s chair.” From that day, he received a “greater inspiration to be a man some day and stand out as a leading example for his race to follow.” 12 He learned, he said, “With money and property come the means of knowledge, keeping in mind that a poverty-stricken class will be an ignorant and despised class.” He understood that “his destiny was in his own hands and that every dollar he laid up represented one day of independence, one day of rest and security in the future; and also a dollar gave him an equal chance in the race of life.” He appreciated that “by observing very closely the association and conversation of men higher up in life,” and realized that “life is a long journey across a barren desert and it depends upon how you start as to your condition when you reach the other side.” 13 In the fall of 1879, Bates opened a small business in Annapolis selling crabs and oysters. Soon he added firewood, which he bought and split himself. Two years later, he began his grocery business at the corner of South and Cathedral streets. Buying a minimal amount of basic staples, “he started his enterprise . . . with cash capital of twelve cents.” Proud of his achievements, he wrote about himself, “He was soon known as the Negro Gentleman by all in his community and especially his white patrons.” In addition to running his successful grocery, Bates was involved in many civic and social activities in the town, looking very respectable in his three-piece suit. 14 Some professional blacks had to work at more than one job. Richard E. King, a graduate of Boston College, who was the first black from Anne Arundel County admitted to the bar, worked as an attorney and ran a

Struggles, 1902–1905

23

small restaurant and an employment service for domestics. He could not provide for his family solely as a lawyer representing blacks. He advertised his services in the Capital, which called it a “novel advertisement.” His handbill stated, “Here the colored people and the kind of publican have all kinds of legal business promptly transacted. Where all kinds of good meals and lunches are served at all hours, cheap for cash.” 15 Many black workers in Annapolis looked for ways to supplement their meager incomes. (In 1904, blacks made from $0.50 to $4.00 a day.) They fished in the creeks and river or hunted nearby to provision their families. Black domestics prepared extra-large meals for their employers so they could take home the leftovers to feed their families. 16 White residents were aware of these efforts, but interpreted them differently. They noticed blacks “loafing about the streets whom no inducement will persuade to go to work permanently.” One contributor to the paper asked, “Now, how are these people supported?” The writer guessed, “It must be presumed that these people are fed from the kitchen of white housekeepers by food surreptitiously conveyed to them by the few who are employed, and the suffering housekeeper contributes, unwillingly to idleness and viciousness.” 17 Another option open to blacks was to move to Washington, DC, or Baltimore, where one could get a better education or find greater employment opportunities in the federal government or expanding industries. Joseph Allen worked as a mariner and his wife ran a notions shop. They managed to send their son Joseph to Howard University Preparatory School, then to Howard University, where he received his bachelor’s degree in 1904, an education that was out of reach for most blacks in Annapolis. When Joseph became a teacher the next year at the prestigious M Street High School for blacks in Washington, the Capital recognized his achievement, headlining the story, “Honors for a Colored Man.” 18 Most blacks could not follow the Allens’ example and had to rely on the inferior education available to them. Anne Arundel County funded the black school for only a few months of the year, while the white school stayed open from September until June. In 1903, the county allocated $14 a pupil for white children and $3.91 per black student. White teachers received $361.15 a month, black teachers $66.43. The training institute for black teachers ran for two days, as opposed to the three-day white institute. Some years, the state did not hold the black teachers’ institute at all. 19 Many white residents assumed that blacks required only enough education to work as domestics and laborers. When St. Philip’s Episcopal Church opened its training school, the Evening Capital applauded, “Annapolis housekeepers have happy prospects of shortly securing professional housemaids. . . . This is a long felt want in this community, and housekeepers hail the day when they may obtain trained help.” 20

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Stanton School opened its doors in the late 1880s or 1890s. It was named for Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who acquired the lumber for the building from Camp Parole, a Civil War prisoner camp outside of Annapolis. Located on Washington Street, it offered instruction to the black children of Annapolis and the surrounding county, initially for grades one through seven. 21 Because of a new court ruling, which upheld an 1868 law that based the funding of black education on the tax revenue collected from black citizens, county funds financed only ten weeks of school in the fall of 1903. Previously, the school year had lasted ten months. Stanton, which now had nine grades, closed in November without promoting any children to the next grade. The school reopened the next week, but only to those who could pay a fee of fifty cents per month per child. Some of the teachers lost their jobs and went to work in other schools in the county. Principal J. Wesley Chase solicited funds from the principal of the Colored High and Training School of Baltimore, which pledged to pay for one teacher for six weeks. The black community raised money to keep Stanton open until April, an effort that meant an additional five months of schooling for its children. 22 The next school year, the public school commissioners announced that Stanton would remain open until November 15. The board would “provide house, books and fuel for any colored school which desires to keep open, but will be responsible for no other expenses.” To raise the necessary funds, school trustees Solomon Bolden, a laborer, and William Stewart, a messenger for the U.S. Navy, and Principal J. Wesley Chase, put an ad in the Capital to appeal to the “public in general to assist us in our strenuous efforts to keep the school open” so that “600 children would not be left without the means of an education.” One aspect of the drive was a raffle for a “valuable china closet . . . at Mr. Isaac Benesch’s and Sons,” a helpful white merchant. 23 Though the school officially closed on November 15, 1904, Principal Chase proposed that a family pay a penny a day for each child to attend school. Five teachers taught the nine grades. A reader wrote to the Capital, “The colored race in Annapolis . . . are using every means to educate their children and are willingly paying the required assessment.” But the paper said nothing to its white readers about making contributions to further black education. 24 There were at least eight fundraising events, including bazaars and entertainments between December 1904 and April 1905, when the school closed for the year. Newspaper notices about these events (probably submitted by black organizers) advertised these fundraisers and encouraged the black population in its struggle to keep the school open. They also let the white population know that blacks were committed to the education of their children and would not be defeated by legal restrictions that mandated separate education and unequal funding. 25

Struggles, 1902–1905

25

An even greater challenge for the black community was maintaining their right to vote. While Maryland black men regained the vote they had lost in 1810 with the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 (though Maryland never ratified it), early in the new century, the democratically controlled, all-white legislature in Maryland began a campaign to disfranchise blacks, mimicking legislatures farther south. 26 In the 1900 election, Maryland Democrats regained the governorship, which they had lost four years earlier to the Republicans for the first time since the end of the Civil War. The new governor was John Walter Smith from Worcester County, a friend of the Democratic boss, Arthur P. Gorman. The Democrats remained in control of the legislature and governorship in the subsequent elections of 1902 and 1904, when Baltimore banker Edwin Warfield, another Gorman protégé, was elected governor. 27 White Democrats understood that silencing the voice of the traditionally Republican black voter improved their chances of winning elections. In the conservative Eastern Shore and Southern Maryland, substantial numbers of blacks were registered as Republicans, and the white Democratic delegates from these counties were the strongest supporters of disfranchisement. 28 In 1901, the legislature passed a law that forbade use of party symbols to identify candidates on the ballot. Instead it required that party affiliation of candidates be spelled out, candidates be listed alphabetically and grouped according to office. The law prohibited assistance to voters. These provisions made it harder for illiterate voters to understand the ballot and vote. According to a state survey in 1900, 47 percent of all registered black voters could not read or write, versus 8 percent of white registered voters. 29 In response, the black Republicans of Annapolis organized a school for black men at the Knights of Jerusalem Hall on Clay Street to teach reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, English, geography, and Maryland and U.S. history. The paper reported, “The private school for colored men . . . appears to be in a flourishing condition at the start. Twenty pupils were enrolled the first night and a great interest is manifested by the colored men who are anxious to learn before the next election which will disfranchise them.” 30 This effort coincided with a campaign of state Republicans to prepare illiterate black and white Republican voters. The Maryland League of Republican Clubs planned to distribute a sample ballot to Republican clubs in every county in the state to help the illiterate voter recognize the word “Republican.” Their voter education project succeeded; the Republicans won the 1901 municipal elections in Annapolis. 31 The Democratic platform in the gubernatorial race of 1903 stated, “The political destinies of Maryland should be shaped and controlled by the white people of the state.” The black voter was “ignorant, corrupt, the blind instrument of unscrupulous and selfish leaders” that “posed a per-

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petual menace to the prosperity and peace of Maryland.” The Capital supported the Democratic position, describing black voters as “the nontaxpaying, criminal and uneducated class being used en masse by sinister politicians to force political policies on the government that a vast majority of the intelligent white voters of this country oppose.” 32 Election Day in 1903 was difficult for some black voters in Annapolis because of a confusing ballot. Some of the illiterate voters took so long to mark their ballots their votes were rejected. The Capital called the result of the election a “Democratic landslide,” while the Afro informed blacks, “There is nothing for us to do but heroically take our medicine.” 33 Arthur P. Gorman, leader of the Democrats in Maryland and now a U.S. senator, asked John Prentiss Poe, the dean of the University of Maryland Law School, to draft an amendment to the state constitution that would disfranchise blacks but not violate the Fifteenth Amendment. Borrowing from a recent Virginia law, Poe included the “grandfather” clause that permitted white males, who had been qualified before the Fifteenth Amendment went into effect, and their male descendants of legal age, to vote. Other men had to be able to read, or have read to them, a passage from the Maryland Constitution and convince the registrar that they had a “reasonable understanding of its meaning.” 34 The Capital expressed some ambivalence about the sweeping nature of this proposal. It also published, with a disclaimer, a portion of a sermon by Rev. M. W. Traverse of Mt. Moriah A.M.E. Church opposing disfranchisement and the proposed legislation to segregate passengers on the railroad then making its way through the state legislature. Rev. Traverse said, “The passage of the disfranchisement bill and the ‘Jim Crow’ car law are mischievous devices, and calculated to do irreparable injury to the self-respecting colored race. . . . For it is clear to the average mind that the Negro is better prepared today to exercise the right of franchise than at any other period of his political life.” He urged people to speak out: “Are the Christian churches asleep? Is the public conscience paralyzed? Is the aim of the ubiquitous press helpless and inkless for justice? We ask every fair minded person is this Christlike, is it godlike?” 35 In Baltimore, blacks formed a Suffrage League to oppose the pending legislation and urged pastors to discuss the topic in church. Leagues formed in other towns. Members of the Baltimore Suffrage League came to Annapolis to meet with Governor Warfield in the spring. The group learned that while he favored giving the vote to educated blacks and property owners, he still had “old antiquated ideas” and was under a lot of pressure from his party. The Afro repeatedly published editorials opposing the bill. 36 In the spring of 1904, with little debate, the Senate passed the bill drafted by Professor Poe 17–7, and the House of Delegates passed it by a vote of 64–7. The Capital indicated a certain ambivalence about the “sweeping” quality of it because the writer thought that some blacks

Struggles, 1902–1905

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“were worthy of the franchise.” But other comments in the paper would have disturbed black readers in Annapolis. Those worthies were “exceptional cases. The enfranchisement of the negro, conceived in political sin, the offspring of political greed and dishonesty, has been an inheritance of fraud, among the negroes themselves. . . . Disfranchisement of the negro . . . will, therefore, work for the benefit of the community, for the State and for the country.” 37 In the end, Governor Warfield opposed the bill and refused to sign it, much to the dismay of his party. Warfield thought the legislation “unfair and iniquitous,” according to the Capital. He tried to persuade the legislators to alter the bill. The legislature instead called for a referendum that the Maryland voters had to approve by November 1905, a tactic the governor also objected to. 38 The campaign over the referendum on the Poe Amendment, as it was now called, consumed much of 1905. White Marylanders were divided. Immigrants in Baltimore formed a suffrage league to oppose it. Many white Republicans and reform Democrats also objected to it. An editorial in the Capital said, “The election law passed by the legislature seems to meet with disapproval by a large number of voters, both white and colored, in this community, as they claim that the ticket is complicated and liable to embarrass the uneducated voter as well as others.” The voters rejected it that fall. But the struggle over disfranchisement dragged on for years. 39 In contrast, the battle over the laws to segregate blacks in certain railroad cars was resolved in two legislative sessions—1902 and 1904— with a swift and decisive loss for the black residents of Annapolis and Maryland. In 1902, legislation requiring racial segregation on railroads and steamships failed to pass. Opponents of the measure included railroad and steamship companies that did not want to pay the costs of segregation. The Afro-American strongly protested the “Jim Crow” car bill. It urged every black to “take off his coat and resolve to put up the stiffest kind of fight against this infamous measure” and told its readers, “It has for its real purpose the humiliation of our people. It is a wicked and shameful measure.” 40 A delegation of business and professional men arrived in Annapolis in February 1902 to present a petition to the legislature’s Committee on Corporations, signed by more than one thousand black and white citizens of the state. The petitioners told the legislators of “the humiliating effect it would have upon the better class of colored people who are striving to make something of themselves. . . . Most of the traveling done was not by the objectionable class, at which the bill seemed to aim.” It successfully urged the defeat of the measure “to preserve the reputation of our State for justice and fair play.” 41 But with Democratic gains in the 1903 elections, the General Assembly in 1904 “placed more discriminatory laws on the books of Maryland than

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any previous or subsequent legislature,” historian Margaret Law Callcott wrote. In addition to the Poe Amendment and laws that would eliminate black voters in numerous municipal elections, the General Assembly passed laws mandating that all railroads provide separate cars or compartments for blacks and whites and requiring that steamships provide separate seating, sleeping, and dining accommodations. No such laws had existed in the nineteenth century. 42 The debate over the 1904 Jim Crow law was “sharp.” Some senators tried to get their counties exempted from the law. After its passage, the Capital wrote, “It looks as if the colored brother would have to eat crow, after all. . . . Why should the colored brethren feel indignant when a car is set aside for their sole and separate accommodation? A special car is usually regarded as a sign of distinction.” 43 There seemed to be “a margin in interpretation on the BaltimoreWashington line,” the Capital pointed out. The black coach had ten seats set aside for smokers and twenty seats for black passengers. The car had all the same conveniences for travel as the white coach. “On the Short Line, coaches for whites have been partitioned off, a part used for colored and other for white . . . should a colored want a drink of water they will have to pass through the white part,” the Capital reported. 44 Black ministers preached about the injustice of the laws. Some blacks organized a boycott of the trains and excursion lines. Mt. Moriah A.M.E. Church, for instance, made a large poster advertising its annual excursion to Cambridge, Maryland, on the black-owned boat, Jane Moseley. In bold letters it stated, “The Lord will provide no Jim Crow Car.” The Evening Capital reported that few blacks in Annapolis took trains on the first day the law was in effect. “There was not the slightest difficulty. The colored people seemed to know in what car they were expected to travel and they quietly took their seats in it . . . an officer of the law was present at all of the trains in case his services were required to enforce the law.” 45 The Afro-American reported a different version of the Annapolis boycotts: “Colored people are grinning and bearing up as best they can, while some of them are muttering, deep but not loud. The most of them, however, are protesting in a very manly way, and letting the white folks know that while they are submitting, it is with a very bad grace that they do it . . . [they] are refusing to ride on the railroads and steam boats, except where they must do so.” A group of one hundred blacks drove wagons to a camp meeting rather than ride in a segregated train car. 46 Some blacks in Annapolis decided that since they could not defeat the bill, they would make sure that the implementation of the law was equitable. The black alderman, T. A. Thompson, claimed that “the cars for colored people on one of the roads do not contain the conveniences the law provides as to toilet and water cooler, and that he will make an effort to test the law which is not complied with on the local road.” 47

Struggles, 1902–1905

29

Blacks who challenged the segregated seating regulations were arrested. According to the Afro, a passenger getting on the train in Philadelphia to go to Baltimore was told to move into the Jim Crow car after Wilmington. He refused and was “put off the train violently by the conductor in the Northeast Station in Maryland.” 48 Implementation of the act was inconsistent. The Baltimore and Ohio Line interpreted the law to mean that it did not have to provide segregated compartments for the two populations while passing through Maryland. Those trains traveling solely within the state had separate compartments for blacks and whites. The Afro-American pointed out, “Jim Crow has some ridiculous features. . . . Negroes are happy and the whites are profoundly disgusted” by the fact that the “only time the laws are enforced is when traveling in state limits.” 49 The career of the black alderman, T. A. Thompson, a Republican, who had spoken out about the implementation of the separate railroad car law, illustrates the opportunities available to determined blacks, and also the strict limitations they faced in politics. Thompson was first elected an alderman in 1887 and served three terms. He was succeeded by William Butler, Jr. (1893–1897) and Wiley H. Bates (1897–1899) and then reelected to three more terms (1899–1907). 50 Born in St. Croix, West Indies, in 1862, Thompson moved with his parents first to Jackson, Mississippi, where his father served as minister in the African Methodist Church. In 1878, Thompson graduated from Alcorn University, a land-grant agricultural and mechanical college for black men founded in 1871 in Rodney, Mississippi. The following year, the family settled in Annapolis, where Thompson’s father, Rev. Thomas G. Thompson, became pastor of Mt. Moriah A.M.E. Church. Thompson and his family could afford the fees at Howard University in Washington; he graduated with a degree in law in 1892. Thompson then launched a law practice in Annapolis. Representing only black clients did not provide him with a sufficient income, so he sought a second job. He was a teacher at Stanton School and served as the school’s principal for six years. Thompson married the daughter of Frank H. and Sodonia R. Johnson. For years, his father-in-law was the only black Democrat in Annapolis. He and his wife had five children. 51 Newspaper accounts suggest that Thompson had some power and stature, but both could be transitory. He tried to exploit his minority status as a Republican. He was entitled to sit on certain city boards, giving him a voice in the discussions. But the only black on the city council could do little to help his constituents. A profile in the Capital before his reelection indicated that during his 1899–1901 term of office “he has served on important committees and has introduced the greater portion of legislation looking to the interest of his ward, and has succeeded in having same passed.” Because of his efforts, Washington and Clay streets were curbed for the first time. 52

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After winning his election in 1901 to the city council, Thompson had to step down as teacher because of a law prohibiting him from holding two offices of trust. When Mayor Charles Dubois assigned him to committees he did not want, he resigned from them, saying that “he had expected better treatment at the hands of his party.” A few years later in 1904, perhaps attempting to gain favor with his white colleagues, Thompson proposed an order that the city council approve to put a gas line in Madison Street and West Street—a predominantly white area. The Capital observed that Thompson liked to help white constituents who did not live in his ward. 53 His career was jeopardized in 1905, when a client accused him of failing to represent her in her divorce case after she paid his fee. Before the court exonerated him, the Republican committee nominated Solomon Bolden to replace him as one of the two candidates for alderman of the Third Ward. Bolden was another prominent figure in the black community. Now a manager of the Annapolis Coal Company, he also served as a trustee of the Stanton School. The Republican committee also nominated the white businessman and St. John’s graduate, Louis Baer, who ran a liquor store in the Third Ward. After Thompson’s exoneration, Bolden’s supporters and Thompson’s disagreed over which man should be on the ballot, but Thompson prevailed. He and Baer won the election. 54 Blacks had almost no voice in the court system of Annapolis, redoubts of injustice and bias. The police force was entirely white. Wiley H. Bates and Charles Johnson, another black businessman, were the only black men selected as jurors—and they were chosen infrequently. After being arrested, some blacks were subjected to police brutality to gain confessions. 55 The black defendant who was found guilty of murdering a white seaman—the man whites in the town threatened to lynch in 1903—was indicted on the basis of the testimony of a policeman who overheard a conversation between the accused and his attorney during which he made a confession. 56 Members of the black community did not challenge such discriminatory practices directly, but occasionally found ways to express their views. Some fought police making arrests or conducting raids. When two white police officers tried to put handcuffs on a boisterous black man coming out of a “colored ball” at the Clay Street Hall, black revelers crowded around the officers, knocked them down, and beat them. The next day the black man was arrested, and Mayor Dubois threatened to tear down Clay Street Hall if order could not be maintained. A few days later, the trustees of Clay Street Hall wrote to the Capital, noting that the brawl occurred outside the hall, and that they planned to hire two black private policemen to work with the white officers to avoid further mishaps. 57

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31

Blacks in Annapolis publicly requested leniency for some black felons condemned to die. In January 1905, a number of blacks—and whites including two members of the jury—wrote to Governor Warfield requesting clemency for Julius “Tots” Cooper, who had been convicted of murdering George Harris, a “respected colored man.” Cooper’s white lawyer, former judge Daniel R. Magruder, thought the judge had unfairly rushed the trial, denying him adequate time to prepare the case; claimed that the evidence did not prove that the murder was premeditated because Cooper was drunk at the time; and asserted that Cooper did “not appreciate his situation and could be of ‘unsound mind.’” The governor refused to alter the sentence. 58 Cooper’s swift five-hour trial had taken place at the end of October 1904. After deliberating for four hours, the jury convicted him. When read the death warrant, “not a word escaped his lips, not a movement of his brutal face. The face of someone who has permitted the brutal instincts to dominate,” the Capital commented. 59 The paper recounted in voyeuristic detail the condemned men’s last days in jail. It reported that Cooper was served an exceptionally good Christmas dinner “of turkey, hominy sauce, vegetable of every description and side dishes.” On the morning of the execution, the jailers gave him “a new suit of black clothes, new shoes, a black tie and white collar,” which they reported, “he donned with a tremor . . . his senses seemed dulled.” 60 Black residents of Annapolis were also reminded of their inferior status whenever they fell ill. Health facilities in Annapolis were segregated and unequal. Black patients could be treated at the hospital in a small ward set aside for them, but there was no maternity ward for black women. They had to rely on midwives in their neighborhoods or travel to Baltimore or Washington to give birth in a hospital. Dr. William Bishop was able to practice at the small new hospital when it opened. After he died in 1904, no black doctor was permitted to practice at the hospital for the next fifty years. Blacks in Annapolis did not accept the idea of white supremacy. They saw themselves as equal citizens. Many blacks rejected the degradation of themselves implied in Jim Crow legislation and the discriminatory practices already in place, and openly stated in the Capital and the minstrel shows. They asserted their rights. They sought to advance themselves. They boycotted, prolonged their school year, tutored voters, raised funds, wrote letters of protest, and challenged policemen. As time went on, they developed more ways to confront white racism. 61 NOTES 1. Twelfth Census.

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2. Mayer, Supplement to the Maryland Code Containing Acts of the General Assembly, vol. 3, 198; Poe, The Maryland Code: Public General Laws Adopted by the General Assembly, vol. 2, 1188; Brugger, Maryland, 409, 419; Brackett, Notes on the Progress of the Colored People of Maryland since the War, 93; McConnell, Three Hundred and Fifty Years, 14; Harley, The Timetables of African-American History; Bogen, “Precursors of Rosa Parks,” 721–51. 3. EC, October 3, 1903; March 12, 1904. 4. EC, November 27, 1900; May 23, 1903. 5. EC, September 3, 1903; January 7, 1905. 6. EC, April 19, 1905; March 14, 1905; August 20, 1903. 7. EC, March 11, 1904. By the time the editorial appeared in 1904, there had been more than 500 lynchings of blacks in the twentieth century. “Lynching in America,” http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingyear.html. 8. EC, December 28, 1904. 9. EC, March 9, 1901. 10. EC, September 26, 1900. This vocational training corresponded to the curriculum of Tuskegee Institute founded by Booker T. Washington, who believed that Negro education should meet white needs for domestics and laborers and was the predominant model for black education. Churches provided social services to their members, or built social institutions for their congregations. Franklin and Moss, From Slavery to Freedom, 270, 285–86. 11. Bates, Researches, Sayings and Life of Wiley H. Bates, 41–43. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 44. 14. Ibid., 46. 15. EC, January 3, 1900. 16. Greene and Woodson, The Negro Wage Earner, 135, 163; OHI with four people. 17. EC, August 28, 1903. 18. EC, July 5, 1905. 19. AA, January 20, 1906; EC, November 18, 1903; November 15, 1904. The paper only mentions that the white teachers’ training occurred. 20. EC, September 27, 1900. 21. According to Philip L. Brown, in 1898, “Wiley H. Bates, colored Alderman for the Third Ward . . . introduced a resolution accompanied by a petition signed by the colored residents of Annapolis calling for the establishment of a school for colored children in Annapolis. During the same year, the legislature appropriated $1500 for the establishment of an industrial school for the teaching of colored children in Annapolis, and at the same time enacted a law requiring the county to raise $6000 and the city of Annapolis to raise $3000 for the construction of a colored school in Annapolis.” Brown, A Century of “Separate but Equal,” 4. Stanton School is evident on the 1885 Sanborn map, however. The Galilean Fishermen School, founded in 1868 on East Street, provided instruction to black pupils prior to the establishment of Stanton and existed until 1900. Brown, Stanton Elementary School, 3; Sanborn, 1885. 22. EC, July 22, 1903; November 14, 1903; December 21, 1903. 23. EC, October 3, 1904; October 14, 1904. 24. EC, November 18, 1904; David S. Jenkins, “A History of the Colored Schools in Anne Arundel County, Maryland and a Proposal for Their Consolidation.” 25. EC, December 10, 1904; AMA, “Reports,” 1843–1971, MSA M102; EC, April 25, 1905. 26. McConnell, 4, 10. 27. Brugger, 406, 420, 403. 28. Brugger, 421. 29. Margaret Law Callcott, The Negro in Maryland Politics 1870–1912; Brugger, 406, 420. 30. EC, March 23, 1901; April 3, 1901. 31. EC, June 22, 1901; July 9, 1901; November 7, 1901.

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32. Brugger, 420; EC, November 2, 1903. 33. EC, November 3, 1903; November 4, 1903; AA, November 7, 1903. 34. Brugger, 420. 35. EC, March 1, 1904. 36. AA, April 2, 1904. 37. Department of Legislative Services, Under the Dome, 200–202; EC, March 4, 1904. 38. Brugger, 421; EC, March 23, 1904; Callcott, 119. 39. Brugger, 421, 424; EC, November 4, 1904; November 8, 1905. 40. AA, January 18, 1902. 41. AA, February 22, 1902. 42. Department of Legislative Services, Under the Dome, 200–202; Callcott, 133–34. 43. EC, February 26, 1904; March 2, 1904; March 10, 1904; March 3, 1904. 44. Brugger, 422; EC, June 29, 1904. 45. EC, July 1, 1904; July 11, 1904. 46. AA, July 16, 1904; EC, August 2, 1904. 47. AA, June 25, 1904; EC, July 1, 1904. 48. AA, July 16, 1904. 49. EC, August 11, 1904; AA, August 20, 1904; August 13, 1904. 50. EC, July 10, 1903; Brown, The Other Annapolis, 129. 51. EC, July 6, 1901; EC, July 10, 1903; http://www.alcorn.edu/about/default.aspx? id=559. 52. Twelth Census; EC, July 10, 1903. 53. EC, July 6, 1901; July 12, 1901; September 10, 1904. 54. EC, February 21, 1905; February 23, 1905; March 17, 1905; March 18, 1905; March 22, 1905; April 25, 1905; July 11, 1905. 55. EC, January 7, 1905. 56. AA, January 24, 1903. 57. EC, April 11, 1902; April 15, 1902. 58. EC, July 18, 1904; January 18, 1905; January 23, 1905. 59. EC, November 2, 1904; November 25, 1904. 60. EC, December 27, 1904, January 27, 1905. 61. Tilly, “Afterword,” 241–66.

FOUR Own Worlds, 1902–1905

At the end of a hard day, blacks in Annapolis withdrew to their own businesses, entertainments, churches, and homes. Turning their backs on whites to create their own worlds was an old response to white prejudice. By the time the Harvard baseball team came south to Annapolis with William C. Matthews, the blacks of the town had already built four churches and a school, opened shops, and organized clubs. Blacks devoted much time and effort to improving their institutions—and having a good time in the process. Here they gained a sense of self-reliance, community, and accomplishment that was denied to them in the white world. Here they could promote themselves as leaders, people of substance, and members of dynamic churches and societies. Here they could advance themselves despite white restrictions. 1 Blacks in Annapolis began their separate church life late in the eighteenth century when they first left white churches to worship on their own. Following the examples of Richard Allen, who had launched the separate Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia in 1794, and a group of blacks in Baltimore who formed the Sharp Street Church in 1787, free blacks Thomas Folkes, Smith Price, and John Wheeler purchased land outside the town gates of Annapolis in 1799 “for the purpose of building a meeting house to be called ‘The First African Methodist Episcopal Church.’” After about twenty years this building may have burned or was abandoned, and, according to several researchers, the congregation was “unsettled,” worshipping at some point in the basement of the home of Marcelus Hall, a carpenter and undertaker who was one of the church’s parishioners. In 1874, trustees Henry Cooper, James Boardley, John W. Hall, Charles L. Harris, and Loundon Pinkney purchased a lot on Franklin Street, down the street from the courthouse, where the congregation constructed a wood-frame church. Two years 35

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later, it was moved to Parole, now a small black suburb of Annapolis, to be used as an A.M.E. mission church. In its place on Franklin Street, the growing congregation built a handsome new brick building, completed in 1876. Frederick Douglass, the most renowned black American of his time, spoke at its dedication. The following year the congregation named the church Mt. Moriah African Methodist Episcopal Church. 2 Another group of black parishioners of the white First Methodist Episcopal Church on State Circle—permitted to worship only in the church’s balcony, accessible by outdoor stairs—decided to establish their own Asbury Methodist Episcopal Church. Henry Price, a merchant, investor in real estate, and local black preacher, and his wife donated the land in 1836, and Charles Shorter, a founding trustee of Stanton School and master carpenter and builder, financed the construction of the church’s first building on the commercial West Street. It was completed by 1840. The congregation planned and financed the construction of a larger brick building between 1891 and 1895. 3 Initially these black congregations had to agree to abide by the rules of the white Methodist Episcopal Church. Since 1723, blacks had been prohibited from assembling in Maryland on Sundays without the presence of a white person. White ministers gave the sermons and administered communion once a month at these churches while the black lay preachers of Asbury and Mt. Moriah, who were not accepted as members of the Methodist Conference, acted as helpers of the white pastors. They were allowed to bury the dead and visit the sick. These discriminatory practices ceased at the end of the Civil War, when blacks formed their own Methodist Conference and selected their own ministers. 4 A black Baptist congregation formed in the late 1870s and assembled in a clapboard building on Market Street by 1893. This church belonged to a national black Baptist organization. The “independent congregation” of black Episcopalians that formed in 1872 had to remain under the direction of the white Episcopalian bishop of Maryland and the supervision of the rector of St. Anne’s Parish. They converted a house on nearby Northwest Street into their church, which they called St. Philip’s Episcopal Church. And some blacks attended St. Mary’s Catholic Church, which opened in 1823 on Duke of Gloucester Street. Records show that black freemen and slaves were baptized and married in the church from its beginning. By 1903, 214 blacks were members. 5 The black churches offered their parishioners lessons on thriftiness, perseverance, and faith. In some churches, the preacher’s exhortations provoked loud cries of affirmation and instilled a sense of uplift that would carry the worshippers through the week. Most parishioners attended the Sunday morning service. Some went back a second time for an evening service. Children attended Sunday school and sometimes youth meetings in the afternoons. 6

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Holidays brought the black community to the churches for special ceremonies. St. Philip’s Episcopal Church held a Christmas service, and its Sunday school children, sang Christmas carols and received gifts and candy dispensed from “a handsomely decorated Christmas tree.” 7 Summer was the time for camp meetings. Crowds left Annapolis in “drays, daytons, buggies.” Hundreds of participants came from churches up and down the Chesapeake Bay. Some meetings were held each weekend for a month. Others lasted two weeks; attendees set up tents and stayed. The gatherings were an occasion to “praise the Lord” and to visit with friends and family. One meeting in July 1904 included sermons by preachers from three different Methodist churches, who were followed by Singing and Praying Bands that came from all over the region. Members of Asbury M.E. Church formed such a band that summer. 8 Summer also meant the much-anticipated church excursion. A steady parade of over a thousand blacks made its way down to the dock at Prince George Street to board a ferryboat for towns along the tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay. Some stayed home because they thought the excursionists could be too rowdy. One year on the return trip of Asbury M.E. Church’s excursion to Havre de Grace, about twenty passengers got into fights. 9 Funerals and weddings offered recognition and group solidarity, a chance to display wealth or accomplishment. Many mourners gathered at Asbury M.E. Church for the funeral of Rev. Noble Watkins, a local preacher, who died at eighty-nine. “He was a respected colored citizen who had done much good among his race,” the Evening Capital reported. Members of a fraternal or sororal society always attended a fellow member’s funeral in their uniforms and gave eloquent eulogies. 10 Weddings of the small black elite were particularly lavish. The Afro enthused about one in the spring of 1902: “One of the prettiest weddings of the season” was that of Miss Hattie Reid, daughter of Mrs. Sedonia Reid, to Mr. Thomas E. Baden, a member of a respectable old family, at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church. “The bride was beautifully gowned in white organdy with chiffon and pearl trimming, carrying Lilies of the Valley.” Guests attended a reception at the bride’s parents’ on West Street. “The presents were numerous and costly.” 11 Early records of Asbury M.E. Church suggest just how much blacks raised for their churches. Rev. Alexander Dennis, who came to Asbury in 1900, wrote in his report to the Methodist Conference at the end of his first year, “The main debt on the church at that time was $5,227.00 [or the equivalent of about $147,000 in 2012 dollars]. I found the people ready for work and we went at it.” By 1902, the church had paid off about $2,000 of the debt. In 1905 after Nathaniel M. Carroll was appointed minister, the church was “free of debt.” According to Rev. Carroll’s notes, the church was valued at $16,000 and the parsonage at $2,500. He received a salary of $900 a year. 12

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Parishioners developed many ways to raise money. For example, members of Asbury M.E. Church held a “great military rally” in the summer of 1904 for two Sundays in a row. The congregation divided itself into twelve “companies” and competed for a silk banner that went to the company that raised the most money. Visiting ministers preached at three different services each Sunday. The rally brought in $1,026.50, “the most successful rally ever held at the church and the largest amount ever raised at one time in any colored church in Annapolis,” the Afro reported. 13 Women and men spent weeks preparing for the annual Women’s and Men’s Day services. Special committees set the amount of money to be raised, organized the day’s programs, and invited speakers to lead the three services. In 1905, the women’s committee of Asbury wanted the women to raise $250. Whether they met this goal is unknown. Leading black women including Georgia Boston, Sarah Boston, and Alice Warren participated in the services. 14 Parishioners converted their churches into concert halls and charged a small admission fee. Madame Abbie Wright Lyon, a talented singer originally from New York City who called herself “Colored Patti,” gave a concert one night at Asbury. Churchgoers also regularly got permission from the city council to hold bazaars, musical entertainments, and musicales at the town’s Assembly Rooms to benefit their churches. 15 Informative evening lectures were another feature of church life and fundraising. Some well-known blacks came to Annapolis to give talks. In 1900, Rev. James T. Holly, DD, bishop of Haiti, lectured at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church and his son showed pictures from a “stereopticon”—a “highly interesting and instructive” presentation. Another evening, Rev. Ernest Lyon, the American minister and resident consul general to the Republic of Liberia, and husband of Abbie Wright Lyon, came to Asbury to talk about “The Colored Man’s Relation to the Pending Issues.” Admission was ten cents. 16 St. Philip’s Episcopal Church held a “poverty social,” at which the winners were given prizes for the most dilapidated costume. On a Thursday night, when domestics only worked half a day, the Reserve Society of Mt. Moriah held a “grand prize entertainment.” Guests took home such prizes as a music box, mandolin, small piano, tin toilet set, punch bowl and six glasses, and a rug. Five couples competed in a “grand cake walk,” the winning couple receiving the cake and an umbrella. 17 Church organizations met monthly at the churches or in members’ homes, occasions for socializing, gaining management skills, and enhancing one’s status. The members might plan benefits at the Assembly Rooms, decorate the church, assist needy parishioners, visit ill members, or cook church suppers. A group from Asbury formed the King’s Daughters and Sons in 1905 to help the sick and less fortunate members of the church. Members of respected families such as the McPhersons and Ho-

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wards formed the Sunday School Committee of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church. Black Catholics had already established the St. Teresa’s Beneficial Society by the early 1870s to help its members when they were sick or dying. 18 Churchgoers did not limit themselves to spiritual and social tasks. Together blacks and their ministers worked for the betterment of their people. At the turn of the century, First Baptist started a day school built at the rear of the church, where the pastor, Rev. J. T. Reed, worked to uplift the children. On some Sunday afternoons, Mt. Moriah held an “Educational Day” service for the Sunday school students. 19 The ministry attracted educated men who joined the black community’s elite. A number of the ministers attended college and theological school, a noteworthy achievement. Rev. J. T. Reed graduated from Howard University, and Rev. I. S. Lee of Mt. Moriah went to Wilberforce University in Ohio. Rev. John H. Simons, a native of Bermuda and a graduate of General Theological Seminary of New York, which gave him a special commendation for Greek and Hebrew, began his service at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in 1901. He and Rev. M. W. Traverse and Nathaniel M. Carroll of Asbury M.E. Church were doctors of divinity. 20 Black ministers spoke out publicly against pending Jim Crow laws, unequal education, and the Poe Amendment. They urged their congregations to vote against the referendum and boycott trains. They permitted groups to meet at their churches to discuss opposition strategies. Next to the churches, the fraternal organizations played the most significant role as social and social welfare organizations in the black community. The oldest was the Prince Hall Masons, first organized in Boston in 1787 by Prince Hall, a black soap maker and activist. A group of blacks serving in the U.S. Navy in Newport, Rhode Island, founded the Universal Lodge No. 14 in 1864, and moved it to Annapolis in 1876. In August 1903, the group organized a “grand and inspiring” ceremony to celebrate the laying of the cornerstone of the new Temple of the Knights of Jerusalem, another fraternal society. 21 Blacks also established their own Grand United Order of Odd Fellows and the Knights of Pythias. Both provided insurance and financial support to their members, and built social welfare institutions. Called the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows No. 1750, it met the second and fourth Tuesdays of the month at the Galilean Hall on East Street. The Annapolis chapter of the Knights of Pythias was organized about 1889. 22 Like the white organizations, all three fraternal societies had female auxiliaries—the Order of Calanthe, the Eastern Star, and the Household of Ruth, all of which formed in Annapolis by the early twentieth century. These women tended to be more active and formed a stronger community than their white counterparts. 23 Other black fraternal organizations established in Annapolis had no white equivalent. Many had biblical names and drew on religious

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themes, for example, the Independent Order of Good Samaritans, the Order of Isaac and Rebecca, and the Knights of Jerusalem. These organizations also pooled resources to support their membership and social causes. The Grand United Order of Galilean Fishermen, open to men and women, was founded by blacks in Baltimore in 1856. The society promoted education, and, like other societies, helped the sick and paid some expenses of widows and costs of funerals. Incorporated in Annapolis in 1865, the Galilean Fishermen established a free school for blacks on East Street in the late 1880s that may have closed around the time the Stanton School opened. By the turn of the century, the Knights of Jerusalem owned the building known as the “Clay Street Hall,” which they rented out to other social groups. 24 Members of fraternal organizations met in private and shared secret rituals, and they played important roles in the black community. They assembled in their fine regalia at funerals to enumerate the contributions of deceased members. Certain Sunday church services were devoted to recognizing different societies, another opportunity to promote their status in the community. Some societies sponsored excursions with the churches. The Golden Rule Lodge of the Odd Fellows and Mt. Moriah A.M.E. Church assembled a large group to visit Gettysburg. “It was a pleasant affair,” the Capital reported. Societies also marched in parades, putting their polished selves on display for the town to see. They engaged in the important political struggles. The Knights of Jerusalem loaned their building to the night school that prepared illiterate blacks to vote. 25 Whites denied blacks admission into their groups. Black veterans of the Civil War formed the Sheridan Post of the G.A.R. (Grand Army of the Republic) and black women organized its auxiliary, the Women’s Relief Corps. They attended funerals of their members, marched in parades, and spoke at segregated Decoration Day ceremonies at the National Cemetery on West Street. Athletes in the black community created their own leagues. They formed their own baseball team, known as the Annapolis Greys, that played other black teams from the area. 26 Politics offered another opportunity for diverse black expression, but not always separate from the white community. Republicans established the Roosevelt, Fairbanks, and Mudd Club, which may have been an integrated organization, and held some meetings at the Clay Street Hall. 27 Blacks in Annapolis found many different ways to have a good time. Not welcome in white social organizations or the white hotels in town, they created their own social life. Club members gathered at one another’s homes, held lawn fetes, and put on affairs at the Clay Street Hall, the Assembly Rooms, or the churches. The Prince Albert Silk Hat and Beaver Club travelled to Gettysburg each year. 28 Of course, some blacks did not belong to churches or social clubs, but relied on less formal social arrangements—for example, the men who

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gathered at the corner of Clay and Washington streets to talk and drink. The Capital’s accounts make clear that not every black person lived a refined life—far from it. Some entertained each other in more boisterous or illegal ways. Drunken partying and rows were not uncommon in black neighborhoods. Some gambled, shot craps, made and sold bootleg liquor, or engaged in prostitution. Some husbands beat their wives. In contrast, members of the small elite led more refined lives. They entertained each other at their homes. For instance, Wiley H. Bates had a dinner for friends and visitors in October 1903. The Afro called him “one of our most prominent merchants.” Joseph Allen, son of the mariner and notions shopkeeper, while a freshman at Howard University entertained several classmates at his home on Northwest Street. Among the guests were children of other prominent families such as Bishop, Butler, King, and Carr. In 1905, a group of blacks from Annapolis went to Baltimore to attend a debutante ball sponsored by the Manhattan Club, one of the most exclusive black clubs of Baltimore. 29 In 1900, nearly two dozen prominent black citizens formed the Banneker Literary and Musical Association. The group’s announced purpose was “to develop a taste for classical literature. To attain success the organization will invite acknowledged exponents and prominent educators of both races to deliver lectures, addresses, etc.” The organization put notices in the Evening Capital to inform the public of its meetings. Programs included musical recitals, recitations, and the reading of papers. One was entitled, “Resolved, that the Prejudice Toward the Negro in the North is more Detrimental to his Advancement Than the Prejudice of the South.” 30 This group constituted Annapolis’s “talented tenth,” the expression W. E. B. Du Bois coined in 1903 to describe the elite, educated black men and women who, he argued, must uplift the black uneducated masses. A member of the talented tenth, according to Du Bois, “is the group leader, the man who sets the ideal of the community in which he lives, directs its thoughts, and heads its social movements.” 31 Of the twenty members listed in the Capital’s story, at least eleven had graduated from college, six from Howard University. Brief profiles of the members and their activities demonstrate what such people could achieve for themselves and what they strove to accomplish for their community despite white supremacy. The founders elected William H. Butler Jr. president of the Literary Association. A graduate of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, Butler taught at the Pig School on the Patuxent River and worked as a lawyer. His father started out as a carter and progressed from carpenter to builder, then businessman. Butler Sr. had extensive property holdings in the town, including thirty-three homes, four vacant lots, and eight shares in the Annapolis Water Company. His net worth was more than $24,000, or $585,860 in today’s dollars. He and his family lived in a twelve-room

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brick house on Duke of Gloucester Street that he purchased in 1863. He also became the first black in Maryland elected to public office when he won a seat as alderman on the city council, serving from 1873 to 1875. A promoter of education for blacks, he was a founding trustee of the Stanton School. He died in 1892. William H. Butler Jr. followed his father’s example of civic engagement, serving as city alderman from 1893 until 1897. 32 J. Wesley Chase, chosen as vice president, graduated from Athens High School in Athens, Ohio, and Ohio State Teachers’ College. As principal of Stanton School, Chase worked hard to extend the school year for his pupils. He sometimes read his poems or gave talks at church events. George B. Lowry, a Howard graduate, was elected secretary. He taught at Stanton School. J. E. Howard, forty-five, served as treasurer and as a member of the rules committee of the Literary Association. Howard, a waiter, was a trustee of Mt. Moriah A.M.E. Church. His twenty-six-yearold son, William H. Howard, another teacher at Stanton School and a student in law school, was also a member. The association selected as its librarian Robert M. Davis, a butler. 33 The other members of the association listed in the Capital who worked as teachers were Moses H. Jennings Jr., William Bishop, and Lewis D. Chase. Jennings, the son of the builder Moses Jennings, taught at the black Eastport School. Chase, a graduate of Morgan College, taught at Stanton along with William Bishop, the son of Dr. William Bishop. 34 Dr. Bishop, the most prominent member of the group, and the owner of a fine brick house on Church Circle, was a formidable figure in turn-ofthe-century Annapolis. He was a descendent of William H. Bishop, a British sailor, and Jane Ennis, an enslaved mulatto. His son William H. Bishop Jr. married Charity Folkes, also a mulatto slave who belonged to the Ridout family, which bequeathed her property in the town. Bishop Jr. became one of the richest residents—black or white—in Annapolis. His grandson William Bishop received a degree in medicine from Howard University. Dr. Bishop inherited a number of properties from his parents or his uncle James, also a well-known figure in Annapolis and Baltimore, where other members of this illustrious family had prospered and been active in the black community. James Bishop had a sugar manufacturing business and owned a pew in the white St. Anne’s Episcopal Church. 35 Dr. Bishop, a light-skinned man with droopy, thoughtful eyes and a thick, dark moustache, enjoyed the admiration of blacks and whites alike. He easily crossed the boundaries that normally divided them. Along with his involvement in the founding of the white-run Emergency Hospital, Dr. Bishop served on the county petit jury several times, was one of the founding trustees of Stanton School, and was actively involved in St. Philip’s Episcopal Church. Though considered a leader in Republican politics among blacks in Anne Arundel County, Dr. Bishop declined several offers of political positions because he wanted to practice medicine.

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For many years, he was the only black physician practicing in Annapolis. His son, William Bishop Jr., a graduate of Lawrenceville in Virginia, attended meetings of the Literary Association until his death from tuberculosis about a year after the group formed. 36 Three other black lawyers in town belonged to the association. George Pendleton, thirty-three, also a graduate of Howard University, handled divorce cases and managed property. He was an active member of the Mt. Moriah congregation and a Mason. Richard E. King, forty-four, a graduate of Boston University, held several jobs to support himself and his family, as discussed in chapter 3. The third lawyer, T. A. Thompson, held other jobs also—teacher at Stanton School and alderman—and was involved in Mt. Moriah. As an attorney, he and Pendleton sometimes opposed each other in divorce cases. 37 Ministers belonged to the Literary Association: Rev. I. S. Lee of Mt. Moriah Church, Rev. E. H. L. Henderson of St. Philip’s, Rev. George H. Reed of First Baptist Church, and Rev. John W. Lee of the Calvary Presbyterian Mission. 38 Several merchants took part in the meetings of the Literary Association. Wiley H. Bates was a member. Charles A. Butler, twenty-one, also attended meetings. A recent graduate of Howard University, a teacher at Stanton School for a period, and the younger brother of William H. Butler Jr., he was launching his grocery business. He opened his shop in August 1904 at the corner of South and Church Circle. 39 Henry Valentine, a native of Virginia, worked as a steward at the Naval Academy. Unlike the members whose social position may have been based on their professions, Valentine’s status derived more from his employment at the academy. A steward at the Naval Academy enjoyed a certain cachet. As leaders in their community, members of the Banneker Literary and Musical Association collaborated on numerous political, civic, and social causes to advance blacks. They spoke at Decoration Days, fraternal organizations, and church conferences. A number of these men got together to form their own business organization. In January 1902, William H. Howard, the Stanton teacher and now an attorney, organized a banquet to create a “closer union among them.” At the event, participants discussed “business and professional affairs, and especially pertaining to those things which will be for the amelioration and uplifting of their race in their immediate community.” 40 At a subsequent meeting, Howard read “a paper on the needs of a close union on the part of colored people of Annapolis for the purpose of moral, mental and financial development of the race.” Other attendees, who were equally active in the black community, supported the formation of a business organization, including J. Wesley Chase, the principal of Stanton School, local pastor Noble Watkins, Dennis Hebron, local huckster and organizer of Isaac and Rebecca Order, and Frederick Carr.

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He farmed land he owned on the Chesapeake Bay, and operated a grocery store on Northwest Street. 41 It is unclear if this businessmen’s association continued beyond these preliminary meetings because the Capital never mentions it again. Howard may have been aware of or inspired by Booker T. Washington’s National Negro Business League, established in 1900 to stimulate the development of black businesses to further black self-reliance and gain greater white respect. 42 In late 1904, Napoleon Johnson, an enlisted man in the Navy, started a black YMCA in Annapolis. Initially, it had only eleven members, including Alderman T. A. Thompson. In May 1905, a large crowd of members of the “talented tenth” attended a meeting of the YMCA at the Assembly Rooms. Some joined the organization that night. A special guest was Harry S. Cummings, a well-known lawyer and Baltimore’s first black city councilman. Cummings urged the “necessity of establishing the YMCA on firmer basis” for the purposes of “uplifting [our] race.” 43 Members of the Literary Association, or other organizations for that matter, did not always agree with each other. A year after the association was formed, for example, Bishop recommended the dismissal of association member J. Wesley Chase as principal of Stanton School and the appointment of a Dr. Van Sickle to replace him. Bishop had thought Sickle more qualified to serve as principal. However, Literary Association members Richard E. King and Henry Valentine, along with the community leaders Rev. Noble Watkins, J. Albert Adams, Ellen Parker, Rachel Thomas, and others, organized a petition signed by four hundred people protesting Bishop’s action. They said dismissing Chase was unwarranted and would cause him hardship. The all-white board of school commissioners upheld Bishop’s position. But Sickle had accepted an offer at another school, and Chase remained as principal at Stanton. 44 In October 1904, Dr. Bishop died of tuberculosis at the age of fifty-five. He had been operated on two years earlier, and his family believed the doctor had bungled the procedure and damaged Bishop’s lung. A frontpage obituary in the Capital described Bishop as “the leading colored citizen in Annapolis,” a role model for blacks to emulate. “He might have easily passed for a white man anywhere. Bishop was retiring, modest and unobtrusive, always courteous and polite and never thrusting himself where he felt he was debarred from the line of demarcation. He was respected by the best white citizens in the town and his death has removed one of the best men of his race.” 45 Rev. McComas, the white minister of St. Anne’s Episcopal Church, conducted Bishop’s funeral at St. Philip’s. “Many representatives of the white citizens [were] present. The floral offerings were numerous and handsome, particularly those from the teachers and pupils, respectively, of Stanton public school,” the Capital reported. 46

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Whites and blacks in Annapolis recognized Bishop’s unusual status, but usually, the subtle social hierarchy of black Annapolis eluded the town’s whites. Whites divided them into the few “worthy [members of] . . . a respectable class of colored people” and a larger “non-taxpaying, criminal and uneducated class.” Blacks had a better understanding of their differences. Ranking was imprecise and related to many factors, including professional achievement, home ownership, and engagement in community and church affairs, decorum, education, and skin tone. 47 The few educated professional people—lawyers, teachers, doctors, and ministers—enjoyed the highest status. Next came families whose members ran shops or worked at the better-paying jobs at the Naval Academy and as skilled workers in the town. Some of these, if they had accumulated enough income to acquire property, or were members of an old family, or engaged in community uplift work, gained a higher status. Then there were the laborers, domestics, and fishermen, people with fewer skills and less education, some of whom might still be members of the small social elite because of family background, church activities, or community engagement. 48 So status did not necessarily correspond with one’s employment. Traditional notions of class hierarchy were jumbled because so many people were laborers, laundresses, and domestics. The same family could include menial and professional workers. Some members of the Literary and Music Association had blue-collar jobs, but their children had become professionals. So J. E. Howard was listed as a waiter in the census; his son William was a schoolteacher and soon a lawyer. Though blacks knew of their differences, they all felt they were “in the same boat,” Philip L. Brown suggested, as they struggled against white efforts to keep them down. One can wonder how members of the emerging social classes managed or—even harder to accomplish—advanced, given the restraints imposed by white supremacy. A comparison of the household census data of the members of the Banneker Literary and Musical Association with that of less-fortunate black families in town illuminates the commonalities and slight distinctions between the families in the black community. The data reveal the range of black family achievement and struggle in Annapolis. 49 Sixteen members of the Literary and Music Association were found in the 1900 census records. Ten of the sixteen lived with their wives, and seven of them also had children at home. Only five of these families could live independently on one income. To survive, the other five married men had to expand their households to include grown working children, additional relatives, in-laws, or a boarder to augment the family income or to help family members who could not live on their own. The six single men, all in their twenties and five of them teachers, lived with their parents or widowed mothers, because either they could not afford

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to live independently or they wanted to help their families out. Three association members also relied on rental income from their property holdings, and two others held several jobs. Because of their efforts, these families made significant gains. With just two exceptions, everyone living in association members’ households was literate. Twelve of the sixteen members listed in the 1900 census graduated from college or teachers’ training school. Three members accumulated enough money to send their children to high school outside of Annapolis, then to teachers college or Howard University, and in one instance, to law school. Both Bishop and Butler earned enough to finance two children’s higher education. More than one-third, or six members of the group, owned their own house or lived in a home owned by a family member. Another cluster of black residents who belonged to the working class had nevertheless managed to buy their modest clapboard homes. They lived near the Asbury Church on Acton Lane, a narrow dirt street off West Street that ran downhill. The nine homeowners’ households numbered from two to eleven. Six of the nine owners were men; women the other three. Most of the men lived with their wives and children, whereas the women homeowners, primarily widows, expanded their households with boarders or working relatives, or lived alone. While two of the women owners were illiterate, all but one of the male owners and their children had learned to read and write, but not all of their wives. Five of the male homeowners of Acton Lane held low-skilled jobs as laborers, a messenger, a cart driver, and a whitewasher. Noble Watkins was the only professional, a retired local pastor at Asbury Church and a member of a business and professional men’s group. None of the men had to make room for a second family, but several of them took in boarders or relatives. Four out of six men were the only working members of their family. 50 The homeowners on Acton Lane were more self-reliant, slightly more affluent, and better educated than the working-class black tenants renting small houses on two other streets—Chestnut and Bridge. These households needed to take in boarders or double up with other families to survive. Black oystermen, porters, servants, cart drivers, and domestics lived in ten of the small wooden tenements on one side of Chestnut Street, or “Red Head Lane,” a short street that ran down toward the waterfront from Duke of Gloucester Street. Only six black families lived independently in these houses. Eight families doubled up in four of the other buildings because they could only afford to rent part of a four-room house, an indication of a very low income. In the last home on the street, the occupants included a family of seven as well as three boarders.

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While many of the residents of Chestnut Street could not read or write, every family on the block except one included at least one literate member. Parents sometimes had to choose which child got an education. In one family, an eighteen-year-old daughter was illiterate, but her seventeen-year-old brother had learned how to read and write. However, many of the younger children in these households were attending school. A group of black tenants on Bridge Street, a short crowded street off King George Street, whose houses the Naval Academy tore down in 1902, tells more about the household strategies of poor blacks. Ten of the twenty-five black households on Bridge Street took in boarders to help pay the rent. Women headed seven of the ten households. One owned her house. Three were married. One woman was single with a child, one a widow, and the census does not indicate the marital status of the last two. All of the women rented out rooms to men. It is conceivable that some of these women recruited the men as extra tenants because they could not afford to pay the rent by themselves, while others may have been in a commonlaw relationship with their male boarder. Four of the seven women were living with their children as well. Most of these women worked as washerwomen or domestics. Two of the women relied on a child’s income as well as the rent of their boarders. The men boarding with these women also held working-class jobs—oystermen, laborers, watermen, and a cook. The majority of these women could not read or write. However, most of their children were in school or literate. The three men who recruited boarders lived in less crowded households. Two men were married, and the third was single. Their boarders were male and female, in one case possibly a common-law wife. One man was employed as a laborer. The census does not indicate a profession for the other two men. Records about literacy were also sketchy. One of the male heads was literate and so were the younger children of all three men. This survey shows something about what it took for a black family to just get by and get ahead. For some, life got a little better in the ensuing years before 1917, when another significant encounter occurred between blacks and whites. NOTES 1. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 385. 2. Meier and Rudwick, From Plantation to Ghetto, 100; Wright, “Historic Structures Report, Mt. Moriah African American Episcopal Church,” 1–9; Ives, “Black Community Development,” 147; Brown, The Other Annapolis, 77–80. 3. Asbury United Methodist Church, Asbury United Methodist Church, 4–25; Greene and Woodson, The Negro Wage Earner, 5. 4. Brown, Other Annapolis, 77–78.

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5. Briscoe, History of the Negro Baptists of Maryland; Brown, Other Annapolis, 77–78; Greene and Woodson; EC, April 9, 1901; Worden, St. Mary’s Church, 66, 117. 6. Asbury United Methodist Church, 4–25. 7. EC, December 29, 1903. 8. EC, July 10, 1905; July 3, 1904; Blacks in the area had established the first singing and praying ands over a hundred years earlier. Participants walked in a circle as they sang and clapped, working themselves into a spiritual fervor. This practice became known as the “ring shout.” David, Together Let Us Sweetly Live, 6–11. 9. EC, August 29, 1903. 10. EC, July 1, 1903; July 14, 1904. 11. AA, April 12, 1902. 12. Asbury M.E. Church Records, 3; “Measuring Worth–Relative Worth Calculator Data Sets,” http://www.measuringworth.com/ppowerus/ . 13. AA, July 2, 1904. 14. EC, October 28, 1905. 15. EC, October 3, 1905. This performer may have referred to herself as “Colored Patti” to draw attention to take advantage of the success of Sissieretta Jones, who was known as “Black Patti.” Nevertheless, Lyon was a well-regarded singer. Majors, Noted Negro Women, 95; AMA, “Proceedings,” 1901–1905 MSA M49–16. 16. EC, October 17, 1900; November 5, 1904. 17. EC, February 15, 1901; February 12, 1902. 18. Asbury United Methodist Church, 25; EC, November 24, 1903; Worden, 66. 19. WB, January 8, 1897; AA, October 3, 1903. 20. EC, September 29, 1900; October 28, 1901; April 1, 1907. 21. Meier and Rudwick, 109; AA August 1, 1903. 22. Camp and Kent, “Proprietors, Helpmates, and Pilgrims,” 43983; Skopol, Liazos, and Gant, What a Mighty Power We Can Be, 46–48; Brown, The Other Annapolis, 2. 23. Camp and Kent, 439–83. 24. Scopol, 46–48; Brown, The Other Annapolis, 2, 112. 25. EC, July 14, 1904; AA, August 1, 1903; EC, March 16, 1901; March 23, 1901; April 3, 1901. 26. AA, June 4, 1904; EC, July 10, 1905. Professional baseball had already banned black players in 1890. Peterson, Only the Ball Was White, 3–53. 27. EC, October 3, 1904. 28. EC, July 14, 1905. 29. AA, October 3, 1903; EC, September 26, 1900; Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color, 228. 30. EC, September 29, 1900; November 6, 1900. 31. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” 222. 32. Greene and Woodson; Ives, 147 33. EC, September 29, 1900; October 5, 1900; June 4, 1906; AA, July 17, 1915; November 29, 1918; Johnson’s Annapolis Directory, 17. 34. EC, May 30, 1901. 35. Gatewood, 74; “Bishop Family of Annapolis.” 36. EC, October 7, 1904; Jensen, “Do You Know What I Have Been?,” 40. 37. EC, September 29, 1900; October 10, 1905. 38. EC, September 29, 1900; January 14, 1901. 39. EC, August 12, 1905; September 4, 1905. 40. EC, December 24, 1901. 41. EC, December 24, 1901; February 25, 1902; March 11, 1907; Twelfth Census; Johnson’s Annapolis Directory, 13. 42. Franklin and Moss, From Freedom to Slavery, 283. 43. EC, May 18, 1905; “The Road from Frederick to Thurgood,” http://www.msa. md.gov/msa/stagser/s1259/121/6050/html/11427000.html. 44. EC, June 25, 1901; June 26, 1901; July 15, 1901. 45. EC, October 7, 1904. 46. EC, October 10, 1904.

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47. EC, July 31, 1909; November 2, 1903. 48. Gatewood. 49. The survey is based on a review of the 1900 census records for Annapolis and a city directory of 1896–1897. One has to be mindful that the information is sometimes inaccurate. The enumerators did not always record all the occupants of the household or all the occupations of the family members. They mistated or were misinformed about whether a couple was married, whether a woman or a man had lost a spouse, or was separated. Twelfth Census; Johnson’s Annapolis Directory. 50. EC, July 1, 1903.

II

“They took advantage of small opportunities and enlarged them.” —Doris Moses

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FIVE Encounter, A Hanging, 1917–1919

An anxious crowd of about 400 gathered in the governor’s office in the State House under its imposing white dome, visible from many places in the town. It was the wintry morning of February 24, 1919. The assembled group—”mostly a white throng”—included townspeople, farmers, midshipmen, cadets, soldiers, sailors, and the wealthy. “Sprinkled among them was a minority of fifty colored folks,” also from “all walks of life, but not a one of them had a word to say,” according to the Afro-American. “Seems as if they had turned their cause over to the other race, and were standing back to see how well their friends would lambast the governor” on behalf of a black man, John Snowden, who had been convicted of killing a young, pregnant white woman named Lottie May Brandon. Governor Emerson C. Harrington had scheduled Snowden’s hanging for February 28. 1 Someone murdered Lottie May Brandon on August 8, 1917, in her home on Second Street, a “row of flimsily constructed frame tenements,” according to the Capital. A petite woman with dark hair, she lived with her husband, Valentine, a stenographer at the Naval Experiment Station across the Severn River from Annapolis. He came home from work and found his wife of ten months dead on their bed. Partially clothed with one stocking half pulled off her leg, the other on the floor, she had a wound on her forehead, bruises on her neck, and scratches on her legs. Police noticed that the refrigerator door was hanging by one hinge, perhaps a sign of a struggle between her and her assailant. The doctors who examined her concluded that she died of strangulation and shock. Initially they were uncertain whether she had been raped or the murderer had attempted to rape her. 2 Three detectives came from Baltimore to help in the investigation, support that Baltimore provided in such cases because Annapolis did not 53

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have a detective bureau. The first evening, the police “sweated” Brandon until 5 a.m. and decided he had not killed his wife. Rumors flew around the town about Mrs. Brandon’s health, about the Brandon marriage, about the photo Mrs. Brandon had told neighbors she kept of a former fiancé, and about other possible suspects, including Mary and Thomas King, neighbors of the Brandons. 3 The newspapers—including the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Post, and the Washington Times, which offered a $500 reward for information leading to the arrest of the murderer—covered unfolding events assiduously. They printed stories about neighbors hearing noises in the house the night before that would implicate her husband, about Mrs. Brandon’s former lover who was being sought for questioning, and about an allegedly jealous neighbor, Mary King, who might have thought her husband, a professor at the Naval Academy, paid too much attention to Mrs. Brandon. Police treated King as a suspect and interrogated her for hours. The papers wrote about several women who lived near the Brandon house who said they had heard a “shrill scream which suddenly stopped” about noon on the day of the murder. Both Valentine Brandon, a slight young man pictured in the Times in a straw boater hat, and his father-inlaw, Randall Haislup, complained in telegrams to the governor that the investigation was going too slowly. 4 The Brandons had moved recently from Washington, DC, where their families still lived. Lottie May Brandon, who was twenty at the time of her murder, was one of nine children. Her father, a bricklayer, could not afford to hire an investigator, but the Times hired Morgan Bradford of the Bradford Detective Service of Washington, DC, to look into the case. Bradford asserted in the Times that someone in the neighborhood, “probably a woman,” murdered Mrs. Brandon. He concluded, “There is one chance in a hundred that it was done by a negro.” On August 13, he was quoted in the Times as saying that he still thought it more likely that someone in the neighborhood committed the crime, as it would have been “impossible” for a stranger to enter and leave the house unseen. Later he opined that Mrs. Brandon had been killed by a “blow to the head by a hammer” that had been found in the bathroom sink. 5 The Times also engaged Grace Humiston, a famous investigator and a former assistant U.S. attorney in New York, appointed by Theodore Roosevelt. A full-figured attractive woman in a tailored outfit, she arrived in Annapolis by August 11. She surveyed the Brandon apartment, interviewed people in the neighborhood, and spoke with Sheriff John R. Sullivan, pictured in the Times wearing a crisp white shirt and bow tie. The two of them drove out into the country to find a “negro huckster” who was said to have been near the Brandon home the day of the murder. According to Sullivan, the “negro had made disrespectful remarks about white women just before he went into the block in which Mrs. Brandon lived.” 6

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That evening, an article Humiston wrote appeared in the Times. She did not think that it was a “negro crime,” as it “bears none of the earmarks of such a thing.” The murderer had not taken the dollar bill Brandon allegedly had on her or the diamond ring on her finger, thefts that “ a negro would most certainly have committed.” Moreover, the “murderer had taken care to arrange her body in a natural position” on the bed. Humiston could not “imagine a negro doing this.” Finally, “if a Negro had committed the crime, he was activated by lust.” She thought the slayer knew the victim. 7 Humiston continued investigating, interviewing people who lived on Second Street, including Mary King and members of the family of Margaret Queen, a black laundress. By the evening of August 13, Humiston declared in her Times column that she thought a woman had murdered Brandon, partly because of the way the body was arranged on the bed and the fingerprints on her throat. She urged that the body be exhumed and that “the most painstaking examination and analysis of the fingerprints on Brandon’s neck be performed.” She went on to recommend, “Let us work from the beginning and in a scientific manner. We cannot have false premises from which to work.” 8 In the same paper, a story reported that Ida Burch, who lived two doors from the Brandon house, heard screams around noon the day Brandon was killed. Her sister and mother heard the screams, too, and wondered if some of the black women, who lived behind them on Acton Lane, might be fighting, or “some child getting a whipping for nearly every day we hear some pickaninny getting punished.” Mary King, for a while a suspect, also heard screams though other neighbors, next door to the Brandon house, claimed to have heard nothing that day. Both King and Burch told investigators that they saw and spoke to Mrs. Brandon when she came out of her house the morning of the day she was murdered. 9 On the same afternoon of August 13, Ellen Rush Murray, “one of the most active suffragists about Annapolis,” according to the Capital, who lived in the elegant home of her in-laws on Acton Place, was visited by her laundress, Margaret Queen, and Queen’s two adult daughters, Edith Creditt and Mary Perkins. The daughters, Queen explained, wanted Murray’s advice, and Murray agreed to hear them out. The three were living together in Queen’s house on Second Street, across the street from the Brandon house where the murder occurred. Perkins told Murray that on the morning Mrs. Brandon was killed, she had been writing letters when she heard noises coming from the Brandon house, went to the window to look, and “saw a chair go by the window.” The noise continued for about fifteen minutes, Perkins recounted. She summoned her sister Edith from the kitchen. The noise stopped, and Edith went back to the kitchen. Then, Perkins continued, she saw “a rough-looking man” come out of the house, stand on the porch, look up and down the street,

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and take a bottle out of his pocket before going down the steps and up the street towards West Street. She summoned Edith again. When she arrived at the window, the man had started to walk up the street, and Edith saw him only in profile. “Edith said he looked like John Snowden,” Perkins said. 10 When Perkins heard about the Brandon murder, she “became so ill that her mother sent for Dr. Ambrose Garcia,” a black doctor in town. After hearing her story, Garcia “advised her to take the matter to the authorities, but added that if she did there might be a race riot.” Perkins told several friends, who all told her to “keep quiet about it.” She could not decide whether to tell the police because she thought people would think she wanted the $500 reward. 11 On the morning of August 13, Perkins told Murray, the two sisters went to the Parlett and Parlett Ice Company where Snowden worked to see if he was indeed the man they had seen. When Snowden “came along,” Perkins said she recognized him as the man she had seen leaving the Brandon house. 12 Murray, a pretty woman with dark, curly hair, was the wife of W. Spencer Murray, “an electrical engineer of national repute.” After hearing Perkins’s account, Murray encouraged her to report what she had seen. Perkins, whose husband was an enlisted man on a naval ship at sea, said she was afraid of appearing in court. She said that “some of the rougher element of her own people would kill her and her family.” She wanted to see Detective Humiston, who had come to the house earlier in her investigation. But Humiston had not spoken with Perkins because the investigator was told she was sick upstairs. Humiston did interview the second sister, Edith Creditt, a widow of an enlisted Navy man, but she said nothing to the investigator about seeing Snowden come out of the Brandon house. Murray then tried to reach Humiston on the telephone, without success. She contacted Rev. John Ridout of St. Anne’s Episcopal Church and went with him to inform the prosecutor, Nicholas H. Green, Jr., of what Perkins had told her. Green then reported all this to the police. 13 Murray’s account “fell like a bomb” among the “Baltimore sleuths” and the out-of-town detectives, according to the Washington Post, which took a dim view of the investigation so far. The detectives and police found Snowden at the ice plant, and took him to the courthouse for questioning. The two witnesses, Creditt and Perkins, were asked to appear in court. Murray accompanied them to the lineup, where they identified Snowden. According to Perkins, he wore the same outfit in the lineup that he had on when he left Brandon’s home, and when she saw him at his workplace five days later. 14 John “Scoop” Snowden delivered ice for Parlett’s. He lived in Acton Lane, a “negro settlement” where a “rough element” lived behind the Brandon home. He was a “consort of a young black woman, Edna Wal-

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lace, who had worked as a laundress for the Brandons,” the Capital said. The Times described him as a “brutal looking, heavy-set, medium sized Negro” who had been prosecuted on a robbery charge some eight months earlier. The charges were subsequently dropped. The Post described him as “unusually black, and a well-known character about town,” about thirty years old. Snowden said he was innocent, but he could not explain well what he had done that day. He claimed the fresh scratches on his face were the result of a fight with his girlfriend, who later denied to the police that she had scratched him. 15 While the police were questioning Snowden, people began to gather around the courthouse, forming a crowd of about 1,000. Fearing “mob violence,” the police took Snowden out a back door of the courthouse and drove him to the Baltimore jail for safety. There he was questioned further and given the “third degree,” collapsing on the floor, but maintaining his innocence throughout the interrogation. “In the history of the Baltimore Police Department, no negro has been grilled as severely as has Snowden. He has stood out against a corps of skilled detectives, and still persists in his innocence. Persons familiar with the ‘third degree’ methods have been amazed at his endurance,” a reporter for the Baltimore Sun wrote. Snowden first denied leaving his lady friend Wallace’s house, then he tried to implicate another person whom he claimed to see on Second Street, and finally he admitted to walking down the street himself, having left home after eleven and getting to a saloon on West Street around noon. Though certain they had arrested “the right man,” the detectives continued to look for more evidence because they did not want to make a “blunder.” They were sure that he had wanted to assault her and “after choking her into insensibility struck her with a beer bottle.” 16 Humiston wrote in the Times on August 15, the day after Snowden’s arrest, that the police needed to explore other leads. Having earlier “discredited the negro assault theory,” the police, she believed, should not be so confident that they had the right person in jail. Moreover, she had learned from Rev. E. S. Williams, of Asbury Church and a neighbor of the Brandons, that the two female witnesses had told him a different story than they told the police and that the night before the murder, his wife had heard noises coming from the Brandon house next door. Moreover, Williams had told the police he had been on his front porch during much of the morning and had seen no one come out of the Brandon house. Humiston had asked the State’s Attorney Nicholas H. Green, Jr. to accompany her to see Williams’s wife, who was in the country. She again recommended that Brandon’s body be disenterred and a second autopsy be performed to gather more evidence. The Baltimore Sun commented that Humiston, “backed by a small army of reporters, owned the town,” and the Washington Times claimed she “overshadowed” the investigations of the Baltimore detectives. 17

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In her column the next day, she wrote that she was gratified that the police had followed her suggestion because the second autopsy had “eliminated the consideration and suspicion of any white person” because “negro flesh” and two short black hairs were found under the fingernails nails of the five fingers that the doctors conducting the investigation had cut off Brandon’s hands—three from one and two from the other. The autopsy also found evidence that Brandon had been “criminally assaulted.” 18 In Baltimore, the detectives continued to “sweat” Snowden and put him through the “third degree,” questioning him for ten hours at a time. The police thought he was a “quick-witted, stubborn negro, not easily tripped up in his denials and explanations.” He maintained his innocence throughout the ordeal. 19 Prosecutor Green said that the case “was still in doubt” though the “circumstantial evidence indicated that Snowden was guilty.” He wrote in the Times that he thought the two key witnesses—Creditt and Perkins—were reliable. “Our trouble is in getting colored people to testify against members of their own race, and when they volunteer information the assumption is that they are telling the truth.” The Times reporter surmised that the women might have been reluctant to talk earlier because they were afraid of being put in jail, knowing that police in Annapolis frequently locked up key witnesses in important cases. 20 In contrast to the papers’ depiction of Snowden, a reporter for the Times described Perkins as a “striking example of the better type of negro, of slight build and medium light color. She is obviously unusually intelligent for her race and is a very devout Catholic.” The papers’ descriptions of the key witnesses and Snowden reflected the usual white assumption that the black community was composed of two types of blacks—“better types” and the “shiftless negro.” The two key black witnesses were the lighter-skinned, higher-class, better educated, and, therefore, the thinking went, the more reliable blacks. In contrast, Snowden represented the illiterate, “unusually black,” sex-craved, “colored fiend,” as the Post put it. 21 Racist assumptions worked to Snowden’s disadvantage, and also to his advantage. Some in the town accepted that he—a dark, ignorant black—was the obvious culprit. On the other hand, many people doubted that Snowden, who only attended school for a few months, who had a “fairly good reputation,” according to the Times, and whose parents were considered “humble but respectable,” had committed the murder. They did not think “a negro would have pulled down the shades of the kitchen and locked the kitchen door, leaving behind considerable jewelry on the bureau and a diamond ring on her finger.” Many in the town believed that “someone more intelligent and having a greater interest in the Brandon woman committed the crime.” Others thought that “a negro would hardly enter the home of a white man in broad daylight, in a thickly

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settled section of the city, and commit such a brutal act.” The public was puzzled also by the fact that Snowden had not confessed after so much rough interrogation, “for as a general rule a Negro breaks down when he is submitted to the third degree methods of interrogation,” according to the Capital. 22 A “race feeling is said to pervade the city,” the Capital reported on August 18. The tensions between the two populations had been evident even several weeks before the murder. Black ministers and others advised city officials, “Feelings abounded among those of the colored element. . . . A white man twice knocked a Negress to the ground. . . . She had brushed against his wife accidentally.” Black residents were also disturbed when they learned that charges of assault were “dropped against a white man in an escapade with a negro woman in the west end” of the city. 23 While Snowden was being interrogated in Baltimore, and detectives came to Annapolis to interview further witnesses, tourists came to Annapolis to drive down Second Street to see where the murder occurred. Their presence added to the drama. The Capital said, “Snowden probably will not be convicted of first degree murder because the case was a maze of circumstantial evidence.” But as the circumstantial evidence mounted—the “negro flesh” under the fingernails, the scratches on Snowden’s face, Edna Wallace’s denial of scratching him, the statements of the two key witnesses and others about a possible struggle in the Brandon house between 11 and 12 o’clock on August 8, and the screams that five people heard around 12 o’clock, the prosecutor and detectives became more certain that they had the right man. On August 21, the detectives claimed that their hunt for the killer was over because John Snowden was the murderer. 24 In the beginning of October, Snowden was moved “secretly back” to Annapolis. At first officials denied he was there, which the Times thought an “unnecessary caution . . . as close investigation of local conditions fails utterly to develop the slightest indication of a race feeling. Indeed, many of the white people of Annapolis, who might be looked to create mob spirit, do not think the negro guilty.” Evidently tensions in the town had diminished since August. 25 The grand jury indicted Snowden on October 18. No inquest was held. The Capital reported that “Snowden still maintains absolute calmness . . . and he continues to protest his innocence of the crime.” The paper reported that county authorities were now “confident that the strong chain of circumstantial evidence that has been woven about the negro will result in his conviction . . . he has made so many conflicting statements as to his movements on August 8 . . . as to place a veil of doubt as to the truth of many of his admissions and denials.” 26 Snowden’s trial was scheduled to begin Monday, October 29. Two lawyers now represented him—A. Theodore Brady, a white former state

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delegate who in 1908 introduced legislation to disfranchise blacks in Annapolis, and Charles S. Williams, a black attorney from Washington, DC, and a friend of Rev. E. S. Williams. A third attorney, William Hawkins, a black man employed by a congregation of a Baltimore church, attended the opening hearings. Black residents of Annapolis raised $288 for Snowden’s defense. Members of the Baltimore and Washington black communities also contributed to the cause. The Sunday before the trial, the congregation at Mt. Moriah Church held a special service in the afternoon to pray for Snowden. 27 On Monday morning, the trial was delayed for a parade for Annapolis’s black draftees, who were taking a train to Camp George G. Meade, named for the Union Army general, where they would be trained before going overseas to fight in World War I. The Capital commented, “The colored folks of the city and county made the most of the occasion and there were considerably more persons in the line of March than attended the departure of the white draftees [the day before].” The white prosecutor and judge handling the Snowden case were among the marchers. As the recruits approached the train station, black “women handed baskets laden with ‘comfy’ kits and sandwiches” to the drafted men just before they got on the special 11:30 train. “The colored boy scouts took a conspicuous part in the parade and helped preserve order about the station.” 28 After the parade, an entirely different spectacle unfolded inside the courthouse at Church Circle. The courtroom was crowded with “scores of women, white and colored, most of whom are witnesses.” Several deputized men held “at bay men and women who crowded the lobby of the second floor of the court house.” Many blacks and whites gathered outside. “The accused seemed calm when he appeared in court and heard the indictment. He was short of stature, stockily-built, brown skinned, with heavy, thick lips, and a pudgy face. . . . He showed no signs of emotion,” the Capital wrote. 29 Picking an impartial jury stalled. Some of the candidates for the jury admitted that they had already formed an opinion of Snowden’s guilt or innocence. Others were “at sea” about the case. Because of the number of challenges, Brady had to draw from a second list of jurors. After eleven jurors were selected, Green, the prosecutor, had “exhausted his legal number of challenges.” In a surprise move that “stunned the defense, Green then made a motion that the trial take place in Towson, Baltimore County, a motion Judge Robert Moss granted.” Green stated that “it would be fairer for the man.” A number of blacks thought the prosecution moved the case to Towson to get a guilty verdict. During the jury selection in Towson, there were still many challenges to the potential jurors. 30 The trial began January 23, 1918. A special train transported the prosecutor, the witnesses, and the defendant to Towson. Another white attor-

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ney, C. Gus Grayson of Towson, joined the defense team. State’s Attorney George Hartman of the Towson criminal court assisted prosecutor Green. A delegation of prominent, civic-minded blacks from Annapolis went to Towson, among them Rev. E. S. Williams, Rev. James A. Briscoe and his wife, Rosa Norwood, Lizzie Carter, and Hester Johnson. 31 Fifty-three people testified for eight days, longer than most murder trials for black defendants. In the courtroom, white and black witnesses were segregated. White witnesses were addressed formally and respectfully, called Mr. Brandon, for instance, while attorneys called the black witnesses by their first names, as though they were children. Early in the trial, some whites started to applaud when Snowden was described “in black terms,” but Judge Frank R. Duncan threatened to remove them from the crowded courtroom. 32 The prosecution called many witnesses to present what it believed would be sufficient circumstantial evidence to link the death of Lottie May Brandon to John Snowden. Among those who testified were the Baltimore detectives, Valentine Brandon, some of the neighbors, the Kings, Snowden’s employer, Morgan O. Parlett, a bartender at Martin’s Bar, Joseph L. Raley, the two key witnesses, Mary Perkins and her sister Edith Creditt, and Leroy Sisco, a black boy of eleven. He testified that he walked by the Brandon house between eleven and twelve o’clock on the day of the murder and saw a white woman’s arm appear through a slightly opened front door and then disappear as though she had been pulled back into the house. Green also questioned the doctors who had performed the autopsies to elicit the important facts that Mrs. Brandon had died from the shock caused by the injuries and that the skin under her fingernails was the skin of a black man. 33 Brady tried to prove that she died of other causes. In response to Brady’s questions, the doctors stated that they did not believe that Mrs. Brandon had died of eclampsia and had fallen against the metal bedpost, injuring herself, as Brady tried to claim. However, Brady discredited the doctors’ findings that Brandon had been raped. In his cross-examination of Valentine Brandon, Brady got him to admit that the two had had “marital relations” the night before. Under his questioning the doctors acknowledged that they could not identify whose semen they found on Mrs. Brandon. 34 When Brady presented his case, he attempted first to challenge the prosecutor’s claim that Snowden had taken a dollar bill from the Brandons’ dresser. He called Rachel E. Stewart, a midwife who had been looking after Mrs. Brandon. She was one of the first to arrive at the Brandon home after the murder. She stated that she saw a dollar bill on the dresser. 35 Brady’s questions to most of his witnesses related to the testimonies of Perkins and Creditt. Several witnesses testified that the Sunday after the crime, Perkins told them “she thought it strange that she had not seen

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Mrs. Brandon all that day, that she had noticed the house had been closed and saw no one there the entire day.” Perkins denied ever making those comments when questioned by Green. 36 Mary Bias, an elderly black woman and one of the defense’s witnesses, withstood Green’s badgering about what else she remembered about the conversations that Sunday and what Sunday it was. His persistent questioning went as follows: “Q. What day was it, Mary? A. On a Sunday morning. . . . Q. How do you know it [was the following Sunday]? A. Because I know it. Q. How do you know, how do you fix it? A. I don’t have no fixing to do to it, I know it was the following Sunday.” 37 One of Brady’s important witnesses was Rev. E. S. Williams, who stated that he had spoken with Perkins the evening of the murder, and she had made a similar statement to him about not seeing Mrs. Brandon or anyone else in the house on the day of the murder. Williams also testified that he had been on his porch next door to the Brandon house several times that morning and stayed there from about 11:30 to 1:15 the day of the murder and had not seen Snowden on the street nor heard any commotion in the house. 38 Green tried to undermine Williams’s recollection of the time he spent on the porch with questions about statements Williams made earlier in his office. Green asked him about a conversation he allegedly had with Perkins’s mother, Margaret Queen. She alleged that he said to her—and her daughter Mary Perkins overheard—”they cannot make you tell what you don’t want to tell, they can’t make you say what you don’t want to say, it is a white man’s affair, anyhow.” Williams denied emphatically that he ever said that. At one point, Williams could not understand Green’s question and said, “If I am too dense to understand it, then can I ask you to repeat so I can understand what you mean?” 39 Besides Mary Bias and Rev. Williams, there were other black witnesses who seemed unintimidated by the white prosecutor. Edna Wallace, the woman with whom Snowden lived, denied that she ever told a Baltimore detective that she had not scratched Snowden. She testified that she may have scratched him earlier, as they often played and wrestled. 40 When Snowden was on the stand, he stuck to his story of leaving his home around 11:40 or 11:35, despite persistent questioning by Green, who claimed in opening remarks that Snowden had left his house on Acton Lane at 11:15. Snowden said he walked down Second Street, saw Rev. Williams on his back porch, spoke with Florence Baker, who was on her front porch, and arrived at Martin’s Bar on West Street just before noon, then went home to lunch about 1:40. Florence Baker testified that she did not talk with Snowden that day. 41 Brady tried to prove that Snowden was subjected to “rough, cruel, and hellish” treatment by the Baltimore police. Snowden claimed that for two days detectives had repeatedly hit him on the head, put a gun to his

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head, and pulled the chair out from under him, all of which the detectives denied when the prosecutor questioned them on the stand. 42 In his closing arguments, Green said the circumstantial evidence was “conclusive.” Some women applauded when Green asserted that Snowden’s crime had been “prompted by unbridled passion.” The Times said it was one of the most powerful addresses ever made to a Towson jury.” George Hartman declared that “Snowden had been guilty of a particularly fiendish crime, had really taken two lives. . . . And that a Negro who ravishes a white woman deserves the extreme penalty.” Brady claimed the evidence was circumstantial and Snowden should be acquitted. He said that Snowden had been “victimized, inasmuch as he had been the scapegoat for the police authorities, and that his arrest covered up their inefficiency.” 43 The jury began its deliberations on January 31 at 8:30 p.m. Twenty or thirty minutes later, depending on which newspaper’s account one reads, the jury returned to the courtroom, along with extra police and detectives. The jury found Snowden guilty of first-degree murder. Snowden was “near collapse” when he heard the verdict. Creditt and Perkins were put under guard that night. 44 Snowden’s attorneys filed a motion for a new trial. When it was denied, they filed an appeal with the Court of Appeals. The attorneys claimed there were several errors made in rulings about questions of evidence. They had uncovered new testimony, which could show that Mrs. Brandon “had died of convulsion.” There were also statements from Ella Rush Murray that contradicted Mary Perkins. 45 For the next eleven months, everyone awaited the outcome of the appeal. Snowden was brought back to the county jail in Annapolis. Blacks in Baltimore, Washington, DC, and Annapolis formed committees to raise money for his defense. By October, $875 was needed to print a transcript of the trial. More than $500 was raised in Annapolis and the rest from Baltimore. The Capital staff seemed impressed with these efforts when they wrote, “Much money is very generally understood to have been raised by the colored people of Annapolis and Washington, to have a legal fight to the last ditch put up for the negro.” 46 In August, Valentine Brandon, now fighting in the war in France, remembered the first anniversary of his wife’s murder and made a tribute to her. Rumors circulated around Annapolis that Brandon had been killed, but that as he was dying on the battlefield in October, he confessed to killing his wife. 47 On January 16, 1919, the Court of Appeals rejected the appeal for a new trial. The court “had held that there was no reversible error in the ruling of the lower court.” On that day—the same day that the Colonial Theatre burned—the Evening Capital printed an editorial praising the fairness of the judicial system, saying, “That John Snowden is a colored man—a poor man without influence, and yet able to command the same

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measure of consideration and justice for his case that is accorded to the most influential white man, certainly is a tribute to the state judiciary system.” The Capital suggested that the governor “will not intervene” and commented, “The colored people of Washington and Baltimore, as well as of Annapolis . . . subscribed considerable sums to carry the case to the Court of Appeals. They generally profess to believe that Snowden is innocent, and is being made something of a martyr in order that someone else may be protected.” 48 John Snowden wept when he heard that his appeal for a new trial had been rejected. Rev. Holt visited him in jail. The Capital reported that there was a “reason to believe that friends of Snowden among his own race will still make an effort to secure commutation.” But as they struggled to prevent his hanging, Annapolis blacks celebrated the end of World War I at a large peace jubilee at Asbury. 49 Attention now turned to Governor Harrington. “Letters pour in” to his office, according to the Afro. Several delegations also visited him and asked for a reprieve. More petitions arrived. The governor seemed “convinced of the guilt of the condemned man after thorough study of case,” the Afro declared. 50 Governor Harrington was a Democrat from Cambridge, Maryland, who grew up on a farm in the Eastern Shore. He attended St. John’s College in Annapolis and played catcher for the school’s baseball team. He eventually became a lawyer and was elected Dorchester County state’s attorney. Known as a “vigorous prosecutor,” particularly of oyster and liquor laws, he was defeated after four years in the job. In 1911, he was elected comptroller of the Treasury, a position he held until his election as governor in 1915. 51 In late January, Harrington visited the Brandon house on Second Street, stood at the window out of which Mary Perkins saw Snowden, and read the testimony for the third time. He allegedly met with both Creditt and Perkins several days earlier to ask them if they were certain they had seen Snowden come out of the Brandon house. Both claimed they had. On January 29, 1919, his mind unchanged, the governor scheduled John Snowden’s hanging for February 28. Snowden, shaken by the “certainty of execution,” was “seized with a vomiting spell and was quite sick for a time.” The sheriff reported to the Capital the next day that Snowden’s spirits had improved enough for him to eat. The white secretary of state, opposed to the hanging of Snowden, had declined to sign the death warrant. Snowden repeated his “protestations of innocence, using his oft repeated formula, ‘If God were to come down to this jail, he would tell you I am innocent. I never went in the woman’s house and I never spoke a word to her in my life.’” 52 The next week, Governor Harrington went to the John Wesley M.E. Church in Baltimore to meet with “colored lawyers, ministers, government employees and others of more or less supposed influence,” who

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made pleas of clemency to the governor. He “made it clear to the friends of Snowden that he would not interfere” in his case. Two delegations of black ministers tried persuading him to change his mind. One included the famous evangelist Rev. Simon P. W. Drew, who proselytized in Annapolis in 1906. The governor told one of the delegations that he knew Mary Perkins because she had worked in the governor’s mansion, and he thought she was reliable. 53 Three days later, the Capital published a statement Snowden dictated to Georgia Boston, a domestic worker and well-regarded leader in the black community who frequently visited him in the jail. Much of the statement is quoted below: I want to thank all those who have taken such an interest in me since I have been locked up in prison. As true as there is a God I am an innocent man. . . . I have never been to the lady’s house and I have never seen her in my life to know who the lady was, . . . and if I have to die I will die telling the truth. I also want to thank Rev. Briscoe, who was my first spiritual adviser, for visiting me and bringing me sweet words and cheer and telling me about the love of Jesus. And Rev. B.S. Holt, my present spiritual adviser, who is at my side each day and night, offering up prayers to God that I may grasp hold of faith and got in touch with Mrs. Georgia Boston, Mrs. Armita Dennis and others, whose songs and prayers helped to save my soul from hell. I want to warn young men to shape their lives out different from the way I shaped mine, for when I was younger, my mother used to carry me to Sunday school, but after the Lord took her away, I strayed away from my Christian principles. . . . And as I shall step out of time into eternity . . . I shall go into God’s presence, not as a murderer, but as an innocent man, and there I shall hold my dear mother, who left me but a small boy to battle in this world alone before I go to the scaffold. I would like to see Mrs. Mary Perkins and sister. I want to show them the scaffold that they have been the cause of me being hung, on Friday, February 28. Then I want to shake their hands and tell them that I forgive them for the false oaths they taken against me and to get right with God, so as to meet me in Heaven.

He signed his name “in characters betraying illiteracy but apparently indicating perfect physical control,” the Capital reported. Snowden told Boston that he wanted “to see Harrington, not to ask for clemency but to thank him for his interest.” Snowden claimed not to be afraid of the gallows and said that he had “only learned to read while in jail.” 54 Efforts to gain clemency for Snowden continued. George L. Pendleton, a black attorney and former resident of Annapolis and member of the Literary Association, now worked for the Monumental Lodge of Elks in Baltimore. He planned to file an appeal to the Supreme Court. Brady thought “there was little to nothing to be expected of such a move.” White businessmen and professionals in Annapolis were circulating a

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petition asking the governor to commute the sentence to life in prison. People from all over the state wrote to the governor asking him to alter the sentence. Every day, people approached the round-faced governor about the case. “He is convinced they don’t know the true facts of the case. . . . Believes he is guilty,” the Capital stated. “He has said repeatedly that it is the most complete case founded on circumstantial evidence that he has ever known.” 55 Six days before the scheduled hanging, Detective Humiston came back to Annapolis “to save the condemned man.” She was hired by Ella Rush Murray, the employer of Margaret Queen, who was the mother of key witnesses Edith Creditt and Mary Perkins. Murray had originally told Green that the sisters claimed to have seen Snowden come out of the Brandon house. Humiston claimed to have new evidence that she wanted to present to the governor. 56 The governor announced that he would “meet with any and all persons who have the least doubt concerning Snowden’s guilt in his office at the state house on February 24 at 11 o’clock in the morning when he will read his summary of the evidence.” He wanted in particular to hear from the people who signed the petition requesting a commutation of Snowden’s sentence. 57 In the main executive office, three hundred to four hundred concerned townspeople assembled to hear the speakers make recommendations to the governor about Snowden’s fate. The meeting, “crowded with important people” and principal players in the drama, including the “elegantly gowned” Ella Rush Murray, who came down from Connecticut, where she now lived. R. E. Lee Bosley, one of the Snowden trial jurors, presented a petition signed by all but one of the jury members that surprised some in the audience. It stated, “The undersigned . . . realizing the possibility of mistake in human affairs, and after further considering the matter, feel that justice would be done, if the sentence in Snowden’s case was commuted to life imprisonment.” Then James M. Monroe, the white owner of large real estate holdings and president of the local Trust Company read a petition, signed by “nearly 60 of the leading white businessmen” that said, “Let’s not hang the wrong man in our haste to get the right one.” Brady, Snowden’s lawyer, also brought a petition that “prominent Annapolitans signed.” It stated, “it was almost the unanimous desire of Annapolis that the sentence be commuted because it was generally believed that Snowden was innocent.” 58 Harrington was surprised by the size of the crowd. He “seemed plainly nervous over the large number of white people and their attitude of defending Snowden. He seemed also not to have expected any colored people to be there,” the Afro reported. Even though he was not feeling well, he responded “emphatically” for over an hour to his audience. Most of the “roomful of people listened patiently” and quietly. He told them he had not read the new evidence supplied by Humiston. The governor,

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whose white hair was neatly parted and his white mustache carefully trimmed, went over the case thoroughly, reviewing the facts, the different suspects, different motivations, and the evidence. He “was inclined to think it was robbery, and for that purpose the woman’s stockings were taken off, believing that she kept her money in her stocking and that coming into contact with the white woman’s flesh aroused the beast within him and he committed the greater crimes, murder and rape.” 59 He stated that he thought the evidence was “most complete and convincing,” the Baltimore Sun reported. He called Edith Creditt and Mary Perkins, “credible witnesses. They are colored women of more than ordinary standing, intelligent, far above Snowden’s class, and there is absolutely an absence of all motive for perjury.” He went on to say: “I happened to know these colored women and they have a most excellent reputation. They are not after any reward and have been made to suffer for standing squarely up right and for justice and they are entitled to praise, not censure.” Other residents of the town thought Perkins and her sister were of “questionable character.” Stories circulated around Annapolis that the two were rewarded for their statements. 60 He “denounced those” who believed that Lottie May Brandon’s husband was the murderer. He explained his position on upholding the sentence: “I am opposed to capital punishment, but I will never start the exercise of my prerogative in a case of this character. The people of Annapolis have unfortunately yet fortunately too been unacquainted with the character of this heinous and horrible crime committed right in the heart of the town.” For emphasis, he asserted, “The safety of their women is at stake. I refused recently to commute to life imprisonment a colored man guilty of rape upon a colored girl, and I certainly shall not commute the sentence of a negro who has committed, in my opinion, both murder and rape upon a white woman.” 61 Later he said, “I am a friend of the colored race but I believe that the greatest harm I could do their race is to commute Snowden’s sentence. The best citizens of his race want Snowden to pay the penalty, if guilty. He has had a fair trial. It is not up to me to try this case.” 62 He criticized some of the petitioners for commutation: “Some foolish, in my opinion criminally foolish, white people have expressed the idea that Snowden was being railroaded and that race prejudice had been invoked. He has been treated with remarkable consideration. There is no impartial jury on earth upon the evidence in this case that would have any doubt as the guilt of Snowden.” He concluded, “The fair name of the state must be vindicated. The virtue of our women, white or black, must be protected. Willful, deliberate, cold-blooded and ravishing murderers must pay the full penalty of the law. This is no case for mercy. This is a case if there ever was one, where the law should be vindicated. I will not interfere.” 63

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“When he said that he intended to go on with the execution, not a sound was heard. The disapproval of his audience was evident,” according to the Afro. The governor “concluded his remarks amid a murmur of questions, and was escorted by friends back into his office.” The paper claimed that “no governor of the state ever witnessed such a demonstration of white people in behalf of a colored man convicted of murder. No governor ever received such a deluge of silent disapproval when he refused to grant their petitions.” 64 Although the governor did not review Humiston’s petition, which included new evidence and a request for a ninety-day reprieve for Snowden, it appeared in the Capital the same day as the account of the governor’s meeting with townspeople. According to her petition, witnesses could give new evidence about the Brandon marriage, about Mrs. Brandon’s conduct the day before the murder, about Mr. Brandon’s conduct the day of the murder, about a “mysterious friend” of Mrs. Brandon, about a lack of activity at the Brandon house the day of the murder, and about an alleged confession by Brandon in a dream. Two witnesses could testify that “loud thumping noises were heard coming from the house the night before” and “moaning sounds early the next morning.” 65 In its editorial that day, the Evening Capital explained that it printed both Humiston’s petition and Harrington’s statement “in a desire to be fair to both sides of the controversy.” It suggested that “both statements should have the most careful and unbiased reading about the justice of the case.” The paper did not approve of these last-minute efforts that it thought would only stir up bad feelings: “No good purpose was served and that in all probability only ill resulted. . . . there was a display of feeling [at the meeting] where cool judgment should have prevailed.” 66 According to the next day’s news reports, Humiston had allegedly attempted “to induce Mrs. [Ida] Burch, one of the State’s prominent witnesses in the case, to change her testimony.” An announcement from the State House threatened that she would be arrested if she tried to do so. Although Murray refused to talk with the paper about these allegations, she asked the Capital for “a little final space” to make a last statement about the Snowden case the day before his execution. She claimed the attack on Humiston “was one of many endeavors made by certain interests to discredit a woman who was appointed assistant to Attorney General Charles Bonaparte by President Roosevelt.” Burch’s “very curious and contradictory statements to me were one of my first reasons for sending for Mrs. Humiston” to reinvestigate the case. Murray stated she was “strongly warned by three highly prominent men, all connected with the case, not to bring Humiston back to Annapolis.” She also explained that she had not taken the stand in the trial because she would not have been allowed to “testify as to [her] conscience.” 67 The same day, the Capital reported that the governor had received a death threat in a letter. The author wrote that the governor “had no heart

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and no mercy,” that Snowden had been “railroaded to the gallows” and that Lottie May Brandon was “poor white trash.” If he did not stop the execution, the writer warned, the governor would be shot. 68 In its editorial that day, the Capital commented, “It is rarely that an unknown negro, with few friends among his own race, with no points of character to commend him to the white race, may expect to command the interest and effort which have been expended in his cause by white people of high standing.” It asserted that “there seems to be no question that John Snowden had a fair trial,” and averred that this was “a time for cool judgment to prevail and the white people need this admonition as much as the colored ones.” 69 As the date for the hanging approached, preparations for the event began. More and more people asked for passes to observe it. The board of directors of St. John’s College announced that students could not watch it. Snowden asked to have his picture taken. The sheriff gave him a new blue suit and black shoes to wear. The Capital reported that there was “money to save life, none to bury Snowden.” His body would be “consigned to Potters’s Field unless funeral expenses are forthcoming.” J. Albert Adams, the black undertaker and now alderman, informed the Capital the next day that Snowden would “be given proper burial, after all.” Adams issued a statement saying that he would arrange it. He corrected Sheriff Bellis, stating that there had always been money. 70 Snowden was “resigned to the fate awaiting him,” the Capital reported; he was “in good spirits.” His attorney Brady visited him and reported, “I have never in all my experience seen a man like Snowden. He appears cheerful and happy and when, we talked of the hanging Friday, he said: ‘I shall certainly be glad when it is all over, Mr. Brady. I can hardly wait for Friday to come.’” Snowden said a statement published after his death that after thanking Brady, he “shook his hand and told him to meet me in heaven. When I saw him drop his head I told him to look up and not down.” 71 At special church services “for the salvation of John Snowden,” Rev. Briscoe and Rev. Williams prepared their congregations and warned them to “make no attempt to go near the jail” and “not say unpleasant things or do anything that will cast reflection on them before and after the execution of John Snowden. . . . Snowden’s fate is sealed and the episode is all but a closed book.” Briscoe stated, “I cannot impress on the colored citizens of Annapolis at this time too earnestly the need for refraining from anything that might cause unpleasantness or worse.” 72 Murray wrote Snowden a letter, which the Capital printed the next day, apologizing that she had not come to visit him, but she had been too busy working on his behalf. “The truth will come out in the end, and all the good element know that you are innocent,” she said. “Please forgive me if you can for the part I have played in bringing this dreadful thing

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upon you. It is a heart-breaking thought to me when I was only trying to do what I thought was my duty, by taking that story to the authorities.” 73 Attorneys worked through the night to try to save their client. A writ of habeas corpus was denied by the Supreme Court. Attorneys from Washington, DC, arrived at the jail at two in morning with a final legal maneuver. They wanted to see the governor but were prevented from doing so. The governor stayed up until midnight talking with newsmen and officers of the National Guard. Two detectives stood at the entrance while a “strong guard was thrown completely around the enclosure.” 74 The evening before the hanging, the police took “extraordinary precautions.” Rumors spread that both whites and blacks had bought pistols and that “threats have been made.” Marshall Robert G. Carter came over to Annapolis from Baltimore and brought with him forty-two police officers, who “scattered around the city.” “Two companies of infantry also came from Baltimore and quartered in the Bladen Street Armory.” “Squads of officers and militia,” including a machine gun company, guarded the approaches to jail. Two machine guns were set up in front of the jail. All night, enlisted men from the Second Infantry patrolled the streets near the jail with fixed bayonets. “Annapolis was like an armed camp,” practically under martial law. Most of the extra military and police were to remain on duty until the funeral on Sunday. 75 At one point, about one hundred blacks assembled outside the jail and listened to singing coming from Snowden’s lit cell. The Singing and Praying Band sang, “We will understand it better by and by. Over and over, “like a wail of distress, they sang “God will take care of you.” When the home guards and the police from Baltimore appeared, the crowd dispersed. By midnight the streets were empty. 76 Early in the morning, those who had passes to witness the hanging entered the jail and waited on the first floor. The father of Lottie May Brandon and father of Valentine Brandon were among the first to arrive. “Soldiers with bayonets and policemen kept order in the jail yard where the crowd with passes were now allowed in. A screen had been built around the scaffold, preventing people from seeing the execution from nearby rooftops and trees. 77 Upstairs on the third floor, Marshall Carter visited Snowden, who said, “Marshall Carter, I want to say before I go that I forgive you for the way you treated me in that sweatbox in Baltimore.” A photographer took a picture of him in his new suit and crisp white shirt. Snowden looked directly into the camera. Rev. Holt and the Singing and Praying Band returned to sing with Snowden and walk with him down to the jail courtyard and scaffold. As they proceeded, they sang, “I Am a Child of The King,” “the strong, robust voice of Snowden rang out above the others” in the “crisp morning air.” As he mounted the steps of the gallows, the only sound heard was him singing, “Get Right with God,” accompanied by Holt and the band. After the noose was placed around his neck and

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the shroud over his head, the sheriff pulled the lever to open the trap door, and Snowden dropped to his death. His body was placed in a casket and taken to the home of his sister Sedonia Isaac. 78 Snowden had prepared a statement, similar to the one published earlier in the press, which Georgia Boston, one of his spiritual advisers, gave out after his execution. He asked “authorities to please continue to search for the murderer of that lady” and thanked his attorneys, supporters, newspapers, and jailers. 79 The headline of the Capital’s editorial, a morals and manners lesson for black people on how to relate to whites, read “Colored Citizen’s Part—Case Closed.” For the paper, the case was over. “John Snowden has satisfied the demands of the laws of Maryland and of society by giving his life in return for that of Mrs. Lottie May Brandon, cruelly murdered,” it asserted. “This should close the last chapter in the history of this crime which has been near to creating a serious division of feeling, not racially fortunately, but between intermingled whites and blacks. So far as the case of John Snowden itself is concerned it should become a closed and forgotten incident, as it probably will be.” 80 The editorial complimented residents of Annapolis for not giving in to their “racial feelings.” “But the death of John Snowden points a moral to the colored people of Annapolis which it is well they should heed. There can be no denying that there is a latent racial feeling here just as there is every place where the two races compose the community.” It continued, “Where ever such a feeling exists it is certain that it is highly inflammatory and may be ignited to a devastating and shameful conflagration with but a spark. It is to the credit of both white and black that this feeling has not been allowed to gain ascendancy in this city during the last few trying days.” 81 The paper admonished blacks, “Colored people who are honestly convinced of the innocence of Snowden or who have even the slightest feeling that their race has been persecuted must accept the judgment of the courts and good citizens. They must do more. They must so conduct themselves that racial prejudice will be dismissed even if it cannot be eliminated, and thus make less likely the possibility of injustice being done to them as a race. They must seek to gain the respect of the white people by a course of conduct equal to that of the best of whites.” 82 The paper instructed them: “So long as colored people make themselves obnoxious, just so long will they arouse the resentment of white people. The colored man who pushes white ladies aside in the effort to gain admittance to electric cars is creating hatred for his race. White gentlemen do not do such things, and colored people may well emulate the example not of white men, but of white gentlemen.” It warned, “The colored man who retains his seat in a crowded public conveyance and permits an aged white man to give up his seat to a lady brands himself at

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once as lacking in gentlemanly instincts and arouses hostility toward his race.” 83 A few days later, in anticipation of possible “excitement” at Snowden’s funeral, the governor had called out Company M of the Maryland State Guard, but “it remained in Armory as there was no disorder.” At the service, Briscoe preached an “eloquent but conservative funeral sermon” at Mt. Moriah A.M.E. Church on Franklin Street. By the time the service began at 2 p.m., the crowd of 1,500 “filled every available inch of floor space and overflowed into the street.” Bouquets of flowers from unnamed friends were on display near the altar. Snowden’s sisters and brothers were in front. Ella Rush Murray and three white newspaper reporters were among the few whites present. Places were reserved for the fundraising committees from Baltimore and Annapolis who had worked on the case. 84 The service lasted two hours. Holt, of Asbury Church, who had counseled Snowden, spoke of his bravery. He said Snowden received his “new blue suit with a smile and put it on as if he was going to church.” Murray talked about how she had been misused. “We have a double responsibility first through the fresh evidence that is coming in every day to clear Snowden’s memory, and then to see to it that the man who has misused his authority in this case [Governor Harrington] regrets it. I would rather be John Snowden than the man.” The Afro reported that there “were many amens” during her brief talk. 85 Briscoe said Snowden was not an angel. “He was a drinker, gambler and lived with a woman who wasn’t his wife.” He pointed out to the crowd the danger of being a black in Annapolis, “You know that had I or you gone down Second street the day of the crime as Snowden did, I or you would now be in Snowden’s place. I am afraid to go out at night without my wife or some other person. Annapolis is not a safe place for colored people.” 86 The Capital’s version of Briscoe’s sermon did not mention these chilling comments. Instead, the paper observed, “Throughout the service was marked for its absence of bitterness or the spoken word which might have aroused the feelings of many colored people who are convinced Snowden died for another’s sin.” The paper commented, “Briscoe pointed out that had Snowden lived a cleanly life he might not have been put to death . . . not to judge whether guilt or innocent . . . but to point to errors of his ways to his people so that they might avoid the pitfalls which would bring them only dire trouble.” 87 After the funeral, many went on to the burial at Brewer Hill Cemetery out West Street, beyond the National Cemetery. In that evening’s Capital, a small item appeared with the headline, “Anonymous Letter Writer Says He Is Brandon Murderer.” The story said, “The sheriff’s office received a letter from Washington in which writer declared, ‘I am sorry you killed Snowden today. He is not the gulty [sic] man. I am the man. I could not

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stand to see another man live with my heart so I put Lottie May out of the way. I hope his sins fall on my head. I am willing to answer them. He is not the man. God will bring things right some day.’” 88 Several weeks later, Murray wrote to the Afro. In her letter, she stated that she and Humiston had a number of sworn statements that would show new facts about the case that could prove Snowden’s innocence. Among them were that Brandon came out of his house much earlier on August 8 and was seen burying something in an empty lot behind his house; that Mrs. Brandon was not seen at all that day; that two witnesses saw Snowden that day without any scratches; and that new evidence would reveal that “Brandon had various reasons for being jealous of his wife.” 89 More than seven decades later, elderly black residents remembered Snowden’s hanging vividly. Philip L. Brown recalled walking to school that day from his parents’ house on Spa Road and seeing fifteen to twenty policemen milling about. His classmate Doris Moses, the granddaughter of Dr. Bishop who lived on Church Circle, “heard a lot of whispering, horrible that it was.” She remembered that the “police came in for one day . . . covered the place that night and day.” It was “not anything Annapolis will forget.” Parents kept their children home. One of them recollected that the police “made people get off the streets.” Another, who was nine at the time, recalled that it was “so dark. Lot of people didn’t go to work that day. . . . They stood in circles and things.” 90 This incident still troubles citizens of Annapolis. Everyone I interviewed knew of the event. Many described the day of Snowden’s hanging in almost apocalyptic terms, though only four of the people I talked to were alive at the time. According to the others, the skies all around Annapolis darkened. Some claimed that the witnesses, the judge, and the prosecutor all died violent deaths. Others believed that military authorities had delayed the discharges of more than four thousand black troops and sailors—then at Camp Meade near Annapolis and on ships in the Baltimore harbor—until Snowden was hanged to minimize the chances of violent protests. The Snowden case remained a sensitive subject for years afterward. In 2001, after reviewing the records of the case and the recommendation of the Maryland Parole Commission, Governor Parris Glendening pardoned John Snowden. 91 This dramatic encounter between whites and blacks had the familiar characteristics of the Jim Crow era: whites accuse a black man of murdering a white woman, rush to judgment, and then hang the alleged perpetrator. But as befitted Annapolis and its complex history and society, the story played out in an unusual way. Snowden was not lynched; many whites came to doubt his guilt and pleaded openly for clemency; blacks were not afraid to speak out about the situation; the governor had to weigh the evidence and make a decision; and despite the Capital’s best

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efforts, the episode was not buried and forgotten, but became an important element in the history of race in Annapolis. NOTES 1. EC, February 24, 1919; AA, February 28, 1919; BS, February 25, 1919. 2. BS, August 10, 1917; Washington Times, Washington, DC, hereafter WT, August 9, 1917; EC, August 9, 1917. 3. WT, August 11, 1917; August, 12, 1917; August 13, 1917; EC, August 11, 1917. 4. BS, August 10, 1917; August 12, 1917; August 13, 1917; WT, August 10, 1917; August 13, 1917. 5. WT, August 9, 1917; August 10, 1917; August, 11, 1917; August 12, 1917; August 13, 1917. 6. WT, August 10, 1917; August 11, 1917; August 12, 1917. 7. WT, August 11, 1917. 8. WT, August 13, 1917. 9. WT, August 13, 1917; August 14, 1917. 10. EC, August 14, 1917; Court of Appeals (Records and Briefs) John Snowden, October Term 1918 Case No. 95, Volumes I/II, MSA SC 3520–13632, Maryland State Archives, hereafter COA, Snowden, 1:13–14. 11. COA, Snowden, 1:121. 12. Ibid., 1:13–14. 13. WP, August 14, 1917; COA, Snowden, 1:130; 1:13–14. 14. COA, Snowden, 1:14–18; WP, August 14, 1917. 15. EC, August 14, 1917; WT, August 14, 1917; WP, August 14, 1917. 16. BS, August 14, 1917; EC, August 14, 1917; August 16, 1917; BS, August 17, 1917; WT, August 14, 1917. 17. WT, August 14, 1917; BS, August 14, 1917. 18. WT, August 15, 1917; EC, August 15, 1917; WP, August 14, 1917. 19. BS, August 15, 1917; BS, August 16, 1917; WP, August 17, 1917. 20. WT, August 15, 1917; BS, August 15, 1917. 21. WT, August 14, 1917; WP, August 13, 1919. 22. EC, August 14, 1917; August 17, 1917; August 16, 1917; August 15, 1917; AA January 26, 1918. 23. EC, August 18, 1917. 24. EC, August 18, 1917; WT, August 21, 1917; WP, August 21, 1917. 25. WT, October 6, 1917. 26. WT, October 18, 1917; EC, October 27, 1917. 27. WT, October 28, 1917; WP, October 30, 1917; AA, January 26, 1918; October 27, 1917. 28. EC, October 29, 1917. 29. Ibid. 30. EC, October 29, 1917; WT, October 30, 1917; EC, October 30, 1917; AA, October 18, 1918; January 26, 1918. 31. WT, January 22, 1918; EC, January 21, 1918; AA, February 2, 1918. 32. AA, February 2, 1918; EC, January 23, 1918; WT, February 1, 1918; January 23, 1918; COA, Snowden. 33. WP, January 26, 1918; WT, January 24, 1918; COA, Snowden, l:298–302; 1:215–16; 2:17–23; 1:285–92, 2:204–13; 1:293–98, 1:303–9; 1:26–46, 152–58; 1:195–205; 1:66–70; 2:71–74; 1:209–14; 1:109–30, 2:75–77; 2:62–63; 1:216–25; 1:99–109, 1:226–55; 2:176–84; 1:70–98; 1:176–83; 1:183–88. 34. WT, January 24, 1918; January 29, 1918; WP, January 25, 1918; COA, 1:216–25; 1:1–35, 239; 1:34. 35. WT, January 29, 1918; COA, Snowden, 2:123–41; 1:99–109, 226–55, 2:202–3.

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36. COA, Snowden, 2:40, 150, 64–71, 194–95, 196–98. 37. COA, Snowden, 2:60. 38. COA, Snowden, 2:150, 151. 39. COA, Snowden, 2:150–59. 40. COA, Snowden, 2:3–14. 41. COA, Snowden, 2:81–122; 1:192–93. 42. WT, January 25, 1918; COA, Snowden, 2:81–122; 2:214–19; 2:204–9; 1:209–14. 43. WT, February 1, 1918; BS, February 1, 1918; WP, February 1, 1918. 44. AA, February 2, 1918; WT, February 1, 1918; WP, February 1, 1918; EC, February 1, 1918; BS, February 1, 1917. 45. EC, February 5, 1918; February 14, 1918; AA, February 9, 1918; February 16, 1918; WT, February 2, 1918. 46. EC, August 8, 1918; AA, February 22, 1918; October 11, 1918. 47. EC, August 8, 1918; AA, October 18, 1918. 48. EC, January 16, 1919; WP, January 17, 1919. 49. EC, January 17, 1919; January 27, 1919. 50. AA, January 31, 1919. 51. White, 251–54. 52. EC, January 29, 1919; January 31, 1919; February 1, 1919; February 4, 1919; AA, January 31, 1919. 53. EC, February 12, 1919; AA, January 31, 1919. 54. EC, February 15, 1919; AA, February 21, 1919. 55. EC, February 20, 1919. 56. EC, February 22, 1919. 57. Ibid. 58. EC, February 24, 1919; AA, February 28, 1919; BS, February 25, 1919. 59. EC, February 25, 1919. 60. BS, February 25, 1919; EC, February 25, 1919. 61. EC, February 25, 1919. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid. 64. BS, February 25, 1919; AA, February 28, 1919. 65. EC, February 25, 1919. 66. Ibid. 67. EC, February 27, 1919. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. 70. EC, February 26, 1919; February 27, 1919; WT, February 26, 1919. 71. EC, February 27, 1919; WT, February 27, 1919; EC, February 28, 1919. 72. EC, February 27, 1919. 73. EC, February 28, 1919. 74. Ibid. 75. EC, February 28, 1919; WT, February 28, 1919; BS, March 1, 1919. 76. EC, Februrary 28, 1919; WT, Februrary 28, 1919; BS, March 1, 1919. 77. EC, February 28, 1919. 78. EC, February 28, 1919; WT, February 28, 1919; AA, March 7, 1919; BS, March 1, 1919. 79. EC, February 28, 1919. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid. 84. BS, March 3, 1919; EC, March 3, 1919; AA, March 7, 1919. 85. EC, March 3, 1919; AA, March 7, 1919. 86. Ibid. 87. EC, March 3, 1919.

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88. EC, March 3, 1919. 89. AA, March 28, 1919. 90. OHI with six people. 91. OHI with many people; Governor’s Press Office, “Governor Glendening Grants Posthumous Pardon to John Snowden.”

SIX Bird’s-Eye View, 1905–1919

From above, an observer would have watched the Annapolis landscape change during the years 1905 to 1919. The town grew. Builders had constructed new homes and stores in the empty lots around town. White homeowners were gradually moving into the spacious neighborhood of Murray Hill, out Franklin Street. Houses lined the new streets of Dean, Water, and Shaw, near where Lottie May Brandon was murdered (see Figure 6.1). 1

Figure 6.1. Map of Annapolis, 1919

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Other changes included an expanded Emergency Hospital and an armory on Bladen Street, near the train station. The Congregation of Kneseth Israel bought the St. Anne’s chapel at the corner of Prince George and East streets and converted it into a small synagogue. In 1919, a serious fire destroyed the Colonial Theatre, where townspeople had enjoyed many shows, including minstrels. Starting in March 1908, an electric trolley began its run through the streets of Annapolis from its depot on West Street. Ferries from the dock at the base of Prince George Street crossed the Chesapeake Bay to the Eastern Shore. 2 The Naval Academy had built a new stadium and a large chapel with an imposing dome. The Reina Mercedes, a captured Spanish cruiser, docked next to the Naval Academy in 1912 to be used as a floating barracks for black and white enlisted men. The USS Cumberland joined it a few years later to house black sailors. 3 Sixty new houses went up in the heart of the black neighborhood growing up around Clay, Calvert, and Northwest streets. One of the principal white developers and landlords in the neighborhood, Morris Legum, owned about two dozen properties in the area, and could be seen collecting rent from the black tenants. He arrived in Annapolis at the turn of the century and initially worked at the Naval Academy. Like a number of other recent Jewish immigrants, Legum then opened a small business in the black community. He ran a grocery at the corner of Calvert and Clay streets and lived above the store, because housing covenants prevented him from renting a house or purchasing land in certain white areas. His children played with the black children in the neighborhood. 4 Black landlords collected rent from the tenants of their extensive property holdings. Members of the Bishop, Ridgley, and Butler families owned numerous houses around the town where blacks lived. Dr. Ambrose Garcia, a West Indian who arrived in Annapolis in 1908 after graduating from Howard Medical School, bought several buildings and eleven garages on Northwest Street. He was the doctor who treated Mary Perkins for the anxiety she experienced after claiming to see Snowden leave the Brandon house on the day of Lottie May Brandon’s murder. 5 More alley dwellings appeared on the landscape, and blacks moved into many of the small cramped houses. Behind Northwest Street, the white alderman and businessman Louis Baer built four houses in 1907 in a court named for him, Baer’s Court. By 1913, a row of eight houses stood on the new short street, Feldmeyer’s Court, off Calvert Street, named for its white developer, William E. Feldmeyer, who lived in a big house on College Avenue. Four clapboard houses had been erected in Shaw Place near Acton Lane. 6 The largest alley development—two rows of twenty-five small clapboard houses—now stretched across the triangular block off Church Circle bounded by West, Calvert, and Northwest streets. This was Gott’s Court, built in 1908 by Winson Gott and other whites. Blacks rented all

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the houses. Gott, a prominent lawyer and former city collector and treasurer, lived in a house he had built in the new restricted development of Murray Hill. 7 An observer looking down would have noted that more blacks were opening their own businesses in their neighborhoods. Literary Association member Robert M. Davis opened a grocery on Clay Street by 1910. Blacks could go to their own pharmacy and soda fountain across from the city jail. Black-owned barbershops, confectionary shops, beauty parlors, pool halls, home laundries, restaurants, funeral parlors, and small groceries had opened. Black barbers and a black businessman still operated their shops and oyster enterprises downtown. By 1919, two black doctors opened offices—Dr. Howard Norwood and Dr. Rodney Milliner. Thomas Queen, a florist, had greenhouses behind his home on Market Street. 8 Living rooms were converted into small businesses. The Mowbry family offered shoe shines and repairs in their front room. Most customers came on Saturdays to get their shoes shined for church. Nearby a woman had a “cookshop,” where she sold pig feet, chitlins, and crab cakes. John Chapman sold wood and coal from his home. 9 In the spring of 1913, black businessman J. Albert Adams opened Adams Park on College Creek. It featured “boating, best artesian well water, fishing, crabbing, swings, flying horses and a large dancing pavilion which has been put in first-class condition.” School and church groups held summer picnics there. Congregations also met for revivals. 10 Churches refurbished their buildings. Mt. Moriah’s parsonage suffered serious damage because of fire. First Baptist congregation relocated to a building on Washington Street. A Second Baptist opened on Acton Lane, and a storefront church on Clay Street drew parishioners. And it was apparent that black fraternal organizations thrived. 11 The edges of the black neighborhood became dumping grounds. There were mounds of garbage near the St. Anne’s Episcopal Church cemetery and piles of ash on the extension of Calvert and Clay streets. Nearby, in an area called “Brickyard Hill,” cows were sometimes butchered and tallow was rendered. 12 That many blacks still led modest lives and suffered misfortune was noticeable. One little girl who lived on Lincoln Place near the Bladen Street train station was run over by a train as she picked up coal next to the railroad tracks. Another girl was badly burned when her dress caught fire from the “smoldering fire” in the dump below South Street, where she was scavenging. Fires in homes were also a terrible hazard. One boy died from a fire in a crowded South Street “tenement,” where four households lived. 13 If an observer could have counted every resident, by 1920 the total was 8,518, of which 2,954, or 35 percent percent, were black, about the same percentage as in 1900. The population at the Naval Academy grew briskly from 868 in 1900 to 2,696 in 1920. By 1920, 492 midshipmen gradu-

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ated, compared with sixty-one in 1901. The growth of the Naval Academy brought more people from around the country into the town. 14 Several celebrities visited Annapolis. Mark Twain was the guest of the governor. Two weeks later, Frederick Law Olmstead, Jr. looked at West Annapolis, a growing development west of the old town. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt attended the burial at the Naval Academy Chapel of the remains of John Paul Jones, who fought the British during the American Revolution. Later President William Howard Taft came twice, once to speak at the academy graduation in June 1912. Woodrow Wilson spoke at the academy when he was governor of New Jersey and returned to the town as president in 1915 for a private visit with his fiancée and brother. 15 In the summer of 1908, Booker T. Washington visited Annapolis after spending time at the Highland Beach resort community established by Frederick Douglass’s son on the Chesapeake Bay. Members of the black elite from Baltimore, Washington, DC, and Annapolis were regular visitors. His wife spoke to the congregation of Mt. Moriah Church a few weeks earlier about the work of the National Association of Colored Women, a ten-year-old organization. 16 An unwelcome visitor was the flu epidemic of 1918 that forced the town to close schools and churches for nearly two weeks in October. One hundred and fifty-one people died in one month. Ellen Parker, the new black undertaker, was very involved during during the epidemic. 17 At first glance, the movement of blacks and whites on the landscape would have appeared much the same to an observer from the capitol dome. But relations between them became tenser in the second decade of the twentieth century. Whites more thoroughly enforced segregation and resorted to greater violence to control blacks, and blacks challenged whites in new ways. Demeaning minstrel show parades still drew a mixed crowd. Spectators “turned out in force” to watch the Kersand performers travel “through principal streets . . . accompanied by the usual dancing, skipping bunch of ‘younguns’ and pickaninnies.” Parades for performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin included white and black brass bands, funny “topsies,” and “Little Eva and the dogs.” But blacks continued to exploit the popularity of the minstrel for their own ends. A group of black Naval Academy and hotel employees formed the “Georgia Minstrels” and put on shows that were “equal to many of the professional troupes.” 18 In other parades, black groups still either brought up the rear or marched separately. Hundreds of blacks from all over Maryland still displayed themselves through the streets with a band to open the conventions of their fraternal organizations. 19 Sporting events showed how blacks and whites interacted. In March 1907, “thousands of town’s people, colored and white, came out to watch two black men race down West Street” for a prize of $5, money that

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“white friends of the sprinters” raised from the spectators. At Naval Academy games, however, blacks knew they were restricted to the end zones or seats at the ends of the bleachers. Black teams such as the Annapolis Greys baseball team played other black teams on the grounds of St. John’s College. Blacks competed at the local horse racetrack outside of Annapolis in Camp Parole, but only against each other. The white track managers designated the third race of the day “for horses owned and driven by colored persons.” Whites similarly segregated visiting carnivals that put up on an empty lot near the West Street train station. Blacks could only attend the last two days. 20 During World War I, whites segregated the enlistment and send-off of black and white soldiers, which took place on different days. To honor the draftees who were scheduled to leave for training, blacks and whites held dances at the new Armory—on separate nights. After the armistice was signed, the townspeople celebrated, churches held special services, and blacks and whites paraded. The order in which they marched is unknown. 21 Not every event was segregated. Both blacks and whites could be seen entering the capitol to meet with the governor a few days before Snowden’s hanging. Some years, the mayor invited all the town’s pastors to bring their congregations to services around the Christmas tree at Market Place. The white Elks Club began a tradition of giving out apples, oranges, and candies to black and white children at Christmastime. One year, 1,500 children showed up. 22 Sometimes during the month of June, the mayor invited black and white children for ice cream and cake. One little girl living on Washington Street put on her white dress and black shoes to go to the party. To celebrate the end of the war, in November 1918, blacks and whites attended a “liberty sing,” an integrated event at the Armory on Bladen Street. This was a space, like the Assembly Rooms, that blacks and whites could use for their own functions, but generally on separate days. 23 In 1909, an observer would have noticed a sharp decline of black voters participating in the city’s election. Whites had successfully disfranchised most black males. Blacks and whites still encountered each other at council meetings at city hall. T. A. Thompson was the only black member until his retirement as alderman in 1907. The black businessman J. Albert Adams replaced him. But after 1909, no black served as alderman for six years. 24 Gambling, drinking, and prostitution all blurred the lines between the two populations. Whites and blacks assembled together down at “The Point” by the wharf for mixed crap games. When a fire started one night in a house in “Buzzards’ Roost,” the name given to White’s Row, a street where poor blacks lived in a cluster of dilapidated houses near the railroad tracks, two white men in Marine uniforms jumped from the window of the house shortly after the fire began. 25

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Not all white spaces were off bounds to blacks. A young light-skinned girl, Charlotte Cushman Andrews, lived with Catherine Andrews, a wealthy white widow and her sisters on Maryland Avenue. The young girl was the daughter of their black maid and seamstress, Hester Johnson, and Andrews had adopted her. “Annapolis folk blinked at a brownskinned baby rolled around in a carriage by a nurse who could have passed for white.” 26 Sometimes blacks let whites know they were nearby, as a group of ball-goers did one night on the way to a fancy-dress ball at the Assembly Rooms on Duke of Gloucester Street. Many of the ball-goers took hacks and carriages to get to the ball and turned the street into a racetrack. 27 Black spaces were not impermeable either. In 1912, 400 to 500 blacks rode four train cars to Annapolis to attend the Masons’ District Convention. The governor and the mayor addressed the large group at the Asbury M.E. Church. Some of the visiting Masons watched the cadets drill at the Naval Academy, where blacks could work or walk, but could not attend as midshipmen. Governor Goldsborough gave a talk at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church that both black and white churchgoers attended. 28 White politicians could be seen canvassing black churches before 1909 and after 1915. At the beginning of World War I, white officials, including Governor Emerson C. Harrington and Mayor Strange, visited Asbury Church to convey their expectations for black support and talked about the “patriotic duty of people in these times of war stress” and “preparedness.” 29 White law enforcement crossed the racial borders to raid illicit black operations. Police arrested a disorderly mother and daughter, “dusky damsels,” who were disturbing their neighbors in “Buzzards’ Roost.” They raided a black-operated speakeasy, crap games, bootlegging operations, and disorderly houses. They broke up fights, and investigated a murder in the different black residential areas. But some blacks challenged white authority. One evening a policeman tried to arrest a black man for disorderly conduct. The man assaulted him, and as he tried to flee, the policeman shot him. 30 Blacks and whites still got into fights that occasionally developed into brawls. In May 1908, a Baltimore paper characterized one fight in “Buzzards’ Roost” as a “race riot.” White Marines, sailors, civilians, and some college students “mixed it up” with a number of blacks. 31 Annapolis had its share of terrible violence. An observer would have watched in horror on the night of December 20, 1906, when fifty white masked men tried battering down the door of the jail, guarded at the time by the warden, two deputies, and the night watchman. When this failed, a group broke into the blacksmith’s shop down the street, took a sledge and a pick, and made a hole in the jail door large enough for someone to crawl through. When black residents across Calvert Street and up Clay Street tried to come out of their homes, they were “firmly, though gener-

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ally without roughness, warned to go back. The men brought out Henry Davis, a black man charged with assaulting a white woman. They dragged him up Calvert one block, turned right onto West Street, but then doubled back; turned right on Washington Street to the railroad tracks, which they followed to the left for 200 yards, then crossed a field called “Circus Lot” through a settlement known as “Brick Yard Hill.” 32 At a high bank on the creek, the men chose a large chestnut tree where they strung up Davis. He “confessed and begged for his life.” After they strung him up and pushed him from the high bank, the rope broke, and people shot at him. Many in the crowd then cut up the rope into little pieces to get a souvenir of the lynching. Blacks and whites streamed to the site to see Davis’s body. 33 Four years later, blacks assembled to prevent what they feared would be the lynching of a fourteen-year-old black defendant, James Diggs, who had been accused of assaulting a five-year-old white girl. His mother lived across the street from the jail, and when she saw the white night watchman lead her son out of the jail, she raised the alarm that her son was going to be lynched. (She did not know that the judge had ordered her son moved to the Baltimore jail for his safety.) More than a hundred blacks came running and attacked the watchman and took Diggs to a house for protection. Police intervened, retrieved Diggs, and accompanied him on the train to Baltimore city jail. 34 Between 1905 and 1919, an observer would have seen the hangings of six other black men after their trials and convictions. In July 1905, William R. Leazer walked to the gallows “with firm tread.” A crowd of eight hundred persons stood inside the jail yard. 35 A mixed crowd of about onehundred watched Andrew Taylor hanged in August 1912. In the neighborhood, people stood on their rooftops and fences to watch. Taylor “calmly mounted gallows in the yard of the county jail saying, ‘Glad day had come.’” There were “no signs of flinching. . . . When he dropped, his neck broke,” and he “quivered like chicken.” A crowd of fewer than fifty turned out for James Jacobs’s early-morning hanging in January 1913. Jacobs nearly collapsed as he walked to the gallows. Three years later, Arnold Martin hanged before a crowd of 125, mostly white men who came in automobile loads from the the upper part of the county to enjoy the spectacle. Martin seemed unusually calm and brave as he mounted the scaffold. Rev. E. S. Williams, a witness in the Snowden trial, accompanied Martin, and the Asbury M.E. Church choir sang as the black hood was placed over his head. 36 Two other blacks were hanged while Snowden was in jail. In July 1918, wearing the same suit as Martin, Archie Isaacs also appeared composed, singing a hymn as he dropped. In October, about seventy-five people witnessed John H. Evans’s courage as he stood on the scaffold.

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Wearing the same suit as Isaacs and Martin, he smiled to his friends in the crowd. 37 NOTES 1. Sanborn 1903; Sanborn 1908; Sanborn 1913; Sanborn 1921. 2. Warren, Then Again, xxxi–xxii; Mame Warren, “Chronology of Events,” Annapolis I Remember Collection, MSA SC 2140, Maryland State Archives; Jackson, Annapolis, 106; AMA, “Reports,” 1887–1919, April, 1907, MSA M89-9; http://www. stjohnscollege.edu/about/history.shtml. 3. Warren, xxxi–xxii; Jackson, 107. 4. AMA,“Assessment Records,” 1897–1910, MSA M72-9, M72-10, M72-11; AMA, “Assessment Records,” 1911–1918, MSA M72-12, M72-13; OHI; Goldstein, “Surviving Together,” 10; Brugger, Maryland, 350. 5. AMA, “Assessment Records,” 1911–1918, MSA M72-12, M72-13; Ives, “Black Community Development.” 6. All the city directories, with the exception of Gould and Halleron (1910), the Sanborn Maps, and the Evening Capital misspelled the alley, calling it Bear’s Alley instead of Baer’s; “City Clerk Records,” 1887–1919, April, 1907, MSA M89-9. 7. AMA “Proceedings,” 1905–1908, MSA M49-17; Gott had moved to Annapolis in 1896, and became a lawyer and a prominent person in the town. He served as collector and treasurer of the city in 1905 and 1907, respectively, was a trustee of the Presbyterian Church, and became president of the Capital Publishing Company. He married Carrie Gardiner, the daughter of William B. Gardiner, the owner of a lumber company. EC, May 28, 1907; February 16, 1904; May 8, 1906; July 10, 1906; August 14, 1907; April 7, 1908; October 21, 1908; July 29, 1909; August 2, 1905; June 7, 1911; July 20, 1915. 8. AA, July 31, 1915; EC, February 14, 1915; Gould and Halleron, Annapolis City Directory for 1910, 33; Polk’s Annapolis Directory, 223–263. 9. OHI with a number of people. 10. AA, May 17, 1913; June 3, 1916; June 10, 1916; August 12, 1916. 11. EC, March 22, 1906; November 25, 1916; November 11, 1916; OHI. 12. AMA “Proceedings,” 1908–1912, May 9, 1910, MSA M49-19; AMA “Proceedings,” 1912–1916, January 19, 1914; December, 14, 1914, MSA M49-20; AMA, “Proceedings,” 1916–1919, April 10, 1916; January 14, 1918, MSA M49-21. 13. EC, December 28, 1905; May 9, 1906; December 19, 1914. 14. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Census, Seventeenth Census of the United States, 1950. Census Population of 1950 Characteristics of the Population, Vol. III Part 20, Maryland, 20-8; Jackson, 105. 15. EC, May 10, 1907; May 24, 1907; Jackson, 106, Stevens, Annapolis, 318, 320, 321; EC, October 30, 1915. 16. EC, August 24, 1908; August 6, 1908. 17. EC, October 9, 1918; October 14, 1918; October 26, 1918; November 2, 1918. 18. EC, February 22, 1907; October 15, 1910; September 15, 1911; February 2, 1910; Huggins, Harlem Rennaisance, 275. 19. EC, June 5, 1917; May 30, 1906; July 22, 1907. 20. EC, March 30, 1907; June 30, 1908; July 5, 1918; OHI; C. Vann Woodward claimed, “Much ingenuity and effort went into the separation of the races in their amusements, diversions, recreations and sports.” Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 99; With the exception of boxing, most professional sports at this time were segregated. Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, Freedom, 84, 202. 21. EC, October 16, 1917; October 18, 1917; November 11, 1918. 22. EC, December 22, 1917; January 2, 1919. 23. OHI; EC, November 26, 1918.

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24. EC, June 9, 1909; June 30, 1909; July 20, 1915. 25. EC, February 22, 1906; August 16, 1909. 26. EC, July 20, 1901; AA, March 2, 1929; Johnson’s Annapolis Directory, 2; Gould and Halleron, 7; OHI. 27. EC, March 20, 1915. 28. EC, June 5, 1912; AA, June 8, 1912. 29. EC, November 3, 1917; November 25, 1916; May 26, 1917; AA, June 2, 1917. 30. EC, June 24, 1908; August 30, 1915; March 2, 1911. 31. EC, May 15, 1908. 32. EC, December 21, 1906. 33. Ibid. 34. EC, February 4, 1910; February 14, 1910. 35. EC, July 17, 1905; July 19, 1905. 36. EC, August 9, 1912; January 10, 1913; January 7, 1916. 37. EC, July 12, 1918; October 4, 1918.

SEVEN Struggles, 1905–1919

In the years from 1905 to 1919, relations between blacks and whites in Annapolis were marred by ugly events typical of the Jim Crow era— lynchings, legislative efforts to restrict black suffrage, and reinforcement of segregation and discrimination. But blacks in Annapolis fought back— both literally, in brawls, and in the courts, in the legislature, in the pages of the newspapers, and in other arenas. For example, the brutal lynching of Davis provoked strong reactions from black ministers. Rev. N. M. Carroll, the minister of Mt. Moriah Church, published a letter in the Afro-American condemning Davis’s “heinous” conduct not only with a white woman but also earlier with a black woman. He reflected upon the lynching itself “with wonder and surprise at the conduct of respectable citizens. . . . The Holy Scripture tells us . . . what men sow they must reap. It would be sad for this country to reap some things that have been sown. It would be best to pray for forgiveness of God than to continue on with Judge Lynch.” 1 The Capital did not agree. It quoted Dr. W. Clement Claude, who said the “unsavory reputation of Davis, who had on one other occasion escaped the gallows for a similar crime, and the fact that he was more animal than man, made it probably better for the community to have speedily gotten rid of him.” Before the lynching, the Capital had described Davis as “an extremely low type of colored man. He is nearly, if not quite, forty years of age and is short and thick-set. He has no regular work and as a rule no regular home. . . . He has a very low mentality, though it could probably not be said that he was mentally irresponsible.” After the victim identified Davis as her attacker, he confessed. He would remain in jail, the Capital suggested cynically, “Unless the people of the community attempt and succeed in lynching him.” 2

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Governor Edwin Warfield (D), on the other hand, was “highly incensed,” by the lynching. He did not “like idea of this happening on his watch.” He sent detectives from Baltimore to investigate the lynchers, but no one was arrested. A few days later, the Evening Capital reported, “Since the lynching the town has been most orderly. . . . Never known to have such an orderly Christmas, never so few arrests.” 3 When someone was murdered in Annapolis or the surrounding county, the police usually lost no time in finding a suspect. If a black suspect was arrested, the trial was usually brief. The prosecutor, defense attorney, and jurors were always white. Black ministers and other members of the community visited the black man. Sometimes the Guild of Mercy, possibly of the white St. Anne’s Episcopal Church, held services for the prisoner. In some instances, blacks—and whites—petitioned the courts for leniency. The Capital covered these events assiduously, providing its readers with much detail about the mood, meals, and conduct of the condemned man. Executions were a kind of secular pageant. Blacks and whites crossed some color lines during these hangings. They featured special roles for the sheriff, spiritual counselors, family, and the offender himself. There seemed to be etiquette for hanging. As the stories in the Capital convey, the town had certain expectations of how a condemned man should behave. Most importantly, he was expected to show courage as he mounted the scaffold. A month after Cooper’s hanging in January 1905, William Leazer, a black man whose hanging was mentioned in the previous chapter, was captured two days after the murder of a policeman who had tried to arrest him for stealing coal in Curtis Bay. To avoid a lynching, authorities moved Leazer to the Baltimore jail, where he “was put through the sprouts” and “sweated” for six hours. He confessed. He claimed that he had only drawn a pistol to frighten the policeman, who was trying to arrest him for stealing coal and about to hit him with a club. Leazer claimed he shot him accidentally. The Capital said that the crime “was a most brutal and entirely unprovoked one, growing out of the propensity of members of the murderer’s race for carrying concealed weapons.” In late April 1905, black attorneys George L. Pendleton of the Literary Association, and Napoleon Jackson of Baltimore defended Leazer during a two-day trial. Leazer was convicted of first-degree murder and scheduled to hang later that summer. While awaiting his execution, he met with the St. Anne’s Guild of Mercy, who gave him a prayer book and hymnal, and with Rev. Simmons of St. Philip’s Church, who baptized him. A “penitent man,” the Capital called him. 4 In April 1912, black resident Andrew Taylor was charged with killing a black woman. Taylor, a married man, was allegedly having an affair with the victim, and shot her when she left him for another man. Taylor was convicted within a few days of his arrest. According to the Sun, the

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trial “consumed but a few hours, and the white jury gave its verdict in five minutes.” Black and white church members came to the jail to counsel him. He posed for a picture for the Capital photographer. It noted, “Taylor is of the typical African negro type. He has very thick lips, high cheek bones, and a light mustache. His countenance and expression are foreboding, and he has altogether the appearance of the criminal he is charged with being.” Yet the writer also noted that Taylor “is above the average negro in point of intelligence. He can read and write and talks distinctly, uses good language and readily comprehends a question no matter how put to him.” The night before the execution, Taylor ate boiled crabs for dinner. As he “dressed in the death garment” the next morning and listened to the final service performed by Rev. Carroll and the church choir, he was cheerful, having had a “hearty breakfast,” the Capital reported. 5 A judge found James Jacobs, also black, guilty of first-degree murder three months later, on November 19, 1912. Jacobs had been accused of killing John Brooks, an “enemy of long standing.” With one month to live, Jacobs was frightened about losing his soul. “If I loses my soul, does I lose everything?” He was told that if he made “peace with his god, he would be saved.” He wanted “to forgive everybody . . . because if that’s all I got, I want the Lord to help me.” 6 In November 1915, after a one-day trial, a white jury convicted Arnold Martin of murdering a county policeman after deliberating for just a few minutes. The governor signed the death warrant in the beginning of December. At the end of the month, the court rejected a motion of his lawyers to set aside the sentence on the grounds that no black person served on the jury. Rev. E. S. Williams, a witness in the Snowden case, visited him in jail, the church choir sang to him, and Hester Johnson and Rosa Norwood of the Mothers’ League read to him from Pilgrims’ Progress. He dictated a death note in which he expressed his regret for killing the police officer and admitted testifying falsely. 7 Cost-cutting was on the sheriff’s mind for the next execution, which took place a year and a half later. Instead of buying a new suit for Archie Isaacs, the sheriff used the same one Martin wore at his hanging. Isaacs had been convicted of “murder and ravishing” a woman in April 1918. “Brute Kills Another Woman,” the Capital headline announced. Isaacs claimed that two black soldiers were guilty of the crime, which he tried to prevent. But four days after his arrest, Isaacs confessed to the crime, and about two weeks later, he was indicted. A. Theodore Brady, the white attorney who defended John Snowden, represented him. Ten days later, after a one-day trial, the white jury deliberated for four minutes before finding Isaacs guilty of first-degree murder. While in jail, he was visited regularly by Georgia Boston and Rev. Benjamin S. Holt, who had also counseled Snowden. 8

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John Henry Evans, who had been arrested in February 1918 for raping a young black girl, was sentenced in May 1918 to hang, a penalty “rarely if ever been imposed for [raping] a colored woman.” Judge Robert Moss justified his sentence by stating, “Women of both races are to be protected from attacks.” Evans cried, “Oh, my Gawd. Judge, cant yer change dat? Please doan send me to da gallers!” the Capital wrote. 9 In June, Sheriff Joseph H. Bellis, who regularly gave the Capital details of the prisoners’ moods, visits, and last moments, described how the three condemned men then awaiting execution were doing in jail. Bellis told the paper that after he read Isaacs the death warrant, he “bore the ordeal well.” Snowden, who was also awaiting hanging, “continued quietly his own affairs in cell,” while Evans, “bible in hand, prayed.” Two days later, the Capital reported that Isaacs “repudiates his confession after hearing his death warrant . . . becomes surly and constantly declares that the law is taking the life of an innocent man.” 10 A number of people petitioned Governor Harrington to commute Evans’s sentence. Others discussed the case with him. After the hanging of Isaacs, who protested his innocence on the gallows, the governor held a hearing on the Evans case to investigate the character of the victim. When a Baltimore detective found that the girl was not “improper,” as alleged by the defense, the governor declined to reduce the sentence, just as he would not for Snowden. 11 Sentences could be harsh for other offenders as well. A black man was sentenced to three years “to think things over” for “insulting advances” upon a white woman. She claimed that he had grabbed her from the rear. A fourteen-year-old black boy was jailed, then probably sent to Cheltenham Reformatory for Incorrigible Boys, for stealing coal at the Short Line Depot. He was putting it into bags and selling it for ten, fifteen, and twenty-five cents, perhaps to earn money for his family. 12 On occasion blacks challenged the police. In 1907, several blacks asked the police to break up a crap game that was going on at a large camp meeting outside of Annapolis. When the sheriff’s deputies arrived, a number of the gamblers resisted arrest. Some shot at one deputy, others broke the ribs of another, “dozens of Negroes” cut up a third, while still others tried to help an injured deputy. After the gamblers were apprehended, there was talk of lynching. Some blacks refused to cooperate with the police because they were afraid the men would be lynched. “The good element of the colored people,” as the Capital called them, agreed that the men should be punished and were willing to testify. 13 White prosecutors and juries could be swift to jail and execute blacks; blacks had difficulty protecting their own neighborhoods from lawlessness. Groups that included Wiley H. Bates, Rev. E. S. Williams, and other leading black citizens appeared at the city council each year to submit petitions, signed sometimes by as many as one hundred people, objecting to the granting of liquor licenses to the many saloons in their neighbor-

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hoods. The Capital also complained about the saloons—a total of nine. “Some dives are of the loosest kind. . . . Colored women are known to gather here and it is said the colored race is being demoralized by this nest of saloons where vice is fostered. . . . Little children have been sent for stimulants for the grown-ups at home, the colored people allege, and the influence is altogether bad.” The paper pointed out that, “the better class of colored people in this locality . . . hope their white friends who control affairs will hear their cry and listen to their appeal for no more saloons.” But this did not happen. The city council continued to grant most license applications each year. 14 Blacks had even less success with the criminal justice system prosecuting white men who assaulted black women. A few months after Snowden’s hanging, his attorney, Brady, represented a white man accused of raping a thirteen-year-old black girl who worked in his house. He was arrested and released on a $5,000 bond. The Afro reported that Brady was “prepared to establish an alibi and expected to get his client off scot free.” The offender was not indicted by the all-white grand jury. One of the reasons, Brady told the Afro, was that the “colored child did not report the case until one week after it had happened.” The paper commented, “Although the honor of a colored girl is at stake, as well as her future usefulness to society, no colored person will sit on this jury.” The defendant “will get off probably.” 15 Blacks could not rely on the Capital for unbiased coverage of black wrongdoing. For the paper, black misconduct was an opportunity to demean their behavior, which it did with great frequency. One article described “Buzzards’ Roost” as “a disreputable Negro settlement where police have so much trouble and on the whole there is often rioting and fighting with the marines and sailors.” The demeaning expression, “Buzzards’ Roost,” for a street where blacks lived also referred to the balcony section in theaters where blacks were permitted to sit. Women offenders were often called “dusky damsels” or “colored Amazons.” The paper sometimes used what it considered Negro dialect in stories, such as one about a crap game going on in the cemetery off Northwest Street, “come seben, come eleben.” 16 Minstrel shows that ridiculed blacks came less frequently to Annapolis now. A total of nine were advertised in 1912; by 1918, only one was mentioned in the paper. But local groups still staged them. The popular and accomplished black singer and performer Sissieretta Jones, known as “Black Patti,” performed half a dozen times in Annapolis with her troop known as the “Black Troupedours.” At her last appearance in 1913, no local blacks were allowed to attend the matinee performance at the Colonial Theatre. At the evening show, the “left section and part of the rear of the first floor is reserved for the colored and the center and right is for the white patrons” as well as “all box seats; all balcony and gallery are for the colored.” 17

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Black residents continued to read negative depictions of themselves in the ads for the minstrel shows. Notices described, “Ebonized magicians” that “cut up with all the abandon and idiosyncrasies of their race,” or mentioned the favorite “shiftless but resourceful coon” of “Raspberry Snow,” or commented that “all minstrels like all coons are said to look alike.” An ad for a recital of “southern songs” to benefit the white St. Anne’s Episcopal Church said, “There is such an irresistible charm about the old southern life, and the genuine ‘before de wah’ darkey.” 18 When the film Birth of a Nation was shown in Annapolis, the Capital called it “a marvelous spectacle. . . . The early days of slavery are placed in contrast with those times when the liberated negro sought to dominate because of an unaccustomed liberty. Then there are those dashing riders of the Ku Klux Klan upholders of traditions of the South.” Blacks in Baltimore protested the showing of this film, but the black residents of Annapolis did not. 19 The Capital reported on developments in the black community in Annapolis and elsewhere in the country. The paper followed closely the struggle to disfranchise blacks which began in 1900. The virulence of the racist commentary must have offended and discouraged Annapolis’s black readers. In the fall of 1905, Maryland voters were to consider the referendum supporting the Poe Amendment, which would disfranchise many black and some white voters in the state, as discussed in chapter 3. The problem was that in trying to eliminate the black vote, which counted for 20 percent of the electorate, the amendment would also make 15 percent of the native-born white men ineligible to vote. The Capital summarized the Democratic platform, “Disfranchise the d--n negro.” A few weeks later, the paper softened this position in an editorial. It supported an amendment that would eliminate the black voter, an “ignorant, corrupt, blind instrument of unscrupulous and selfish leaders,” while protecting “with some degree of equality the right of every white man to vote.” 20 In the summer of 1905, black voters organized to defeat the amendment. The Suffrage League, first formed in Baltimore, encouraged churches and community leaders throughout the state to tell black voters how to mark their ballots. A meeting held in August at the Clay Street Hall brought together men of Annapolis and Anne Arundel County to urge blacks to vote against the Poe Amendment. Wiley H. Bates, the prominent grocery store owner and former alderman, addressed the group: “Gentlemen, I am by no means a politician, but I do think that when it comes to protecting our sacred rights every man should cry out until the God that ruleth earth and sky shall hear and consider his prayers.” In October, the A.M.E. Conference at Asbury Church endorsed a resolution that denounced the Poe Amendment. On Election Day, 633 more voters in Annapolis opposed the Poe Amendment than supported it. Statewide, the amendment was defeated by nearly 30,000 votes. 21

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The sense of relief was short-lived. In late 1907, after winning the gubernatorial race, white Democrats, led by Isaac Lobe Straus, the newly elected attorney general, drafted another amendment that was named after him. Its provisions included a “grandfather clause” and allowed for six classes of voters. The bill was introduced in the 1908 legislature. At his inaugural in January 1908, the new Democratic governor, Austin L. Crothers, spoke of the need for the “elimination of the illiterate and irresponsible Negro voters from the electorate of the State,” while also saying that all citizens have equal rights and opportunities. The Afro-American pointed out that the legislators overestimated black illiteracy. It was “far less” than the 50 percent of the black population believed by the Democrats. It was “more like 20 percent . . . because of Republicans instructing Negroes how to vote. . . . [They have] perfected a system of schooling that enables them to reach 90 percent of the colored men.” The Afro correctly predicted that the bill would pass, that the governor would sign it, and that it would be submitted for ratification by the voters. The Afro urged its readers to organize against ratification “for [their] own protection.” 22 While struggling to maintain their right to vote in national and statewide elections, Annapolis blacks lost their franchise in municipal elections. In December 1905, Democrats in Annapolis followed the example of the Maryland towns of Snow Hill, Crisfield, and Frederick, which passed laws to disfranchise blacks. The new charters required only the approval of the General Assembly, which was easily accomplished because of the Democratic majority. The mayor of Annapolis appointed a commission to draft a new charter for the city that would require voters to have paid taxes on $500 worth of property, and be able to read and write. 23 The Afro called it a “plan to keep colored people of Annapolis from electing a colored member of the city council.” Several prominent blacks, including Alderman T. A. Thompson and Wiley H. Bates, planned to address a mass rally against the proposition in January 1906. The measure failed the first time it was introduced, but in 1908, Anne Arundel County delegate A. Theodore Brady, who later would be Snowden’s attorney, introduced a bill to restrict the voting qualifications in Annapolis’s municipal elections. Males twenty-one and older had to meet one of three requirements to register to vote in the town’s elections: own $500 worth of assessed property, be naturalized citizens or sons of naturalized citizens, or had voted or were a descendant of men eligible to vote since 1868, the “grandfather” clause. Some of its provisions, the Capital pointed out, were “allegedly forbidden by the Constitution especially the 15th amendment.” The Afro estimated that about 100 of the 800 registered blacks in Annapolis would qualify under the new restrictive charter. 24 Despite the new restrictions, many blacks tried to register in June. By earlier arrangement with the Republican Party, several blacks whom the registrars rejected went to the law offices of J. Wirt Randal, a member of a

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prominent white Annapolis family, to file a formal complaint before a notary public. Their statements were included in a damage suit filed to challenge the constitutionality of the new election law. The three black complainants were John B. Anderson, of Anne Arundel County, and, from Annapolis, William H. Howard, a member of the Literary Association and an attorney, and Robert Brown, a whitewasher. None of their grandfathers could have voted in 1868 because they were black, and the Maryland constitution only gave white men the franchise. 25 A few weeks later, J. Albert Adams, the prosperous black businessman, withdrew his candidacy as alderman for the Third Ward, the most heavily concentrated black area. In 1907, Adams had defeated T. A. Thompson, the black incumbent, who had been endorsed by the white Republican county chairman. The paper reported that Adams was “engaged in several lines of business including blacksmithing and conducting an undertaking establishment and a saloon.” Adams, a light-skinned, thin-faced man with a neat mustache curled up at the ends, explained his withdrawal in a letter to the Capital. His businesses demanded all of his time, he claimed, but he probably realized he could not win without the black vote. 26 Election Day seemed different. “The polls presented an appearance which was new to Annapolitans, the usual colored attendants being absent. Eight hundred and six blacks were denied the right to vote, compared with 211 whites who were barred. After the election, the paper gloated, “Democrats have a clean sweep.” This was the first time in twelve years that a black was not on the city council. The Capital conjectured that the Republicans “won’t make an expensive and probably losing fight.” 27 Despite the Capital’s prediction, the lawsuit went forward. The complainants claimed that they were “unlawfully disfranchised by the registrars” and asked for damages of $5,000 each. Charles J. Bonaparte, former attorney general under Roosevelt, and several other well-known lawyers were involved. Bonaparte said they were “determined to force the issue and if necessary take the case to the Supreme Court of the United States,” the Capital reported. 28 The campaign to disfranchise all of Maryland’s blacks continued. As the November vote on the Straus Amendment approached, the Capital heated up its rhetoric. Among its reasons to support the amendment were, “Because it protects absolutely the white voters. . . . Because the exclusion of the ignorant and thriftless Negro vote will make for better political conditions. Because it will . . . enable the white voter to decide public questions solely on their merits. Because it will stimulate the negroes to thrift and education. Because it will create a better feeling between the races, as restrictions on Negro voting have done in the South.” Blacks must have been offended and discouraged to read this and another editorial that ran twelve days later pointing out that the amend-

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ment would force “the illiterate trouble causing negro under the control of the white man, where nature, precedent and experience prove he should be.” 29 That fall, Maryland voters rejected the Straus Plan 106,069 to 89,808. This was not the end of blacks’ struggle in Maryland to retain their right to vote. In 1910, two Charles County Democrats, William J. Frere and Walter M. Digges, drafted the third legislative attempt at disfranchisement, which would have permitted white men to vote while all others would have to have owned $500 in property for at least two years before registering to vote. An editorial in the Capital supported the Digges Amendment, as it became known. According to the paper, “Unrestricted suffrage for the colored people has injured them. They had not the preparation for the exercise of that great right.” 30 The Suffrage League again instructed blacks to prepare them to vote. For the first time, black women were recruited to help with this training—not to gain their own franchise, but to protect the franchise of black men. While the Capital conceded that “of course, there are many good and law abiding negro citizens, and these have a perfect right to vote the Republican ticket. . . . Yet everyone knows that when negroes congregate in a body, that the lawless and irresponsible portion of the crowd always overrule those who are more conservative and more considerate as to the right of the white people.” It evoked negative stereotypes: “And further, since this campaign has commenced the Republican Party has turned loose a horde of Negro government employees in Washington that haven of the black saints and sent these dandified and over-perfumed sports all through Maryland to arouse the prejudices of the Negroes . . . against the white people.” It saw a potential danger of black voters: “Shame, oh shame, on the white man or men in a party . . . who by inaugurating overt act by the black people put the white woman and the white girls in jeopardy.” 31 But the voters also rejected this amendment by 84,000 to 46,000. No further attempt was made to disfranchise Maryland blacks. The Annapolis municipal election lawsuit slowly worked its way through the courts. In October 1910, U.S. Court of Appeals judge Thomas J. Morris, “delivered the first federal court decision invalidating a disfranchisement plan that was based on a grandfather clause.” He ruled that the “Annapolis law was void under the 15th amendment to the Federal Constitution, and the fact that the officers of registration were acting in obedience to a State law afforded them no protection from damages.” That meant the white election registrars could be held liable for damages. 32 The registration of new voters was “slow getting started” in the 1911 Annapolis municipal election. The city had a hard time finding people to act as registrars, especially in the Third Ward because they were “liable by some 800 negroes,” if they denied them the right to vote, the Capital pointed out, because of Judge Morris’s ruling. About thirty blacks again

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tried to register and were turned down. Another eight hundred did not bother. Yet, “Negroes who were denied the vote last time were among the first to vote this time,” including the complainants who brought the suit. The Democrats won again. The Evening Capital reprinted an editorial from the Baltimore Sun, which regretted that “inferior Federal courts have the power to interfere with matters which concern local self-government.” 33 Democrats decided to appeal the judge’s decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. In November 1913, the opposing sides argued Annapolis electionlaw case, Myers et al. v. Anderson, before the court. At the same time the court heard a challenge to the 1910 amendment to the Oklahoma constitution that required all voters to have grandfathers who voted in 1865, a provision that eliminated black voters. The NAACP, which had been following developments in Maryland and realized that Morris’s opinion “was the first time there has been a friendly decision,” persuaded the U.S. attorney general to challenge the constitutionality of the “grandfather clause” in Oklahoma. On June 21, 1915, the Supreme Court declared Annapolis municipal election law and the Oklahoma amendment were both unconstitutional. This was the NAACP’s first major legal victory in dismantling Jim Crow segregation. 34 That summer of 1915, many blacks registered to vote in the municipal elections. J. Albert Adams chose to run again for alderman from what was now called the Fourth Ward. In the June primary, he defeated William H. Howard, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. The next month, he won the election with 285 votes. He was the first black alderman in seven years. 35 Mt. Moriah Church held a special meeting to celebrate the Supreme Court’s decision. Bates presided. Howard, and another Literary Association member Robert Davis, and several others spoke before the “large and enthusiastic” crowd. They adopted the resolution of Literary Association member, William H. Butler Jr., that thanked Charles Bonaparte and others “for their unflagging interest in the case.” 36 Three months later, white Republicans, for perhaps the first time, drew the color line against black Republicans at the Colonial Theatre, where the governor and the candidate for attorney general spoke at a party meeting. The political gathering ran on a “Jim Crow” basis. Ushers told blacks to sit in the balcony seats. Some refused and left, feeling insulted. Some white Republicans blamed the theater regulations, but the manager denied this “most forcibly,” stating, “I rented the theater to the Republican Committee and imposed no conditions upon them whatever.” 37 Black aldermen attempted to represent their Fourth Ward in the city council by getting services, streetlights, and clean streets in their neighborhood. At one meeting Thompson requested funds for the pavement of Washington and Clay streets. The council voted that these streets would

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only be paved if there was money left over after paving Franklin, Southgate, and other streets, where whites lived. On another occasion, he requested that streetlights be installed in Gott’s Court. Perhaps as part of Adams’s campaign in 1907 against Thompson, who had the support of white Republican leaders, the Capital quoted anonymous sources charging that Thompson “was obnoxious to white members of the council and thus hadn’t been able to obtain improvements for his ward.” The mayor said that the “charges were untrue. [There was a] kindly feeling of all the council toward him. . . . When his proposals [were] defeated it was because there was no money for them.” White politicians and officials frequently used this rationale to thwart black requests. 38 Black challenges to the laws that segregated trains and ferries were less successful than those to disfranchisement. Jim Crow practices were becoming routine. The skirmishes now were small, instead of full-scale battles. If they had to be segregated, blacks demanded equal accommodations. They did not want to be relegated to the smoking car, and they complained that whites took the best seats in the sections set aside for blacks. Black passengers continued to challenge the law, including the grandchildren of Dr. Bishop, who insisted on sitting in the three rows in the front car designated for blacks, even when the car filled. They refused to go back to the smoking car. 39 The assembly enacted additional Jim Crow laws intended to regiment the separation of the populations more completely. One required steamship companies to provide separate toilets and sleeping quarters for black and white passengers. A second law mandated separate compartments for the two populations. A third law required the Short Line between Baltimore and Annapolis and the Washington, Baltimore and Annapolis Railway to segregate their passengers. In 1912, the General Assembly passed a bill making it “mandatory upon conductors and brakemen of passenger coaches [to impose] more rigid enforcement of the law’s provisions.” The same year, blacks began their efforts to repeal the Jim Crow laws, a campaign that would take almost forty years to succeed. 40 Every year black parents pressed for a longer school year for their children. Black county schools closed early in the new year, and like Sisyphus, blacks organized entertainments to keep Stanton open as long as possible every year. Many in the community helped. Churches took up special offerings. The black waiters at Carvel Hall held a fundraiser at the Assembly Rooms. The Capital commented, “The better class realizes the importance of keeping the school open thereby preventing the colored children from running at large, and the old story that streets and idleness make criminals. To this end everything will be done to keep open the Annapolis colored school,” never suggesting a change in the discriminatory laws themselves. 41 White Annapolis priorities centered more on vocational education of blacks. In 1906, the superintendent for public education launched a man-

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ual training program at Stanton. The Capital reported that girls would be “taught to be good cooks, housemaids. . . . [The] school will be equipped with requisites to turn out good servants, a much needed institution here.” A few months later, the superintendent spoke at a large meeting at Asbury Church when many concerned black citizens, including Bates, Perry Dobson, former trustee of Stanton, and Charles A. Butler, also an owner of a grocery store, discussed trying to keep Stanton School open another six months. While the superintendent spoke “highly of Stanton,” he seemed unwilling to help black parents raise the funds or change the discriminatory laws. He said, “Colored people will have to make a sacrifice if [they] want [it] to be open.” William H. Howard, the black attorney and complainant in the municipal election law case, remarked, “No two races could live harmoniously with one highly intelligent and the other basely ignorant.” 42 The following year, a committee of the state Board of Education submitted a report to the board that recommended a “practical education” for blacks. The authors of the report consulted with Gen. S. C. Armstrong, the founder of Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, who suggested according to the Capital, “What the Negro needs at once is elementary education and moral development.” The black leader Booker T. Washington proposed to the committee three areas for education, suggestions that reflected his support of vocational education—”agricultural, domestic and mechanical.” The report stated, “The colored people, in a sense, are still the wards of the state, and that it is the duty of the state to teach them with patience and kindness the things that will fit them for their mission in life at the same time promote their own true and substantial welfare and happiness.” The report claimed that “book learning alone will avail them of little.” Instead, they should “try to gain respect and good will of white brethren.” 43 Neither the school superintendent nor the Anne Arundel County Board of Education ever did anything to remedy the unequal funding. For several years a special committee of black citizens met and drafted a petition to the legislature for an increase in the appropriation for colored schools, but to no avail. 44 A delegation of ministers tried another approach. They asked the allwhite Anne Arundel County Board of Education to extend the black schools’ year. They pointed out, “Though Anne Arundel County has the largest colored population barring Baltimore City, it has had for six consecutive school years the shortest term of any of the 23 counties.” The board “gave them a respectable hearing and promised to better future conditions,” a typical delaying tactic it used for years. 45 One March, a number of the wives of white Naval Academy personnel and other town leaders organized a “Silver Tea” for the school. These women were “deeply interested in the work of Stanton School,” the Capi-

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tal reported. “A pretty girl served the tea and candy . . . on board ship,” and “a silver contribution was solicited.” 46 For several years fundraising was successful enough that Stanton stayed open until June. In 1913, four sixth-graders graduated to the seventh grade, an accomplishment the black community recognized with a ceremony at Asbury Church. The pastor spoke about “colored people educating their children and sending them to school as long as possible.” 47 In 1915, Stanton remained open again until June for the students whose families could pay the fee of fifty cents a month. Enrollment had dropped from five hundred to three hundred students. Three students graduated from the elementary level. Because Annapolis offered no high school instruction at Stanton for black students, these youngsters went out of town for further education. Their parents, members of the Fletcher, Johnson, and Boston families, all well respected in the black community, sent their children to high school in Baltimore and Washington, DC, probably arranging for them to live with relatives. 48 The Capital complained about the short school year for blacks: “Turning these ignorant colored boys and girls into the streets for at least eight months in the year is encouraging crime and fostering criminals.” It chastised its readers—the “general public stands idly by and permits this condition of affairs to go on year after year,” while it sympathized with the schools’ teachers, “Many of the colored teachers, estimable men and women of their race, were thrown out of employment yesterday by the closing of the colored schools throughout Anne Arundel County.” 49 Blacks required only a minimal education, the paper stated in an editorial the same day. “Teach the colored children to read and write some, and teach them arithmetic, geography and domestic science for the girls and boys and we will have a more orderly community among the colored race, less of the outlaw happenings and altogether fewer criminals.” But it pointed out that it was a “shame on this community that with all the money levied for schools and paid by the taxpayers, the colored schools can only be kept open less than four months in the year. . . . Back of it all is probably politics, and those who stand unmindful of the criminal conditions they are permitting will someday be called to account and held responsible.” 50 In late 1915, the legislature began to consider a modest reform and discussed the need for a compulsory education law. Maryland ranked thirty-second out of forty-eight states in illiteracy of white children more than nine years old. A third of white school-age children in Anne Arundel County were not attending school. In contrast, the Capital reported that “without any compulsory school attendance, the Negroes in Maryland have reduced the illiteracy of the members of their own race of 10 years of age and over from 50.1 percent in 1890 to 35.1 percent in 1900

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and 23.4 percent in 1910.” The paper concluded that at these rates, “Negroes will be literate by 1930 and whites by 1950.” 51 A white commission appointed by the legislature to study the Maryland school system recommended certain reforms including a minimum term of nine months for white children, and seven months for blacks. Teachers would have to meet certain training requirements as well. The study revealed an interesting fact: more black teachers had a college education than whites. 52 In April 1916, the legislature passed the Compulsory Education Act, based on the recommendations of the commission. It changed the basis on which black schools were funded and extended the black school year to seven months. But the act also extended the white school year by forty days, a difference that perpetuated second-class education for blacks. The legislature established an “equalization” fund to ensure that all counties could meet the minimum education requirements set by the act. Nevertheless, funding for Stanton fell short until 1922, when the legislature allocated the mandated funds. So the tenacious fundraising efforts to keep Stanton open continued each year. 53 Members of the black community wanted to remedy other inequities. In a letter for state legislators published by the Capital, Howard, the black attorney and complainant in the municipal disfranchisement case, enumerated other issues ripe for reform. He recommended an increase in the pay of both white and black teachers. He asked the legislature for help in enforcing state laws and city ordinances prohibiting crap games and “bawdy houses” that were operating near the school and affecting the children. He reminded them of the grand jury inspection report that “condemned the [Stanton School] toilet system as unsanitary.” And he complained about the school curriculum, which made blacks “nondescript because [they were] not mentioned in history class except for slavery.” Among black citizens’ achievements, he thought, were “holders now of property, decline of illiteracy, increases of churches, in wars. . . . If these facts are taught in all of the schools [it] will help bring about an equitable equation in the lives of the white and colored citizens, each appreciating the other for their virtue and their valor.” 54 A U.S. Bureau of Education report on “negro education” showed how Maryland discriminated. The state spent $13.79 per white student and $6.33 for blacks. In Anne Arundel County, spending for black students was actually $1.60. Black students and teachers in Annapolis could attend only segregated black colleges and training schools in Maryland. For an advanced degree, they had to go out of the state. Annapolis black teachers were paid considerably less than white teachers, despite the fact that some were more qualified. In 1918, the legislature set the black teachers’ minimum salary to $30 a month. White teachers’ minimum salary was set at about $66 a month. Blacks petitioned the legislature for equal pay

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every session, but it would be another two decades before this inequity was remedied. 55 The 1910 and 1920 Annapolis census records show what limited employment opportunities blacks had. Name after name on page after page is categorized in the most lowly professions: laborer, waiter, cook, driver, domestic, maid, laundress. There is only the slightest hint that any of them could find better jobs. The 1920 census lists fewer than forty professionals—six teachers, one school official, three ministers, five barbers, three doctors, one dentist, one pharmacist, two midwives, three store owners, one bookkeeper, three haulers, two undertakers, two owners of restaurants, two attorneys, one hairdresser, one florist, and one insurance salesperson. 56 The post office allocated only one position to a black mail carrier, which was considered a good job. Frank Smith held the job for more than twelve years. He was the one seen about town pulling a toy wagon to deliver mail in the Third Ward. Harry Spriggs replaced him. Blacks’ preferred employer was the Naval Academy, because the wages and hours were more reliable. But the academy only allowed blacks to work as janitors, cooks, laundry workers, groundskeepers, and waiters. A few worked as stewards and mechanics, but only at the lowest ranks. Even these menial jobs gave the blacks who held them a certain status in the black community. 57 Annapolis had no industry, further limiting opportunities for black workers. A number found better work in Baltimore’s factories. Others could only find seasonal work. Entire families worked as berry pickers on the Eastern Shore in the summer, earning $2.50 to $4.00 a day. Many worked as oystermen or fishermen, jobs that were also seasonal. 58 Dangers existed in laboring and construction jobs. A “well-known industrious colored man” worked for the contractor Feldmeyer, for whom Feldmeyer’s Court was named. He lost a leg when it was crushed by a freight train. Some blacks stood up for their rights with unfortunate consequences. Garfield Blackistone, a member of an old Annapolis black family, got angry with his employer, whom he claimed owed him money, and attacked him. His boss, the contractor Fred Stehle, beat him so badly with a board that Blackistone was “unconscious for two hours.” 59 Blacks faced poor living conditions. Many lived in cramped, poorly constructed houses without indoor running water or electricity. They had to use outdoor toilets, which were not properly cleaned or inspected, particularly in the alleys and streets in the Fourth Ward. City officials insufficiently enforced regulations requiring that outdoor toilets be connected to the city sewage system in these areas. Black residents also complained about the dumping of refuse near St. Anne’s Episcopal Church Cemetery and city ashes on the extension of Clay Street, near their homes. 60

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Medical care was another challenge for black Annapolitans. There were few black doctors to attend to their needs. A young black doctor, R. P. Keesee, replaced Dr. Bishop, but died after practicing medicine for just a few years. Dr. Bishop’s son-in-law, Cornelius Ridgley, trained as a doctor, but because he was not permitted to practice at the hospital, he and his family eventually left Annapolis. Dr. George Thomas, a pharmacist, had set up his own pharmacy at the corner of Calvert and Clay streets. Dr. Ambrose Garcia and Dr. Harold Norwood were practicing at the time of Snowden’s trial and hanging. Several black midwives delivered babies, as black women could not have their babies in the hospital, and a white county nurse looked in on ill black people. 61 Whites in Annapolis did not see black poverty and grim living conditions as a consequence of their own discrimination, but rather saw blacks as biologically weaker. The president of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Frank J. Goodnow, articulated these views at a State Conference on Tuberculosis in 1915. “The negro is more predisposed to tuberculosis than the white man. Wherever we find the Negro living with the white man the danger of the continuance and spread of the disease is increased. The white man has no immunity from negro tuberculosis.” 62 Members of the black community must have appreciated reading a less-degrading explanation of their susceptibility to the disease in the Afro which quoted one expert, who claimed, “One should compare negroes and whites of same economic status. . . . Consumption is a poor man’s disease.” 63 In May 1915, at a mass meeting at Asbury Church, blacks formed their own permanent Relief Committee of Tuberculosis at the encouragement of and affiliated with the white State Health Association. Blacks in Annapolis often formed parallel organizations that worked alongside white ones on health and other problems. 64 Blacks in Annapolis publicly challenged other racist perceptions promoted by whites. Just before the U.S. engagement in World War I, whites in Annapolis questioned black patriotism. “Why Not a Colored Company?” was the headline of a Capital story. It asked, “Where are the patriotic among the colored race? Why not organize a colored company? Does not the colored race of Annapolis have the same governmental protection and privileges as the white? Is there no patriotism among the colored race? There are enough colored men in Annapolis to form a company. Cannot they be persuaded to enlist?” It asked ominously, “Are the only men to be left behind to protect white women to be colored men? There are some things worth looking into.” 65 The next day, a strong reply appeared in the paper: “As a race we have always helped to defend this, our country, in times of need and always will. From the earliest wars the colored people have answered the call and we are just as patriotic today as we were in the sixties. We did

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our share at San Juan, Parral, etc., and always will.” The letter was signed by Richard B. Brice, a member of a respected black family. 66 At a well-attended public rally at Mt. Moriah Church, the black churches called on their men to “show patriotism.” They unanimously passed resolutions affirming that “We are proud of the record the black man has achieved in the wars of the past. . . . We stand ready to answer our country’s call and to sacrifice our lives if need be . . . as negro soldiers have done in every war in the history of this nation.” 67 Annapolis talked about war preparedness. People were told to save jars and bottles, eat meatless meals, and hang the flag. Both black and white women responded to the call. The recently organized Mothers’ League of black women held a public meeting at the Municipal Building to hear a talk on preparedness. Members of the Asbury Church congregation joined the Red Cross appeal that was getting under way. Now complimenting the black community effort, the Capital reported that “Asbury M.E. Church comes forward with patriotic response” when many in the congregation enrolled in the separate African American Red Cross Auxiliary. 68 Registration of eligible men began in June 1917. Governor Harrington announced, “Idlers will have to work if they don’t enlist.” To launch the enlistment, Annapolis held a parade in which the black Boy Scouts were the only black community group mentioned in the paper. The Enforced Labor Law required that all men between the ages of thirteen and fifty register. The governor could put them to work for the state or private individuals. The Capital claimed that there were a number of “young, able-bodied men, whose principal occupation is playing pool. In Annapolis most of these idle colored men are supported by their wives.” 69 That same month, a statewide delegation of professional blacks met with Governor Harrington to encourage equal participation in all aspects of the war effort, including appointing blacks to state commissions, enlarging “the First Separate Company to the strength of a full regiment,” and using “his executive influence against the passage of any segregation measure for Baltimore County or any other portion of the state.” Three months later, the governor appointed black businessman Wiley H. Bates and two black ministers, Rev. E. S. Williams and Rev. J. E. Briscoe, to the Preparedness Commission. The governor said, “I want to give the colored people of Maryland an opportunity for service. I believe they are loyal in every respect and by proper organization they will be in a position to render great service to the State, both for patriotic purposes and for properly assisting in solving the food and labor questions.” 70 A few nights before their departure to boot camp, the first black draftees attended a dance in their honor at the Bladen Street Armory. Both Asbury and Mt. Moriah churches held special services for the men. The Naval Academy offered them the use of the Guild Hall as a rest and recreation room. The Mt. Moriah congregation also converted the house

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next door to the church into a special recreation home for the soldiers to visit when they were on leave from Camp Meade. The Mother’s League made 102 comfort kits for the soldiers. 71 Eventually, 174 black men from Annapolis went to fight in World War I. Those remaining in the community supported the war effort. They raised funds for Christmas packages and for the Red Cross and supported other programs. They used the effort to advance their people. 72 The Capital offered conflicting images of the black troops. The paper reported that a “regiment of negro stevedores” put on a minstrel show. “They shuffle the same dances and sing the same plantation melodies as at home.” In a later story, the paper reported that Gen. Pershing praised them. Their “losses were fewer,” but “on a par” in gallantry with the whites. 73 By the end of the war, the Capital seemed more appreciative of black patriotism than it had at the beginning. In a November 1918 editorial, it stated, “Colored citizens of the county deserve credit. . . . All reports are not yet in, but to date show wonderful work . . . for United War Work Drive.” 74 In November, Annapolis held a victory parade when the war ended. Annapolis’s blacks held their Peace Jubilee to honor their soldiers and sailors. The governor and mayor were unable to attend for health reasons, the Capital said. Black dignitaries came from out of town. On display was a service flag with 174 stars, seven of which were gold for those who had died in the war. The relatives of the 174 soldiers were asked to stand when their family member’s name was called. The entire congregation stood for the reading of the seven names of the deceased. 75 A month later, John Snowden was dead. Some of the soldiers did not come back to town until after the hanging. Before returning to the United States, many black units had been assigned to cleanup work in Europe, such as reburying the dead. Some believed that four thousand black troops in Camp Meade awaited release and others were on ships in the Baltimore harbor; they thought the men were delayed deliberately until after Snowden’s hanging to avoid any violence in the town. 76 NOTES 1. This was the tenth lynching to have occurred in Maryland. At least nine victims were black. The Capital listed them in its December 21, 1906 paper: “5/13/91, Asbury Green, Centreville, accused of felonious assault; 5/17/92, James Taylor, Chestertown; 6/ 8/93, Isaac Kemp, Princess Ann, accused of murder; 10/24/94, Stephen Williams, Prince George’s County, accused of assaulting a white woman; 3/16/95, Marshall Price [no category mentioned so white?], Caroline County, accused of killing 14 year old girl; 3/28/ 95, Jacob Henson, Ellicott City, accused of murder; 11/16/95, James Brown, Frederick; 6/9/97, William Andrews, alias ‘Cuba’ accused of assaulting a woman, Somerset County; 5/25/98, Garfield King, Salisbury, accused of murder; and 12/21/06, Henry Davis,”EC, December 22, 1906; AA, January 5, 1907.

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2. EC, December 21, 1906; December 17, 1906; December 19, 1906. 3. EC, December 24, 1906; December 26, 1906. 4. EC, March 23, 1905; BS, March 23, 1905; EC, March 24, 1905; March 29, 1905; BS, April 28, 1905; EC, June 21, 1905; July 17, 1905; July 19, 1905. His last name was spelled both “Leaser” and “Leazer.” 5. EC, April 29, 1912; BS, May 4, 1912; EC, July 9, 1912; July 25, 1912; July 26, 1912; July 27, 1912; August 8, 1912; August 9, 1912. 6. EC, September 26, 1912; December 15, 1912; January 10, 1913. 7. EC, October 16, 1915; November 11, 1915; November 12, 1915; December 1, 1915; December 28, 1915; January 6, 1916; January 7, 1916. 8. EC, April 6, 1918; April 10, 1918; April 19, 1918; April 27, 1918; April 29, 1918; BS, April 30, 1918; EC, July 12, 1918. 9. EC, February 19, 1918; May 9, 1918. 10. EC, June 13, 1918; June 15, 1918. 11. EC, June 13, 1918; June 18, 1918; July 12, 1918; July 26, 1918; August 29, 1918; September 30, 1918; October 3, 1918; October 4, 1918. Whether these hangings constituted “legal lynching” is not known. Punishments of blacks and whites for rape and murder were not compared, though no white offenders were hanged in Annapolis during this period. Nor were any transcripts of trials examined. White officials in the criminal justice system discriminated against and tried to intimidate blacks, but the tactics did not keep the blacks down. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky. 12. EC, August 19, 1910; March 11, 1915. 13. EC, September 2, 1907; September 7, 1907. 14. EC, April 10, 1912; April 29, 1912. 15. AA, April 11, 1919. 16. EC, July 27, 1909; May 21, 1909; April 12, 1910. 17. EC, April 6, 1912; April 17, 1912; May 24, 1912; June 22, 1912; June 29, 1912; July 5, 1912; July 13, 1912; October 21, 1912; November 5, 1912; December 30, 1918; January 31, 1913. 18. EC, February 23, 1907; September 3, 1910; October 10, 1910; January 7, 1913. 19. EC, May 6, 1916. 20. EC, September 29, 1905; October 10, 1905; Callcott, 101–138. 21. EC, August 16, 1905; October 2, 1905; AA, October 7, 1905; EC, November 8, 1905; Brugger, 423. 22. AA, January 11, 1908; February 1, 1908; Feburary 15, 1908. 23. Callcott, 137. 24. AA, December 30, 1905; EC, March 13, 1908; June 12, 1909. 25. EC, June 8, 1909; July 31, 1909; Annapolis City Directory for 1910, 19. Hereafter Gould and Halleron. 26. EC, June 24, 1909; June 10, 1907. 27. EC, July 13, 1909; October 30, 1909; June 30, 1909; July 12, 1909. 28. EC, July 14, 1909; July 31, 1909. 29. EC, October 6, 1909; October 18, 1909. 30. Brugger, 424; EC, April 11, 1910. 31. EC, October 31, 1911. 32. Brugger, 424; EC, October 29, 1910; Callcott, 138; EC, July 12, 191l. 33. EC, July 10, 1911; July 11, 1911. 34. EC, July 11, 1911; October 29, 1910; Callcott, 138; Bennett, 519; AA, November 15, 1913; “NAACP: A Century in the Fight for Freedom,” NAACP Victory in Guinn v. United States. 35. EC, June 10, 1915; July 20, 1915; AA, July 17, 1915. 36. AA, July 17, 1915. 37. EC, October 22, 1915. Jim Crow practices were already in place at political rallies in Baltimore starting in about 1908, Callcott, 150–54. 38. EC, May 15, 1906; June 11, 1907. 39. EC, April 11, 1908; AA, September 13, 1913; Moses, interview.

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40. EC, February 21, 1912; March 17, 1908; December 5, 1914; Callcott, 136; Department of Legislative Services, Under the Dome, 201; EC, February 21, 1912; February 16, 1951. 41. AMA, “Proceedings,” 1905–1908, January 13, 1908, May 11, 1908, MSA M49-17; EC, January 31, 1911; March 8, 1911. 42. EC, April 7, 1906; November 8, 1906; January 29, 1907; January 30, 1907. 43. EC, August 29, 1907. These recommendations were typical of Washington, whose model of black education dominated at this time. He took an accommodationist position with whites, advocating the acquisition of manual labor skills as a way to Negro advancement. Marable and Mullings,Let Nobody Turn Us Around, xvii–xxv, 270–71. 44. AA, February 8, 1908. 45. AA, January 23, 1909. 46. EC, March 19, 1910; March 21, 1910; March 29, 1910. This is the only evidence in the Capital of white support of black efforts to keep Stanton open. 47. EC, June 26, 1913. 48. Brown, A Century, 16; EC, June 24, 1915. 49. EC, January 30, 1915. 50. Ibid. 51. EC, December 2, 1915; December 22, 1915. 52. AA, January 8, 1916; Brown, A Century, 17. 53. AA, April 8, 1916; Brown, A Century, 13–20; Jenkins, “A History,” 41–42. 54. EC, June 6, 1916. 55. AA, July, 21, 1917; Brown, A Century, 20. 56. U.S. Department of Interior, Thirteenth Census of the United States, Population Schedules, Anne Arundel County, City of Annapolis; U. S. Department of Interior, Fourteenth Census of the United States, Population Schedules, Anne Arundel County, City of Annapolis. 57. EC, August 4, 1906; March 14, 1917; OHI. 58. EC, May 19, 1917; OHI. 59. EC, December 5, 1907; EC, July 15, 1909. 60. EC, March 29, 1907; November 18, 1915; AMA, “Proceedings,” 1908–1912, July 14, 1910, May 9, 1910 MSA M49–19; AMA “Proceedings,” 1912–1916, June 16, 1913, 216; April 10, 1916, 12, MSA M49–20; AMA “Proceedings,” 1916–1921, January 14, 1918, 196, MSA M49–21; OHI. 61. OHI; At this time, the Flexner Report recommended, among other things, the consolidation and standardization of medical training. The implementation of the report resulted in the closing of most medical schools that had accepted and trained blacks, thus limiting their access to medical education. Beck, “The Flexner Report,” 291: 2139–40. 62. EC, January 23, 1915. The racist views prevalent at this time explained differences between blacks and whites on the basis of biological differences. Baker, From Savage to Negro. 63. AA, January 20, 1917. 64. EC, March 30, 1915; May 14, 1915. 65. EC, April 2, 1917. The paper reflected the prevailing racist attitudes. Blacks were either cowardly and inept fighters, an idea that justified limiting them to the most menial assignments, or they were dangerous when armed and therefore had to be controlled. Buckley, American Patriots, 163–222; Franklin and Moss, From Slavery to Freedom, 326–44. 66. EC, April 3, 1917. These views exemplified the views of many blacks throughout the country at this time. Buckley, 184–85. 67. EC, April 12, 1917. 68. EC, April 27, 1917; May 12, 1917; June 30, 1917. 69. EC, June 5, 1917; June 7, 1917; June 30, 1917.

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70. EC, June 21, 1917; June 30, 1917; September 19, 1917. The governor’s appointment of blacks on the commission paralleled the new efforts of the Wilson administration to recruit a black who could advise the government about problems for the black soldiers. Wilson’s appointment was the result of pressure by organizations such as the NAACP. Franklin and Moss, 327; Bennett, 346–52. 71. EC, October 16, 1917. 72. EC, January 27, 1919. 73. EC, December 14, 1917; June 24, 1918. 74. EC, July 11, 1918; November 18, 1918. 75. EC, January 27, 1919. 76. Buckley, 221; OHI with several people.

EIGHT Own Worlds, 1905–1919

As blacks in Annapolis pushed to be treated equally, they worked to make themselves more self-reliant. With ambition and determination, they set about developing their community, organizing new clubs and fraternal organizations, and building up their churches, establishing new businesses, and entertaining themselves. Among those active in these endeavors were members of the Banneker Literary and Music Association, who were seen all about the town. In 1907, some of its professional members came together with other businessmen to create a Colored Business and Professional Men’s League of Annapolis “to encourage unity, thrift and cooperation among members of the race, and to place business and professional men of Annapolis in a more direct communication with like men of other communities.” Perhaps they reassembled the small business group established five years earlier. Of the members of both groups listed in the Capital, only J. Wesley Chase, the former principal of Stanton School, belonged to both organizations. Sustaining such organizations was a challenge for black communities because so many causes and problems needed their attention and money. Important leaders moved away, for example, when ministers were assigned to new churches. Mortality inevitably had an impact too. Noble Watkins, a lay minister, and Dennis Hebron, a huckster, both died not long after the first business association was formed. New leaders emerged and began organizing new associations to help their community. 1 Napoleon Johnson, a water tender in the Navy and president of the Annapolis Coal Company, organized the first meeting of this league. A number of men present at the gathering operated their own small businesses. Charles A. Butler was the proprietor of Butler’s Notion Store, and fellow Literary Association member Robert M. Davis had opened a gro109

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cery store on Clay Street. Solomon Bolden, who worked as manager of the Annapolis Coal Company, had been a political opponent of Alderman Thompson, and C. C. Lomax was a grocer. J. Wesley Chase was now a real estate and collection agent, and W. H. Adams ran Adams Brothers Buffet. Rev. R. W. Wortham was pastor of Mt. Moriah Church. Henry Hebron had a lunchroom on Washington Street. Henry Valentine, another member of the Literary Association, worked as a steward at the Naval Academy and was becoming a caterer. J. Albert Adams was the mortician who owned a hotel. The recently arrived young doctor, R. P. Keesee, was a member, as was the alderman, T. A. Thompson. Benjamin Phillips worked as a barber, and Harry Spriggs was the mailman. William E. Brown worked at the Naval Academy. 2 The group met at their YMCA on West Street that Napoleon Johnson had helped establish a few years earlier. They discussed new businesses that blacks could start in Annapolis “so as to give the race a better financial standing.” Adams brought up the idea of purchasing a small steamer for excursions. Butler suggested inviting Booker T. Washington to visit the city and give a talk “on the race question.” The proceeds from the lecture would be deposited in an educational fund. The group discussed the other challenges blacks faced, including extending Stanton’s school year and the need to raise teachers’ salaries. 3 The group held a “grand star concert” at Asbury Church. Kelly Miller, the new dean of Howard University’s College of Arts and Sciences, was the guest speaker. He recommended that “the Negro of the United States should so educate himself as to be prepared to make of himself the highest type of a citizen.” He added, “The marvelous progress the race has made, has made the white man fearful of him, therefore the Negro has proven himself a force recognized by the white race. . . . What we need is a close union of our forces and a high appreciation of our own business and professional men, who stand for race development and race advancement.” 4 By the following year, Napoleon Johnson had been transferred to the League Island Naval Yard in Philadelphia, but the group remained active. A special committee of Butler, Chase, Brown, and Keesee drafted a petition to the legislature requesting more funding for black schools. Many of the local Business League members were present when Booker T. Washington visited Annapolis in the summer of 1910. 5 Other members of the growing black elite joined the league, including Dr. Cornelius Ridgley, who had married the daughter of Dr. William Bishop, and his father, the barber, Louis Ridgley. Many attended the league’s 1910 annual banquet at Clay Street Hall, including Wiley H. Bates, Robert M. Davis, Perry Dobson, a former trustee of Stanton School, a naval enlisted man, and operator of an all-night restaurant, and William E. Fletcher, a board member of Asbury Church and waiter. The topics of the toasts reveal the broad interests and concerns of the group—”The

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Negro in Church and Business,” “The Negro in Politics,” and “The Negro and Education.” 6 In 1911, several guests from Baltimore, including the Liberian consul, Dr. Ernest Lyon, attended the group’s annual banquet at the Clay Street Hall. There are no further newspaper accounts of meetings of the organization, which may mean that the league ceased to function after 1911. Its members continued to contribute to the development of the black community through their businesses, churches, fraternal organizations, and social clubs. Butler tried to raise money and get legislation passed to establish a home for black boys that would offer industrial education. League members Butler, Brown, Fletcher, Davis, and Keesee planned another social welfare initiative that would raise funds to purchase land for a home that would accommodate dependent women and the aged. Apparently, those efforts did not succeed. Bates, Adams, and Valentine were members of the Masons Universal Lodge No. 14. At an impressive ceremony on Clay Street in 1911, the Masons laid the cornerstone for the new building of the Isaac and Rebecca Order, another fraternal organization with seven hundred members. 7 A new fraternal organization, the Ancient City Lodge No. 175, the local affiliate of the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, held its first meeting in Annapolis at the Clay Street Hall in 1910. J. Albert Adams was elected the first exalted ruler; Dr. Howard M. Norwood was among its charter members. In 1913, the Elks gave a ball at the Assembly Rooms. They were particularly busy over the holidays in 1916 when they raised enough money to distribute twenty-five baskets of food for Christmas, and hand out refreshments to 1,205 children. They also entertained “the ladies of Annapolis” from 4–7 p.m. on New Year’s Day. They served a “fine collation” to about five hundred women in their “handsomely decorated” home on Northwest Street. 8 The Grand United Order of Odd Fellows held its annual smoker in February 1910 at its lodge room. Literary Association and Business League member William A. Fletcher was the toastmaster. He reported that the “lodge was in a most prosperous condition . . . making large investments, owning quite a good bit of property in the city.” 9 Many prominent and striving black women participated in auxiliary organizations. Sarah Boston, a shopkeeper, and Georgia Boston, Snowden’s counselor, attended Galilean Fishermen conventions in Baltimore. Carrie Johnson, a domestic, was a member of Naomi Court, an auxiliary of the Masons. Ellen Parker, the new mortician, joined fellow members of the Household of Ruth at a surprise party for their president. A number participated in a program on Memorial Day in 1906 as members of the Women’s Relief Corps, an organization formed to help the wives and children of Civil War veterans that was affiliated with the Grand Army of the Republic. In 1916, women from Annapolis’s old black families estab-

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lished the Pride of Annapolis Temple No. 76, the affiliate of the Elks Ancient City Lodge No. 175. 10 Although women did not have the right to vote, they exercised influence in the community by forming such auxiliaries, operating their own businesses, and establishing their own church organizations and social clubs. One was the Charity and Aid Circle formed in 1906, which performed “good work among the poor and needy of the colored race.” 11 In 1916, seventy-five civic-minded women gathered at Stanton School to form the Mothers’ League, whose purpose was “to awaken the colored race to their great responsibilities of the parents and for the further uplift of the colored race.” Leading black women in Annapolis joined the effort, including Elizabeth D. Snowden, county supervisor of colored schools; M. J. Williams, wife of Rev. E. S. Williams, witness in the Snowden trial; Fanny Briscoe, wife of Rev. J. A. Briscoe; Sarah Boston, the shop owner; Agnes Spriggs, wife of letter carrier and Business League member Harry T. Spriggs; Amelia Dennis, counselor to Archie Isaacs and John Snowden and wife of Rev. Alexander Dennis; Eliza Fletcher, wife of Business League and Literary Association member William E. Fletcher; Mary King, wife of John W. King, a laborer at the academy; Bertie (Martha) Morgan, daughter of Dr. William Bishop and wife of Norris Morgan; Audrey Garcia, wife of Dr. Ambrose Garcia; Sarah Jennings, dressmaker and sister of Literary Association member Moses Jennings; mortician and pianist Ellen Parker; Emma Wells, a washerwoman; Carrie Johnson, a servant; and Georgia Boston, a domestic, counselor to John Snowden, and community leader. Hester Johnson, a maid and seamstress, and her daughter Charlotte, who had been adopted by the Andrews sisters, her mother’s white employers, were also members. 12 As this roster of professions—from cook to shopkeeper to dressmaker to undertaker—reveals, the standing of these women was based primarily on family status, their conduct, and their engagement in the community, not their profession or wealth. The organization planned to hold monthly meetings at which social workers would give lectures and musicians would perform. They wanted to organize classes in sewing, and hold baby weeks in May and October. The sewing classes began several months later in Eliza Fletcher’s home on Second Street. Forty members attended. The Capital commented that the Mothers’ League was “accomplishing good work . . . [it had] done much toward the uplift of the race.” 13 The women wanted to clean up the black neighborhoods and get rid of the saloons and to pay a black social worker to visit the group each month. At the monthly meetings, the women discussed establishing a day nursery for working mothers, and opening an employment bureau to help women find jobs. Ella Rush Murray, the white suffragette and employer of the mother of the two key witnesses at the Snowden trial, attended one of the meetings. She proposed the opening of a free library, a

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suggestion that the group supported. Murray also spoke about suffrage. By October 1917, their discussions began to include war preparation, such as special work for the defense council and the black Red Cross. The planning for the nursery was set aside during the war, when the group devoted their time to the needs of the drafted men. 14 Like their male counterparts in the Business League and Literary Association, the women participated in many church, civic, social, and political activities. Carrie Brice, Carrie Simpson, and Sarah Boston, who the Capital reminded its readers, stood “for the upright and trustworthy among her race,” were among the first to join the Red Cross Campaign in 1917. Mary King participated in the Volunteer Relief Association campaign to raise money for an anti-lynching fund. Georgia Boston, Lizzie Carter, and Rosa Norwood sold tags for the Visiting Nurse Fund. Elizabeth Snowden, Eliza Fletcher, Beulah Adams, and Audrey Garcia belonged to the Women’s Cooperative Civic League, which organized street cleaning campaigns and gave children milk. Many helped in their Women’s Day Services, church rallies, and Memorial Day speeches. 15 Black men and women in Annapolis socialized at numerous gettogethers and parties at their clubs. Friends who lived on certain streets such as Northwest, Calvert, Franklin, South, and West streets, formed clubs that met in members’ homes. Sometimes they held garden parties, dances, card parties, and chocolate sips. Even on meager salaries, they decorated their homes and offered meals to their guests. Their clubs gave elaborate, sometimes exclusive, affairs at the Assembly Rooms, the Clay Street Hall, and church halls. The Banneker Social Club gave a “social affair” at the Assembly Rooms and decorated with the club’s colors. Over the door hung a welcome sign in gold letters. Schreyer’s Orchestra of the Naval Academy band played. “Nothing during the season approached this splendid entertainment. The ladies were dressed in the height of fashion and gentlemen were in full dress,” the Afro wrote. One February, the waiters of the Naval Academy and Carvel Hall organized a “strictly invitational affair” at the Assembly Rooms to honor George Washington’s birthday. “Only those men and women in full evening dress” were allowed on the dance floor. The rooms were “elaborately decorated” with patriotic “flags and bunting.” Dancers competed in a clog dance contest one night at the Clay Street Hall, where participants also performed buck and wing dancing. One evening, the well-regarded Baden family, whose son Thomas’s wedding was described in chapter 4, held a “turkey trot” party at their home on West Street. First there was dancing; then the guests went into the dining room for “delicacies.” 16 Even during the war, clubs held dances. The Young Men’s Social Club gave a “grand affair” at the Assembly Rooms that ended at two in the morning. Professor T. Henderson Kerr’s orchestra of eight played in the

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“balcony almost hidden by palms.” The “grand march” took place at 11:30 p.m. 17 John H. King, stepson of Mothers’ League member Mary King and a steward at the governor’s mansion, organized a number of the dances, social events, and benefits for Stanton School. During the war, he held a dance at the Assembly Rooms to raise funds for the Red Cross. He hosted a stag “Thursday Evening” of whist for friends that included Thomas Baden. At 11:30 p.m., a “repast was served in the dining room. Each man gave a toast.” 18 Women hosted card parties and other social gatherings, too. Rosa Norwood, a member of the Mothers’ League, had a party for the Ladies Whist Club in her home. Members of the Sterling Club, including Emma Wells and Agnes Spriggs, who also belonged to the Mothers’ League, held a “fancy dress soiree” to raise funds for charity. 19 Children went to dancing classes. J. Albert Adams, the businessman and alderman, gave a birthday party for his two daughters, who were home from school in Wilmington, Delaware. The Afro reported that “a dinner in harmony with the occasion was handsomely served” to the many young and adult guests at Adams’s “beautiful home overlooking Dorsey Creek.” One winter night, “Miss Mattie Thomas made her debut—a fine affair”—at her house on Calvert Street. 20 Summertime brought other entertainments. At the new Adams Park, schoolchildren and their teachers celebrated the end of the school year. Churches held camp meetings there. A delicious supper and a dance at the park’s pavilion were enjoyed by members of the Mothers’ League and the Business League, and many other guests. Members of the elite started camping at the Carr family’s farm on the Chesapeake Bay. Another bay activity—still anticipated each year—was the annual church excursion, when hundreds of blacks left Annapolis for the ferry ride on the Chesapeake. The special train trip to Gettysburg drew several hundred people every year. 21 In summers, black residents left town to visit family or husbands in naval ports, or perhaps to work or rest at resorts along the eastern coast, or to harvest crops on the Eastern Shore. Others went to their society’s conventions out of town. Some students returned to Annapolis from school or college in other cities. 22 Residents of the neighborhoods of less affluent blacks enjoyed themselves at small, quiet dances and gatherings in their homes. On Saturday nights, some people went to bars or the small tearooms on Calvert, Washington, and Clay streets. Some streets became quite loud with boisterous revelers. White residents of Green Street, which was around the corner from the Assembly Rooms, complained that blacks would travel “up and down Green Street to the saloons on Main Street . . . often congregate on the front steps of the houses until late in the night drinking, carousing and using vile language.” 23

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The Capital wrote stories about the “non-elite” when the socializing got out of hand, people got too drunk and became obstreperous and noisy, and someone called the police. Too much alcohol soured relations. One woman who lived on Fleet Street hit her uncle with a club when he chastised her for drinking too much. At Perry Dobson’s all-night eating place on Clay Street, a black piano player who was playing some “ragtime” tunes got into a bad fight with a customer, who cut his hands. 24 There was still illegal entertainment. Some people gathered to shoot craps around the cemetery, near a stable on Dean Street, in Gott’s Court, on St. John’s Street, and on Clay Street. Some went to after-hours speakeasies, or visited “disorderly houses” for sex on Lincoln Place, a “poor section,” and on Cathedral Street in a reputable neighborhood. 25 The social hierarchy began to change during these years as a modest middle class emerged. Owning a house, working at the Naval Academy or as a professional conferred a certain status. “There was not that much difference [between people]. . . . Maybe one or two families owned their homes.” There was “not enough [of them] to be in a class . . . all so near together,” was the perception of one boy growing up in a household headed by a self-educated father who had a grocery store. Yet, as the roster of the Mothers’ League reveals, a woman could work as a domestic but still have standing and influence in the town. 26 Status was occasionally on display at weddings that the Afro and the Capital covered. For example, members of the Literary Association, the Business League, and the Mothers’ League were all present at the July 1908 marriage of Lucy Johns, who was a member of the Mothers’ League, too, and William H. Pack, an “expressman,” or moving man. The bride, who had been married previously, wore “white silk tulle over taffeta,” and the groom, who was a member of the Business League, “wore customary evening clothes.” William H. Howard, the attorney, was the best man. The home was “beautifully decorated,” and the couple received “many expensive presents.” 27 Churches remained the most important institution in the black community. To clear church debts, pay the pastor, buy new equipment, fix up buildings, help the poor, and even build new churches and parish houses, congregations showed persistence and ingenuity to collect money from their fellow members, many of whom lived on modest salaries. The St. Philip’s congregation moved its church to the back of its lot and built a new chapel extension on the front, celebrating its completion in November 1905. The same year, Asbury Church underwent renovations that cost $100. The ceiling and walls were frescoed, the woodwork and pews painted. The pulpit was extended to make room for the choir to stand behind it. The lower floor was carpeted, and bookracks with new Bibles were placed in the backs of the pews. The outside woodwork of the brick church was painted white. Three years later, the parishioners installed a gas line, replaced the furnace, and purchased a piano. The

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congregation also raised money to buy a new parlor suite and remodel the summer kitchen of the parsonage. 28 A few years later, in 1913, under the direction of the newly arrived Rev. E. S. Williams, who would be a witness in the Snowden case, church members decided to launch a campaign to raise $3,800 to construct a new parsonage on Second Street—next door to the Brandon house, as it would turn out. When it was completed, the three-story parsonage contained eight rooms and a library. 29 The Evening Capital complimented Williams’s fundraising, “If there is any church in this city or elsewhere that can raise more money in a given time than Asbury M.E. Church (colored) Annapolis would like to know it. Only a few months ago Asbury church raised the sum of $2,107.86, and last night the sum of $718.60 was raised. The pastor of this church is a hustler.” 30 Mt. Moriah Church suffered a setback when its parsonage caught fire in 1906. The building was fully insured, but its contents were not. The minister’s wife, Mrs. Wortham, had just “handsomely furnished” the parsonage with the help of the Willing Workers. Other ministers pitched in to raise the needed funds and preached special sermons; the waiters at Carvel Hall gave a “star concert.” 31 In 1915, the Mt. Moriah congregation raised $58.75 for electric lights. At a special evening service, the elderly members of the congregation were the first to turn the lights on. The Afro documented the accomplishments of Rev. James A. Briscoe, who had arrived in 1913. One debt of $759.54 and one mortgage had been paid off. All the coal, water, and rent bills were up-to-date, the papering of the parsonage paid for. A new roof had been put on the parsonage, and the church newly painted. The church still owed $2,888.88 and $700.25 on two other mortgages. By 1917, the Capital praised, “He has done excellent work with his small congregation, having paid a number of small debts of long standing around the town.” 32 Starting in the summer of 1916, with a lawn party, its annual carnival, and other events, First Baptist Church raised sufficient funds to construct a new church on Washington Street, closer to the more populous black area. The Capital reported that “the people are working like Trojans to build their new church and materials are being hauled on the premises.” By the end of November, the Masons Universal Lodge No. 14 laid the cornerstone, and Mayor Strange spoke at a special service to celebrate the opening of the new clapboard church. 33 The year before, church trustees disagreed over the conduct of the pastor, Rev. S. S. Wormley, who resigned. Some thought Rev. Wormley had accomplished a great deal. He arrived in 1912 with “a dilapidated edifice, members scattered and accumulated debt.” Others claimed that “the church was at a standstill.” He had not “squared his accounts, and had increased the debt by $500.” 34

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It is unclear from newspaper accounts precisely when a group of blacks formed the Second Baptist Church. The Afro mentions the church as early as 1906. An article in the Capital dates the church’s beginning to 1913 or 1915 when a group of six people met “in a house on Acton Lane to organize a Baptist Young People’s Union, and to study the advisability of building a church.” A few Sundays later, “a congregation was organized with a membership of twelve.” By 1918, the group had constructed a church at 36 Acton Lane. 35 Churchgoers combined old practices and new strategies to raise the money to cover the growing costs of their churches. Most still depended on the annual donations for Women’s and Men’s Days. Newspaper accounts suggest there was a competition between the men and the women, as well as between churches, to see who could raise the most money. Invariably, women brought in more funds. In 1911, Emma Wells, future member of the Mothers’ League, chaired the committee that recommended that women parishioners at Mt. Moriah Church raise $1 each for Women’s Day. A live-in domestic made about $10 a month, cooks, $8. To raise money, some women and men held special events in their homes, sold dinners, or solicited donations from their neighbors. Churches often held concerts, offering suppers for sale beforehand. 36 One year, Mt. Moriah’s Women’s Day hosted two accomplished blacks. Rev. Wesley J. Gaines, the bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, “was listened to with great interest” in the morning. Mattie Bowen, an officer of the Bethel Literary of the Metropolitan A.M.E. Church of Washington, “thrilled the audience” in the afternoon. The women raised over $100 that year, while the men raised only $93. At another Women’s Day Service, Harriet Cully spoke on the topic, “Should We Patronize Our Race in Business?” 37 Rallies were still another popular fundraising device. Churches held state rallies, king and queen rallies, “talent” rallies, and twelve tribes of Israel rallies. Congregations divided themselves into competing groups to raise money. People who brought in the most money for a tribal rally at Mt. Moriah Church received prizes such as a “handsome gold mounted umbrella,” a “pair of fine blankets,” and a charm for a watch fob. 38 First Baptist and Second Baptist churches’ fundraising efforts were less well documented in the papers, but the congregations held many events every year, including a flower carnival and church suppers. One advertisement announced that a supper of “stewed chicken, cold ham, cream gravy, hot biscuits, cream potatoes, cranberries, and cold slaw,” would be served from 6 to 9 p.m. “The Baptists are famous for good suppers, don’t miss this one.” 39 Fundraising and church suppers at St. Mary’s Catholic Church were a different experience for the black parishioners, because the church segregated them to the back pews and made them walk in the rear of church

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processions. They separately organized benefits for the church. In 1914, they held a bazaar “to show what they can do for church” as a follow-up to a successful fundraiser run by the white Catholics. They decorated the church hall and set up different booths—“Fancy Table and Wheel of Fortune, the Candy and Cake Booth, the Fish Pond, and the Ice Cream Parlor.” The advertisement printed in the Capital thanked “the white people for their generous donations” and stated, “Although this is a colored parishioners’ bazaar, they wish it to be understood that the white folks will be most welcome to the Hall.” 40 Some summers, St. Teresa Beneficial Society, a black Catholic organization, held a popular outing at Martin’s Grove outside of Annapolis to benefit the small St. Mary’s Colored School. One year a crowd of more than six hundred attended. People danced in the pavilion hung with flags and bunting. The society sold refreshments. Whites attended, too. By evening the grove was “brilliantly lit.” 41 Some church suppers at St. Mary’s appear to have been integrated, but seating arrangements sometimes presented a problem. At one oyster supper, the white ladies refused to serve the black children at the same table as the white children and “caused some unpleasantness.” The matter was resolved by seating the black children separately. In the next day’s Capital, an explanation appeared: stating that because many white children were sitting in most of the chairs on the stage, the black children were seated in “the body of the hall” so that they would not have to wait for seats.” 42 Black parishioners continued to convert their churches into theaters for entertainment and education. A crowd came to Asbury for a concert given by Madame Abbie Wright Lyon, a well-known singer from New York City. Parishioners of St. Philip’s heard “Things That Make for Our Progress,” a lecture by Rev. William Tunnell, warden of the Divinity School in Washington. Kelly Miller, dean of Howard University’s College of Arts and Sciences, gave a talk at Asbury Church entitled “Glimpse of the Race Problem.” 43 Blacks promoted pride in their race and history at church events. A large crowd celebrated Lincoln Day at Mt. Moriah. Wiley H. Bates, the businessman, chaired the day’s programs, which included a reading of the Gettysburg Address and eulogies to Lincoln given by the wife of J. Wesley Chase and William H. Howard, who was one of the plaintiffs in the disfranchisement suit. At an evening memorial service for Frederick Douglass, Charles A. Butler, the shop owner and member of the Business League, discussed Douglass’s life and work. 44 Church groups were their community’s social welfare organization. The Kings’ Daughters and Sons, the welfare organization of Asbury, collected monthly donations and distributed baskets at Christmastime. The “Junior Department” of Asbury’s Fairbanks Association gave poor children “sufficient clothing to make them presentable at Sunday school.”

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Churches raised funds for the local Emergency Hospital, where they could be treated but women could not deliver their babies. Asbury donated $27 in 1914. 45 Churchgoers regularly celebrated their pastors. The members of the First Baptist Church brought “eatables of all kinds” to surprise their minister, Rev. H. C. McCoy, at his home. The Golden Leaf Circle of Asbury Church honored the minister and his wife, Rev. and Mrs. E. S. Williams. They decorated the reception room with yellow and green flowers and covered the tables with red lights and chrysanthemums. After several vocal and instrumental selections, an “elaborate repast” of chicken salad, slaw, ham, ice cream, and hot chocolate was served. To show their appreciation after his fourth year at Mt. Moriah, the congregation gave Rev. James A. Briscoe a $30 suit to wear to the annual church conference. 46 Churchgoers listened to important talks. Rev. Wesley J. Gaines spoke about “Harmony between the Races” at Mt. Moriah in 1908. At an A.M.E. conference, the participants discussed the paper, “Should Not We, as a Race, Foster and Maintain the Business Enterprises of the Race.” Among the organizers of the convention were Business League members Valentine and Brown. 47 When he proselytized in Annapolis for a week at Asbury Church in March 1906, evangelist Simon P. W. Drew, who was also the minister of the Cosmopolitan Baptist Church in Washington, DC, gave an interview to the Capital, in which he praised whites “for their unusual interest manifested in the progress of the colored race in the State, but he was somewhat at a loss for words of regret to find that the school terms here are rather short for the colored children in the capital of the State.” He told the reporter that “he found more vice and ignorance in this little city than he had ever seen anywhere in the United States in all his evangelistic work.” 48 In October 1908, Rev. Dr. Jenifer of Mt. Moriah Church spoke about the candidates for the presidential election—William Jennings Bryan and William Howard Taft. Blacks heard a debate on women’s suffrage at St. Philip’s Church in 1912. They listened to their ministers’ views on temperance. 49 Obviously, black residents in Annapolis had a lot to show for themselves by 1919. They had big ambitions for their churches, their organizations, and their clubs. They had even higher hopes for themselves and their families. But their aspirations regularly collided with the meager realities of their lives. Most worked at demeaning, low-paying jobs without hope of advancement. Most lacked the money to finance higher education for their children. Nearly all lived in cramped quarters, many in structures little better than shacks, lacking electricity and running water, as mentioned in chapter 7. Feeding their families and looking after children required a perpetual struggle.

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Like all black citizens of Annapolis, the women of the Mothers’ League inhabited a world whose comings and goings were rarely recorded. But the decennial census counted them, their husbands, and children, and recorded basic facts about their lives. The census reports for 1910 and 1920 suggest how hard life remained, but also revealed the determination and resilience that was typical of these women. The choices they made, the families they constructed, the careers they had, and the losses they suffered were not unlike those found ten years earlier in the 1900 census for the members of the literary society, the homeowners on Acton Lane, and the residents of Chestnut and Bridge streets, discussed in chapter 4. Thirty-four of the forty-seven members of the Mothers’ League listed in the Evening Capital in 1916 were found in the 1910 census for Annapolis. Thirty-four were also found in the 1920 census. A comparison of the status of these women and their families in 1910 and 1920 shows what some black families could achieve in ten years’ time. But the changes in their status were small, and many did not change at all. The details that the census enumerators recorded reveal the limited opportunities and choices black families faced. 50 These black women and their families used different strategies to survive, and, in some cases, to advance themselves and their children. Their ages ranged from nineteen to fifty-nine. Many lived near each other, primarily on Northwest, Calvert, and Washington streets, and would have passed each other on their daily rounds. Twenty-six were married, three widowed, one divorced, and four single. The enumerator labeled sixteen, nearly half, mulatto. One was mistakenly identified as white. Ten, or 29 percent, owned their homes or lived with a relative who owned the home, a slightly smaller proportion than the Literary Association members. A number were in long, stable marriages, like the families discussed in chapter 4. All of these women were literate, and so were their children and husbands, with one exception—still an important achievement. The census does not indicate how much schooling these women had, but at least the four professionals—a teacher, now the county supervisor to the colored schools, a mortician, a chiropodist, and a shopkeeper—must have had some advanced training. Four others were dressmakers, three seamstresses, and one a hairdresser, positions that gave them some status and perhaps fewer humiliating encounters with whites. Eleven others held demeaning jobs from laundress, washerwoman, waitress, cook, to domestic servant with little hope of promotion or advancement. Those working in or near kitchens may have had access to free food to supplement their meager wages. The other eleven women did not list a profession. Twelve members of the league had lost children. Sixteen, or 47 percent, of the mothers lived in overcrowded quarters. Except for William H. Butler Jr., who by this time was vice principal of Stanton,

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these women’s husbands held low-skilled, poorly paid jobs with little chance for promotion. Ten worked for the Naval Academy. One delivered mail. 51 Some of these mothers must have been discouraged by their children’s prospects, while others may have experienced some pride in the jobs their children acquired. Georgia Boston may have hoped that her daughter would eventually get a better job than a servant’s position, the position both held in 1910. Ellen Parker, the undertaker, may have had greater ambitions for her son, who at twenty-five was working odd jobs, when her husband was employed as a messenger at the Naval Academy. The Spriggs’s teenage son was starting out as a waiter at the Naval Academy—a government job, but not in the post office like his father. Other young adult children made slight but subtle gains in status. Several sons of Frances Brice, a laundress, worked as waiters at the Naval Academy, and two daughters were nurses. Emma Hardesty’s son was also a waiter at the academy, an improvement over her husband’s laborer position. Hester Garver’s son worked as a house painter, a semi-skilled job. Others made more obvious progress. Two daughters of Jennie Butler, a seamstress, were teachers—as was their father. Three daughters of Emma Wells, a washerwoman, moved far ahead of their mother. One was a teacher, and two others were dressmakers. Several children of Rachel Thomas, who had no job, and her husband, who was a cook at a hotel, also had better prospects than their parents. A daughter was a teacher, one of her sons was studying to become a pharmacist, and the other was working as a waiter at the Naval Academy. These families managed to scrape together the money to finance their children’s advanced education. Out of the thirty-four families, seven constituted what was considered the classic nuclear family of husband, wife, and their children. Three of these families had adult children living with them to make ends meet, or perhaps because the children could not afford to live on their own. Two of the other Mothers’ League families had to take in boarders, and another seven took in lodgers. At almost the opposite extreme, two members of the Mothers’ League had live-in servants. Thirteen households recruited relatives to live with them. In another six families, the women lived with three generations—parents, children, and grandchildren. Four had to share the house with a second family. Ten years later, life had changed significantly for some of these women, and not at all for others. At some point, fourteen of the Mothers’ League families moved. Martha Bishop married Norris Morgan. Agnes Spriggs, Ellen Parker, Sarah Boston, and Rachel Thomas became widows. Hattie Simms, Carrie Simpson, and Alice Warren now lived in houses they owned, a significant achievement. The census hints at how they may have accumulated enough capital to purchase their homes. Two of the

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husbands may have benefited from access to free food that would have defrayed some household expenses, and the third was a steward at the Naval Academy, perhaps a better paying job. All three husbands got better jobs. They shifted from steward to master caddy at a golf course, waiter to cook, and butler to building attendant. Five women may have improved their employment situations ever so slightly, often the only kind of progress that was possible. For example, instead of being a servant in a private family, Nannie Bell worked as a servant at the Carvel Hall Hotel. Her daughter’s prospects looked brighter; she was a teacher. Fannie Queen advanced from having no job in 1910 to working as a seamstress at home. Carrie Brice still worked in a hot laundry, but at the Naval Academy instead of a commercial one in town. Ella Gray now took in laundry at her home instead of having to spend six days a week working as a servant for a white family. Jennie Butler was now a dressmaker for a private family instead of a seamstress working outside the home, perhaps a slight improvement. Her husband was still vice principal, but two of their daughters no longer taught school. Because of the unpredictability of the length of the school year, they may have wanted more stable work. They worked as dressmakers, like their mother, for private families. One member of the Mothers’ League became a professional during this decade. Ethel Weems, who was probably looking after her daughter at home in 1910, was now the proprietor of the Weems family confectionary store. The employment circumstances of two of the guild’s other professionals remained much the same. Ellen Parker continued to operate her funeral parlor with her partners, and Beulah Adams still saw patients as a chiropodist. Sarah Boston may have no longer operated her small grocery store. 52 Agnes Spriggs faced new challenges after her husband died. She had to go to work. She decided to take in laundry in her home, where she lived with her daughter. To help pay her living expenses, she took in two boarders. Thirteen other working members of the Mothers’ League held the same jobs in 1920 as in 1910 as laundresses, cook, dressmaker, seamstress, and hairdresser. 53 The home lives of the members of the Mothers’ League changed, sometimes subtly, sometimes significantly. All but two of their husbands had gotten slightly better jobs—from Naval Academy laborers to a dormitory laborer and janitor; from a dormitory laborer to a “corridor boy”; from a sailor to a cook on a ship; and from hotel cook to Naval Academy cook. The household composition of many of these women also altered. A number of them—or their children—could actually survive independently on the salaries their husbands were making in these working-class jobs. In 1910, Francis Brice lived in the largest family—eleven people, including seven working adult children, several grandchildren, and a

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niece. Ten years later, only two sons and one grandchild remained at home. Annie Chew’s family changed the most. In 1910, she lived with her husband and his parents and sister. Ten years later, they lived in the same house, but the number of people living there had more than doubled to thirteen with the addition of their five young children and her sister-in-law’s three children. Six families had to rent out space to boarders, one fewer than in 1910. No one had to recruit lodgers, as opposed to three families that took in lodgers in 1910. As in 1910, six housed three generations. But fewer families had to recruit other relatives to live with them—three compared with seven in 1910. Only two members of the Mothers’ League were sharing a house with a second family compared with five ten years earlier. 54 Besides the three new homeowners, the most obvious signs of advancement were the few children of these women, who had become teachers, waiters, and stewards at the Naval Academy when their parents were servants, laundresses, laborers, and haulers. Rachel Thomas’s son, George, now worked as a pharmacist in his own drugstore—the most significant advancement of any of the league members’ children. Another indication of achievement was the ten families—instead of three in 1910—who could live on their own without additional family support. But the two census reports make clear how hard it was and how long it took to get ahead. What forward strides were made were always tiny, almost immeasurable. NOTES 1. EC, January 17, 1907; AA, February 8, 1908. By the time the Annapolis group organized their association, there were 320 branches of the Negro Business League, Franklin and Moss, 283; EC, July 1, 1903; EC, March 11, 1907. 2. EC, January 17, 1907; January 25, 1907. 3. EC, January 25, 1907. 4. AA, March 16, 1907. 5. AA, February 8, 1908. 6. EC, November 26, 1910; January 22, 1912. 7. AA, December 1, 1911; EC, March 13, 1908; April 22, 1908; AA, December 30, 1911. 8. Brown, The Other Annapolis, 110; AA, November 29, 1913; December 30, 1916; January 6, 1917. 9. AA, February 19, 1910. 10. AA, May 1, 1909; August 22, 1914; EC, May 28, 1906; Brown, The Other Annapolis, 111; AA, April 21, 1917. 11. EC, January 2, 1907. 12. EC, March 10, 1916. 13. EC, July 1, 1916. 14. EC, October 26, 1916; July 1, 1916; May 12, 1917; October 27, 1917; December 7, 1917.

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15. EC, June 30, 1917, January 13, 1917; AA, September 23, 1916; EC, March 7, 1917; December 13, 1915; AA, February 24, 1917; Mjagkij, Organizing Black America, 77; EC, July 12, 1918; February 15, 1919. 16. AA, January 6, 1906; EC, February 22, 1911; September 12, 1910, AA, January 31, 1914. 17. AA, June 14, 1918. 18. AA, November 20, 1915; EC, February 12, 1918; AA, December 13, 1918. 19. AA, April 6, 1912; January 20, 1917. 20. AA, April 4, 1906; July 25, 1914; January 20, 1906. 21. AA, June 16, 1917; September 4, 1915; July 22, 1916; EC, August 10, 1914. 22. EC, April 21, 1916. 23. EC, May 12, 1916; AA, October 17, 1908; August 21, 1915; September 18, 1915. 24. EC, September 1, 1908; January 22, 1912. 25. EC, April 12, 1910; April 2, 1917; August 30, 1915; February 6, 1906; December 4, 1916; August 30, 1915; May 1, 1918; June 18, 1915; OHI. 26. OHI. 27. EC, July 3, 1908; Gould and Halleron, 85. 28. EC, November 21, 1905; October 2, 1905; AA, September 30, 1905; March 14, 1908. 29. AA, August 2, 1913. 30. EC, March 7, 1917. 31. AA, March 31, 1906; April 7, 1906; October 31, 1908; January 9, 1909. 32. AA, December 4, 1915; October 30, 1915; EC, March 19, 1917. 33. AA, July 22, 1916; EC, August 12, 1916; August 19, 1916; September 16, 1916; AA, November 26, 1916; EC, November 25, 1916. 34. EC, January 25, 1915; February 11, 1915. 35. Brown, The Other Annapolis, 80; AA, August 4, 1906; October 17, 1908; EC, September 29, 1950. 36. EC, March 17, 1911; March 15, 1912; A Negro Nurse, “More Slavery at the South,” 196–200. 37. EC, February 16, 1906; AA, February 24, 1906; Wright and Hawkins, Centennial Encyclopedia of the African Methodist Church, 367–68; AA, February 20, 1915; March 6, 1915. 38. AA, December 26, 1908. 39. AA, May 9, 1914; EC, January 13, 1906. 40. EC, April 20, 1914. 41. EC, July 5, 1906. 42. EC, November 4, 1907; November 5, 1907. 43. EC, October 3, 1905; AA, April 7, 1906; EC, March 13, 1907. 44. AA, February 20, 1909. 45. Franklin and Moss; Asbury United Methodist Church, 25; AA, December 30, 1911; September 30, 1911; December 13, 1913. 46. EC, May 18, 1907; AA, October 4, 1913; EC, April 14, 1917. 47. EC, February 29, 1908; September 29, 1905; Caldwell, History of the American Negro, 67–70. 48. EC, March 12, 1906. 49. AA, October 31, 1908; EC, February 10, 1912. 50. Several others were located in the 1910 city directory which indicated that they lived in Eastport, or in the outskirts of Annapolis and were not included in the analysis. Gould and Halleron; R. L. Polk, Polk’s Annapolis Maryland 1924 Directory; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920, Vol. III, Population, Composition and Character of the Population by States; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States, Anne Arundel County, City of Annapolis; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States, Anne Arundel County, City of Annapolis.

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51. The Chicago Commission on Race Relations in 1919 in its investigation of the 1919 race riots determined that a house was overcrowded if there was more than one person to a room living in the house. Most of the houses that blacks lived in were fourroom houses. Fifteen families lived with five or more people in a house. Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago, 154–64. 52. The First Colored Professional, Clerical and Business Directory of Baltimore City for 1918–1919, 136. 53. The First Colored Professional, 136. 54. A lodger is generally a person who lives in a room in someone’s house, and a boarder is a person who lives in someone’s home and is served meals.

III

“We made room.” —Philip L. Brown

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NINE Encounter, A Lawsuit, 1938–1940

On the wintry afternoon of January 5, 1938, the ninety-one black teachers of Anne Arundel County walked from Stanton School or drove from their schools scattered around the county to the Board of Education’s office on Green Street. They had requested the meeting, and the all-white board allowed them to dismiss their classes at noon that day. Philip L. Brown, who was the principal at rural Skidmore School, picked up his wife, Rachel, who taught fifth grade at Stanton School on Washington Street. The son of William H. Brown, the prominent businessman who owned a grocery store on Spa Road and was pastor of Mt. Nebo A.M.E. Church, Brown had attended Stanton School while helping out at his father’s grocery store and a second business, a wood and coal delivery service. After graduating from high school, Brown went to Bowie Normal School, where he got his teaching certificate. He wanted to go to Morgan College, the leading black institution in the state. His father, who had only about three years of formal schooling but had devoted hours to educating himself at nights, could not afford the tuition. He suggested to his son that after graduating from Bowie and working for a while, he could finance his own further education—which he eventually did. By 1938, Philip Brown had been working in the school system for ten years. 1 Soft-spoken and cordial, he presented the teachers’ view to the board. Years later Brown remembered that he had not been nervous that afternoon: “I did not have sense enough to be nervous!” He reminded the board of the difference between white and black teachers’ pay, and the “efforts of the teachers in the past to convince the board that colored teachers were entitled to the same compensation as white teachers,” he wrote in his book, A Century of “Separate but Equal”: Education in Anne Arundel County, published fifty years later. Brown also advised the board 129

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that the teachers did not want a pay raise. They wanted “the abolishment of dual scale salary system” that set their salaries lower than their white counterparts. In its place, they wanted to establish the practice of equal pay for equal work. 2 The board minutes of the encounter recorded that “the contention of these teachers was that they should receive the same compensation as other teachers in this County, in as much as they have certificates of equal grade and have met the same requirements as white teachers have met; and that they were teaching schools with an equal number of children under their care.” The board chairman, Alexander W. Andrews, was a “middle-aged and weather beaten” farmer from Shadyside, the rural part of the county, whose wife worked as a teacher, Brown recalled. He roughly interrupted Brown. “What’s your name?” he asked, trying to intimidate him. “Not a friend of the teachers—to him you were not worth much,” Brown remembered. Andrews informed the teachers that funds were not available to increase their salaries at that time. The board unanimously adopted the motion of Mrs. Payne, another board member who was “true to her name.” She proposed a motion that stated that “nothing can be done immediately to equalize pay in the County. Therefore this Board goes on record as favoring a revision of the State Equalization Law so that there will not be any discrimination between white and colored teachers for equal work.” A third board member named Cromwell was a “little smoother and used to talking to people,” in Brown’s words, and suggested to the delegation of teachers that they return in the fall, “When the County Commissioners could consider at least partial equalization of the salaries in our next year’s budget.” 3 It was clear to the teachers that the board members never “had any intention of giving any serious consideration to changing the salaries policies,” Brown wrote. They expected to be turned down. Following the plan the group made before the meeting, Brown informed the board that “it was the intention of the teachers to sue the Board of Education of Anne Arundel County and have the court determine if the dual scale was a violation of their civil rights.” 4 “The board members seemed to treat the matter lightly and were not disturbed by the prospect of being taken to court by the teachers,” Brown wrote. Andrews “chuckled,” as though he was amused at the idea of black teachers filing a lawsuit. Members of the board disagreed on how they would respond to a lawsuit. Some supported such legal action because then “we would all know exactly where we stand.” Others opposed legal action, but told their colleagues “they would not object to their entering suit for final settlement of this case,” according to the minutes of the meeting. 5 As the meeting was breaking up, Cromwell approached Brown and asked him to meet with him at his office that Saturday. When the two met

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at the county courthouse where Cromwell worked, he suggested that the Board of Education could propose that the teachers get a 10 percent increase annually until the salaries were equal. Brown said he would consult with the other teachers, but he was not interested in that proposition, and knew that the others would reject it as well. 6 This was the teachers’ latest step along the long road they had travelled in search of equal pay for themselves, and an equal school year for their students. In 1916, William H. Howard, the black complainant in the disfranchisement lawsuit and an attorney, noted the unequal pay of teachers in a letter to the Capital and asked the legislature to remedy it. The legislature established the teachers’ salaries for the first time in 1918 when it created the two-track salary system for blacks and whites. In 1922, the legislature passed an Equalization Act, but its purpose was to equalize education spending among the counties of Maryland, not between blacks and whites. Counties were expected to levy a minimum school tax of sixty-seven cents per $100 of assessed property. If the county could not meet the minimum requirements set by the statute for school funding or teachers’ salaries, the new law provided that the state would pay the difference. The 1922 act required the counties to pay their black teachers a minimum of $65 a month, and white teachers $96. 7 Legislation to equalize the pay of the black and white teachers was introduced in every legislative session for years. White governors regularly mentioned the problem in speeches before black audiences, but the legislation was never passed. In the winter of 1918, at a theater in Baltimore, Governor Harrington addressed a patriotic mass meeting and was “loudly applauded,” according to the Capital, when he promised the audience that the black teachers’ salaries would be increased. 8 In the fall of 1919, the Afro-American quoted George Fox, a thin and wiry white man who was the Anne Arundel County superintendent of schools, as saying that the black teachers were the “third best-paid in the state.” They earned an average of $306 a year, compared to white teachers’ $686. In January 1920, J. Albert Adams, the black owner of a hotel and funeral parlor and an alderman, disagreed. In a presentation before the city council on behalf of the Stanton School teachers, Adams said the teachers had a hard time living on their small salaries, and praised their dedication to raise the standard of the school. They had recently requested permission to hold a fundraiser at the Assembly Rooms to help pay for an electric light system in the school. Adams told the council, the Capital reported, that the “teachers decided to remain in their posts . . . largely in anticipation of increased pay to be provided by the Teachers’ Salary Bill” that was then before the legislature. But the Afro-American said the bill, which would increase the salary to $520 for black teachers and $950 for white teachers, would “rob the colored teachers.” The difference between the salaries was “unfair,” the Afro said. 9

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Albert C. Ritchie, the Democratic governor who succeeded Harrington, disagreed. He thought the salaries were “fair.” A large delegation of blacks appeared before the Joint Education Committee two weeks after the governor’s statement to appeal for equal salaries. They met with the governor and asked for an additional appropriation of $25,000 to close the gap in salaries. He said the state was already spending $2 million, and they should suggest cuts in spending elsewhere to cover the costs of equalizing salaries. Yet later in July, when Governor Ritchie addressed the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools at Trinity Church in Baltimore, he told the group that he wanted to resolve the equitable salary issue, and invited them to visit him at the capitol. 10 In 1924, the state established the Maryland Inter-Racial Commission, composed of ten white and nine black members to investigate conditions for blacks in Maryland. The legislature made it a permanent organization in 1927. That spring, Governor Ritchie said that he would not back the commission’s recommendations, which included ending Jim Crow segregation and equalizing teachers’ salaries. The same year, the Baltimore City Council passed legislation establishing equal pay for black and white teachers after the Defense League, a group of black ministers, lawyers, and teachers, had filed a lawsuit against the discriminatory pay scales. The court did not order equalization, but said that the plaintiff had a good case. Two years later in 1929, when the commission again recommended the same salary scale for both groups, the governor passed the proposal on to the legislature. 11 On February 20, 1929—”Race Day at Legislature,” the Afro called it— hearings were scheduled for the equal pay bill and other civil rights legislation. Teachers from Stanton High School and Bowie State Normal School, the Maryland training school for black teachers, were among those who spoke to the legislators. The Morgan College choir sang spirituals. People came from all over the state and filled the gallery. The equal pay bill passed the House. In early March, a thousand people—both black and white—assembled at the capitol for the Senate hearing. A month later, the legislation was voted down. The legislators tended “to listen very politely as if they were interested, but the result was always the same,” Brown recollected. 12 These hearings and debates recurred every other year when the legislature met. In January 1931, about a year into the Depression, Governor Ritchie announced that he would sign an equalization bill, but, according to the Afro, he would not “take responsibility to increase the budget to pay” for it, the same position he had taken four years earlier. 13 A year later, the Maryland State Federation of Negro Parent-Teachers Associations held its annual meeting at Asbury M.E. Church in Annapolis. Speakers noted improvements in the schools and praised Governor Ritchie. Howard D. Pindell, a new math and science teacher at Stanton High School who organized the county teachers into the Colored Teach-

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ers Association of Anne Arundel County, welcomed members of the state association. Born in Annapolis, Pindell spent his childhood in Baltimore, and graduated from Morgan College. He was the first to make the county teachers aware of the unconstitutionality of the unequal pay system. At the meeting at Asbury, the president of the federation questioned whether the salary law was legal and complained that because the salaries were unequal, some black teachers left the state to work in other states where the pay was better. 14 In 1935, another large delegation from all over the state urged the state Senate to pass a bill that would equalize salaries over three years. At the time, white teachers made 30 percent more than blacks. The white head of state schools said the financial burden of equalization legislation was too great for the state. Meanwhile, the Maryland Inter-Racial Commission again recommended repealing the laws that provided for separate and unequal pay. That April, the legislators again voted against the legislation. 15 Instead, the state budget included a reduction in all teachers’ salaries. In November, Pindell, who “carried himself well,” Brown recalled, led a delegation composed of other Annapolis black leaders—the next generation—including the new alderman Charles A. Oliver, Carroll Hynson, an up-and-coming businessman, William H. Richardson, a Naval Academy employee, Joseph Hardesty, also a Naval Academy employee and husband of dedicated schoolteacher Lulu Hardesty, and Rachel Carter Smith, the librarian of the new Bates High School, an active supporter of uplift endeavors in the community. The group presented a petition signed by seventy-eight black county teachers and 250 taxpayers requesting that the teachers’ salaries be restored to their previous level. 16 George Fox, the county superintendent, who as Brown recalled, was better trained and a “little smoother” than school board president Andrews, claimed he supported the teachers’ position. When he visited the teachers at their schools every year, he would tell them that they were “the salt of the earth.” However, they knew that he “didn’t care about us. He was a hypocrite,” as Brown later put it. To get equal pay, Fox suggested to the teachers that instead of asking for a large increase to equalize salaries—an amount which “seems like a lot of money to the State, so you get nothing”—they should seek “for a bit at a time, then you won’t starve and you will be getting a living wage.” Fox did not, however, support a one-track salary system for both groups. 17 A “monster mass meeting,” as the Evening Capital called it, was held the next week. Members of the Annapolis NAACP, which was first founded in 1935, and other black citizens assembled at the First Baptist Church to meet with Thurgood Marshall, then the attorney for the national office of the NAACP, and the president of the Baltimore NAACP. Marshall discussed the successful lawsuit he had argued on behalf of Donald Murray, an Amherst graduate who had sued the University of

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Maryland after its regents rejected Murray’s application to its law school. The court ordered the university to admit Murray to the law school. When Murray entered that fall, the dean “suggested he not sit next to white students. . . . Marshall objected,” the Afro reported. 18 The NAACP legal office decided to take the fight for equal pay to the courts. Because the county boards set teachers’ pay in Maryland, the NAACP decided to challenge the practice county by county. 19 Pindell, who was now vice president of the Maryland State Colored Teachers’ Association, and several colleagues, formed a small strategy committee to discuss a lawsuit in Anne Arundel County. Enolia Pettigen, who was the president of the association and a member of the NAACP in Baltimore County, asked Pindell to be the plaintiff, and he agreed. The NAACP selected teachers as plaintiffs only if they had been teaching for two years, so that they could be fired only for cause. Concerned about white intimidation, the NAACP and the teachers’ association tried to keep their plans secret until they filed the case in court. The summer before they intended to file the suit, Pindell received an offer to become principal of Lincoln High School in Frederick, Maryland. Marshall suggested that he take the job. He recognized that it might be a good opportunity for Pindell, and Marshall was confident that someone else could become the plaintiff. By fall 1936, Pettigen found Walter S. Mills, also young, single, and with two years of teaching experience, who agreed to be the plaintiff. 20 Before filing a suit on behalf of the Anne Arundel County teachers, the NAACP filed two other equal pay lawsuits for teachers in Montgomery County, a suburb of Washington, in December 1936 and in Calvert County in November 1937. After reading the NAACP petitions, both school boards decided to settle and gradually increase the black teachers’ salaries until they were equal with whites’. A year after the settlement, William B. Gibbs, plaintiff in Montgomery County, lost his job as principal. It could not be proven, but many believed that he lost his position because of the lawsuit. Because both county boards settled out of court, no precedent was established to force the other counties to end their discriminatory salary system. 21 While these two suits were being settled, Governor Harry W. Nice and superintendent Fox responded to the Anne Arundel County black teachers’ petitions. Both publicly supported equalization of salaries, but disagreed as to which government—state or county—should pay the difference in the short term. In 1937, both agreed the state should assume responsibility for the equalization—in the future. 22 The black teachers of Anne Arundel watched these developments. By early 1938, the teachers realized that neither the state legislators nor members of the county board were going to abolish the dual salary scale simply because they knew “it was morally wrong,” in Brown’s words. They concluded “that the court was their only recourse.” To be certain

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that “they had exhausted every means at their disposal . . . the teachers decided that they would make one final appeal to the board of education,” Brown wrote. 23 He recalled years later that some of the older teachers worried about losing their jobs if they filed a suit. Their jobs were hard to come by, and white supervisors had sometimes tried to “cow” them. They could fire a teacher “on the spot.” 24 That January 1938, the Afro published an enthusiastic account of the teachers’ meeting with the county school board described at the beginning of this chapter. “The joint appearance of all the teachers in the county made a united front against any action that might have been taken against any one or two teachers who might have headed the fight.” Governor Nice spoke at a rally at the Quinn A.M.E. Church in Frederick on January 9, 1938, three days after the Anne Arundel teachers met with the Board of Education, and “renewed his pledge to equalize teachers’ salaries,” the Capital reported. 25 In February, Governor Nice again promised to support pay equalization when he met with a delegation from the Maryland Educational Association in his office. Among those present from Annapolis were Walter Mills, who would become the plaintiff in the Anne Arundel teachers’ lawsuit; Rachel Carter Smith, the Bates librarian; Philip Brown, the teachers’ spokesman; Cynthia Brown, a teacher at Bates; and Sarah V. Jones, a black woman and supervisor of the colored schools of Anne Arundel County. 26 Nothing was heard from the teachers until that fall, when a delegation went before the board in October to discuss salary equalization, as the board had suggested in January. This time those board members present said that they supported raising the teachers’ salaries one half of the difference between white and black pay. 27 The teachers realized that the board would at best gradually increase their pay over many years. So they decided to proceed with the lawsuit. Mills, now the principal at Parole Elementary School and president of the Anne Arundel Teachers Association, would be the plaintiff. The group contacted Thurgood Marshall—”a big step for us,” Brown recalled. Marshall came down from New York to meet them. He said that this time he would sue the Maryland Board of Education in federal court instead of the Anne Arundel County Board of Education. He hoped to get salaries equalized throughout the state and avoid the need for actions against each county. A “friendly, regular kind of guy,” Brown thought, Marshall impressed the teachers that he was “someone who knew his law.” 28 With the assistance of Dr. Charles H. Houston, former dean of the Howard University Law School, Leon A. Ransom, a professor of law at Howard, Edward P. Lovett, and W. A. C. Hughes, the chief counsel of the NAACP in Maryland, Marshall filed the petition on December 16, 1938, in the District Court of the United States for the District of Maryland in

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Baltimore. Judge W. Calvin Chesnut, a white man, was assigned to the case. 29 According to the Afro’s account, the petition requested, “A permanent injunction forever to restrain the State of Maryland from paying out funds to teachers according to the present law.” The suit asked the court to “rule on the constitutionality of the Maryland law under which the average colored teacher in the Maryland counties is paid an average of $700 less than white teachers doing the same work.” According to the petition, these teachers “illegally are being deprived of salaries totaling $490,000 under the present State law.” 30 The petition showed that like teachers, black principals of elementary schools had a different salary scale from white principals. Mills contended “that he is a principal in a colored elementary school for which no provision is made under the law.” This, his attorneys stated, “deprives him and others in whose behalf he brings the suit of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed him and them by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.” In the suit Marshall documented the history of the discriminatory salaries to 1904. 31 William C. Walsh, the state’s attorney general, argued, “There is nothing in the Maryland law to compel the State Board of Education to pay Mills the same salary paid to whites. The law did not discriminate between the two groups of teachers in that it provided minimum salary for white teachers and a minimum salary for teachers in colored schools.” The black schools “simply happen” to have black teachers. They could be fired and replaced by white teachers. 32 During the trial, Judge Chesnut commented on the uniqueness of the Maryland Equalization Law. In his book, Brown quoted the judge: “While there is prevailing inequality of pay between white and colored teachers in nineteen states, Maryland is the only state which has a statute containing a minimum salary scale for white teachers with a lower minimum for teachers in the colored schools.” The judge observed, “On the face of the statute the discrimination is based not on the race or color of the teacher but on the color of the scholars.” If a white teacher taught black students in a black school, she would be paid on the lower pay scale, and conversely a black teacher instructing white students would be paid the higher wage. 33 The judge dismissed the suit because it was filed against the State Board of Education and the State Equalization Fund instead of the Anne Arundel County Board of Education. Nevertheless, he observed that if the facts stated by the plaintiff were true “they would constitute violation of the fourteenth amendment.” 34 The teachers in Anne Arundel County found the dismissal “disturbing and disappointing,” Brown recorded in his book. Marshall explained that the ruling did not mean “that the teachers did not have a case but

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rather it said that they had sued the wrong party.” He would file the suit again against the Anne Arundel County Board of Education. 35 Superintendent Fox was served with the new complaint on April 15, 1939. Four days later, the Board of Education met in special session. The board authorized Noah A. Hillman, the attorney for the county, to ask the state attorney general, William C. Walsh, to participate in the case. The board authorized Hillman to answer this suit and to employ an additional attorney to help him file any necessary papers and to inform the board what the approximate costs of the suit would be. 36 The Capital reported what the expense to the county would be if it “lost” the lawsuit, not what the black teachers had suffered as a result of the law’s discrimination, nor what they would gain if they won. If the county “lost,” it would have to pay approximately $40,000 annually to equalize the salaries. Teachers in white schools were “paid on an average of $1,100 while teachers in colored schools make $800.” The state legislature had recently passed a law that would raise the teachers’ salaries in white schools to an average of $1,300, a figure that would have to be matched if Mills won his lawsuit. 37 By the end of September, the case was in court. The NAACP attorneys were confident that Mills would win, and they hoped that a favorable decision would serve as a precedent for the rest of Maryland and for other states as well. The Chesnut opinion on the constitutional issue was “the first court opinion in the country” on the constitutional question of equal pay for white and black teachers, and it “serves as a guidepost” for future cases, the Afro suggested. 38 While awaiting the court’s decision in the Anne Arundel case, a delegation of black teachers appeared before the Board of Education on October 6, 1939, to discuss the salary question. They reminded the board that it had voted in November 1938 to add $6,000 to the budget for a 10 percent increase in their salaries. This had been done as a temporary measure until the legislature increased the salaries. The board responded that the teachers could only get the increase if they abandoned the lawsuit. The delegation showed interest in this deal, and the board asked Hillman, their lawyer, to contact Marshall to draft an agreement. Marshall wrote to W. A. C. Hughes, the NAACP lawyer for Maryland, “It is absolutely necessary that we have as much pressure as possible to keep these teachers from accepting the compromise, and we would like very much to have you go as local counsel in the case to lend your influence.” 39 A mass meeting of teachers, their lawyers, and several ministers was held to discuss the board’s “appeasement offer,” the Afro called it. When they calculated that it would take four to five years to receive salaries equivalent to the white teachers’ salaries, the teachers voted to decline the settlement offer and continue the fight. 40

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At the second round of court hearings in November, the plaintiff’s lawyers asked that the two state pay laws be held invalid because they violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Hillman, whom the black teachers considered “not too smart,” represented the Anne Arundel County Board of Education. Benjamin M. Michaelson was the attorney for the county commissioners. William C. Walsh, the attorney general, and H. Vernon Eney, his assistant, all white men, appeared again for the state. Marshall and Ransom represented Mills. 41 According to the Afro-American, Hillman argued that, The Anne Arundel County Board would prove: 1. That the differences in salaries were due to the fact that most of the white schools are consolidated and the principals have to report an hour earlier and leave an hour later. 2. That the standard of instruction was higher in the white schools as mental tests showed that colored children are not up to the standard of the whites.” 42

The defense did not claim that the unequal salaries reflected a difference in qualifications and experience. “There was a distinct reason for this. In the past, whenever the qualifications of the two races of teachers were compared, it was found that the colored teachers were usually more highly qualified than the white teachers,” Brown wrote in his book. Fox “attempted to establish . . . [that] the white teachers were being paid more because they were better teachers. He reasoned that white students required more work than colored because their intelligence is higher.” Brown wrote, “All types of records, charts, and graphs were presented in court that indicated that on various achievement tests and in any other way the white children compared with colored children, the white children were usually higher than or ahead of the black children. The superintendent attributed this to the fact that the white children were being taught by better teachers.” Mills’s attorneys called two expert education witnesses to refute Hillman’s claim that black children were intellectually inferior. 43 When Fox took the stand, the NAACP attorneys questioned him about the board’s October offer to increase their salaries 10 percent a year if the teachers dropped the lawsuit. Under questioning from Marshall and Ransom, Fox admitted that Mills’s salary was $1,058, while a teacher in a white school performing similar work received $1,550. Fox acknowledged that a white teacher with less experience and qualifications than Mills earned $1,400 to teach in a white one-room school. Fox also admitted that white assistant teachers in elementary schools made 35 percent more than black teachers teaching the same grade. No black teacher received as much as the lowest-paid white teacher. Fox said that white high school principals earned from $1,750 to $2,150 a year compared with the $1,600 that the principal of Bates High School made. 44

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According to the Capital, Judge Chesnut demanded, “Can you sit there and tell me that the racial factor did not enter into this state of affairs?” Fox answered that the differences in salaries were the result of the difference in the teaching abilities of blacks and whites. He claimed that “his poorest white teacher was better than his best colored teacher.” Marshall then asked him why black teachers had to scrub the classroom floors, and the white teachers did not. Fox replied, “This has always been blacks’ work.” 45 Hillman informed the court that if the county had to pay equal salaries, it would have to increase its tax rate by 7 percent. In his final arguments before Judge Chesnut, Hillman asserted that Anne Arundel County was the wrong location for the test case. Noting it was the first such action in a federal court, he asked, according to the Capital’s account, “Why don’t the attorneys for Mills choose a county in Georgia, or the deep South against which to lodge their bill of complaints?” 46 On November 22, 1939, Judge Chesnut found in favor of Mills, and ordered the county to pay white and black teachers equally. The Evening Capital’s restrained account discussed the financial repercussions of the landmark decision for the town and citizens, not the financial and civil rights gains for black teachers. It contrasted sharply with the jubilant Afro-American editorial that appeared a few days later. The Capital’s headline read, “County Faces Tax Boost in Teacher Case; Court Bans Discrimination in Teacher Pay Based on Race and Color.” The paper estimated that equalizing the salaries of black and white teachers would cost the county “$30,000 to $40,000 annually, about seven cents additional on the tax rate.” 47 The Afro-American editorial, by contrast, crowed: “Last week, Maryland won a $490,000 suit which will eventually equalize salaries of colored and white teachers in every county of the State.” Anne Arundel County “has been caught in the act of stealing pennies from a blind man’s cup, and the public spectacle it made of itself those three days in court has not been at all pleasant to the best citizens.” 48 The school board met on December 22 in special session. Marshall and Hillman were present to discuss when the teachers’ salaries should be equalized. Given the restrictions of the budget for that year and the approved budget for 1940, Marshall “stated that the colored teachers would be satisfied to receive the increase in their salaries in January, 1941, but they would expect to be paid equal salaries as of September, 1940,” according to the board’s minutes. Fox and Hillman replied that this was not possible because the funds were not in the budget and the board could not pay for expenses incurred this year in the next year’s budget. The board claimed that it did not plan to appeal the court decision as long as the teachers did not demand that their increased pay come from the 1940 budget. 49

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Negotiations continued. Judge Chesnut was kept informed, and permitted the two attorneys to draft the court order after a January meeting detailing the agreement between the teachers and the board. All ninetyone county teachers met with the board, on Tuesday, January 2, 1940. Many years later, Martha Alsop, who was a dedicated fourth-grade teacher at Stanton Elementary School, remembered walking down Main Street to the school board office with Thurgood Marshall that day. “It was the proudest day of my life.” 50 The teachers and the board met for three hours. No board minutes were recorded, but the Capital reported that no decision was made at the meeting. The teachers continued to insist that their pay adjustment start in September 1940 and the board wanted the pay rise to be postponed until January 1941. Hillman wanted to threaten the teachers with an appeal of the court decision, but he realized that if it lost the appeal, the county might have to pay the difference in salaries dating from the date of the lower court order. Brown recalled that Ransom “ran a little warm and said he was tired of you trying to intimidate my clients.” 51 Ten days later, Judge Chesnut ordered that the equalization of white and black teachers’ salaries was to take effect by September 1, 1940. This would mean pay raises for ninety-one black teachers of 50 to 75 percent. The board would have to raise $17,000 to pay these court-ordered increases or risk being held in contempt. 52 Eight months later, the board finally voted to include $30,000 in its annual budget for 1941 to equalize the teachers’ salaries—two and a half years after they first met with the black teachers to hear their demands. But the teachers had a new fear. Under a new state law, the board had to put every teacher in one of two grades, which would determine their pay. They were afraid that if the county graded them lower than white teachers, the county could still deny them equal pay. Fox sent out a letter to all teachers on June 21, 1940, explaining the system. Most of the black teachers were rated second class—a difference of $250 a year. Brown recollected that this rating system did not last long. 53 In October, Marshall again appeared before the Board of Education to discuss the retroactive payment that would be due to the teachers for the months of September, October, November, and December 1940 because the county did not have the funds to cover the increase at that time. “The Board assured Marshall that the colored teachers would receive their increase in salary for these months after January 1, 1941, in a lump sum,” the minutes of the meeting stated. The teachers held a celebration at Bates. They felt “pretty good,” Brown recalled. It meant an increase of $25 to $30 a month for some. Marshall would not accept any money from the teachers, so they gave him a watch. He told them that Judge Chesnut’s decision had “nothing to do with Negroes. . . . Don’t get the idea that he did you any favor. He was a judge, and a judge doesn’t want his cases reversed.” Marshall thought any judge would have ruled the same way.

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Around the same time, the legislature voted to equalize the school years of white and black schools. 54 The teachers experienced some repercussions as a result of the lawsuit, but not as drastic as they feared. Frank B. Butler, the principal of Bates High School, was demoted to science teacher two years later. Believing that his demotion was a consequence of the lawsuit, the teachers asked to meet with Fox to protest the action and request that Butler be reinstated. They assumed that the school officials thought Butler had been the organizer of the lawsuit. In fact, he had “remained in the background,” Brown explained. 55 At the meeting, Fox insisted that he meet with the teachers one by one in a room separate from the room where they were all assembled. He ordered the remaining teachers not to talk among themselves. Harold R. McCann, the white superintendent of colored schools of Anne Arundel County, stayed to ensure that no one talked. He “did not have much respect for colored teachers,” and would refer to them as “‘you people.’ He didn’t realize that it was offensive,” Brown said. He would come around to their classrooms and pick on them for insignificant things, and threaten “to fire them on the spot,” Brown recollected. While waiting to talk to Fox, Cynthia D’A Brown, who was married to Philip Brown’s nephew, decided that the teachers were being treated unfairly and spoke to one of her colleagues. McCann immediately reported this to Fox, who came and told her that she was fired for insubordination. When the general meeting ended, Fox did not reinstate Butler to his former position. Fox later informed Mrs. Brown, who was a graduate of Hunter College and a tenured teacher, that if she apologized to him, he would reinstate her. She refused because she did not think she had to apologize for objecting to what she considered unjust treatment by her superior. As a tenured teacher, she could have protested her firing. Instead, she and her husband moved to Washington, DC, where she worked as a teacher in the DC school system. 56 Despite these attempts at intimidation, the teachers believed that white school officials saw them slightly differently after the lawsuit, Brown recollected years later. Whites now understood that they would fight for equal rights for themselves and their students. On the other hand, many other blacks in the community did not react to the teachers’ pay victory. Brown recalled that many people in the town were probably unaware that the teachers were engaged in a struggle and lawsuit for equal pay and thus did not see their victory as a stepping-stone to further action. In fact, those interviewed for this book, who worked as domestics at the time of the lawsuit, did not recall hearing about it. According to Brown, there “was not much impact. There was not someone to take the lead to correct things. A lot depended on whites for their jobs, and they were afraid to take a stand.” 57

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When it was suggested to Brown that there was more room for them to maneuver in Annapolis than farther South, he corrected the observation: “We made the room” to maneuver, he said emphatically. 58 This face-to-face encounter between blacks and whites was a struggle that the blacks won. It showed that tenacious and courageous black teachers in Annapolis, with the help of a committed NAACP lawyer dedicated to winning equal rights through the courts (and with the help of a fair judge) could finally gain equal pay—one step closer to equal citizenship. But equal pay for black teachers did not mean that whites considered blacks equal citizens. They still could not practice medicine at the Annapolis hospital, live in certain neighborhoods, attend the University of Maryland, or expect new schoolbooks every September, as whites could. This imbalance would not change for many more years. NOTES 1. Brown, interview. 2. Brown, A Century, 72. 3. Brown, A Century, 72; Brown, interview; Anne Arundel County Board of Education, “Minutes” 1935–1939, January 5, 1938, 155–56, MSA CM 1391–3. The first names of Payne and Cromwell are not mentioned in the board minutes or in Brown’s book. 4. Brown, A Century, 72–73. 5. Ibid.; Brown, interview; Board of Education, “Minutes,” 155–56, MSA CM 1391–3. 6. Brown, interview. 7. EC, June 6, 1916; Brown, A Century, 20, 70. 8. Ibid.; EC, January 17, 1918. 9. AA, October 31, 1919; EC, January 20, 1920; AA, January 30, 1920. 10. AA, February 13, 1920; February 27, 1920; EC, July 39, 1920. 11. Department of Legislative Services, Under the Dome, 207; EC, January 11, 1929; AA, March 5, 1927; February 9, 1929. 12. AA, February 16, 1929; February 23, 1929; March 2, 1929; April 6, 1929; Brown, interview. 13. AA, January 24, 1931. 14. EC, February 20, 1932; Brown, interview; Howard D. Pindell, interview by author, Philadelphia, PA; AA, March 24, 1934. 15. EC, February 26, 1935; AA, March 30, 1935; EC, March 14, 1935; AA, April 13, 1935. 16. EC, November 21, 1935; Brown, interview. 17. EC, November 21, 1935. 18. EC, November 30, 1935; AA, September 28, 1935. The Murray suit was one of many lawsuits the NAACP filed. It had launched a “coordinated attack against Jim Crow segregation starting in 1933 to gain equality” for blacks. Bennett, 53. 19. Brown, A Century, 71. 20. Marable and Mullings, Let Nobody, 106; Bennett, 362–64; AA, February 4, 2004 citing, Pindell, 2004. 21. AA, November 21, 1936; July 31, 1937; Brown, A Century, 71; EC, November 12, 1937. 22. EC, December 29, 1937. 23. Brown, A Century, 72.

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24. Brown, interview. 25. AA, February, 19 1938; EC, January 10, 1938. 26. AA, February 19, 1938. Philip Brown does not recall being present at this meeting. 27. Board of Education, “Minutes,” 1935–1939, 217, 225–27, MSA CM 1391–3. 28. Brown, A Century, 74; Brown, interview. 29. AA, December 17, 1938. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid.; Brown, A Century, 77. 32. AA, January 14, 1939; January 21, 1939. 33. Brown, A Century, 77. 34. AA, February 18, 1939. 35. Brown, A Century, 78. 36. Board of Education, “Minutes,” 1935–1939, 261, 264, MSA CM 1391–3. 37. EC, April 23, 1939. 38. AA, July 15, 1939; September 23, 1939. 39. Board of Education, “Minutes,” 1935–1939, 298, MSA CM 1391–3; AA, January 31, 2004. 40. AA, October 14, 1939; Brown, A Century, 81. 41. OHI; AA, November 14, 1939. 42. AA, November, 14, 1939. 43. Brown, A Century, 80–81; AA, November, 7, 1939. 44. AA, November 14, 1939; EC, November 16, 1939. 45. EC, November 16, 1939; Department of Legislative Services, 209. 46. EC, November 16, 1939. 47. EC, November 24, 1939. 48. AA, November 28, 1939. 49. Board of Education, “Minutes,”1935–1939, 14, MSA CM 1391–3; EC, December 22, 1939. 50. Ibid; Martha Alsop, interview. 51. EC, January 2, 1940. 52. EC, January 13, 1940. 53. AA, August 27, 1940; Brown, A Century, 82; Brown, interview. 54. Board of Education, “Minutes,” 1939–1943, 58, MSA CM 1391–4; Brown, interview. 55. Brown, A Century, 85; Brown, interview. 56. Brown, A Century, 85; Brown, interview. More than sixty years later, some of the teachers learned that the white school officials’ promotion of Howard D. Pindell in 1936 from teacher in Anne Arundel County to principal of a school in Frederick County may have been their way of removing the most vocal advocate of equal rights for teachers from Annapolis. By becoming principal, he lost his tenure as a teacher. After two years on the job, with one more to go before gaining tenure as a principal, Pindell was fired. The Frederick County superintendent, Pindell told the Afro in 2004, “called me into his office and said, ‘you’ve done a wonderful job, but I’ve got to ask for your resignation.’” In an interview that year, Pindell said he thought that the white superintendent for colored schools in Maryland requested his dismissal. AA, January 31, 2004; Pindell, interview. 57. Brown, interview. 58. Pindell, interview; Brown, interview.

TEN Bird’s-Eye View, 1919–1940

When the teachers met with the school board in the winter of 1938, Annapolis looked different than it did when John Snowden was hanged in 1919. The town had spread out to the north and west beyond its original, small peninsula. It crossed over Spa Creek into Eastport, beyond the capitol to Homewood and Germantown, and over College Creek to West Annapolis, growing new, suburban neighborhoods. 1

Figure 10.1.

Map of Annapolis, 1938

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In the original town, new houses stood on formerly empty lots, and small clapboard houses went up in the interiors of some blocks, creating new alley communities. Stores had changed owners; new enterprises had opened; garages of all kinds were everywhere. They had popped up like dandelions behind houses, in rows on empty lots, and behind shops on the main commercial streets to accommodate the ever-growing number of automobiles that Annapolis residents were buying. Gas stations opened on Bladen Street, College Avenue, and Market Place, where blacks and whites used segregated restrooms. Auto repair, painting, bodywork, accessory shops, and dealerships had cropped up along West Street. 2 Access to and from the town had changed in other ways. In 1927, 150 trains came in and out of Annapolis daily. That number dropped sharply in 1935, when the Washington, Baltimore, and Annapolis line closed, which meant an end to its train service within Annapolis and between the town and Washington, DC. After that, only the Short Line trains went back and forth to Baltimore. A bus company offered service to Washington, and the Annapolis Bus Company began its route through town in 1937. In 1930, a ferry line connected the town to the Eastern Shore, and a steamboat line provided service to Baltimore. By 1939, ferry passengers had the choice of twenty round-trips across the bay in the summer and fourteen in the winter months. 3 The population of Annapolis grew 15.1 percent between 1920 and 1930. The 1930 census takers found 12,531 people in the town, 2,728 of them living on the academy grounds; 9,125 were white and 3,218 black. Of the 192 black residents of Annapolis listing birthplaces other than Maryland, 160 came from the South, half of them from Virginia. By 1930, there were 60 Filipinos. Living on the two ships off the academy were another 75 Filipinos and 5 black sailors on the USS Cumberland and 16 Filipinos, 1 black, and 204 white sailors on the Reina Mercedes. 4 Special events brought both presidents and crowds to Annapolis. In 1928, the town celebrated Colonial Day, a commemoration of the Annapolis Convention of 1786. President Calvin Coolidge came for the reenactment of Gen. George Washington’s resignation of his commission as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. Many citizens dressed in colonial costumes and thousands came to watch the spectacle. Visitors dropped by the venerable colonial mansions opened to the public, including the Hammond Harwood house, where two blacks—Mary Proctor and someone only identified as “Valentine”—played “Aunt Hester” and a “butler.” The Asbury Community Center served lunch to the outof-town black chauffeurs and the people working in the pageant. 5 In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt attended the graduation at the Naval Academy. His wife, Eleanor, discussed housing problems before the Naval Academy Women’s Club in March 1937. In 1936, the famous aviator Amelia Earhart spoke to the midshipmen. 6

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Every year during June Week at the Naval Academy, the town was flooded with the “relatives, friends and sweethearts of the middies.” Legislative sessions in the odd-numbered years drew hundreds of legislators and citizens hoping to influence them. A 1929 roster of the elected delegates lists twenty-two farmers, twenty-two lawyers, twenty-one merchants, five salesmen, four real estate agents, and four insurance agents. 7 A steady stream of citizens came to Annapolis to plead their favored causes before the state government. Among them were delegations of black teachers petitioning the legislature for equal pay. In April 1931, some two dozen Communists broke up a session of the legislature to demonstrate on behalf of the unemployed. Two of them, one black and one white, were injured in the tussle with police. The next year, a large number of state and local police were brought in to control crowds of Communists from Baltimore who demanded the abolition of Jim Crow laws, the appointment of blacks to juries, and the release of Euel Lee, a condemned black man. In 1933, an integrated group of Communists got into a fight with the police. Two of the whites and one black were convicted of assaulting a policeman. The prosecutor in the Snowden trial, Nicholas H. Green Jr., had become a circuit court judge, and he sentenced them to jail. 8 Among the new houses springing up all around the town were five row houses built by Morris Legum in the Fourth Ward. The new row was called Legum’s Court. In 1935, Legum rebuilt ten houses on Clay Street. Six were four-room homes; four were six-room homes with “all conveniences,” including cement porches. In 1934, Harry Ivrey connected fourteen homes on Water Street to sewer and water lines in order to meet the town’s sanitation requirements. 9 The most noticeable change was apparent at the end of Clay Street, where William Gardiner, a white contractor, built seven large houses. Four were constructed for three sisters and a brother, all McPhersons, an established black family. These siblings had each borrowed about $450 to pay for each lot and an additional sum to build the six-room homes. 10 Developers put up twenty-three more houses on other streets in the black neighborhood. These were clapboard houses, unlike the new, shingled detached homes with porches nearby. On the other side of Northwest Street, Morris Legum built fifteen small houses in narrow alleys. Altogether, Legum built twenty-nine properties in that now-crowded area. 11 White landlords, many of them Jewish, owned most of the homes in the neighborhoods where the blacks continued to live. From 1919 to 1938, Morris Legum nearly tripled the number of properties he owned, and built “as many as his builder could squeeze into the lots,” recalled his son Edward Legum years later. His holdings grew from twenty-eight to seventy-five houses. Starting at the age of nine, Edward could be seen

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accompanying his father, who could not read or write English, in his chauffeur-driven car to collect the rents. 12 Other big property owners in the black neighborhoods included Jake Bloom, who held thirty-two properties, and Louis Bloom and his wife, who owned twenty-four houses. Walter Hart had acquired thirty-nine properties. Harry Ivrey was the second-largest property holder after Legum, with sixty-two properties. 13 There were at least eight black landlords who might have been seen collecting rents, as well. Louise and Alberta Adams, the daughters of J. Albert Adams, owned seven houses. Wiley H. Bates had purchased twelve properties, and the Ridgley siblings owned fourteen properties. Carroll Hynson had two buildings, and Anthony Brown also had property. 14 By the early 1920s, new and remodeled homes in black neighborhoods, including the growing suburb of Parole, testified to the increasing affluence of the black community. John T. Stepney, the alderman, moved into a “beautiful” new home. Henry Valentine remodeled his house, the Weems also made “extensive improvements on their property,” and the Phelps family renovated their home. John H. King was now “proprietor of ‘King’s Inn,’” a confectionary establishment in Parole. Wiley Bates built a garage and bungalow, and Eliza and Edward Fletcher had moved to their “attractive suburban home” they called “The Lindens” in Parole as well. Near the end of the decade, Charlotte Johnson Andrews and her mother, Hester Johnson, both members of the Mothers’ League, and her father, Moses Johnson, moved to 238 King George Street, a home Charlotte inherited from the Andrews sisters, who adopted her. 15 Other properties were destroyed. In 1927, St. John’s College razed fourteen houses on St. John Place and twenty-three houses on Lincoln Place that had long been considered eyesores. These had been homes for working-class blacks. Between 1930 and 1938, an additional seventy-one homes were demolished in the town. 16 During the Depression, the federal Public Works Administration financed road and building projects. Out-of-work residents, black and white alike, were hired to construct new government buildings, including an office building on College Avenue. PWA workers also connected houses to a sewage system, paved some streets, and put in new sidewalks. 17 Commercial development also changed the town. Besides all the new gas stations and auto shops around town, there were electrical appliance and contractor businesses. National grocery chains, including the A&P, opened stores in the town. William Gardiner’s Construction Company on a field across from Pleasant Street was torn down. Among the industries in Annapolis were two boat-building yards, ice plants, dry cleaning plants, and Annapolis Dairy Products. 18

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In 1921, the J.M.L. Corporation of Norfolk, Virginia, a white business, purchased the blacksmith shop of William H. Feldmeyer at the corner of Northwest and Calvert streets. On this lot the firm built a $20,000 movie theater, the Star Theatre. It was packed for the opening night double bill on July 15 of The Mark of Zorro, starring Douglas Fairbanks, and a comedy, Get Out and Get Under. Sam and Lena Eisenstein bought the theater and refurbished it in 1930, installing a “talkie” system, rugs in the aisle, a new screen, and expanded food offerings. 19 Also in 1930, Morris Legum built the Washington Hotel. His son Edward ran the hotel, recruiting jazz musicians on the circuit in Baltimore to come to Annapolis to entertain, Pearl Bailey, Billy Eckstine, and Peg-Leg Bates among them. Blacks came from Baltimore and Washington to hear some of the performers. 20 Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia owned many of the little corner groceries and liquor stores, or “jew stores,” as some referred to them, that dotted the black neighborhood. Among them were the Levins and the Blums, who had grocery shops, the Gritzs, who ran a liquor store, and the Greengolds, who sold clothing. Black customers could buy food on credit from the shopkeepers who “kept a book.” On paydays, the proprietors or their children would show up at workplaces to collect payments from their black customers. 21 More blacks opened their own businesses. Charles Hicks launched a funeral parlor. Black men could now go to new barbershops started by Thomas Richardson and Sydney Taylor, and black women had new choices of beauty parlors—Artistic, Milady, Oriental, and Smart. These enterprises provided jobs, and served as social centers. Two nurses, Pauline Simms and Rachel Pinkney, and a midwife, Victoria Davis, one new doctor, Dr. Raymond L. Richardson, and a new black dentist, Dr. Oliver W. H. McNeil, all worked in the Fourth Ward. The Star Confectionary opened. Sarah Watkins and Francis Diggs ran small groceries. Children attended a small kindergarten Wiley H. Bates built next to his house on Cathedral Street where Mattie Holt taught. The ambitious young entrepreneur, Carroll Hynson, a former delivery boy, had become a bail bondsman. Emmett Nelson taught music, Edward B. Notis ran an upholstery business, and Emma Hall Stepney was a notary public. Blacks operated several taxi services. 22 Black businessmen and women opened hotels, pool halls, bars, and half a dozen small restaurants including Gray’s, which sold the best crab cakes in town, and Susie’s Tea Room, which some described as a “greasy spoon good time place.” Blacks enjoyed going to the new Brown’s Hotel, a former pool hall that Anthony Brown converted, and Stanley Hotel, a popular nightspot that became known as Wrights Hotel after its owner Stanley Wright who had managed the Blue Bird Restaurant. He had entertainers from Baltimore and Washington, DC. 23

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New or expanded facilities for black fraternal organizations could be seen around town. In 1922, the Odd Fellows received a permit to build at 15 Clay Street. In June 1927, the Elks Ancient City Lodge 175 built a new clubhouse that cost $12,500. The new three-story Elks facility was reputed to be “one of most modern and best equipped homes in the city.” 24 From a bird’s-eye view, the relationship between blacks and whites on the landscape may have appeared unaltered over these two decades. But a closer look would reveal that some small, contradictory changes had occurred. At unexpected moments, blacks integrated places, or “made room” for themselves, where whites had obdurately enforced separation and inequality. However, in new places that opened whites still limited black access. Sometimes, whites threatened violence or attempted to intimidate blacks in new ways to keep them down. Blacks became even more self-contained in the Fourth Ward, enriching their own space, a simultaneous expansion and contraction of blacks on the landscape. As before, in the mornings, blacks came out of “their” streets (see figure 10.1) to go to work and school. Black women walked to work in their street clothes to maintain their dignity, carrying their work clothes or uniforms with them. Black men would make their way from different parts of town to their jobs. Some now worked at low-level jobs at the service stations and garages or at the construction sites during the building booms of 1919 and 1939. The Navy replaced local black messmen with enlisted Filipinos who lived on the USS Cumberland. By 1933, the Navy put the Filipinos on active duty so the local blacks returned to their jobs, but the next year, they lost them to enlisted blacks whom the Navy had recruited to be the messmen. 25 During the Depression years, fewer people may have been seen going to work. After 1933, the Naval Academy reduced employment for blacks and whites by one-third. Some black women may have gone to work in white neighborhoods less frequently because fewer white families could afford their services. Some black men worked on the Works Progress Administration (WPA) job sites. Both blacks and whites went to the social welfare office for financial assistance, food, and clothing and to separate WPA training programs. 26 School mornings looked different in the black community. More black children than ever went to Washington Street to attend Stanton Elementary School, which had to open extra classrooms in the Community Center in the next block. Between 1917 and 1932, older students could attend crammed high school classes on the third floor of the Stanton Elementary School. In January 1933, black teachers arrived each morning at the new Bates High School on Smithfield Street, off Spa Road, about a mile from Clay Street. Now black high school students walked out West Street to their new school. White high school students passed them in a bus going to their school on the other side of Spa Road, sometimes taunting or throwing things at them. 27

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Between sixty and a hundred black schoolchildren walked over to Duke of Gloucester Street to attend the two-room St. Mary’s Catholic Colored School. During recess, they could peek through the hedge and see the white schoolchildren and sometimes talk with them. 28 After school and on Saturdays, enterprising black boys assembled at the train stations and grocery stores with their wagons to haul luggage or groceries for white people. Other boys went to the station with their shoe shine kits to polish shoes. To earn spare change for themselves or their families, young black girls—even ones as young as eight and nine—could be seen going after school to work in houses in the black or white neighborhoods. 29 Black children played in the streets, alleys, or backyards. Boys competed at marbles, pitched oyster shells, or worked on their go-carts. Girls roller-skated, played jacks, and shared their dolls. In winter, some skated on the frozen creeks, or sledded down Cornhill Street or the Capitol Hill. Some scavenged in the dump near Paca Street, where Murphy’s five-anddime store discarded broken toys. One little girl thought the men felt sorry for them and deliberately left an occasional unbroken toy. 30 After work, some black adults walked down to the creeks that surrounded the town to fish, sometimes taking their children. In winter some men hunted for rabbit outside of Annapolis. Families raised chickens and grew vegetables in their small backyards. One family kept ducks, another had a pigeon house. Some raised flowers and shared seeds with their neighbors. On Saturdays, family members came in from the country to shop in Annapolis and would bring fruits and vegetables, sausage, and bread to relatives in town. 31 Black Annapolitans had more options when they went out in the evening. They could now go to Stanton School, Waltz Dream Hall, the former Clay Street Hall, the Star Theatre, the new Bates High School, the Community Center that opened on Calvert Street in 1920, new and old clubhouses, hotels, friends’ houses, and, of course, their churches for meetings, lectures, concerts, movies, dinners, parties, and dances. In June 1937, crowds of black men, women, and children “poured into the streets shouting, singing, blowing horns and setting off firecrackers” to celebrate the news that Joe Louis was the new heavyweight boxing champion of the world. Police stood in the intersections leading from the Fourth Ward and kept the revelers in their own neighborhood. “There was no disorder, only joy over the victory.” 32 On Sundays, families dressed in their best clothes to “let people see what you had” as they paraded through the streets to church. Evangelists walked the streets, going from “house to house and street to street among the colored people to sing and pray with them.” Children went to Sunday school first, then the 11 o’clock service, then home for a big meal, and then back for youth meetings. Some children went to church at night with their grandmothers, who had worked all day preparing, serving, and

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cleaning up the Sunday meal for their white employers. “Church started at 8 o’clock and you’d stay there until 11. If you get sleepy, you put your head down in their laps.” 33 Camp meetings still drew hundreds of people to town. In August 1928, a crowd of 1,500 attended Asbury’s closing camp meeting. Another 800 assembled at a village camp at Adams Park that went on all day and evening. “They’d be singing and praying . . . people that sold food had stalls . . . and there would be a big tent and chairs for the participants. Different bands would sing separately, then together.” “The older people were worshipping on the inside while the young were drinking, dancing, and fighting outside.” 34 Summer was the season for municipal elections. Most blacks voted in a segregated polling station, separate from white voters. Those in the Fourth Ward—about 1,200 voters in 1923—cast their ballots at Stanton Elementary School. The election judges selected to observe the voting in the Fourth Ward were now black. Among the blacks who served were lawyer William H. Howard, hotel owner Stanley Wright, community leader Emma Hall Stepney, and Snowden’s counselors Georgia Boston and Rev. Holt. 35 White public officials and political candidates made the rounds in the black neighborhoods before elections and at other times in the year. Walter E. Quenstedt, the Republican mayor up for reelection in 1931, campaigned in the community. After he was reelected, Quenstedt shared the stage with the two black aldermen, Charles A. Oliver and Charles Spriggs, at the Star Theatre, where the new black congressman from Chicago, Oscar DePriest, came to speak to the Elks about politics. 36 Black and white women could have been seen going to the polls for the first time to vote in the presidential election of 1920. Black women “crowded about the Third and Fourth ward polling houses throughout the day.” When the polls closed on the first day, many were still in line. 37 White salespeople, peddlers, and farmers frequented the streets where blacks lived to sell their wares. “The ice truck used to come up there. The milkman, he was a white man. And there was a lady, she was a foreigner. She spoke with an accent. She sold chickens, vegetables, and sometimes she had fruits from a small pick-up truck.” Children called her “Chicken Mouth” 38 One white “work lady” drove into Gott’s Court in her Model T to visit her black housekeeper. “We had to put on our clean clothes and would have to sit down on the floor. If she wanted something to drink, my grandmother would get it and serve her.” 39 George Fox, the school superintendent, regularly went to the Stanton graduation programs that took place at one of the churches. (Some students remember that he made demeaning comments about them, even telling “nigger” jokes.) In 1927, Mayor Smith and Governor Ritchie went to St. Philip’s Church for the

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funeral of Dorsey Garver, a former alderman who worked as a steward for the governor. 40 Of course, white police continued to enter black neighborhoods. Often they were called to the various alleys and streets to deal with a range of disorderly conduct, fights, murders, numbers runners, and stolen property rings. Twice a year, police inspected backyards to report any unsanitary conditions. On occasion, police went in the houses for a cup of coffee. One policeman was rumored to be “going with” a black woman, dropping by her house. 41 One unexpected sight was a black woman patrolling the streets in the Fourth Ward from 1923 to 1926. Mayor Charles Smith had appointed a tireless community worker, Elizabeth Carter, to help keep order in dance halls and public places. 42 Police arrested whites in some of their raids in the black community, where the boundaries between blacks and whites remained more malleable than in white establishments. The police nabbed five white sailors and two black men in a Clay Street house, and arrested four whites and six blacks, five of whom were women, in a raid on a house described as a disorderly house on St. John’s Street. On another evening, police found two white soldiers playing craps in Gott’s Court. 43 Some blacks and whites collaborated in the thriving numbers racket, and could be seen collecting bets and paying off winners all around the town. Boys running numbers could make “thirty cents for every dollar’s worth of business they wrote. If they wrote a winning number for a man, they said they received 10 percent of that man’s winnings.” Other whites and blacks were engaged in fencing stolen property and selling bootlegged whiskey. One white businessman was arrested for operating a disorderly house and bootlegging in the black neighborhood. 44 Annapolis blacks still regularly entered “white” places in town. In 1927, Governor Ritchie permitted the black Odd Fellows and Household of Ruth to hold their district meeting in the House of Delegates. Ten years later, Governor Harry W. Nice welcomed the delegates attending the convention of the Grand Lodge of Colored Masons of Maryland to the House of Delegates chamber. A group of Masons in their “regalia” walked with the governor from his mansion to the statehouse. 45 Every New Year’s Day, the white Elks club on State Circle handed out treats to both black and white children. For some black children, this was the only time of the year that they ate an orange. But the club now maintained a segregated schedule. About 1,500 white children came for their candies and fruit at 2 p.m., and 1,000 black children came at 4 p.m. 46 When Albert C. Ritchie became governor in 1920, he treated the children to a free movie every year at Christmastime, but in segregated facilities—white children saw him in the morning at the movie theater on Main Street, and in the afternoon, he dropped by the Star Theatre to greet the black children. Once, Ritchie brought his mother to the Star Theatre.

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More than 600 children swarmed the theater, sometimes sitting two or three to a seat. Ritchie’s successors carried on the tradition. 47 One white institution was occasionally integrated surreptitiously—the governor’s mansion. When the governor was not there, some black servants in the mansion took certain liberties. Emma Dickerson, for one, who worked there for twenty years, sometimes entertained her friends at dinner at the mansion. Another black servant invited Stanton schoolchildren to tour the mansion. 48 Blacks now entered other whites-only places. As the only Republican members of the city council, the two black aldermen served on several boards that previously had only white members, including the Merit Board, the City Zoning Committee, and the Water Board, which had to include representatives of both parties. A few blacks would have been seen going into the courthouse, not just as defendants, but now as members of juries. Wiley H. Bates was one of the first. He served in the first decade of the twentieth century and then again in 1920. In 1926, he was chosen to serve on a U.S. grand jury and made daily trips to Baltimore for the spring term. Charles A. Oliver served on a jury in 1934 and 1938. 49 Perhaps the most surprising sight of all was a black man, Joseph Burley, entering Carvel Hall one night in 1933 to eat dinner and then spend the night. He was the first black to break the whites-only practice of the hotel. Burley was a member of the jury for the trial of three white defendants, all charged with the murder of a Naval Academy night watchman. It was customary for the jurors in a murder case to stay overnight at Carvel Hall. 50 Another new sight was the first black plebe at the Naval Academy— James Lee Johnson, who appeared in June, 1936. But this rare sight did not last long. By February, Johnson was gone. He and 134 white plebes were drummed out of the academy for failing to meet its requirements. 51 Some blacks made more aggressive claims on whites-only places. In 1919, James Flippen was arrested when he arrived at the Bladen train station in Annapolis and fined $5 for refusing to leave a seat “assigned to members of the other race on the Maryland Electric Line.” In 1926, nine black actresses and actors were arrested at Bladen Station and fined $6.75 for sitting in the front of a train car and refusing to move. Three years later, a black female schoolteacher from Philadelphia refused to move from her seat on the train. She was arrested when she arrived in Annapolis. 52 Other blacks were seen transgressing prescribed boundaries. One black man from Georgia walked around the white neighborhood of Murray Hill begging for food. “His appearance frightened housewives to such an extent that police were called to get the man out of that section.” Whites caught two black men stealing sugar, butter, and flour from the Naval Academy, a common practice among kitchen workers and waiters

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there. A black snatched the mayor’s wife’s purse when she was walking on Church Circle. 53 Blacks occasionally confronted the police. One evening an officer was hit by a black man on West Street after the policeman tried to arrest his wife for walking into a white woman and using obscene language. The husband said that it was “up to every colored man to protect colored women.” Sometimes when policemen came to break up drunken family feuds on Saturday nights on Block Street, the residents attacked them. 54 But as always the view was complicated. Late one night in December 1929, an observer would have noticed that police protected a black defendant from a lynching. About thirty-five white men had assembled just outside of Annapolis, then moved toward the city jail. They had hoped to break in and seize a black prisoner accused of murdering a white couple in lower Anne Arundel County. While waiting for another sixty men, the group had gathered not far from the jail, when the sheriff and the state’s attorney—the lawyer who had represented Snowden ten years earlier, A. Theodore Brady—arranged for the prisoner to be transported to a Baltimore jail. 55 Eight years earlier, the observer would have witnessed the last hanging in Annapolis. In April 1921, two years after Snowden’s hanging, another black man, Robert Robinson, was hanged. The sheriff used the same scaffolding. Inside the jail yard, about one hundred men watched the hanging on a rainy day. Other spectators watched from “the colored tenant houses” near the jail. 56 Blacks and whites continued to alternate the use of certain spaces in town. Blacks still had their turns to rent the Assembly Rooms. Both now used the new Bladen Street Armory for some of their biggest functions, always on different days. The armory became a popular venue where “gay throngs” went to dance, attend receptions, and watch sports events. 57 Sports events remained segregated. Separate stands were used for an unusual baseball game in 1937 between the Hillsdale Giants, the “colored champions” from Washington, DC, and the “famed Zulu Stars,” black baseball players who wore “short grass skirts . . . necklaces made of teeth and bone . . . and tribal top-knots,” a sports minstrel show. 58 New public programs followed entrenched Jim Crow practices. Several health clinics opened at different hours or days for white and black patients. Black and white children now attended government-sponsored, segregated recreation programs in the summer. White children went to a playground behind Green Street. The black children played behind their churches because their neighborhoods lacked playgrounds. Returning veterans had to go to separate community centers. 59 Parades were also still segregated. In May 1919, blacks organized their own “royal welcome home” parade for the returning soldiers to show their appreciation “for what their race did to win the war.” For Defense

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Day, black delegations marched at the end of the parade. Each fall, the black Elks parade attracted big crowds of white and black spectators. In 1939, 1,500 delegates from twenty-five black lodges from Delaware, Maryland, and Washington, DC, paraded through the streets lined with 25,000 spectators. Another year, there were marching clubs, one hundred automobiles, five bands, and the Daughter Elks in their white and purple uniforms. 60 Blacks still paraded to the ferry dock on their way out of town for excursions, letting whites know they were gone for the day or evening. One September day, 1,730 left for the Eastern Shore. Negro Health Week, first instituted by Booker T. Washington in 1915, became another occasion for blacks to display themselves. The “children marched well and the costumes they wore added greatly to the effectiveness of the demonstration.” 61 White minstrel groups, composed of members of such local organizations as the Odd Fellows, fire companies, and Knights of Columbus, walked through the town in blackface prior to a performance. A group from West Annapolis, some in blackface, rode on a fire truck around the town. The characters “Raspberry Snow and Midnight” played musical instruments at certain stops along the way. Local groups staged shows every year, but professional troops no longer came to perform. 62 The Ku Klux Klan, which had gained in strength around the country, started parading in Annapolis in the early 1920s, sending a more threatening message. The Klan inducted several hundred new members in 1922. While hundreds watched, two thousand—including Annapolis residents—in ceremonial dress marched behind a “huge emblazoned cross” through the streets of the town, then met for a feast and oyster roast at Horn Point Beach. Fifteen hundred came through the streets again behind an illuminated cross the next month. 63 Some members of the Klan made surprising overtures to the black churches. Klansmen stopped at the Mt. Moriah Church’s parish house and asked if they could attend the Sunday evening service and make a donation. Rev. J. J. Jordan said no. The minister of First Baptist Church, Rev. H. U. Pierce, also received a visit from Klansmen. He permitted the group to come to his church and was given a contribution of twenty dollars. 64 The following winter, when Governor Ritchie refused to let the Klan meet at the Armory, 800 of them showed up at the Circle Theater on State Circle for a series of lectures. About 1,000 Klan members paraded again in August 1923. The majority was unmasked and rode in cars. Floats, waving American flags, displayed the principals of the Klan. One evening the next summer, about 700 people marched, the men walking four abreast and women riding in seventy-one cars. 65 The last reported Klan demonstration occurred in 1934, at the ballpark outside of town after about 325 Klan members paraded through the

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streets. They “wore white, blue, yellow and red robes of the order . . . some on horse, some on foot, some in automobiles and a bus. The white gowns of the women were set off by red capes. . . . One group of Klansmen carried a huge American flag.” 66 One black woman, who lived as a child near the field where the Klan assembled, recalled these demonstrations years later. At the time, her aunt had drawn the shades and told her young niece not to go outside or look out the window. Of course, she peeked and was terrified by the sight of men in white robes and hoods riding horses. 67 NOTES 1. Jackson, Annapolis, 188. 2. Jackson, 188; Warren, Then Again, 115–120; McWilliams, Annapolis, 261; R. L. Polk, 1939, 305–49. 3. McWilliams, Annapolis, 268; Warren, 115–20, xxii. 4. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Census, Fifteenth Census, Anne Arundel County, City of Annapolis; U.S. Department of Commerce 1932, 930, 1061; McWilliams, Annapolis, 384; Johnson and Campbell, Migration in America, 94–96; U.S. Department of Commerce 1952, 20–26. 5. EC, March 14, 1928; May 12, 1928. 6. WP, March 14, 1933; EC, March 2, 1937; WP, November 8, 1936. 7. Writers’ Program of the Works Projects Administration, Maryland, A Guide to the Old Line State, 179; Radoff and White, Maryland Manual, 775. 8. EC, April 1, 1931; May 18, 1932; March 16, 1933: April 20, 1933; April 22, 1933. 9. Sanborn 1930; EC, January 21, 1935; July 16, 1935; October 12, 1934. 10. OHI. 11. Sanborn, 1930; OHI; AMA, “Proceedings,” 1926–1931, 264, MSA M49–23. 12. AMA. “Assessment Records,” 1923–1929, 1325, MSA M72–16; Edward Legum, interview. 13. AMA, “Assessment Records,” 1923–1929, MSA M72–16. 14. AMA, “Assessment Records,” 1923–1929, 339–41, 176, 1266, MSA M72-16; Polk’s Annapolis Directory, 1939, 31. 15. AA, June 9, 1922; November 29, 1924; EC, April 13, 1926; AA, January 8, 1927, August 20, 1927; May 2, 1924; September 15, 1928; March 2, 1929. 16. EC, December 11, 1926; August 8, 1939. 17. AMA, “Proceedings,” 1921–1926, 338, 345, 264, 278, MSA M49–22. 18. Jackson, 193. 19. EC, February 15, 1921; July 16, 1921; February 1, 1930; Goldstein, “Surviving Together,” 16. 20. AMA “Assessment Records,” 1923–1929, MSA M72–16; Legum, interview; EC, February 16, 1921. 21. Polk’s Annapolis Directory, 1924; Polk’s Annapolis Directory, 1939; Goldstein, 16; OHI with a number of people. 22. AA, February 25, 1928; Polk’s Annapolis Directory, 1924, 223–63; Polk’s Annapolis Directory, 1939, 305–49; Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, 214; AMA, “Assessment Records,” 1923–1929, 1325, MSA M72–16; EC, April 6, 1935; AA, May 16, 1924; OHI with a number of people. 23. OHI; Polk’s Annapolis Directory, 1939; AA, December 12, 1925; March 26, 1927. 24. EC, May, 11, 1922; June 27, 1927; AA, October 15, 1927; February 18, 1928. Expansion of black clubs and fraternal organizations was happening around country, Franklin and Moss, From Slavery to Freedom; Polk’s Annapolis Directory, 1939, 344; Polk’s Annapolis Directory, 1924, 35.

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25. OHI; EC, May 20, 1919; August 30, 1939; McWilliams, Annapolis, 272–73. 26. OHI; EC, August 21, 1933; August 3, 1938. 27. Brown, A Century, 21–26, 33; OHI. 28. OHI with six people. The first graduation took place in 1920 when one black girl received her diploma. After that, anywhere from four to eight students graduated each year. Worden, St. Mary’s Church, 131–32. 29. OHI with seven people. 30. OHI with five people. 31. OHI with five people. 32. EC, June 23, 1937. 33. OHI with three people. 34. AA, August 4, 1928; July 28, 1928; OHI with three people. 35. AMA “Proceedings,” 1926–1931, June 20, 1923, 239; August 25, 1924, 337, MSA M49–23; AMA “Proceedings”; EC, June 21, 1937. 36. EC, July 6, 1931; December 2, 1929. 37. EC, September 28, 1920; September 29, 1920. 38. OHI. 39. OHI. 40. OHI; AA, June 1, 1935; March 11, 1933; EC, February 26, 1927. 41. EC, January 6, 1931; July 25, 1930; September 17, 1928, August 6, 1928; September 13, 1926; November 15, 1926; October 29, 1929; March 18, 1930; June 7, 1930; October 28, 1935; July 29, 1935; June 10, 1939; April 2, 1929; OHI. 42. EC, October 26, 1923. The council abolished her position after three years. AMA “Proceedings,” July 12, 1926, 14, MSA M49–23; AA, September 10, 1920; September 24, 1920; EC, May 14, 1920. 43. EC, June 1, 1929; April 4, 1928; March 19, 1926. 44. EC, January 9, 1936; January 10, 1936; January 11, 1936; March 4, 1936; October 3, 1938; April 27, 1921; October 20, 1924; December 11, 1928. 45. AA, August 13, 1927; EC, August 17, 1937. 46. EC, January 2, 1923; December 31, 1924; OHI. 47. EC, December 27, 1926; December 27, 1932; December 27, 1935; December 27, 1939. 48. OHI. 49. AA, April 2, 1920; April 24, 1926; March 26, 1938. 50. EC, May 5, 1933. “For the first time in its history, a colored man ate and slept in the Carvel Hall, pretentious colonial residence, now a hotel, which is the center of the social life of this city,” the Capital echoed its comments when Matthews, the Harvard baseball player, stayed in the Maryland Inn thirty years earlier. AA, May 13, 1933. 51. EC, June 16, 1936; February 13, 1937. 52. EC, March 31, 1919; June 5, 1926; September 6, 1929. 53. EC, February 28, 1929. 54. EC, August 22, 1919; October 7, 1926; OHI. 55. EC, December 17, 1929. 56. EC, March 8, 1921; April 1, 1921. In 1900, Robert Wyatt was the last white to hang from the gallows for first-degree murder, EC, July 27, 1900. 57. EC, December 17, 1920; AA, December 17, 1932; March 18, 1939. 58. OHI; EC, July 23, 1937. 59. EC, January 15, 1924; August 3, 1937; October 28, 1938; March 29, 1919. 60. EC, May 5, 1919; AA, June 20, 1924; EC, June 21, 1939. 61. EC, September 16, 1924; April 7, 1933. 62. EC, June 14, 1922; October 23, 1922; May 5, 1922. 63. EC, September 9, 1922; October 30, 1922. 64. AA, November 3, 1922. 65. EC, January 6, 1923; August 11, 1923; August 13, 1923; August 18, 1924. 66. EC, April 30, 1934; AA, April 14, 1934. 67. OHI.

ELEVEN Struggles, 1919–1940

Unequal pay for teachers was only one item on a long list of injustices blacks sought to correct. Just in the realm of education, they worked to equalize their school year, improve school facilities, develop the first black high school in the county, and enrich programs for children and adults. In 1919, the school year for black students was two months shorter than for whites. Parents, teachers, schoolchildren, and concerned members of the black community pitched in to raise money to pay for a longer year. The Home and School Association, formed in 1920, raised the money needed to keep the school open through May. 1 The next year funds raised by the association kept the elementary school open until the end of May, and the small high school until June. Members staged literary and musical evenings. John H. King, described by the Capital as a “colored promoter of dances and other forms of entertainments among his race,” used the Assembly Rooms for a fundraiser dance to help pay for extending the school year. The city council waived the usual fee. The event was advertised in the Capital as “one of the biggest dances ever held by the colored folks.” Frank B. Butler, no relation to the Annapolis Butler family, was the principal of the high school and supervised a student fundraising project, which raised $115. Some of the children donated their lunch money to the teachers’ salary fund. 2 In 1922, the legislature extended the black school year from seven to eight months—one month short of parity. By 1929, the Inter-Racial Commission reported that there was an average of twenty fewer days in the school year for the county’s black schools than its white ones. Not until 1938 did the legislature equalize the black and white school years. Blacks in Annapolis had been fighting for such a law for more than thirty years. 3

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Teachers and parents concerned about conditions at Stanton School sometimes paid for the needed improvements themselves after the school board turned down their requests for funds for equipment, supplies, or repairs. In 1922, they raised the money to install electric lights. In 1925, the new black alderman, Dorsey Garver, introduced an ordinance in the city council to close off Washington Street for fifteen minutes twice a day to allow black schoolchildren to have recess on the street because they had no playground. Other aldermen agreed that the area available to the children was “too small for a dog to get proper exercise in.” 4 Every spring, the twenty-three members of the grand jury of the Anne Arundel County circuit court inspected the school and any other public buildings that might be considered hazardous to the public. Some years it reported that conditions at Stanton were a “disgrace.” They noticed that “practically all the floors and windows need repairs, overcrowded conditions prevail . . . some rooms found three pupils seated in one seat built for one . . . toilets are the worse ever saw . . . scant partition separating boys from girls in little frame building in rear yard, not half enough drinking places.” 5 By 1927, Stanton—built to hold 280 students—had enrolled 500 in the elementary grades, taught by ten teachers, and 132 in the high school classes, with five teachers. High school classes met in the attic, and vocational classes in the basement next to the boiler room. Additional children—the overflow, which could number between 175 and 200—attended school at the nearby Waltz Dream Hall and at the former Community Center on Calvert Street, a building now considered “ramshackle” and in “deplorable condition,” according to the grand jury’s report. At certain times, children had to attend half a day to accommodate the large enrollment. 6 Relief came in 1930 when the legislature approved an allocation of $50,000 to build a high school in the county for black students. At the same time, the board approved $400,000 for a new white high school. This appropriation culminated years of effort by black Annapolitans. They had selected a site off Smithville Street, off Spa Road, for a new high school, and raised at least $2,300 of the $7,500 cost for the two lots of land. The purchase took two and a half years to complete, with supplemental funds coming from the board. By 1929, there were about 200 students in the four attic rooms at Stanton, according to a State Inter-Racial Commission report. It indicated that state and county governments were spending an average of $98 for each white high school student and $57 for each black. At the elementary level, $48 was spent on a white student and $23 on a black. 7 Work began on the black high school in the spring of 1931. The plans called for a two-story brick building that would accommodate 250 students. It would include nine classrooms, a principal’s office, a library and “modern toilet facilities,” and a large auditorium that would seat 400 to

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500 people, according to the Capital. The final cost was nearly $60,000. The Julius Rosenwald Fund donated $3,600 to help finance the overrun. The new school, named for Wiley H. Bates in honor of the businessman who donated $500 to buy the land, was dedicated in November 1932, and opened the following January. 8 At its annual meeting held at Asbury in February 1932, the president of the Negro State Parent Teachers’ Association noted the achievement of the new high school, but then mentioned many other items of unfinished business. The county still needed a black doctor and nurse to treat the schoolchildren, because the white medical staff was too busy tending to white children. Black teachers should have the same training as white teachers—four years instead of two. More than one hundred children in the county could not attend Bates or Baltimore high schools because there was no state-financed transportation. 9 Enterprising blacks started private bus services to bring children to Bates High School from rural parts of the county. Some families created car pools. By 1936, the recently formed Annapolis chapter of the NAACP held mass meetings to press for bus transportation. Thurgood Marshall helped draft a petition to the school board about the now-overcrowded Bates High School and the need for buses. In 1937, the state provided money to acquire three buses to transport about 200 students to Bates. Using WPA funds, the state also paid for a six-room addition to the high school, which by 1939 had an enrollment of 278. 10 Aware of the NAACP’s activities in other counties—and probably nationally through reading black newspapers—a group of seventy blacks, under the leadership of Robert A. Brooks, a steward, and Joseph A. Dorsey, a chauffeur and a former member of the NAACP in Albany, New York, had begun to organize a local chapter of the NAACP in the spring of 1935. Among its members were up-and-coming leaders Josephine C. Young, Philip Brown, and Frank B. Butler, teachers, John Chambers, a barber, Francis Diggs, a grocer, William H. Richardson, a Naval Academy employee, Bessie Jacobs, a housewife from Bellis Court, and old-timer William E. Fletcher. Thurgood Marshall attended the branch’s first mass meeting in 1937 and wrote to Walter White, chief secretary of the NAACP, “Last night I spoke to a local branch in Annapolis at their first mass meeting. The meeting was held in the First Baptist Church, and was crowded beyond even standing room. The people down there seem to be waking up. The branch seems to be in the hands of excellent men, including the pastor of this church.” 11 Shortly after its formation in 1935, the new chapter protested the county commissioners’ proposal to convert the Reynolds Tavern on Church Circle into a whites-only public library. The library board replied, “It is unwise for Negroes and whites to use the same library.” Charles A. Oliver, a black alderman since 1925 who was not a member of the NAACP, joined a majority of the council to defeat the proposed alloca-

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tion of $1,000 of city money for the white library. About two weeks later, the book committee of the public library decided to send books to one of the black churches as a way of starting a separate library for blacks. 12 Brooks objected to this plan and wrote to the Capital. He wondered, “Why the necessity for a ‘colored library?’ . . . When it is time to pay taxes the county and city do not set up a separate tax office and label one ‘colored tax office’ and the other ‘white tax office.’ There is no discrimination there. But when it comes time to derive some benefit from the taxes paid then they attempt to erect the color bar.” Two days later, the library board announced that it would borrow $19,500 to establish a library for blacks elsewhere in the city, and appointed a committee of white women to identify a location. The local NAACP expressed annoyance with the two black aldermen when they voted for the appropriation of $750 for books for blacks; the NAACP called them “Uncle Tom or Essau—they had sold their political birthright.” The branch tried to encourage the churches not to accept a “Jim Crow library” and protested to Mayor Louis Phipps. 13 The NAACP found it hard to continue. Brooks moved to Pittsburgh the next year. In October 1939, Josephine Young wrote to Walter White of the national organization that the Annapolis branch had ceased operations for the moment. She expressed hope “that a new branch can be organized.” Before closing, the branch petitioned the Board of Education, listing a series of inequalities of the “education of Negros in the county— physical plant, textbooks, teachers’ salaries, materials of instruction, health service, and supervision.” 14 Black Annapolitans seeking self-improvement developed their own education programs. In November 1920, they opened a night school at Stanton School. Young and old attended the courses, which included domestic arts, science, manual training, basket weaving, and shoemaking. By 1935, twenty students ranging in age from twenty to seventy participated in these classes. 15 During the Depression, some blacks took advantage of classes that the U.S. Office of Adult Education funded to develop the vocational skills of unemployed adults. Jim Crow practices prevailed there too. Starting in 1934, whites attended classes at the Globe Building, and blacks went to Asbury. Graduates of Morgan College and Tuskegee Institute taught them reading, writing, arithmetic, sewing, cooking, and domestic training. White students could study English, French, German, Spanish, landscape gardening, blueprint reading, and dramatics. 16 In October 1939, the Stanton Elementary School was damaged by fire caused by defective and overloaded wiring. During the reconstruction that followed, students and teachers were farmed out to different churches and buildings, including Bates High School. A delegation of members of the PTA and Judge Linwood L. Clark, a white attorney who was a former judge in Anne Arundel County circuit court, asked the

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Board of Education to consider building a new elementary school with the assistance of the WPA. The board turned them down. 17 A few black parents managed to set aside enough money to send their children to college or teacher training. Most families could not afford a four-year college. Going to Bowie Normal School, which trained schoolteachers, was seen as the first step for some, including Philip Brown. Churches, teachers, social clubs, and fraternal and sororal organizations tried to help the students out. Black students were barred from the University of Maryland. The Murray decision forced the university to accept a black student in its law school—but only its law school. In 1937, at the request of the president of the university, Maryland legislators passed a law that would fund professional education for blacks—out of state. If Morgan College and Princess Anne College, the two black four-year colleges in Maryland, did not offer the professional courses students wanted, they could apply for scholarship funds that covered both travel and tuition costs at out-of-state universities. When the legislation was introduced, Francis Diggs, a member of the NAACP who had a small grocery store on Clay Street, wrote a letter to the editor of the Capital chastising the university for its Jim Crow policies: “This bill is . . . an open violation of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.” 18 The Naval Academy also barred blacks. In 1936, James Lee Johnson became the first black midshipman to enter the academy in sixty-four years. The first black Democratic congressman, Arthur W. Mitchell of Illinois, had appointed Johnson, a graduate of the elite Dunbar High School in Washington, DC. He lasted at the academy for only about eight months. The academy’s leadership, officers of a racist Navy, offered Johnson no support. White midshipmen ostracized and harassed him, giving him demerits for minor infractions that they would have overlooked for others. He was dismissed from the academy for failure to “make satisfactory marks in the Department of English and History and in conduct . . . he had too many demerits . . . he was late to formations seven times. . . . In addition he failed to pass the required eye tests.” 19 Politically, black Annapolitans could operate in two arenas—their own and the larger white one. During these two decades blacks organized along party and gender lines. In October 1919, several hundred black male members of the Annapolis Republican Club held “an enthusiastic meeting” according to the Capital, at the Clay Street Hall to discuss the “good and welfare of the party” in the upcoming November election. Rising community leader Charles A. Oliver chaired the meeting. 20 After women gained the right to vote in 1920, a group of black women, including several members of the Mothers’ League, organized a suffrage league for Annapolis and Anne Arundel County. They called it the Harding-Coolidge Weller and Mudd League. Elizabeth Carter, probably the same woman who became the temporary policewoman, and who was

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“Lizzie” Carter of the Mothers’ League, was president, Georgia Boston was one of the vice presidents, and Carrie Brice was a member of the executive committee. The group planned to help female residents of the city and county register to vote, and explain to them how to cast their ballots. By the fall of 1923, women established a branch of the Negro Women’s National Republican League in Annapolis, the first in the state, and a branch of the National Negro Coolidge League. 21 The 1923 municipal election began to attract attention in January. John F. Stepney, a well-known black businessman, Naval Academy employee, co-owner of the Leonard Pharmacy, and member of a fraternal organization, had replaced the sole black alderman, J. Albert Adams, in 1920, when Adams became ill. When Stepney moved to the Third Ward, the field was open in the Fourth, and seven respected men entered the race for the two alderman positions: Charles H. Bell, William H. Butler Jr., the teacher, J. Saunders Chase, R. P. D. Garver, or Dorsey Garver, William H. Howard, the attorney and plaintiff in the voting law case, Dr. Rodney Milliner, and Henry Valentine, the naval steward who had become a caterer. The Republican City Executive Committee of the Fourth Ward, which included businessman William H. Hebron and Mothers’ League member Georgia Boston, endorsed Garver, whom Governor Ritchie had appointed executive steward of the governor’s mansion. 22 Garver and Bell, a waiter at the Black Cat Café, won the nominations. In July, they defeated their white Democratic opponents. The AfroAmerican cheered their victory with the headline, “True Democracy in Annapolis.” This was the first time two black aldermen represented the Fourth Ward—known as the “colored belt” or the “black belt”—where 1,200 out of 1,400 voters were black. 23 In 1925, the year of the next election, black voters split after the Republican City Convention, which was allegedly dominated by a group of white Republicans, rejected the primary nominations of the incumbents, Bell and Garver. Some charged that this group of delegates “manipulated a delegate system on the convention floor,” the Capital reported, and instead selected Charles A. Oliver, well known in fraternal and church circles, and Charles L. Spriggs, the son of mail carrier Harry E. Spriggs and Mothers’ League member Agnes Spriggs. He worked as a steward at the Naval Academy health club and was an Elk. Some Republicans evidently opposed Garver because he worked for Governor Ritchie and was too close to the Democrats. Garver and Bell appealed their loss in the circuit court on the grounds that they received the most votes in the primary, but they lost their case. 24 In response, Garver and Bell formed a new organization called “Fourth Ward Club for Howard,” the white Democratic mayoral candidate, Allen B. Howard. About 300 blacks joined this Democratic Party club to express their disapproval of the white Republican candidate for mayor, John A. Russell, who had once represented the Fourth Ward.

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They preferred the white Democratic administration because it had appointed Elizabeth Carter the first black policewoman and improved the streets and put in water in the Fourth Ward. A number of blacks did not like Russell because he had ignored them during the primaries, though they had voted for him for alderman five times. The white Democrat, Howard, won. 25 Two summers later, perhaps concerned about black support of Democratic candidates, the black grocer and member of the Business League and Literary Association Robert M. Davis published an appeal in the Capital urging black voters to cast their “ballots for the Republican party. In October 1928, before the presidential election, the nascent black Democratic Party in Annapolis expanded. Bell formed the “Smith for President Club.” Alfred E. Smith, the former liberal governor of New York, was the first Catholic to run for president. The Royal Flush Club, one of the biggest black social organizations in Annapolis, invited Bell and other Democrats to speak. Bell suggested that it was “time to stop following [the Republican Party] blindly,” the Capital reported. The same month, Helen A. Davis organized the Colored Women’s Al Smith Club to promote his candidacy. 26 In the 1932 presidential campaign, J. Saunders Chase organized the Colored Democratic Association of Annapolis and Anne Arundel County. According to the Afro, he claimed that the club was fed up with “promises that never materialize” and would support only Democrats in the election. In a letter to the editor of the Evening Capital, Chase said that President Hoover was “opposed to the principles laid down by Lincoln. . . . We are not seeking social equality but equal opportunity and recognition for those who are qualified regardless of race, color or previous condition.” 27 White Republican candidates for mayor needed black voters to win. Walter E. Quenstedt, the Republican candidate for mayor in 1929, 1931, and 1933, stumped in the Fourth Ward in each election, and won them all. The Afro commented after his election in 1931, “No street in the Fourth Ward should go unpaved in the next two years, no child without a seat in a healthy, well-equipped school room.” 28 White Democrats tried to manipulate the black vote in the next two municipal elections. In 1935, the Republicans accused them of trying to lure black voters on buses to a picnic outside of town where they would be served beer, crab soup, and “other edibles,” but would miss the chance to vote, the Capital reported. The plot was foiled by the sheriff, who got a tip from Republicans in the Fourth Ward, and arrested Frank “Bluebird” Johnson for illegally transporting ten cases of beer through the city. The charges against him were eventually dropped. 29 In 1937, new black challengers confronted Oliver and Spriggs in the Republican primary: James J. Brown, a hotel waiter, tennis player, and election judge, and Dr. Ambrose Garcia, a doctor from the West Indies

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who had been active in several community organizations. Spriggs and Oliver won again. The Capital commented that many blacks did not vote at all, and one hundred voted Democratic—the most ever—for the mayoral candidate, Louis Phipps. 30 Oliver and Spriggs tried to improve conditions in the Fourth Ward. They complained about the poor quality of some streets, particularly Gott’s Court, often to no avail. They objected to the dumping of refuse on Calvert Street Extended and on Gardiner’s vacant lot on Pleasant Street. They opposed—often as the only dissenting voices—the granting of liquor licenses to bars and hotels near Stanton School or their churches. 31 Blacks met with greater success in a dispute about jazz being played at dances at the Assembly Rooms. In October 1919, the council received a petition from fifty-two neighbors, presumably whites, who complained that the hall was “a nuisance and detrimental to the good order of the neighborhoods” because of the jazz music and loud talking by black partygoers. They wanted the black-sponsored dances banned. At first the majority of the aldermen supported their petition, but the council ultimately decided to permit the dances provided a patrolman kept order in the neighborhood and inside the hall. 32 Blacks in Annapolis suffered disproportionately from smallpox, syphilis, infant mortality, and tuberculosis. Sanatorium facilities were inadequate for them, and many were afraid to see a doctor when they became ill. In 1938, the Anne Arundel County Tuberculosis Association encouraged blacks to form their own separate parallel organization, as was the practice. Eliza Fletcher chaired the organization, and Josephine Young was one of its early members. At the organizing meeting, Dr. William J. French, president of the white association, told the black audience, “Tuberculosis is a disease to which your race is rather prone.” 33 To combat disease and poor health, the black community participated in Negro Health Week each year. Booker T. Washington had launched the program in 1915 to teach black Americans about good health and cleanliness practices. The annual campaign, which included a spring cleanup drive, engaged the entire community. Churches organized special programs featuring speeches by doctors. The PTA of Stanton ran daily programs. Doctors and dentists visited the schools to examine and treat children on the spot, even extracting bad teeth. They immunized the children against diptheria and informed adults about tuberculosis and other health problems. As their living conditions improved, they became healthier. 34 County officials opened several new health clinics and health care courses to address a range of problems, but segregated them. The child welfare clinic and a baby clinic saw white patients in the mornings and blacks in the afternoons. Black and white mothers went to a prenatal clinic, but on different days. The Emergency Hospital continued to treat

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blacks for emergency care and give them beds in a “colored ward,” where the beds were hand-me-downs from the white ward. 35 Blacks did not challenge these discriminatory practices. They relied on midwives, or if they could afford it, had their babies in Washington or Baltimore. And they raised funds every year for the hospital at various events to improve conditions in the black ward. One year the fundraisers included business and civic leaders Norman Cully, Henry Valentine, Georgia Boston, J. Albert Adams, and Eliza Fletcher. They raised money to redecorate and paint the ward and to purchase draperies and linens. 36 Blacks were more outspoken about discrimination in the criminal justice system, and certain whites made small adjustments toward more equal treatment of blacks. For example, a white judge, Robert Moss, the original presiding judge in the Snowden case, sometimes allowed blacks’ names to appear on jury selection lists, so some served on juries. One of the first chosen was Wiley H. Bates, in 1920. “Leading white and colored people” made “favorable comments” about the judge’s action. Bates commented in a letter to the editor of the Afro, “I think the advantage of having a colored man to serve on the jury has tended to temper the prejudice with justice when colored are on trial.” In 1926, Bates was appointed to the spring term of the U.S. grand jury. 37 As a result of an important lawsuit on behalf of Euel Lee, a black man convicted and sentenced to be hanged for the murder of a white farmer in Worcester County, decided in 1932, blacks had to be included in the jury selection. In Annapolis, 240 names were put in the box from which a judge would draw forty-eight names, twenty-three for the grand jury and twenty-five for the trial jury. By March 1933, eight blacks were selected to serve on petit juries in Anne Arundel County for the first time in fifteen years. Wiley H. Bates and James Burley were among them. Charles A. Oliver served on juries in 1934 and 1938. 38 These changes did not make the criminal justice system fair. Judges continued to make racist and condescending comments from the bench. One was Judge Robert Moss, who included blacks in the jury selection process. When Moss sentenced William Gaither to eight months in the Maryland House of Corrections for fighting and cutting his common-law wife, he scolded: “The colored people of this county are badly in need of an overhauling. They throw their money to strumpets they call common law wives, with whom they would be much better off without. The law refuses to recognize these common law unions. You, Gaither, need to get away from Laurel, [Maryland] and the liquor to be found there,” the Capital quoted him as saying. 39 The city council in Annapolis regulated aspects of the relations between blacks and whites, including marriage. A law making black-white marriage an “infamous crime” had been on the books since 1884. Since the early 1920s, Filipinos who lived on board the USS Cumberland met and married black or white women and began to settle in the town. In

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1934, the city council unanimously resolved that it “viewed with alarm the number of interracial marriages in the city” between whites and Filipinos and blacks and Filipinos. It proposed legislation to ban “intermarriage in Annapolis of a white person with a mulatto, Mongolian or member of the Malay Race.” The legislature approved such a bill at its next session. 40 Five years later, Rev. Lee F. Drummond, the former pastor of Mt. Moriah, was fined $200 for marrying a black man and a white woman, both from Baltimore. Rev. Drummond appealed. The married couple was held “for grand jury action on charges of violating the marriage laws.” Their marriage was voided, and they were both given ten-year jail sentences, which were suspended on the condition that they live separately. 41 The demeaning portraits of blacks in the Capital changed subtly. It carried fewer stories about respectable, faithful “ol’ time” servants. “Respectable Negro” now meant blacks who had achieved a certain status in the community, such as teacher, minister, or alderman. When Dorsey Garver died, the Capital wrote, “Dorsey Garver, respectable negro citizen . . . former alderman” and “steward of Executive Mansion since Gov. Ritchie began his administration” in 1920. 42 But the Capital ridiculed other blacks. Crime stories involving blacks appeared regularly, but sometimes less frequently. According to one account, “Chickens again are Negroes’ weakness.” The paper reported that a “dusky” stole three chickens and sold two of them and probably ate the third. 43 The words the Capital used to depict blacks changed. “Dusky” could refer to either a man or a woman, usually in a derogatory way, as in the story above. The word “damsels” appeared less frequently, although one headline read, “Colored Damsels in Cutting Affray Saturday Night.” The word “Amazon” no longer described unruly black women. Other words—for example “negress,” a word some blacks chuckled over when they read it in the newspaper—continued to appear. “Negress” could apply to respectable or unrespectable women. For instance, in an article reporting on the first day women could register to vote in 1920, the paper compared the level of enthusiasm of the two populations. “Colored Women Out in Greater Force to Enroll,” the story’s headline read, but further in the story, the writer wrote, “Negresses are showing a greater interest and eagerness.” 44 A “Mrs. C. White” complained in a letter to the editor, “Why it is when anything is published in the Evening Capital about a Negro woman you will say Negress?” She suggested a reason: “It seems as though this is done in scorn. . . . When anything is published about any of the fine races, except the Negro race, you will designate them according to their nationality, and regardless of the race, you will only say man or wom-

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an. . . . So please use Negro man, Negro woman, colored man or colored woman, and not Negress, or Nigger.” 45 The editor printed a dismissive response in the next day’s paper. “Negress—a female Negro (Webster’s New International Dictionary).” Six days later, the Capital published a letter written by a white businessman in support of Mrs. White: Dear Sir: I do not know who Mrs. C. White may be, but I think her point is very well taken. I have often noticed from time to time the same inference and it has attracted my attention as being unnecessary, particularly as it is resented by our better class of colored citizens as an uncomplimentary reference to their race in general. If they feel that way regarding it, why displease them, if it is hurtful to their feelings. . . . As I know, from personal past contact with the Manager and editor of the Evening Capital that they have a good opinion and kindly feeling for the better class of colored people, and for that reason would do nothing to intentionally displease them. Very truly yours, P. P. H. Magruder

The editor became more responsive. “Editor’s Note: The editor agrees with the writer and is inclined to follow this policy in the future.” The word did not appear again for nearly five years. 46 Returning World War I black veterans read compliments about themselves in the Capital that they had not seen before they left for Europe. The paper praised their service, which “has been satisfactory to their superiors and creditable to themselves. Many of them won promotion, and, without exception the men showed that they have conducted themselves in a manner which reflects credit upon their race and the community. . . . They say that not one of the Annapolis men failed to do his full duty or did anything to discredit himself as a soldier or a man.” 47 The town established separate community centers for the returning veterans, as discussed in chapter 10. The black version was called the “Roosevelt Club.” By March 1919, its doors opened, and 250 enlisted men attended programs. By January 1920, whites and blacks were coordinating fundraising campaigns to finance the expansion of these clubs to serve the white and black townspeople. Funds raised by blacks were to be deposited with the white treasurer and spent only when “properly authorized by the executive committee,” which was probably all white. Many members of the Mothers’ League and their husbands helped raise money. Blacks soon decided to buy their building and turn it into a community center. 48 Most charity efforts in Annapolis divided along black-white lines. Before the Depression, blacks in need would have turned to their own fraternal and veterans organizations, small charity groups, churches, and family members for help. The Evening Capital occasionally published appeals to help blacks who found themselves in dire straits. Charity in

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Annapolis was meant for the “worthy”—those who had worked hard. The town’s attitude about the poor was patronizing until the Depression. Annapolitans thought they could provide for the town’s most destitute citizens. In Annapolis in the 1920s—as in other towns and cities—women’s organizations encouraged the local government to care for the poor. Annapolis had its Guild of Mercy at St. Anne’s Episcopal Church, and the black Mothers’ League. Asbury Church created the Women’s Home Missionary Society, which gave concerts, entertainments, and talks to raise funds to help the poor at holiday time. 49 City and county governments began to establish small agencies to meet the needs of poor children including a Milk Fund. The Red Cross, the State Bureau of Child Hygiene, and the State Department of Health organized a Child Welfare Clinic to promote good health for well children. The Children’s Aid and Welfare Office opened in 1929 to look after the neglected and “wayward.” 50 Better-off black residents enjoyed themselves while helping the poor. Club members entertained each other in their homes at monthly meetings to plan their fundraising events. Two examples were the Women’s Home Missionary Society and the Union Charity Club. The self-help initiatives of social clubs and fraternal organizations included dances, such as the Elks Charity Ball at the Bladen Street Armory that drew a crowd of 700 people. At a charity ball at the Waltz Dream Hall, ladies wearing the “grandest gown” and the “most fancy” won prizes. Other organizations held dances to raise money for Thanksgiving food baskets and the Red Cross visiting nurse. 51 Like countless towns across the state and country, Annapolis was unprepared for the economic disruption caused by the Great Depression. Longtime Annapolis residents did not recall breadlines in their town, but they agreed that many suffered. The Naval Academy had to reduce its workforce and cut salaries. The county cut teachers’ salaries. Whites cut back their domestic help. The Capital reflected the traditional view of caring for the poor when it wrote in the fall of 1930: “The American theory of government is based on the assumption that the people can and will take care of themselves. Paternalism has never been welcomed in the United States.” But as conditions worsened, the Capital closely covered the response of the town’s residents to the ever-growing numbers of unemployed. The paper reported an ongoing debate about who could and should meet their needs—first the local charities, then the county, and then the state. By the time federal assistance began in 1933, the paper was less hostile to government support. Its articles about the poor became less paternalistic and patronizing, perhaps because the editor and his staff knew people who had to seek help. No longer were they the “noble” or “deserving” or “undeserving” poor, but sometimes friends and neighbors. Prejudice was

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rarely evident in stories that recounted diminishing city and county budgets and lists of items given away to the poor. Because poverty crossed both racial and class lines, blacks were rarely the object of criticism or derision in the Capital. They were listed, like whites, as people who needed jobs, clothing, and food. 52 The impact of the Depression first became apparent in November 1930. The Red Cross reported that it had received an “unprecedented number of appeals for help.” Already in its annual drive, the Red Cross asked the citizens of Annapolis to donate food and clothing, particularly children’s clothing. By December, the town created a fund which the Red Cross and Salvation Army used to help the poor get through the winter. The movie theaters planned charity movies, donating the proceeds to the fund. 53 By February 1931, the Children’s Aid Office was flooded with requests and expected to be out of funds in two months. One black woman remembered, “There was no work. Where were you going? Everybody stayed home.” Stores donated goods at wholesale prices. Teachers identified needy children and families. By mid-April, the Child Welfare Clinic was helping forty-three families and 190 children, and seeking work for sixteen laborers. Soon residents organized a Community Chest and a Community Welfare Association to coordinate donations and allocations. It is unlikely that any of their members were black. 54 A September 1931 survey found that unemployment in Annapolis grew 5 percent since the previous winter, and support funds were exhausted. The Community Welfare Association inaugurated a two-week subscription drive to raise $5,000 through the city’s churches. A committee of blacks chaired by Alderman Charles A. Oliver directed the black fundraising effort. Its members included Emma Hall Stepney, Eleanor Hicks, a mortician, and Dr. J. B. Johnson, a new black doctor in town. The Parks Board planned to hire twenty to thirty unemployed white and black men to cut wood and clear ground for a new park outside of Annapolis. The wood would be sold or contributed to needy families. Proceeds from Naval Academy football games and other charitable donations would pay the men’s salaries. 55 Two weeks before Christmas, the city council banned beggars from the streets. “City observes Christmas quietly,” the Capital noted. The Salvation Army handed out food bags that contained “bread, butter, coffee, tea, pound-cake, celery, potatoes, onions, pork roast, oranges and apples” to twenty-nine families. The city helped another seventy. 56 By the beginning of March 1932, Annapolis charities realized they had insufficient resources to provide for the growing number of distressed families—now numbering seventy-two. They would have to ask government agencies for assistance. The county gave $1,000 to the Children’s Aid and Welfare Office. The Naval Academy expected a cut of nearly

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$144,000 in federal funding, which would lead to layoffs and salary cuts for civilian employees, many of them black. 57 In September, the local Red Cross announced that it had received 158 barrels of flour and 5,000 yards of cloth from its national organization. These were expected to last about ninety days. Women would be recruited to sew garments to be distributed to poor families. The county PTA met to discuss its plans for helping impoverished schoolchildren. By the fall, more than 11 percent of the parents of black schoolchildren in the area were unemployed, and 24 percent worked only part-time. Among parents of white students, the unemployment rate was just over 2 percent. These numbers reflected national and state conditions. Governor Ritchie asked the town to organize a Community Chest drive to raise $30,000. About half that amount was raised. 58 By Christmas, the relief committee was providing assistance to 300 families at a cost of $2,000 a month. The line of applicants for relief, which formed daily at the Health Department office on School Street, was “becoming lengthier every day.” By mid-March it was clear that the Welfare Board needed the state’s assistance. At this time of uncertainty, the federal government announced it would cut pay by 15 percent, a reduction that would affect nearly 2,400 people in the Annapolis area. 59 Thanks to New Deal assistance programs and an allocation of $1.75 million to the Naval Academy for public works projects, employment eventually improved. Still, in August, the unemployed lined up at the new federal reemployment office at the rate of twenty-two an hour. New construction work at nearby Fort George G. Meade absorbed a number of the unemployed in October. Employment was not stable, though. In the winter of 1934, the Civil Works Administration reduced workers’ hours and eliminated others’ positions, including some jobs at the Naval Academy. The demand for relief increased again. 60 By March 1934, the Welfare Board criticized the cost of relief. For the first time, an agency publicly brought up racial differences. The Capital reported that 787 people were on relief, of whom 247 were employable. “One of the problems facing the Anne Arundel County Board of Welfare in administering relief in the county is the percentage of Negroes on the rolls,” the board said. “More than half the people on relief in the county were Negroes . . . when they comprised 25 percent of the population yet 62 percent of the relief rolls.” The numbers mirrored the situation in the country. 61 An editorial in the Afro-American noted that “Everywhere colored people are receiving relief funds out of all proportion to their relative numbers. . . . The only thing this proves is that unemployment is relatively larger among us than other groups. This is a situation that was bound to develop once communities and industry established the policy of hiring colored people last or not at all.” 62

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With the institution of federal assistance, the Capital’s accounts of the plight of the poor calmed down. Community efforts returned to traditional holiday giving. In the fall of 1934, the city council formed its own relief committee. The black alderman, Charles A. Oliver, was a member, so he had a voice in the council’s distribution of $1,000. This may have been the first time a black was so directly involved in the town’s relief effort. 63 WPA construction crews and road workers gave Annapolis new paved streets and new gutters. In 1938 and 1939, the WPA also supported sewing groups that worked in the old white high school building on Green Street. Seven white women worked in one room and nine black seamstresses in the other. From August 1 to December 31, they made 3,078 garments; all were given to the poor. The NAACP monitored the WPA programs, and earlier in 1936, investigated the replacement of a black supervisor of the sewing room by a white woman. 64 The NAACP wrote letters to the headquarters of two grocery stores, the A&P and the American Store, asking them to hire black clerks. The Afro publicized examples of the large income disparity between the two populations and wrote about how racial prejudice affected the distribution of relief. The “average [annual] income of white families is $1,535; that of colored families is only $566.” Blacks publicly protested against some hardships, even striking against their employers or forming unions, perhaps the beginning of collective labor action among blacks in the town. In 1933, nine black truck drivers went on a brief strike over their wages, which were regulated now by the National Recovery Administration. 65 Blacks who worked at the Naval Academy or Carvel Hall brought food home for their family, friends, and neighbors. “If it wasn’t for the Naval Academy and Carvel Hall, people would have starved,” recalled one black resident whose family bought some of the food. “The food that came out of those two places. People would bring it out . . . had to . . . they would hide it inside their clothes, and they would sell it. You might get six, seven, ten pounds of meat for a dollar. That’s going to last you a long time. Meat, butter, different things, clothes, handkerchiefs, shirts, shoes.” 66 With the assistance of the WPA, civic-minded Annapolitans launched several recreation initiatives in the late 1930s. Whites were the first beneficiaries. For their project in 1937, the organizers of the Greater Annapolis Recreation Association cleared an area behind the old white high school on Green Street for a playground for white children. A WPA official said at a meeting, “We must concentrate on one playground for the moment,” the Capital reported. At the same meeting, Alderman Oliver said that a playground for black children could be developed “almost immediately” if a site could be found. Part of the problem was the lack of open, level space in the Fourth Ward. 67

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Recreation programs for white children began that summer. The first recreation program for black children opened the next year behind St. Philip’s Episcopal Church. Some forty children wanted to participate in the games, so many that they had to be divided into different groups. The Recreation Association sponsored other segregated programs for children and adults, such as a Fourth of July celebration in 1938 out West Street Extended. The whites sat in the two large grandstands, and blacks were relegated to bleachers. 68 The association’s rigid segregation of the two populations was most evident in its establishment of a segregated Soap Box Derby. For several years it held the derby on a downhill stretch of Lafayette Avenue, between Monticello and Southgate avenues, in the heart of a newer, white section of town. The mayor closed the street, and crowds assembled to watch. In 1939 “two white and two colored boys entered the contest. . . . The soap-box wagons surprised the adults by the ingenuity shown and their designs. Many had the appearance of racing automobiles, under slung and with complicated steering mechanisms. Some were equipped with lights and horns.” To accommodate, but also to separate the two black entrants, the association scheduled a separate race for them. Godfrey Blackstone won. Years later, Blackstone chuckled at the memory and said, “That was just the way it was.” 69 During the years from 1934 to 1939, readers of the Evening Capital would have learned something about the appalling conditions in which many blacks in the town had to live. The first time the word “slum” may have appeared in the newspaper was in 1934, when the Civitan Club, a white organization, announced that it was discussing the conditions of the slums in Annapolis. The members hoped that federal funds from the Public Works Administration could be obtained to improve the living conditions of the town’s poor, “particularly the Negroes.” It was an unusual gesture for a white organization. 70 The Civitan Club in Annapolis raised the issue with city council members, which may have prompted the formation of a committee of city officials, including the city counselor, the town’s lawyer, the city health official, and the aldermen of the Third Ward, to spend “hours inspecting some of the shacks in which black residents of the city live. The findings of the committee have horrified the committee.” They reported that in Acton Lane, Water Street, and Ridout Court, “scores of Negroes are living without the convenience of running water, sewerage conveniences and many of the houses do not have doors and windows that work. Some were without water inside or outside, a violation of the law. Some of the houses in this section of the Third Ward are falling down and rats are as tame as house cats.” 71 Dr. J. J. Murphy, the city health officer, was concerned that the “unsanitary and unhealthy conditions in these homes could be the source of a serious [tuberculosis] epidemic and that steps must be taken at once to

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have landlords meet health requirements,” the Capital reported. City Counselor Rowe said that Annapolis was “known to be a historic and beautiful city,” but compared to slums he had seen around the world, Annapolis had the worst. He said the city could initiate a slum cleanup now that there was federal money to support such an effort. 72 Within days, city officials ordered the landlord Harry Ivrey to tear down one house on the corner of Compromise and Chestnut streets and to install sanitary facilities and drinking water in seven houses on Water Street because they were a “menace to the health of the occupants,” who were all black. The landlords of houses on Ridout Court received similar orders. Three of the houses were deemed “unfit for human habitation.” Fire Marshall Jesse A. Fisher said he had told the council frequently about these conditions, but this was the first instance that “concrete steps” were being taken. For years, Alderman Charles A. Oliver had tried to get the city to pave some of the alley streets, but the city council never seemed to find the funds. 73 The city council and the Civitan Club met to develop a plan to eradicate the slums. Their concerns included the health of slum residents; improvement of the neighborhoods adjacent to the “slum” housing; better housing for blacks; and affordable housing for white residents, particularly families of enlisted men who could not pay the high rents in the town. Alderman Oliver persuaded the council to put one alderman from each ward on this new committee, known as the City Planning Commission. This assured that a black would have a voice in the city’s slum clearance project. By the spring of 1935, the council had asked the Federal Emergency Relief Administration to conduct a housing survey, the first step toward getting federal assistance for slum clearance and the construction of low-cost housing. 74 The Civitan Club’s and the council’s campaigns improved the living conditions of some black tenants. The white landlord Morris Legum announced in January 1935 that he would rebuild ten houses on Clay Street. “I have found that the old dilapidated property, which once produced a fair income, is now a liability, in addition to making sections of our city unsightly. My new property will be attractive stucco buildings, to be offered at a rental within the reach of the average colored family,” he was quoted in the Capital as saying. The Legums were regarded as among the better landlords by their black tenants. They gave their tenants paint and wallpaper to decorate their houses; they sometimes indulged overdue rent payments, which they collected monthly or weekly, depending on the reliability of the tenant; and they occasionally helped a tenant buy his or her house. In contrast, later that year, the mayor swore out a warrant for the arrest of Harry Ivrey, whose black tenants considered him a negligent landlord who made little effort to keep up his houses. He was charged with “maintaining a nuisance on his properties in Compromise Street.” 75

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To get federal assistance for slum clearance, the city first had to build low-cost houses to replace the ones it wanted to tear down. By June 1937, the city had approved the creation of a Housing Authority. It had no black member. Oliver and Spriggs voted for the approval of the slum eradication program that passed the council that October. 76 The results of a city council survey of the slums were published in September, when the Federal Housing Authority announced its approval of a low-cost housing project in Annapolis containing one hundred family units for black residents. The inspectors found that 38.5 percent of 2,703 families in Annapolis lived in “sub-standard housing.” Of the 2,351 buildings they examined, 744, or 31.6 percent, needed major repairs or were unfit for use—“807 had no bathrooms, 821 only cold water running, 133 no running water, 1,247 no central heating, 359 no electric lights, 746 no interior flush toilet, 1,062 were sub-standard because of two or more of the listed conditions existed.” Of the 1,750 white families in the town, 217 lived in slum housing; 812 of the 938 black families lived in slums. With incomes of less than $1,200 annually, eighty-four families were doubled up to save expenses. Two-thirds of these families were black. 77 Maps of the incidence of tuberculosis, syphilis, arrests, and fires revealed a correlation between all these and substandard housing. The worst area was north of West Street, from Ridout Court to Bladen Street. “Most of the cases are concentrated in the densely populated streets and alleys,” the Capital reported. The maps led to a formal distinction between contaminated and healthy spaces—the latter being better parts of town. Of course, the maps could not reveal the underlying socioeconomic processes that produced the stark differences. Officials reasoned that new low-cost housing would reduce the city costs by cutting disease, crime, and fires. The weakness of the black population was no longer mentioned as a factor. 78 The results of the survey persuaded the Housing Authority that the blacks had the greatest need for a housing project. The authority selected the Clay Street-Pleasant Street area, which had an open field where they planned to eventually build housing for 250 families. 79 Landlords objected strongly to the project. W. Donald Morrow, a Baltimore contractor, said, according to the Capital, “I am not in favor of a plan to permit the Government or local municipalities, states, or counties to spend your money and my money to build houses better than your house or my house, for those who through their own neglect, carelessness or lack of pride, do not see fit to help themselves. A large percentage of those to be benefited are in their situation through no fault of their own, but a large percentage have faults of their own.” He went on to complain, “Every tenant on Pleasant Street will leave and go where they can get electric lights, central heating and electric refrigeration. I can’t afford to give it to them at the rental paid, and still pay the taxes on the property.” 80

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Mayor Louis Phipps asked Morrow if he would have the same objections to apartments the federal government was constructing for naval officers. Morrow replied that he would not. Alderman Oliver said that the realtors of the city “were to blame for not giving renters healthy and sanitary quarters before the federal government got stirred up,” according to the paper. A few days later, a member of the Housing Authority criticized Morrow: “You have made over 20 percent out of your property. We can show from our records profits from 15 percent up on low cost housing. Did they exploit these people? For years you have done it.” Morrow denied that he got that sort of return. Other members of the Housing Authority commented that the tenants were aware that landlords had exploited them, and were “deeply resentful of the treatment they got.” 81 Earle S. Harder, a white Annapolis architect, designed the three-story buildings to complement the brick colonial homes in Annapolis. Work began in the summer of 1940. Three hundred men, mostly blacks, worked on the project. Students at Bates High School repaired furniture and sewed curtains for the new homes, an idea of the Annapolis Housing Authority to help the new residents, which revealed its ignorance of the domestic capabilities of black tenants. The authority explained, “To prevent these tenants from rushing out and buying a lot of new furniture they can’t afford, and then being burdened with installment payments, we want to show them how their own furniture can be repaired to be attractive as well as useful,” the Capital reported. 82 Unlike the white housing officials, black teachers who visited the homes of their students before the beginning of each school year recalled seeing a more nuanced situation. They saw the wretched conditions, but they also saw clean rooms with little furniture, and “families with pride,” trying to make do. In the spring, some families put down new linoleum— and later joked that one more layer helped to keep out the cold. They repainted or repapered their walls, which had blackened from the smoke of their kerosene lamps and stoves. 83 A man who grew up in substandard housing recalled that the experience was “rough.” It meant bedbugs, a leaking roof, seeing outside through slats in the walls, crumbling plaster, coal dust seeping under the front door, houses shaking from the passing trains, and frost on the inside of the windows on cold winter mornings. Winters meant bundling up at night with blankets made of old coats, and more coats on top of that; stuffing all the windows with paper to try to keep the cold air out; and seeing snow downstairs just inside the front door in the morning, because it had blown in during the night. It meant shivering trips to an outdoor toilet out back or to the water pump and sometimes breaking ice that collected around the faucet. 84 A new ordinance passed in 1938 gave city officials the authority to order owners of some of the slum houses to either tear down or repair

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their “unfit” properties. Carey L. Meredith tore down his eight empty houses in Johnson Place. Jacob Blum said he “would be glad” to repair the nine houses on Block Street if the city would explain what work needed to be done, and Charles W. Smith also agreed to repair his five properties in Joyce Court, but he was unwilling to “put tile in the bathrooms.” Blacks lived in the houses on these streets. 85 Shopping for blacks in Annapolis could be an unpleasant experience. Some shop owners simply barred black shoppers. One hat store made black women come to the back door and point to a hat they wanted to buy; they could not try it on. “It makes you feel bad,” one woman recalled. Blacks knew that when they went into certain stores, the owner would yell at them; in others they might have to wait until all the white customers had been served. Some avoided stores where they were mistreated, or ordered from salesmen from Baltimore who came into the black streets. “In those days you could buy from these stores in Baltimore; salesmen used to come to Annapolis and go door to door. And you could buy this stuff, give them fifty cents down and fifty cents a week.” Others journeyed to Baltimore to shop at stores where they were better treated. 86 Some schoolteachers were spared the worst of this. One teacher recalled: “You were a little more important than run of mill so you could try clothes on at home” from the Parsons dress shop on Main Street. However, a bank teller mistreated the same woman when she cashed a paycheck. She “was ashamed that it was so little money. The teller slammed the money down. I counted it and told him he had made a mistake . . . given me too much money. . . . He said he never made a mistake.” The next time she went into the bank, she went to the same teller, and he asked her to go to another teller, but she said she “wanted to do business with him. This time he counted the money three times and gave it to me softly.” Her insistence on returning to the same teller the next time she went to the bank, she explained, was her retaliation for his mistreatment. She thought, it “doesn’t make a whole lot of noise, but [I] try to get back at him [the teller the] best way I can.” 87 One light-skinned schoolgirl rode the train from Parole to West Street to attend Stanton School. She was aware that she was “not good enough to sit in front.” She knew she was “good enough to go into [white] homes and raise their children, but not good enough to sit beside them . . . made no sense. For the devil of it, I would sit beside them, and they would move.” 88 NOTES 1. EC, May 15, 1920. 2. EC, May 5, 1921; April 16, 1921; April 19, 1921; April 30, 192l. 3. AA, February 9, 1929.

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4. EC, January 20, 1920; March 10, 1925. 5. Pat Melville, “The Grand Jury System,” The Archivist’s Bulldog, 10:3; EC, January 21, 1931. 6. EC, May 8, 1927; October 18, 1930. 7. EC, October 18, 1930; January 24, 1930; McWilliams, Annapolis, 270–71; AA, November 26, 1927; March 15, 1930; February 9, 1929. 8. EC, May 11, 1931; November 26, 1932. Julius Rosenwald, a wealthy businessman who was president of Sears and Roebuck, set up the fund in 1917 to support a number of social initiatives, including the construction of black schools in the South. In Maryland, the fund helped pay for the building of 156 schools in twenty counties. “The Rosenwald Schools of Maryland Multiple Properties Documentation.” 9. EC, February 20, 1932. 10. Robert A. Brooks, letter to Thurgood Marshall, March 29, 1936, Records of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1919–1991, Annapolis Branch; EC, September 1, 1937. 11. Brooks, letter to New York office of the NAACP, October 21, 1935; Thurgood Marshall, letter to New York Office, April 5, 1937, Records of the NAACP, Annapolis Branch. 12. EC, December 11, 1935; January 7, 1936; EC, January 16, 1936; Monthly Report, February 1, 1936, Records of the NAACP, Annapolis Branch. 13. EC, January 14, 1936; EC, January 16, 1936; Brooks, letter to New York, March 24, 1936, Records of the NAACP, Annapolis Branch. Actually, only Oliver supported the appropriation of $750. AMA “Proceedings,” 1936–1941, 39, MSA M49–25. 14. Josephine Young, letter to Walter White, New York Office of the NAACP, October 31, 1939, Records of the NAACP, Annapolis Branch. 15. EC, November 4, 1920; December 3, 1935. 16. EC, October 16, 1934. 17. EC, October 4, 1939; October 12, 1939; November 14, 1939; November 18, 1939; December 15, 1939; Board of Education, “Minutes,” 1939–1943, 19, MSA CM 1391–4. Judge Clark spoke to the Negro Young Peoples’ Republican Club the year before, and the club commended the judge for his help in the construction of a larger elementary school. EC, September 17, 1938; December 16, 1939. 18. EC, March 9, 1937; March 10, 1937; March 17, 1939. 19. EC, June 16, 1936; February 13, 1937; February 24, 1937. Before Johnson, the three previous black midshipmen entered in the 1870s and did not complete their first year. Harry E. Baker entered in 1874 and was allegedly taken out on the bay, and left on a buoy all night. A few days after his rescue, he left the Academy. AA, April 14, 1922; EC, February 13, 1927. Schneller found no information to verify this. Schneller, Breaking the Color Barrier, 85–134. 20. EC, October 15, 1919. 21. EC, September 16, 1920; October 2, 1923. 22. AA, July 15, 1921; January 6, 1923; March 23, 1923; May 11, 1923. 23. AA, July 27, 1923; EC, July 7, 1923; July 10, 1923; Polk’s Annapolis Directory 1924. 24. EC, July 7, 1925; July 13, 1925; WP, July 4, 1925; “Charles L. Spriggs,” “Biographical Series,” MSA SC 5496–050593; AA, July 1, 1925. This may have been a white-run meeting. 25. AA, July 1, 1925; July 18, 1925; EC, July 7, 1925; July 13, 1925. 26. EC, October 1, 1928; October 17, 1928. Nationally, the Democratic Party was gaining black supporters. 27. AA, October 8, 1932; EC, October 3, 1932. 28. EC, July 6, 1931; AA, July 25, 1931. 29. AA, July 13, 1935; EC, July 13, 1935. 30. EC, June 2, 1937; June 21, 1937; June 22, 1937; July 13, 1937. 31. AMA, “Proceedings,” February 14, 1927, 69; March 23, 1929, 80 MSA M49–23; March 23, 1936, 52, MSA M49–25.

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32. EC, October 14, 1919; October 17, 1919; AMA, “Proceedings,” October 13, 1919, 324, MSA M49–21. 33. EC, December 21, 1927; November 27, 1936; September 14, 1938; October 15, 1938. 34. EC, March 11, 1929; April 7, 1931; April 1, 1932; March 8, 1933; April 2, 1934; March 6, 1935; March 30, 1935; March 5, 1936; March 14, 1939. 35. EC, April 13, 1925; January 15, 1924; November 3, 1932. 36. EC, April 11, 1919: August 23, 1920; August 27, 1920; August 11, 1925; December 7, 1925; October 22, 1926; December 4, 1926. 37. AA, April 2, 1920; May 28, 1920; April 24, 1926. 38. EC, September 26, 1932; April 6, 1933; AA, April 3, 1933; EC, September 28, 1934; March 26, 1938. In 1935, in Norris v. Alabama, the Supreme Court held that deliberately excluding blacks from juries was a denial of an accused person’s constitutional rights, Marable and Mullings, Let Nobody, 106, 39. EC, November 13, 1930. 40. AMA,”Proceedings,” 1931–1935, 373, MSA M49–24; AA, March 2, 1935; EC, March 8, 1935; McWilliams, Annapolis, 272–73. 41. EC, October 24, 1939; November 2, 1939; November 14, 1939. 42. EC, February 26, 1927. 43. EC, April 28, 1930; I have not done a systematic analysis of the frequency of crime stories and other events in the town. 44. EC, October 6, 1927; March 7, 1921; September 29, 1920; OHI. 45. EC, September 12, 1935. 46. EC, September 18, 1935. My notes from reading the Evening Capital indicate that the word next appears February 6, 1940. 47. EC, March 15, 1919. 48. EC, March 29, 1919; April 12, 1919; January 15, 1920; January 17, 1920; April 8, 1920. 49. EC, June 18, 1921; February 25, 1922; April 23, 1927; AA, December 12, 1925; February 13, 1926. 50. EC, July 11, 1922; January 15, 1924; August 16, 1932. 51. AA, May 17, 1930; April 17, 1937; February 5, 1927; AMA, “Proceedings,” November 11, 1929, 326, MSA M49–23; AMA, “Proceedings,” April 24, 1922, 129, MSA M49–22. 52. EC, September 25, 1930. 53. EC, November 8, 1930; November 10, 1930; November 11, 1930; November 12, 1930; December 4, 1930; December 6, 1930; December 8, 1930; December 11, 1930; December 13, 1930; December 15, 1930; December 24, 1930. 54. EC, December 10, 1930; January 21, 1931; OHI; EC, February 9, 1931; February 19, 1931; February 27, 1931; April 14, 1931; April 15, 1931; April 24, 1931; April 28, 1931; May 13, 1931. 55. EC, September 4, 1931; September 9, 1931; September 10, 1931; September 19, 1931; September 21, 1931; September 28, 1931; October 1, 1931; October 2, 1931; November 13, 1931; December 11, 1931; December 26, 1931; December 31, 1931. 56. EC, December 16, 1931; December 24, 1931; December 26, 1931. 57. The Community Welfare Association, Children’s Aid Office, and Red Cross were all moved to 25 School Street. EC, October 8, 1931; March 16, 1932; April 21, 1932. 58. EC, October 5, 1932; October 12, 1932; October 29, 1932; October 11, 1932; Franklin and Moss, From Slavery to Freedom, 384; EC, January 13, 1933. 59. EC, December 20, 1932; January 13, 1933; January 14, 1933; March 29, 1933. 60. EC, August 22, 1933; August 21, 1933; October 21, 1933; November 21, 1933; January 19, 1934; February 15, 1934; February 16, 1934; Jackson, Annapolis, 109. 61. EC, March 23, 1934; Franklin and Moss, 384. 62. AA, April 7, 1934; Franklin and Moss indicate that “even in starvation there was discrimination, for in few places was relief administered on a nonracial basis. Some

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religious and charitable organizations, in the North as well as in the South, excluded African Americans from the soup kitchens they operated to relieve the suffering,” 384. 63. AMA, “Proceedings,” 1931–1935, 365, MSA M49–24; EC, December 16, 1935; December 23, 1935. 64. EC, January 24, 1939; Files of the NAACP, Monthly Report, February 1, 1936, Box I. G-84, 1936 Folder. 65. Files of the NAACP, Monthly Report, July 28, 1936; AA, September 10, 1938; EC, August 14, 1933. Discrimination in relief occurred around the country as well. Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White. 66. OHI. 67. EC, August 3, 1937. 68. EC, January 15, 1940; July 2, 1938. 69. EC, September 5, 1939; Godfrey Blackstone, interview with author. 70. EC, September 6, 1934. The Civitan Club was founded in 1917 in Birmingham, Alabama, by business and professional people whose motto was “Builders of Good Citizenship.” It is unknown when the Annapolis chapter began, but a group organized one in nearby Washington, DC, in 1922. Clubs were encouraged to “seek out needs within their community and to fulfill those needs.” “Civitan Club.” 71. EC, September 6, 1934; October 4, 1934. 72. EC, October 10, 1934. 73. EC, October 9, 1934; AMA, “Proceedings,” 1926–1931, 273, 345, 351, 358, 401, 428, 431, MSA M49–23; AMA, “Proceedings,” 1931–1935, 414, MSA M49–24. 74. AMA, “Proceedings,” 1931–1935, 310–407, MSA M49-24; EC, October 11, 1934; November 13, 1934; April 27, 1935. 75. EC, January 21, 1935; OHI; EC May 1, 1935. 76. EC, June 15, 1937; October 16, 1937; Garvin, The American City, 249. 77. EC, September 8, 1938. 78. EC, August 8, 1939; January 2, 1940; Roberts, “Where our Melanotic Citizens Predominate,” 93–94. 79. EC, December 7, 1938. 80. EC, March 14, 1939. 81. EC, March 18, 1939. 82. EC, March 8, 1940; August 23, 1939; June 4, 1940; December 20, 1939. 83. OHI with five people. 84. OHI with five people. 85. EC, December 19, 1939. 86. OHI with four people. 87. OHI. 88. OHI.

TWELVE Own Worlds, 1919–1940

Black residents of Annapolis liked to think they had their own “mini Harlem Renaissance” during these years, as one recalled. “It was heyday for black people—we had everything,” he said, his exaggeration a measure of his pride. In the years before World War II, black Annapolitans diversified and enriched their lives. They launched new businesses, services, clubs of all kinds, and entertainment for themselves. Some of these initiatives resembled earlier ones, some were short-lived, and others endured. 1 In 1919, a group of black entrepreneurs formed the Calvert Realty and Mercantile Amusement Company. Officers of the company included well-known figures in the town: John H. King, John T. Stepney, William H. Howard, and Dr. George Thomas. They planned to build a two-story theater and dance hall on Calvert Street. They bought three houses that Bates owned and planned to convert them into a 500-seat theater on the first floor and the dance hall on the second. The construction of the Star Theatre in 1921 must have ended their plans, as there is no further mention of the project in the papers. 2 The city directories of 1924 and 1939 and the census of 1930 showed changes in the lineup of black businesses in the Fourth Ward, though their listings may have been incomplete. The 1924 directory listed thirtytwo black businesses, and the 1939 identified thirty-three. Twenty-two of the black businesses operating in 1924 were not included in the 1939 directory, which meant that twenty-three new ones had opened. Among the survivors were barbers Holt, Williams, and Sisco, the Leonard Pharmacy, Sarah Watkins’s grocery, and the Parker funeral parlor. The midwife Victoria Davis, the dentist Oliver W. H. McNeill, and Dr. Ambrose Garcia were all still practicing. Some owners may have succumbed to the Depression, or died. The 1930 census adds to the picture. It lists four 183

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doctors, two dozen teachers, five proprietors of grocery stores and seven proprietors of lunchrooms, three taxi drivers, eleven barbers, six ministers, two undertakers, one upholsterer, and one pharmacist. One young woman who grew up on Larkin Street recalled with pride the opening of new black businesses. “We were so glad a black person could open a store cause it was always white people,” who owned most of the businesses in town. 3 Five prominent male leaders of the black community died during these two decades. Dorsey Garver’s death in 1927 has already been mentioned. J. Albert Adams, a mortician and owner of a hotel and cafe on Calvert Street, died in 1921 at the age of fifty-two. Adams was trustee of Stanton School, a member of the Masons and Knights of Pythias, and the first exalted ruler of the Elks. Well regarded in the black community, he had been elected alderman for three terms. A Republican, he was “not an extreme partisan on the council . . . and was a valued member of that body and was always on the best terms with the other members,” the Capital wrote in its obituary. 4 William H. Howard, an attorney and one of the plaintiffs in the municipal election law case, died in 1929 at the age of fifty-six of “general paralysis of the insane,” caused by syphilis. He spent the last two years of his life in the Crownsville State Hospital. The Capital wrote that he was a “member of a highly respected colored family of Annapolis.” First a teacher at Stanton Elementary School, Howard was admitted to the Maryland bar in 1901. He had run unsuccessfully for alderman in 1915 and 1923. Active in Mt. Moriah, the Literary Society, and professional circles, he was an outspoken promoter of equal education of blacks. 5 In 1933, John T. Stepney died from “an attack of acute indigestion,” according to the Capital. He was fifty-nine. A trustee of Asbury, he succeeded Adams as alderman. He co-owned the Leonard Pharmacy with Dr. George Thomas and advertised himself as a trained pharmacist. He had worked at the Naval Academy, first as a messenger, then for twenty years the chief steward of the mess. Capt. R. W. Schumann, the midshipmen’s commissary officer, wrote a tribute that the Afro printed: The regiment has lost the services of a faithful friend; one willing to work early and late to please the midshipmen. To prepare appetizing menus, varying from day to day called for experience and painstaking care of the highest order. He took pride in his work, and nothing which would increase the contentment of the regiment was too much trouble. 6

Two years later Wiley H. Bates died at the age of seventy-six. The Capital called him the “wealthiest colored man” in town. He was one of the most respected. Active in Mt. Moriah, he was a Mason. He served as an alderman and sat on a number of juries. He operated his successful grocery store until 1912, when he started investing in real estate. Committed to

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the education of black children, Bates served as a trustee of Stanton High School and a member of the Stanton PTA. For four years, he was also a trustee of Wilberforce University. He donated funds for the purchase of land for Bates High School. 7 Not all blacks’ efforts to raise the economic status of their community conformed to the legal norms of the day. For example, blacks dominated the popular and lucrative numbers racket. “Reliable persons,” according to the Afro, estimated in 1930 that between $600 to $700 a day was taken in by seventy-five numbers runners and their assistants from about 40 percent of the black population who tried to pick the day’s winning, three-digit number. Some played as much as four or five dollars a day, even during the Depression. Lucky winners enjoyed big jackpots, but many suffered losses they could not afford. Even children played, sometimes betting their lunch or church money. Several “speakeasies” that were near Stanton School—one owned by a black man and the other two by whites—were suspected of being “numbers joints.” “The better class of people” was concerned about the impact of the gambling on the welfare of children and their families. 8 Other blacks seized legitimate opportunities that came their way. In January 1920, Asbury’s parishioners decided to buy the Community Service building, the former recreation club for black veterans, and open their own center. They hoped to provide an employment bureau, library, day care center, vocational center, and a place for social events and meetings. They had to raise $15,000 to purchase the property. In April 1920, they held a rally at the Assembly Rooms to publicize their plans and initiate a special fundraising campaign called “Over the Top.” By June, Asbury held a dedication service for the Community Center after the morning service. 9 The building had rooms for a boy’s club, a girl’s club, a game room, an assembly room, a social room, lunchroom, and twelve dormitory rooms. The house was used both by the residents of the town and by the 250 to 300 black sailors working at the Naval Academy. By the summer of 1921, the center was helping more than 1,000 people each week. 10 The new center stimulated a florescence of community activity. The Afro reported, “The Asbury social center is filling a large place in the social and recreational life of the people in Annapolis.” Many groups held meetings there, including Asbury organizations: the Elks, the Silver Trowel Club, the Jolly Three Club, the Dunbar Dramatic Club, a new business association, the American Legion, and the PTA. Children came after school to day care or vocational classes run by Georgia Boston and an assistant. Adults came in the evening for vocational classes in typing, bookkeeping, printing, dressmaking, and catering. Others went to use the small library that volunteers created from donations from friends and the American Library Association. Requests for cooks, nurses, and housekeepers came into the center’s employment bureau. Boys and girls at-

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tended business classes. Girls learned sewing and opened an arts and crafts shop to sell their wares. 11 Starting in April 1921, a group of black business and professional men and women met monthly at the center for lunch. The group included John T. Stepney, Charlotte Ruddock, the Stanton high school home economics teacher, and Norman Cully, now a caterer and brother of Mothers’ League member Beulah Adams. They wanted to “map out a definite program of community welfare,” the Capital reported, and create new business opportunities for blacks. Their slogan was “Annapolis, City of Success.” In July 1921, “all the outstanding colored men in business and professional life of the community” met to create a “banking and building loan association to promote thrift and industrial efficiency.” No further news about this ambitious undertaking was ever reported by the Afro or the Capital. 12 In the summer, a stage and summer garden built in the center’s backyard was used for concerts and other performances. Members hosted a Halloween party, and organized benefits for a free milk station and a baby clinic. Children came to Asbury’s vacation bible school at the center taught by Emma Hall, who was to become Emma Hall Stepney, an active community leader. 13 By 1925, Asbury no longer had the $4,000 needed each year to run the center and had to sell it. People still attended sewing classes, recitals, dinners, and meetings of the church’s organizations at the center. A group of boys and girls formed the Excelsior Glee Club there in 1926. By 1927, the overcrowded Stanton School was holding classes during the day in the center, which began to deteriorate from neglect. 14 Blacks in Annapolis reassembled at their new community center, the Bates High School, that opened in 1933. From the outset, the idea was that the school should serve students during school hours, and the larger community at other times. So after the school day ended, parents, students, and other members of the black community came to the school for scholarship, sports, entertainment, and exchange of news and ideas. Howard W. Pindell, the high school science teacher, president of the PTA, and first plaintiff in the teachers’ salary lawsuit, launched the Wiley H. Bates High School Forum. He invited speakers and performers to give informative presentations to the black public on Friday nights. One night, the Morgan College Dramatic club put on “Pygmalion and Galatea.” In March 1934, Ralph Bunche of Howard University spoke on the subject, “Black Men and White Government.” 15 In the summer of 1938, a group of politically minded blacks formed the Young People’s Republican Club. They met monthly to celebrate important events in black history, hear speakers on current events, applaud black achievements around the country, and hold entertainments. Among the events the club organized was a Lincoln-Douglass Memorial Banquet and a three-month Institute of Public Affairs on “the New Prob-

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lems of Government, National and International.” The club advocated for the construction of a new elementary school after the fire at Stanton School in 1939. They recommended that certain streets be paved. The officers included Francis Diggs, who wrote the letter protesting discrimination at the University of Maryland, Alphonzo Addison, and Summerfield Brown, all new active figures in the community. 16 Graduating from high school was an accomplishment that the community celebrated throughout the Fourth Ward for a week. In 1926, a reception for graduates was held at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church Hall, decorated for the occasion in purple, gold and orange. The following week, Mt. Moriah’s minister gave the baccalaureate sermon for the graduating high school class, and the community center on Calvert Street hosted class day exercises. The junior class gave the senior class a reception at Waltz Dream Hall, and parents, teachers, and students went to Asbury for the graduation ceremony—the school’s sixth. The High School Alumni Association held a banquet for the graduating class in Waltz Dream Hall. 17 Churches, teachers, and social clubs tried to help high school graduates go to college. In 1919, four graduates of Stanton High School including Rachel Carter, who was to become Rachel Carter Smith and the librarian at Bates, received $20 to help pay their expenses at Bowie Normal School. Asbury raised funds for a Stanton School scholarship fund, and a “Collegiate Club” charged admission for talks and concerts at Mt. Moriah to raise funds for high school graduates. Fraternal organizations gave annual prizes to high school graduates. In 1933, the Elks sponsored a week-long program to promote education. Each night its auditorium was “packed,” for the presentations students and faculty gave. The week closed with a reception for the public and a dance. 18 Blacks developed their sports teams during these two decades. In 1923, Stanton High School organized its football team, the Little Giants, whose colors were the same as the Naval Academy’s blue and gold, perhaps because the players wore hand-me-down uniforms from the academy. They played on the grounds of the white high school off Compromise Street. After Bates opened, black students played football on their own field. Others organized football leagues. 19 In the early 1920s, Thomas Smith, head waiter at Carvel Hall Hotel, formed the J. Albert Adams Tennis Club that played at Adams Park and competed in tournaments in the area. The dentist Dr. McNeil and candidate for alderman James J. Brown were among the club’s members. Students at Bates raised money to build two tennis courts at the high school in 1933. (WPA funds had financed the construction of tennis courts at the white high school.) 20 Boxing, basketball, and baseball were other spectator sports that blacks organized for themselves. The West End Boxing Club sponsored bouts at the Clay Street Hall. In 1923, Battling Coleman of New Orleans

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fought local fighter Gillis Dennis before 600 spectators. In the winter of 1926, Stanton High School formed a basketball team. Both a Stanton baseball team and black baseball league teams from Annapolis and the surrounding area played on a field in Parole. 21 Of course self-improvement was only part of the agenda for blacks. They were also enjoying themselves. Social clubs flourished and multiplied. In the 1920s, John H. King, as chairman of the Pleasure Seeker’s Club, organized dances with the Jazzaola Band to raise money for the linen fund at the Emergency Hospital and for the salary of the visiting public health nurse. 22 The names of new clubs had a certain élan: the Blue Paradise Club, Beaux Art Club, Collegian Club, Four Leaf Clover Club, Best Yet Club, Mid-City Pleasure Club, Panama Social Club, and Silver Trowel Social Club. The Entre Nous Club met each month to play bridge. “Ladies” belonged to that one, a black Annapolitan recalled. The Strut Your Stuff Club changed its name to the Happy Twenty Club. 23 Elaborate social events entertained the residents in the Fourth Ward. The Four Leaf Clover Club held an annual dance at the Waltz Dream Hall, when “400 of Annapolis’s younger social set, danced and made merry.” Professor Emmett J. Nelson’s Society Orchestra played in the hall that had been decorated green and white. Starting in 1926, the black high school graduates attended an annual prom, the first at the Waltz Dream Hall. 24 A popular event from the late 1920s through the 1930s was another annual dance of the Guess Who We Are Club, a “ladies” organization. The club celebrated its sixth anniversary at the Armory, which was “beautifully decorated in the club’s colors of pink, blue, orchid and white.” Emmett Nelson’s orchestra performed. 25 The Beaux Art Club, another women’s group, gave teas and bridge and dancing socials at members’ homes. Mary Oliver, wife of Alderman Charles A. Oliver, and Rachel Carter Smith, a teacher at Bates High School, were both members. The club sponsored a “Porch Dress Party” at Waltz Dream Hall, which was decorated “to resemble a porch in the colored school.” The Baden Brothers played at the event, which Emma Hall Stepney chaired. She was also a member of the El Progresso Embroidery Club, and the Dunbar Dramatic Circle. 26 Women formed sewing and art clubs such as the El Progresso, the Rosemary Sewing Circle, the Heliotrope Sewing Circle, the Jonquil Art Circle, and the Sunshine Needle and Art Club which held a large reception at Waltz Dream Hall in 1928 attended by 140 guests. The club members met in each other’s homes, sewed or listened to musical programs, and had dinner. 27 Men got together too. Some met to play poker once a month, rotating among houses. The host’s wife would prepare them something to eat and stay out of the way, according to the wife of one poker player. The Royal

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Flush Club formed in 1926 was a “good time club,” according to one of its neighbors, that held parties such as an “Impromptu Dance” at Waltz Dream Hall and a Masked Ball at the Armory at Halloween. On Easter Monday in April 1928, the club celebrated the opening of its new club house on Clay Street Extended with an Easter egg hunt for the children in the morning. That evening, it hosted a reception; Johnson’s Syncopation provided the music. Men who worked at the Naval Academy belonged to the Blue and Gold Club that met on the second floor of the Elks Club each month. Several businessmen belonged to the Silver Trowel Club: barbers John Chambers and Roger Williams, and restaurant owner Mason Alsop. 28 Dances were held nearly every Saturday night at the Waltz Dream Hall. Young women would go down to Parsons on Main Street, buy some fabric, and sew a new skirt to wear on a Saturday night. Men and women might go to a parlor social held in someone’s home. The host or hostess would charge about twenty-five cents and provide some beverage. Some men might bring liquor. These events could draw a crowd, participants recalled. 29 A “chocolate sip” was another sort of social event. One woman who worked as a domestic and lived in a small alley called Jefferson Place used to have them in the summer. Her grandson recollected, she “had a piano in house . . . somebody would play.” She would serve donuts, chocolate and sandwiches. Some guests had “little bottles [of liquor] too.” She and her friends would dance and the “kids would all sit on the fence.” 30 Other grown-ups went bar hopping. Some went to the Washington Hotel run by Edward Legum. Pearl Bailey sang there early in her career. One young girl used to deliver to her hot rolls baked by her grandmother. The patrons enjoyed the music and drinking at Brown’s Hotel, owned by Anthony Brown, whose wife worked as a hairdresser. Some women were “doing the devilling after eleven at night,” giggled one of the women who devilled. Men could be seen lining up outside one place to pay for the services of two prostitutes who came from Washington. The Blue Bird on Calvert Street was a “rough bar,” some said. One girl remembered how she would “sneak down and peek in and see girl dancers.” 31 Many felt hotels and cafes were not proper places to go. Teachers believed they had to socialize out of public view. Some formed their own exclusive clubs and got together on weekends. Some went to Baltimore and Washington for entertainment. 32 Those who could not afford the clubs or bars improvised their own “clubs.” In Gott’s Court, for instance, one resident explained: “In the summertime . . . we partied together. You would come out your front door with one or two card tables. Maybe down the street was some; maybe across the street was some. And you just would go back and forth

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to each other. Course, naturally, there was little disputes every once and a while.” 33 Members of Annapolis’s small but growing black elite hosted fancy social gatherings in their homes. Gertrude Baden married Lewis E. Carter of Washington, DC, at St. Mary’s Church. According to the Afro, she was dressed in “white georgette and satin and wore a wreath of orange blossoms and carried white bridal roses. Agnes Baden was maid of honor in pale yellow georgette and carried pink carnations.” The guests attended a reception at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Orville Coates. Their house on Cathedral Street, according to the paper, “was beautifully decorated with ferns and autumn flowers; color scheme was pink and green, the table was beautifully decorated in pink.” About one hundred guests came. The married coupled received numerous silver, crystal, and linen presents. 34 Two hundred guests—some with “handsome presents”—went to Mr. and Mrs. Charles Johnson’s house at 111 Clay Street to celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Mrs. James Parker, the caterer, decorated the cake with yellow and green and added twenty-five candles. Professor R. N. Moore provided the music. Another well-established family, the McPhersons, held a debut for its eighteen-year-old daughter, Viola, who was “beautifully attired in an orchid dress.” Out-of-town and local guests who attended the party brought many presents. 35 On another occasion, sixty little boys and girls converged on at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Spriggs for a birthday party for their son and daughter. The children and guests enjoyed games, music, and a “table laden with goodies.” John T. Stepney and his wife gave their ten-yearold daughter an even more elaborate birthday party. The children played games, listened to music, went on a peanut hunt, and then went into the “spacious dining room that was beautifully decorated in Mother Goose scenes to a real fair feast.” 36 Blacks could now patronize the Star Theatre. The movies ran the gamut from Tom Mix westerns to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. One night they watched Body and Soul, starring Paul Robeson. “Vodivil” shows such as Zaletta’s Jazz Party often came to town. Annapolis’s Own-All-Star Comedy Company put on a show one night. Blacks attended Charleston contests, talent shows, and beauty pageants held at the theater. 37 In the summer of 1937, the Star started showing movies on Sundays. Some blacks were lured into such secular activities on Sunday, but many devoted their Sundays to church. Women “would talk about Women’s Day for weeks. They really got dressed up, and the church was really packed,” recalled an active participant. One woman made delicious fudge to make money for her special offering. Many engaged in the work of the church. Mt. Moriah’s events in one week were typical: the church ushers met at the home of John Parker; the faculty and student body of Stanton High gathered at the church for a musical and literary program; the Jewel Circle met at the home of Little

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Henson; Mother’s Jewels and Home Guards held their mite box opening and raised $14; the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society met at the residence of Mary E. Dennis; the Allen Life Guards of Annapolis began a campaign to raise $1,000 to buy uniforms and equipment; Charles Foote, district supervisor of the Allen Life Guards, entertained at his home; a fish fry to raise money for the lifeguards was held at the parsonage; the Missionary Society of Mt. Moriah met at the home of Mrs. Countee; union services were held at the church; and the Faithful Workers held their monthly meeting at the home of Blanche Carpenter. 38 Churches led the community’s charitable efforts. “Churches were the mainstay. . . . [They] made donations to needy families,” one black resident recalled. They “raised money, had tea parties, had special collections for the needy first Sunday of the month,” recollected a beneficiary of church assistance. The Kings Daughters and Sons of Asbury held block parties for the benefit of the poor. By 1927, black Catholics formed the Drexmore Club named for Mother Katharine Drexel and Louise Drexel Morrell, half-sisters from the wealthy Philadelphia Drexel family, who for nearly fifty years donated funds to St. Mary’s Colored School. The club, one of whose members was Alfonzo Addison, raised funds to buy shoes and outfits for the First Communion class, graduation awards, and floral wreaths for deceased parishioners. 39 Not all in need received help from the churches. One woman recalled that when she was “growing up, the church did not reach out. . . . We had to go to the Catholic Church for food.” Her mother, who had been deserted by her white husband, did not belong to a church. She had to support her children on $8 a week. 40 The New Deal expanded church roles. The WPA funded adult music programs as well as vocational education classes in the churches. Emmett J. Nelson rehearsed a chorus of nearly ninety black singers for six months to perform at Asbury in March 1936, one of a number of musical projects funded by the WPA. 41 During these decades, blacks in Annapolis probably became more socially and economically differentiated. Some acquired property, became better educated, and earned more money—for example, the families on Clay Street that built large homes. The 1930 census lists 159 black homeowners compared to eighty-two in 1920. The Depression slowed but did end these economic achievements. 42 At church and school, children observed differences among themselves. Some children visited other churches with relatives and found a hierarchy of decorum and slight class differences. One member of St. Philip’s, where the pews on the left side of church were reserved for the families whose members had purchased the benches, thought her church was “quiet.” When she visited the Baptist church, she found out that “Baptists like joyful noises.” Others thought that St. Philip’s parishioners were a “little more snooty . . . little more decorum but they were not any

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better off.” They were “a little further up the ladder,” one member of Asbury recalled. The Asbury and Mt. Moriah congregations were more the middle class. 43 Children noticed that some of their classmates came to school in “busted out shoes” and uncombed hair. “Lots of kids wore white tennis shoes,” which their parents got at the five-and-dime for ninety-eight cents. That “set you apart from everyone else—made you feel different and poor,” explained one woman who had to wear them as a little girl. 44 People in the “upper class,” others thought, were “lighter skinned” and “gave off airs.” “They tried to make you feel less than they. They might be on the same street, but they had better houses.” One young man noticed that the “fair-skinned segregated themselves. They had more clothes, and seemed to be doing better.” Those in the “upper class,” according to some, were “Navy people,” teachers, or professionals who had good jobs and owned their own homes. Others said doctors and teachers, who were “mostly nice” and “would speak to you,” made up the upper class. “High-up groups” belonged to the Elks Club, Masonic Temple, Odd Fellows. The rest were “people who didn’t have too much.” 45 The high held them apart from the low. They would visit each other, but there was “no fellowship within the community,” one resident of Gott’s Court observed. Recalled another woman who grew up on Acton Lane, later called Larkin Street, “There was segregation among the blacks themselves in those times—people who lived in Larkin Street were treated differently by the people who lived on Calvert and Clay Street.” She remembered that a friend who lived on Calvert Street was not allowed to invite her over to play. Her friend, she noticed, “didn’t have to get coal from the dump. Her friend’s grandmother, though, was a bootlegger of home brew.” 46 Residents were aware of a geographic distribution of the classes. Carroll Street had “nice houses,” brick with porches, where “striving families” lived. “Good families” lived on Carroll Street. “They were kind of well off. They were what you would call, I guess back then, middle class,” remembered an alley dweller. 47 The homes on Northwest Street—a “nice street”—were “in better condition than those on Clay but not a whole lot,” said a man who grew up on Northwest Street. Residents considered Northwest, Lafayette, and Cathedral streets “nice” streets, where “substantial” people such as teachers, morticians, and some Naval Academy employees lived. College Avenue was a “fine street where people lived with high porches,” a status symbol, thought a resident of an alley. 48 “Very respectable people lived on Cornhill and Fleet streets,” remembered a neighbor. Shaw Street, off Cathedral, “was fairly nice,” thought another resident of the area. There were “nice families around Pleasant Street,” a teacher who visited families all over the Fourth Ward remembered. 49

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South Street had “little better homes”; it was “a sophisticated area.” The families had a “little push” compared to others, recalled one man who spent some time there as a boy. Residents of Franklin and Cathedral were “people who wanted to amount to something,” reminisced a man, who received little guidance growing up. 50 “Upper classes” lived on Market Street and Duke of Gloucester, like Mr. Adams, who “always dressed well, his son played violin. He had a little better class job” than most men. He was “refined, and his brother had a white collar job,” recalled a man who grew up in a nice house on South Street. Few held positions as supervisors, but Adams and Stepney managed to work up to that level at the Naval Academy. 51 The more prominent lived on Clay Street, according to a number of people. “We had a lot of substantial people living over there. So it was a stable neighborhood,” said one of the street’s residents. The new large Clay Street houses “were the nicest things in town.” The owners were “just ordinary people who rose above,” recalled a woman from a higher class family. One woman who played at one of the houses remembered that it was “like being in a white person’s house.” Her grandmother used to say, “They are going to Sugar Hill now!” The rest of “Clay, Calvert, and Washington streets were more middle class,” though some thought Clay was divided into a “striving first block” that was “better than second.” 52 The people living in alleys were seen as poor, but some managed better than others. Bellis and Calvert courts and O’Brien’s Alley were “typical courts like Gott’s Court. Some overdid it,” a neighbor thought. One neighbor of these alleys knew a “woman and lots of kids who were well spoken” who were living in a house “that a pig wouldn’t live in. Stench and dirt everywhere . . . and the woman’s sister was a schoolteacher,” an indication that not all members of one family had the same “push.” 53 Buzzards’ Roost, whose name meant the worst and was located “across the tracks,” had families who “reached a little more . . . nice people came from there.” Cecelia Green, a much-loved teacher at Stanton, grew up there. Another refined resident of the street remembered families that were worse off than hers. “They used to come to my mother’s house and ask for things they needed like flour and tea. They would come and borrow—they didn’t have much clothing, and they didn’t talk well.” 54 For black children growing up during the 1920s and 1930s, life in Annapolis could be rich and rewarding, or grim—or both. These youngsters experienced family love and abandonment; the fun of play and the burden of labor; hunger and cold or plentiful meals and a warm stove full of coal; the shame and pain of poverty or the comfort of having enough to get by; the friendship of white children and hostility of white adults; the shelter of the Fourth Ward and humiliation in the white world. The les-

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sons they learned from parents or grandparents or from their observations of life shaped the choices they made as they left home to start on their own. Interviews with thirty-three individuals—ten men and twenty-three women—brought these contradictions to life. Eight spent their entire childhoods with both their parents in the same house, a nuclear family. The parents of fifteen separated or divorced, and nine lost at least one parent in childhood. Of those who did not grow up in a nuclear household, eight were raised by their grandmothers, five lived with a grandmother and mother, seven with their mothers, three with their fathers, and one with great-aunts. One lived with an adoptive mother. 55 As children they saw how hard it was for their parents and grandparents to cope with life in the rigidly segregated town. They learned that more than one member of the family had to work to provide food and shelter. They understood that support from extended family members was essential. Some appreciated what it took to get ahead through thrift, determination, and hard work; others saw only struggle and failure. Some were inspired; some received no guidance. Several lived near the coal dump and railroad tracks. The trains passing every hour shook their houses, sending coal dust under the door. Few had electricity in their early years. Twelve lived in one of the alleys at some time in their childhood. Most of their homes were small, modest, four-room clapboard houses, some in disrepair. Others lived more comfortably on the “nice streets” of South, Cathedral, Clay, Northwest, Calvert, and Washington streets. Their houses tended to be larger, better built, five to six rooms instead of four. Some grew up with “family furniture,” old settees that they were not allowed to sit on. Others had “broken down furniture” acquired at second-hand stores or from their “work lady,” the white woman of the house where they worked as servants. All but a few of the families belonged to the working class. More fortunate fathers had jobs at the Naval Academy. As one woman recalled with some anger, “Where was colored people supposed to work? Either in the laundry or a naval officer’s house or somebody’s house.” Her father “kept the midshipmen’s quarters clean all his life.” Another father “always left for work in a coat and tie as he rode to work on his bicycle” to the Naval Academy. A few children watched their fathers advance to a higher rung on the economic ladder. One father “found a way” over time to get a post office job. First he did odd jobs for someone at the post office; eventually he got a full-time job. Another father managed his small grocery store, and a coal and wood business, and became a local minister too. His sons helped out at the store and delivered coal and lumber. Some parents had jobs that took them out of town. A steward for Navy ships “was gone for months at a time.” Another father was a parttime musician, work that took him to New York. A mother who had a

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“live-in” job arranged with her aunts to look after her daughter, whom she saw twice a week on her days off. 56 Most mothers worked outside the home. Some worked in the Naval Academy laundry “because they had that Sunday off.” The women “made the midshipmen look so smart with their pressed trousers and hats,” said the daughter of one of them. Another mother worked as a waitress in a restaurant. One young girl’s maternal grandmother was a midwife who wore a gingham dress to deliver babies. Other mothers and grandmothers were domestics. Several mothers and grandmothers took in laundry from white families or washed and ironed napkins from St. John’s College. One boy watched his grandmother “wash clothes on a wash board, starch them for the servicemen—lots of Navy people.” Jobs offered more than just an income, the children discovered. Some mothers could do their laundry on their employer’s time or at the academy laundry. When mothers working as domestics prepared meals for their employers, they could make extra food to bring home for their own families. One girl’s grandmother who cooked at the Emergency Hospital brought home enough food for dinner for her, her two uncles, and some of the children of a neighbor up the street. She wore a big cape that covered the purloined food. Another girl, who lived with her great-aunt, uncle, and grown cousins, noticed that her great-uncle always wore a filthy raincoat when he went to work at the Naval Academy mess. Once she looked in the raincoat’s lining, and understood why he wore it every day. It had special pockets into which he put “meat, eggs, butter, whatever was available.” As she recalled with a chuckle, “Whatever the midshipmen ate, we ate. We may have been poor, but we were never hungry!” 57 Children wore midshipmen’s shoes, pants, and jackets that black employees brought out of the Academy after graduation. They also wore secondhand clothing their mothers received from their white employers. A daughter of a domestic explained, “A lot of clothes that was given down from the white children helped to dress the little black children.” Children sometimes accompanied their mothers to work. When she went to the house of her mother’s “work lady,” one young girl realized that she was wearing the cast-off clothes of the white children she played with at the house. This employer paid her mother about twenty-five cents an hour for an eight- to twelve-hour day. After school, another girl sometimes went with her grandmother, who worked for “Navy people to set the table, iron napkins . . . clean silver.” Her grandmother told her, “Don’t be ill-mannered, don’t touch, don’t steal anything . . . work for what you get.” Another girl went with her cousins to help her grandmother out in the evenings. She recalled: “We would go there and take coats and help her wash dishes if she had a big dinner party. We never got paid for it. It was like a palace over there.”

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Children noticed that their parents had outside jobs to earn money, or engaged in barter. One boy’s father who worked as a chauffeur fixed people’s cars in his spare time. He went “from house to house” offering to work on cars. A brother and a sister remembered the still their father had at home. “It was a big contraption in the dining room. . . . He was always making liquor but he never sold it . . . [he’d] trade it for food.” Many children knew they were expected to work to bring in extra money for their families. One girl “had to go to work when she was about eight to ten years old . . . stand on a milk crate to wash dishes and learned how to do housework. She got fifty cents every other day and gave it to her mother.” Some children were expected to scavenge firewood or coal. One little girl “would pick up wood from houses under construction and pick up coal from the dump.” Others scavenged for toys in the dumps. They made dolls out of the pieces they found, or took wheels to make their own wagons or go-carts. One girl “ran numbers” every day “to get movie money . . . in summertime twice a day . . . plenty of kids doing it.” When one girl “reached her teens and wanted spending money,” she “did washing for June week and babysat at Carvel Hall Hotel.” When they were ten or eleven, some boys started delivering groceries with their homemade wagons. One boy shined shoes at the Bladen Street train station. He used to “shine governor’s shoes for twenty-five cents . . . if [I] made $1 that was a whole lot.” One boy in a family of ten started “working when I was eight years old . . . I had a little job at a grocery store. I used to bring my money home . . . family that large needed it.” One of his responsibilities at the store was to clean the pigeon coop, a job he disliked. Worse, he was called “boy . . . that was terrible. It really got to me when anyone addressed me like that.” Education mattered in some households. Some parents carefully went over their children’s homework, often with light from a kerosene lamp. Children were asked to read the Bible, the Afro-American, and Saturday Evening Post to their illiterate grandparents. Certain parents were deliberately careful with their money, and at Christmastime would give each child only one gift, preferring to save for their children’s future education, while other parents “didn’t push their children,” a teacher noticed, to do well in school and graduate. 58 Children were aware of the differences between them at Christmastime. They noticed who got bicycles or sleighs when they did not because their parents were frugal or too poor. A daughter in a large working-class family said, “When I was a little girl . . . people that didn’t have no children, they would bring you some sweets and stuff, you know. You’d get a Christmas stocking from somebody. And it didn’t bother us if we didn’t have a Christmas tree, okay. We would go to our little friends’ houses and see their trees. And their toys.” She went on to explain, “And I’m telling you, when you got a mother and father with seventeen chil-

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dren and you working and men are making eighteen to twenty dollars a week. That ain’t no money. And a woman working making three, four, and five dollars a week and working from Monday till Saturday! But that is the way it used to be.” Some children ate modest meals of bread and beans, soups, hot dogs. Some just had bread and gravy for breakfast. One boy ate whatever his grandmother brought home from her job. He recalled, “Didn’t need much, but didn’t have much.” Sunday meals were the most important of the week. They often featured fresh rolls—“you could smell them all over the neighborhoods.” Some children ate pork chops and fish for breakfast, and after church, a roast chicken and fresh homemade ice cream for dinner. Families that had them would bring out the good china from the corner cupboard and the linen tablecloth for the table in the dining room. Other families had mismatched cast-off china. In the evenings, some children noticed how tired their parents or grandparents were when they came home from work. Still, some children got help from their parents who carefully went over their homework. One mother went to meetings of the NAACP. Some fathers were educating themselves, reading mail-order books every night. Other fathers went off to their clubs. Saturday nights for these children ranged from quiet family evenings listening to the radio to “fun parlor socials” to drunken family feuds, which police were called to break up. Children heard something of their ancestry from tidbits of handeddown family stories. As one recalled, “Well, my family was so mixed up. . . . My grandmother’s father was a slave master, and my grandmother’s mother was a British Indian. I remembered her, and she had these two children by her slave master and they growed up without no education.” One little girl knew that her own father was white, but never met him because he moved out of Annapolis. Another learned much later, after visiting a certain white lawyer’s office in Annapolis, that he was the brother of her great-aunt. Other children were told that it had been common for a slave to have a white baby, “which was why they were all different colors.” Parents tended not to talk about white prejudice, and when children experienced it, they did not discuss it with their parents. One little girl came out of Acton Lane, and a white family out for an evening stroll commanded, “Get in the gutter, nigger!” She did not tell anybody. “What could we do about it? It might only cause more trouble.” Another girl played with a couple of white sisters on Shaw Street who “would call us ‘nigger’ and once when the fat sister tried to run up the hill,” the girl hit her with a stick, “gave her four or five good licks!” Most reported that they first realized that there was racial discrimination when they began Stanton Elementary School and they saw their white playmates went to the Green Street Elementary School. One man recounted his painful discovery of white supremacy. “As children we all

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played together, but when school time came, they went that way and we went that way. The question stayed in my mind, what’s going on? How come, if they’re in the same grade I’m in, how come they don’t go to school with me?” He had to ask his parents. “That had to be explained to me and then I started to feel like that something’s wrong. How come the Chinese don’t have a school? . . . Everybody went to the same school except us. We had to go to a separate school.” He did not like what he was told. “The explanation was not a good one—‘that’s just the way things were.’ Black people weren’t respected that way. Everything for us was separate.” Others noticed that “schoolbooks were hand-me-downs from the white schools. Pages were missing.” Another said, “We really never knew anything about segregation or integration until I guess we got in high school. We went to Bates, and the white kids went to Annapolis High, and at one time we both got out of school at the same time. And they would call us niggers and we would call them names and we would start fighting and that’s when we knew something wasn’t right. Why were kids doing this to us? And I guess they were figuring why we were doing that to them.” Those that attended St. Mary’s Colored School went to mass together, but they had to sit in pews on the left side of the church while their white schoolmates sat on the right. Those children that told their parents of their experiences and observations of discrimination were told that they were “equal in God’s eyes.” One mother told her daughter, “It’s not what color you are, but what person that you are.” Many families wanted to protect their children by keeping them out of the white world in Annapolis as much as possible. Other children walked with their family around town, and a few strolled on the grounds of the Naval Academy on Sundays. One little girl “knew she couldn’t go up to Second Street and play with white people on West Street. She stayed in her street.” Others were told not to go up to State Circle, or the “Student Doctors,” an expression for the Ku Klux Klan, would kidnap them. As they got older they saw more. One boy visited his father at work at the Naval Academy and could see that blacks held only low-skill jobs, and the supervisors were always white. He noticed that there were separate toilets for blacks and whites, even though his father was the only black working in the shop. Another boy noticed that “you didn’t see young black men doing different kinds of work that you’d say, ‘Well now, I’d like to do that when I grow up.’ They were driving wagons and driving trucks and they were porters and all that sort of thing. . . . And opportunities were opening up. There were not too many because now at the time that I finished high school, well, you could be a teacher, of course. You could go into a school for the ministry if you’d like. You could be a doctor that meant so many years you know, and you had to have so much money. Lawyers, those who did get through, there were

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not enough colored people with money enough and businesses enough to give ‘em a good living.” 59 Other children noticed in restaurants that only whites were sitting down and eating a meal. Blacks, they came to realize could go in some restaurants and buy food but had to take it home to eat. Those that went with their parents into stores noticed how they had to wait for all the whites to be served first. They could not try the clothes on in the store, but had to wait until they got home. These experiences of deprivation and discrimination, of schooling and odd jobs, close-knit family life, hard-working parents, and unstable living arrangements greatly affected these children. As they approached adulthood, many realized that whites in the town would limit their futures too. Some came to understand how hard it would be to make a decent living and hold a dignified job. Still, many pressed on. NOTES 1. OHI. 2. EC, November 6, 1919; AA, February 27, 1920. 3. Polk’s Annapolis Directory, 1924; Polk’s Annapolis Directory, 1939; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States. Anne Arundel County, City of Annapolis; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States. Anne Arundel County, City of Annapolis; OHI. 4. EC, August 15, 1921; AA, August 19, 1921. 5. “William H. Howard,”“Biographical Series,” MSA SC3520–13931; EC, August 23, 1929; September 29, 1900; October 10, 1910; February 15, 1911; January 6. 1915; June 10, 1915; June 6, 1916; November 6, 1919; AA, March 23, 1923. 6. EC, January 3, 1933; AA, January 14, 1933. 7. EC, April 3, 1935; AA, March 25, 1921; “Wiley H. Bates,” “Biographical Series,” MSA SC3520–1942. 8. AA, October 4, 1930. 9. EC, January 20, 1920; April 1, 1920; June 19, 1920. 10. AA, June 3, 1921. 11. EC, September 29, 1920; October 9, 1920; AA, June 15, 1923; January 28, 1921. 12. EC, April 13, 1921; April 16, 1921; May 14, 1921; AA, May 6, 1921; EC, July 5, 1921. 13. EC, June 25, 1921; AA, November 8, 1924; May 6, 1921; August 1, 1925. 14. AMA, “Proceedings,” 1921–1926, May 9, 1921, 17, MSA M49-22; EC, July 9, 1921; Asbury United Methodist Church, 5; AA, April 9, 1927, August 20, 1927, November 5, 1927; December 10, 1927; January 16, 1926. 15. Brown, A Century, 42; AA, April 22, 1933; March 31, 1934. 16. EC, February 24, 1939; July 14, 1939; October 14, 1939. 17. AA, June 5, 1926; June 12, 1926; June 19, 1926. 18. AA, June 13, 1919; September 25, 1926; May 20, 1933. 19. Brown, A Century, 24; EC, December 31, 1925. 20. AA, May 6, 1921; April 7, 1922; October 17, 1924; August 20, 1927; April 29, 1933; EC, March 2, 1933. 21. EC, October 23, 1923; AMA, “Proceedings,” 1921–1926, December 17, 1925, 466, MSA M49–22; AA, January 23, 1926; July 27, 1928; EC, May 31, 1929.

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22. EC, December 17, 1920; May 18, 1921; December 13, 1921; AMA “Proceedings,” March 14, 1922, 113, MSA M49–22; AMA “Proceedings,” April 24, 1922, 129, MSA M49–22. 23. OHI; AA, April 17, 1927. 24. AA, May 22, 1926; April 3, 1926; April 14, 1928. 25. AA, June 1, 1929, December 17, 1932. 26. AA, August 20, 1927; June 9, 1928; June 1, 1929; February 18, 1928. 27. AA, December 3, 1927; December 24, 1927; October 22, 1927; March 23, 1929; January 7, 1928. 28. OHI; AA, January 16, 1926; April 9, 1927; October 8, 1927; April 14, 1928; October 12, 1929; March 23, 1929; February 8, 1930. 29. OHI with three people. 30. OHI with two people. 31. OHI with two people. 32. OHI. 33. OHI. 34. AA, October 29, 1927. 35. AA, July 9, 1927; June 28, 1930. 36. AA, October 10, 1924; August 24, 1923. The social news about Annapolis diminishes considerably in the Afro American, and the Evening Capital also carries much less news about the social activities of the black residents. 37. EC, November 1, 1929; February 1, 1923; October 19, 1926; January 30, 1925; October 15, 1926; AA, October 2, 1926. 38. AA, March 10, 1928. 39. AMA, “Proceedings,” July 16, 1923, 249, MSA M49–22; Worden, St. Mary’s Church, 86, 137; EC, November 8, 1927. 40. OHI. 41. EC, April 6, 1935; March 24, 1936; May 28, 1938. 42. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Census, Fourteenth Census; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Census, Fifteenth Census. 43. OHI with two people. 44. OHI. 45. OHI with four people. 46. OHI with three people. 47. OHI with two people. 48. OHI with three people. 49. OHI with two people. 50. OHI with one person. 51. OHI with two people. 52. OHI with three people. 53. OHI with three people. 54. OHI with two people. 55. I interviewed everyone for at least an hour. In conjunction with the Archaeology in Annapolis and Banneker-Douglass Museum exhibit in 1992, I interviewed five people who lived in the Franklin Street, South Street block. A year later, I met with a dozen former residents of Gott’s Court, five of whom I interviewed over the course of a summer. One of them I interviewed over the course of a number of years. The others I met through the Senior Boosters, an organization I joined, and at the Memory Hour project I organized at two senior centers, Timothy House and Glenwood Apartments, after I began my dissertation fieldwork in 1996. 56. OHI with six people. 57. OHI. James Scott would call this stealing “resistance.” It is the way an oppressed people can respond to and in some cases subvert their oppressors. However, I think it goes beyond that. This action was not directed against the Naval Academy so much as it was taking advantage of them—seizing an opportunity—a way of getting free food

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when one’s salary was so low that it made it difficult if not impossible to support one’s family. 58. OHI with two people. 59. Brown, interview.

IV

“We wanted what we saw whites had.” —Philip L. Brown

203

THIRTEEN An Encounter, A Parade, 1949

On May 20, 1949, a Friday, Mayor William U. McCready opened an exposition called “Panoramic View of 300 Years of Industrial and Cultural Progress in Annapolis and Anne Arundel County” in the armory on Bladen Street. The next evening, Song of the Severn premiered at Annapolis High School. On a special outdoor stage, 853 performers put on a pageant that depicted the town’s history. These were the first events of a weeklong celebration of Annapolis’s three-hundredth birthday, a source of pride and enthusiasm. A planning commission, probably all white, spent months preparing. The tercentenary celebration officially opened on Sunday, May 22 with a speech by Governor W. Preston Lane Jr. to a crowd gathered in Thompson Stadium on the Naval Academy grounds. The Combined High School Choirs of Anne Arundel County sang. The Evening Capital did not report on the composition of these choirs, but the singers were probably students from the white high schools in the county. 1 On Monday the post office issued a special tercentenary stamp. The Naval Academy Band performed that morning, and the high schools gave concerts in the afternoon. For once, the black group went first. At 4 p.m., the Bates High School chorus sang on the statehouse hill. The fortyfive singers might have noticed near the capitol the statue of Justice Roger B. Taney, who wrote the Dred Scott decision declaring slaves were property, not citizens. Matilda Palmer conducted the students, who sang twelve songs, including “Ave Maria” and the beloved spirituals, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Roll, Jordan, Roll.” At 5:30 p.m., the Combined High School Choirs sang a selection of songs composed since the founding of the town. The Song of the Severn pageant may have been performed again that night. It is unknown if any black Annapolitans were members of the large cast. 2 205

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On Tuesday, Mayor McCready and his wife, dressed in colonial costumes, led the County Day parade. Its floats depicted three hundred years of life in Anne Arundel County and consisted of four different divisions: agriculture, schools, industry and business, and firefighters. Among the first marchers in the agricultural division were four black men who pushed a large barrel known as a hogshead through the streets, demonstrating the early method of transporting tobacco known as “rolling road.” They were followed by an ox team, then a horse team each carrying a hogshead, and then a truck of the Maryland Tobacco Growers Association to show the progress that had been made in the transportation of tobacco, an important local crop. Behind this group, a black man rode a bicycle cart with flags flying. “No one was certain what he represented, but he got a good round of applause,” the Capital reported. The paper’s account does not mention any black participants in the other divisions that followed. Among them were the County Council of Homemakers, the City of Annapolis, the Anne Arundel County Board of Education, the Boy Scouts, Consolidated Gas, Electric Light and Power Company, and then the floats of various schools. The paper’s account did not mention either Bates or Stanton. Fire departments followed with their floats of fire equipment from the hand pump to horse-drawn pumpers to contemporary fire trucks. 3 First Lady Bess Truman attended the events on Wednesday afternoon. At the Armory, she was greeted by city officials, dressed in colonial costumes. At the governor’s mansion she saw an exhibit of former governors. Then she took her place in the viewing stand at St. John’s College to watch a second parade. The mayor, governor, adjutant general of Maryland, Anne Arundel county commissioners, and city aldermen—presumably including the black members Charles A. Oliver and Walter W. Adams—stood in the reviewing stand with Mrs. Truman. 4 The parade highlighted the town’s “civic, fraternal, veteran, colored, and military and naval organizations,” according to the Capital. Led by state troopers on motorcycles, state, county, and city dignitaries followed in cars. Then came the Chamber of Commerce car filled with women in colonial dress. Other floats represented community organizations, starting with the white D.A.R. chapters. One of its floats carried people dressed as early settlers meeting Indians in their full regalia. Two boys and two girls wearing white academic robes came next on the white Annapolis Rotary Club float. Then a white Boy Scout troop stood on the Civitan Club float, which was followed by floats of the numerous other civic and fraternal organizations, and the post office, and veterans’ organizations. 5 Between the YWCA stagecoach and buggy and the Boy Scout Troop 378 float came a green float decorated with garlands of vines and roses— the Girl Scouts float, representing “Girl Scouting throughout the World.” This was probably the first integrated parade float in the town’s three

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hundred years. The girls from one troop had painted a map of the world on a large ball on loan from the Naval Academy. Two Girl Scout leaders rode on the float, Mrs. Albert Thackston from the white Troop 25 in Ferndale, and Mrs. Vernon Sparks from Troop 40 of Bates High School. Because both their troops had each won the banner—one for black scouts and one for white scouts—for selling the most Girl Scout cookies that year, they earned the privilege of riding on the float. Some of the girls wore the scout uniforms of countries such as France, Germany, and Brazil. Among the scouts wearing American uniforms was Brownie Marie Makell, from Troop 51 of Parole, the black neighborhood on the outskirts of town. 6 The white veterans’ groups marched by next. Then came the black veterans’ group, the Cook-Pinkney Post American Legion with “strutting drum majors.” It led the fourth or black section of the parade. The Annapolis Drum and Bugle Corps, dressed in yellow and black uniforms, with countermarching drum majors, came next. Behind them marched members of the Sports Club of the Ancient City Lodge of Elks No. 175, all wearing matching suits and straw hats with purple bands. The Daughters of Elks followed. Girls wearing white dresses and yellow socks and hair ribbons marched with boys in yellow shirts and white pants. Members of the Household of Ruth rode in a float behind the Elks. The women wore black hats, black dresses, and white blouses. A second float held women dressed in white dresses and caps. Armored weapon carriers, Army bands, Marines in uniform, National Guard units, and the Annapolis Naval Reserve completed the parade. 7 At the awards ceremony after the parade, black and white entrants won separate prizes for their presentations. The Cook-Pinkney Bugle and Drum group won first prize for black groups, the Daughters of Elks placed second, and the Household of Ruth third. That evening, a performance of Song of the Severn was scheduled at the Annapolis High School. 8 Friday’s events included a demonstration by amphibious forces, a Naval Academy band concert, and, from 10:30 p.m. until midnight, the Princess Anne Ball at the St. John’s College gymnasium for whites and a dance at Waltz Dream Hall on Clay Street for black residents of Annapolis. The next day’s Capital carried a number of pictures of the white dance, but none of the black celebration. 9 The final day’s events began with a midshipmen’s band concert in the morning at the capitol and the county Girl Scouts May Festival on the St. John’s College campus. Both the Bates High School and Stanton Elementary troops participated in the program called “Dancing Through Three hundred Years.” The Stanton troop “was a gay picture in many-colored crepe dresses and ribbons.” All the dancers joined hands for the grand finale “Shoo Fly” dance and a singing of Taps. The tercentenary celebration concluded with a Marine parade by the Naval Academy, a festival at

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the Naval Academy Armory, a costumed colonial reception at the statehouse, and an hour-long fireworks display. 10 Six years before the tercentenary celebration, Mrs. E. W. Foster, the executive secretary of the Anne Arundel Girl Scout Council, inducted the leaders and twenty-five girls into the first black Girl Scout troop in the county on May 29, 1943. The Bates High School auditorium had been specially decorated with a lighted Girl Scout trefoil that had been constructed in the school’s shop, and a large “V” made up of small green trefoils that stood for victory. Foster, who was white, spoke about the history and aims of Girl Scouts. Mrs. George D. Lyon, the Girl Scout commissioner, congratulated the new scouts and their leaders. The principal of Bates High School, Douglas S. King, welcomed the many guests before the large audience that filled the auditorium. 11 Teachers and parents of Bates students had organized the troop. The planning committee included Beatrice Coates; Gaynell Marchand, a member of First Baptist Church whose husband taught shop at Bates; Thelma Sparks, a physics teacher; and Cassie Gaskins, a parent. When they were not teaching or looking after their families, many of these women were actively serving their community. In their early meetings, the women were not certain that the white Girl Scout Council would give them a charter. They decided to select Gaynell Marchand, a light-skinned redhead from the South, to go to the county Girl Scout headquarters in the Community Services Building to register the first black troop. She submitted the application without difficulty, Thelma Sparks recalled years later. 12 Soon teachers and parents at other black schools began to form troops. As a result of the increasing interest, the founders established an advisory committee to organize other troops and train volunteers. The committee maintained troop standards, conducted a publicity campaign, financed county programs, and involved the troops in the community. The Annapolis members of this committee represented some of the next generation of active black women in the town—Eloise Richardson, a librarian and writer; Gaynell Marchand; Mary Wiseman, an elementary schoolteacher; Sarah V. Jones, supervisor of colored schools; and Lillian Burrell, also a teacher. Other members came from Carr’s Beach on the Chesapeake Bay, Shadyside, and other communities in the county that had their own black schools. 13 In the summer of 1945, Gaynell Marchand and Mary Wiseman attended a training course at Camp Edith in New York. That fall they trained “over one hundred prospective leaders and assistants.” By January 1946, twenty-eight black troops in the county had registered with the Girl Scout Council. All were connected to black county schools. Sarah V. Jones, the county supervisor of colored schools, and Flora Andrews, the assistant supervisor, helped identify suitable leaders at the schools and arrange the meeting schedules. Among those who formed Stanton

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School’s troop were the well-known teachers Mary Baden, wife of photographer Thomas Baden, Jr. and Rachel Brown, the wife of Philip L. Brown. 14 Six hundred black Girl Scouts assembled at the Armory that spring, “All immaculately turned out in fresh starched uniforms, [they] dramatized their activities and the meaning of scouting to them,” the Capital wrote. “Brownies, pigtails braided so tight they plied skin taut and gave a wide-eyed look to their wearers, high-lighted their part of the program with an elephant dance.” Several hundred leaders, assistant leaders, committee members, and friends and family of the scouts joined the girls, bringing the total attendance to more than 1,000. This was the first time all the county’s black troops, now numbering forty-three, assembled together. David S. Jenkins, the new superintendent of schools, and Mrs. A. C. Halleck, the head of the liaison council between black and white schools, both white, also attended. 15 At the weekly scout meetings at their schools, the leaders taught the girls about etiquette and appearance, and encouraged them to stay in school. The girls learned a bit of needlework and cooking. They paid modest dues, and bought their own uniforms. They performed community service work including volunteering for the Negro Health Week and occasionally held dances. 16 In the summer of 1948, Beatrice Coates, Mary Wiseman, and Gaynell Marchand launched a Girl Scout day camp at Camp Elizabeth near Carr’s Beach, outside of Annapolis on the Chesapeake Bay. It was named for Elizabeth Carr Smith, who donated the land for the camp and had died that spring. A graduate of Howard University, Carr taught in a county school at Skidmore before opening her beach resort on family property that became known as Carr’s Beach on the Chesapeake Bay. Her father, Frederick Carr, was one “of the first Negro businessmen” in Annapolis, according to Eloise Richardson. As mentioned in chapter 2, he had a grocery on Northwest Street and farmed his land on the bay. 17 Twice a year, the black and white Girl Scouts came together for special events. At Christmastime, they walked around the town together singing carols. They always ended up at the governor’s mansion, where they were invited in for tea and cookies. In the early spring, the two groups met at the Armory for the annual celebration of the founding of their organization. On that occasion, the black and white troops tended to segregate themselves, sitting on separate benches, but the girls came together to sing, play games, and receive awards. In the early years, some whites conveyed the attitude of “we don’t want to be bothered with you. . . . [But] they treated us nicely once they got to know us,” recalled one of the black Girl Scout leaders. 18 Each spring, Girl Scout troops sold cookies to raise money for the organization and the individual troops. Separate rallies—one for black troops and one for white troops—were held to award the banner for the

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most sales to the winning troop. In April 1949, a month before the tercentenary celebration, Troop 40 of Bates High School won the banner for selling the most boxes of cookies for the black scouts—708 boxes. The Capital published a group picture of Troop 40 for the first time. Its victory meant a place on the float in the tercentenary parade. 19 Thelma Sparks, leader of the senior troop of Bates, was a graduate of Virginia State who had arrived in Annapolis in 1943. Her husband, Vernon, was serving in the Army at the time. He eventually became a psychologist after completing his degree at Virginia State and doing his internship at the Crownsville Mental Hospital. Attractive and poised, Mrs. Sparks boarded at a home on Lafayette Street and ate her meals at a Mrs. Green’s on Clay Street, where Green served dinner to a number of teachers. 20 The participation of two blacks, Sparks and Makell, on the Girl Scout float reflected subtle changes taking place in the relations between blacks and whites. Blacks were including themselves in white-dominated activities. Many were well educated, well mannered, and some noticeably light-skinned, all of which probably eased their integration into the white organizations. Generally, whites encouraged blacks to form separate organizations, such as their own March of Dimes, Community Center, and Tuberculosis Association. In some cases, blacks formed their own parallel organizations on their own initiative. Their fraternal organizations, the early YMCA, and Red Cross committees were examples. By applying for a charter for a troop at the Girl Scout County Council, the black women acted as equals to their white counterparts. They wanted to gain something whites already had—Girl Scout troops. They were not trying to integrate the white troops. They were pleasantly surprised by the ease with which they succeeded; they did not have to resort to the strategies used by the black teachers, supporters of Snowden, or Matthews. The integration of the Girl Scout float represented a small shift. Blacks were taking more initiatives to gain equal status, and whites were tolerating these piecemeal levelings of the racial hierarchy. The historians Franklin and Moss write that the Boy Scout and Girl Scout movements “did not seek to involve African-American youth until the late 1920s.” By the 1940s, there was already a precedent that the Anne Arundel County Girl Scout Council may have had to follow. Other national trends and events helped: the military troops of both populations fighting in World War II; the growing assertions of blacks for greater civil rights around the country; civil rights gains for blacks in Baltimore and other cities through protests and lawsuits; the need to project internationally an image of a nation that was the bastion of individual rights, not a country that discriminated against certain groups; President Roosevelt’s executive order of 1941 prohibiting discrimination in employment in the defense industries and the government; and President Truman’s 1946 civil rights report

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“To Secure These Rights” and executive order of 1948 requiring “fair employment throughout the Federal establishment.” All these factors influenced what was going on between blacks and whites in Annapolis. 21 NOTES 1. EC, May 21, 1949; May 23, 1949. 2. EC, May 24, 1949. According to Jane McWilliams, inclement weather forced the postponement, cancellation, or shortening of some of the week’s events, but not the parades. McWilliams, Annapolis, 308. 3. EC, May 21, 1949; March 30, 1949; May 25, 1949. 4. EC, May 26, 1949. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. EC, May 27, 1949. 11. EC, May 29, 1943. 12. OHI. 13. EC, April 25, 1945. 14. EC, October 26, 1945; January 15, 1946. 15. EC, April 8, 1946; April 11, 1946. 16. OHI; EC, April 1, 1948; June 11, 1947. 17. EC, May 7, 1948; February 17, 1948. 18. EC, December 23, 1946; March 11, 1948; OHI. 19. EC, April 21, 1949. 20. OHI. 21. Franklin and Moss, From Slavery to Freedom, 427, 462: Harvey, 55, 58.

FOURTEEN Bird’s-Eye View, 1940–1949

When the Girl Scout float came down West Street, the landscape to the north of the street was startlingly different. Gone was the open field off Clay Street, where Mr. Gardiner trained his horses for racing and kept his lumber, and where carnivals set up their rides and circuses put up their tents. In the field’s place stood the first public housing project in Maryland—built especially for black residents of the town. It consisted of two

Figure 14.1.

Map of Annapolis, 1949

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rows of attached, two- and three-story brick houses that lined a narrow new street, really a cul-de-sac that ended before Pleasant Street. Construction on the project began in the summer of 1939 as the teachers were filing their lawsuit. In August 1940, 108 families moved into College Creek Terrace, as the project was called. On moving day, practically every moving van in Annapolis could be seen hauling furniture to houses in the new project. By the fall, Annapolis’s black children were playing on their first real playground with a jungle gym, merry-goround, swings, seesaw, sandbox, and basketball backstop. 1 Farther over to the east stood a second housing project, built on St. John’s Street for eighty-four white families and completed by the summer of 1941. Right below the capitol dome on College Avenue stood a new state office building that filled up the space from the post office to Bladen Street to Carroll Street, all built on land occupied by ten dwellings, a hotel, and a church that were demolished in the fall of 1938. Beyond the new building, the little wooden houses on Paca Street—the homes of black people—had disappeared. 2 Looking toward Market Place down by the waterfront, an observer would notice that all the properties in a four-block area east of the market had been torn down in December 1941. White retired naval officers, clerks, the mayor, and Naval Academy musicians lived in—and many owned—the larger houses on Randall and Prince George streets. White laborers, cooks, watermen, domestics, laundresses, and seamstresses lived on King George and Holland streets, where a number of Filipinos also lived. Black tenants largely inhabited the small clapboard houses in the alleys of Block Street and Joyce and Terry’s courts. The Naval Academy seized the property, a neighborhood known as Hell’s Point, to develop a recreation center. But World War II interrupted that plan, so the cleared lot remained empty for more than a decade. 3 In 1947, the city condemned another eight houses on Dock Street so that the town could develop a park in the area. At the base of King George Street, the ferry dock had also been torn down after the state moved the ferry landing to Sandy Point on the bay in 1941. The Floating Hotel, a former ferryboat at the foot of Prince George frequented by midshipmen, congressmen, and state politicians, was forced to move. On the other side of the market, the old brick building at the corner of Chestnut and Compromise streets and the predominantly black tenement houses on Chestnut Street had been razed by 1949. The new Community Recreation building for whites stood near the corner of St. Mary’s and Compromise streets. 4 During the summer of 1948, the area around Franklin Street where some of the prominent blacks lived changed dramatically. State and county governments condemned twenty-one properties on South and Cathedral streets and Bellis Court, many of them owned by blacks, to make room for an extension of the courthouse and an office building.

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Harry E. Feldmeyer bought ten houses on South Street and moved them to Eastport. Contractors tore down another three houses and eighteen garages along South and Cathedral streets. Some black homeowners on Franklin Street, among them the Hardestys, were spared. 5 Fewer blacks would be seen coming out of homes in the “downtown” area now. They still rented the small houses on Carroll’s Alley, now called Taylor Street, on Fleet Street, and part of East Street. A few lived on Cornhill Street, including Rev. Norris Morgan and his wife, Bertie Bishop Morgan, member of the Mothers’ League, and Rachel Carter Smith, librarian at Bates (see Figure 14.1). Now only the Burgess family owned a home on Duke of Gloucester Street. Few black families lived on Charles and Market streets and Hutton Place. 6 In the “uptown” area, black residents lived in homes on certain streets alongside whites, while in the Clay Street-Northwest Street area, they became more concentrated. Several families still lived on College Avenue near the Naval Academy, and one owned a house on King George Street, around the corner. On the other side of West Street, only blacks would have been seen coming out of the houses on Acton Lane, now known as Larkin Street, named after Thomas Larkin, an eighteenth-century mayor of Annapolis, and the dilapidated homes on Water Street. Morris and Shaw streets were still home to some blacks. Lafayette Street, formerly Second Street, was where Rev. Leroy Bowman, the new minister of First Baptist Church, settled near other leading members of the black community, including Charlotte Ruddock, the home economics teacher at Bates, and J. B. Johnson, the new mortician. Blacks also lived in Gott’s Court, the largest of the remaining alley communities. A number of blacks had moved out to West Street Extended, or further out in Parole, or to Spa Road. 7 On the main streets in the Fourth Ward, some established black enterprises still operated, but others had closed and been replaced by new businesses. Mason Alsop, the former chauffeur for a well-known white man, opened his restaurant. Randall’s Lounge, the Park Lunch, Lil’s Luncheonette, the New Grill, and J. W. Brooks’s sandwich shop were among the new black-owned small restaurants. A number of other blackrun establishments opened, including the Art Pressing Shop, Esquire Shoe Repair, the Cozy Cabin, Raymond’s Grocery, Phillip’s Grocery, Earle’s Foods, and Dixie Liquor Store. 8 Black residents had the choice of five barbershops and five beauty shops, owned by blacks—one new barber and four new beauty parlors. Henry Herndon operated a bus line and trucking service from his home in Parole. John L. Hicks became the second black upholsterer. William Reese had opened the third funeral home. Alphonse G. Addison, a notary public, ran a public relations firm. At least nine blacks—eight men and one woman—drove taxis. 9

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Several young black doctors had come to work in Annapolis. Dr. Theodore H. Johnson opened a small maternity health clinic at 38 Northwest Street to serve women who were not permitted to deliver their babies at the Emergency Hospital. When Dr. Aris T. Allen came to Annapolis in 1945, he opened his office in his house at 10 Carroll Street. He also worked at the segregated state health clinics. Three black dentists— Dr. Oliver W. H. McNeil, Dr. R. B. Crampton, and Dr. Norman Williams—had offices. Beatrice Abney of 42 College Creek Terrace was a nurse. 10 Duke Ellington visited Annapolis in June 1946 with his “all-star band” and played at the Armory. Two years later, Joe Louis appeared at Carr’s Beach on the Chesapeake Bay, a black-run resort; three thousand people from Washington, DC and Baltimore were expected to come to see him. Clark Gable and Carole Lombard visited Annapolis in January 1941. Eleanor Roosevelt spoke again before the Academy Women’s Club in March 1942. 11 The town’s population—13,069 in the 1940 census nearly 30 percent black—grew during World War II. The town changed visibly. Two hundred extra plebes came to the Naval Academy in September 1940. Starting in December, civilian employees could be seen wearing new badges. The public was barred from the academy sports events. As early as January 1941, black and white men reported to the draft board at the Court of Appeals building for induction—on separate days. As was the practice in World War I, blacks and whites also left for basic training on different days, but unlike the early days of World War I, there were no send-off parades. In August 1942, hundreds of relatives and friends assembled at the Bladen Street station to say good-bye to a group of thirty-three black draftees who went to Fort Meade for training. A group of white recruits left the next day. 12 After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, black and white air wardens walked around the town. “There were blackouts with sirens. There were air wardens with flashlights. They would knock on your door. If you didn’t comply, you could get fined. . . . You had to have black shades or curtains. You could hear planes go overhead.” Residents registered for rationing books for sugar and gasoline. The whites went to the elementary school on Green Street; blacks to Stanton School on Washington Street. With rationing came lines outside stores for meat, sugar, and other consumables. 13 During the war, Bates established a commercial school farm, perhaps the first in the county, to provide the school and townspeople with food. Initially, the farm included 250 chickens, a couple of pigs, a gift of the Kiwanis Club, and a mule, and had a barn, four chicken houses, which the students built, and a large vegetable garden that provided food for the cafeteria and to sell to the community. 14

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Blacks could have been seen actively participating in the war effort in other ways. In September 1942, Stanton School students and teachers scavenged around town for scrap metal to contribute to the town’s drive. They collected more than ten tons, which they turned over to the city at a special ceremony that the mayor attended. Five trucks took away their scrap, and the mayor commended their success: “They are showing a fine, patriotic spirit.” 15 The following fall, black students and scouts from the county and Annapolis marched for war bonds and held a rally. These events led to a collection of nearly $3,000 in bonds and stamps. In May 1944, the Stanton fifth-graders hung an American flag outside the school. For one year, they saved money to buy it. 16 Despite the new challenges, blacks enjoyed benefit dances to raise funds for the war effort. One evening the Ladies Auxiliary of the soon-toopen black servicemen’s center gave a tropical cruise dance at the state armory. Guests were asked to wear “cruise clothes.” A ten-piece orchestra from Baltimore performed, and a five-act vaudeville group entertained during intermission. 17 The federal and state governments established two centers for the growing numbers of enlisted men in Annapolis, retaining the Jim Crow practices of World War I. The white USO was at Compromise and St. Mary’s streets, and the black one was in the renovated Anchor Club on Northwest Street. It was dedicated in July 1942, with a parade led by black sailors from the USS Cumberland and speeches by Mayor McCready and William H. Richardson, an organizer of the USO and husband of Eloise Richardson. Emmett Nelson’s band performed. 18 This new USO gave blacks another venue to entertain and educate themselves. Every day people were going in and out of the facility. In November 1942 three hundred sailors and hostesses attended a Thanksgiving party. Games, dancing, and refreshments were on the program. 19 Blacks came into Annapolis for other reasons. In April 1942, a crowd of nearly 2,000 blacks from Baltimore assembled in front of the capitol to protest the killing of a black private at Fort Meade, and police brutality in Baltimore. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., former New York City councilman and later U.S. congressman, addressed the crowd. 20 When the war ended, the town celebrated. “The bands played, people were walking up to each other and hugging. Church bells rang, the streets were full of people.” The parade to celebrate V-J Day was divided into three divisions; black organizations marched in the middle section. They made “a good showing with rhythmic marching and stirring music.” 21 Blacks marched for other reasons. Each year, black students in Annapolis marched to inaugurate Negro Health Week. Black veterans, sailors from the Reina Mercedes, Annapolis Drum and Bugle Corps, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, fraternal societies, and community groups now marched

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in the afternoons on Memorial Day. One of the most anticipated parades was still the Labor Day Elks that drew large crowds. In 1949, the Elks from Washington, DC, accompanied by their band, led the parade “all dressed in gray suits, white shoes, and carrying canes.” 22 The two populations went to their different jobs, social events, health clinics, schools, and churches. As before, sports and recreation divided them. White children now gathered for recreational programs near the Community Service Center, or behind the Green Street School. Summer recreation programs for black children were held at their YMCA on Northwest Street, their former USO, on the campus of St. John’s College, and at the new playground in College Creek Terrace. At the very same time—but in different places—black and white children could be seen competing in hobby horse races, an obstacle race, and block relays on a special play day for children. Yet in January 1947, blacks and whites held an interracial basketball game for the March of Dimes campaign. 23 Whites still invited blacks to entertain them in “ole time” ways. At Christmastime in 1940, the black WPA chorus, made up of teachers, civic leaders, and others, and led by Emmett J. Nelson, sang at Carvel Hall, the white hotel where blacks usually entered only as maids, waitresses, waiters, and cooks. At the state armory, the Fisk University Jubilee Singers performed a concert that included beloved spirituals. 24 Some encounters between blacks and whites changed during these years, altering their movement on the landscape. There were fewer instances of fighting and no real brawls. Blacks began to move into some “white” spaces in new ways by participating as equals in meetings. In the summer of 1947, the Greater Recreation Association of Annapolis voted to invite blacks on its board including Lulu C. Hardesty, a teacher at Stanton. Beginning in the fall of 1947, the white Ministerial Association invited black clergy to its meetings at different white churches. The group sometimes met for lunch at the Open Door restaurant, presumably off limits to blacks on their own. The Red Cross also asked blacks to join its board that year. 25 In 1948, Eloise Richardson, one of the organizers of the Girl Scout troops and wife of William H. Richardson, could be seen entering the offices of the Evening Capital, where she worked for a while as a columnist. By 1949, black women attended the meetings of the white Annapolis and Anne Arundel County Council of Church Women, sometimes in the homes of white women. One who took park was Gaynell Marchand, who filed the application to form the first black Girl Scout troop. 26 Other emerging black leaders such as Dr. Aris T. Allen, Emma Hall Stepney, Rachel Carter Smith, Rev. Leroy Bowman, Rev. David Croll, the new minister at St. Philip’s, and Robert Green met with interested whites to discuss housing, recreation, and health problems. Starting in 1944, a few black high school students were among the Boy Legislators, or Hi-Y Clubs, who came to the capitol from across the state to participate in a

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model legislature for a weekend. Blacks continued to appear at city hall and the capitol to press for better services in the Fourth Ward. 27 On Sundays starting in 1948, Charles W. Adams, a taxi driver known about town as “Hoppy”Adams, entered the offices of WANN, off Church Circle. Morris Blum established this new radio station in 1947 that appealed to the black community. Adams became a popular disk jockey. Church groups and representatives of black organizations dropped by the station to broadcast musical programs and make announcements. 28 In the spring of 1941, the Harvard lacrosse team visited the Naval Academy with a black player, Lucian Alexis Jr. on its roster. But Alexis returned to Harvard the next day ahead of his teammates, after Rear Admiral Russell Wilson told the Harvard coach the black player was unwelcome. That fall, however, a black player could be seen on the Cornell football team playing against the Naval Academy. 29 One unusual sight during this period was the graduation of a black midshipman from the Academy. Unlike his predecessors, Wesley Brown survived the harassment, hostility, and hazing. He received his diploma just a few weeks after the tercentenary parade in 1949. Many in the black community looked for him when the midshipmen paraded to the train station to go to a football game out of town. Some prominent black families including the Grandisons and Hynsons invited him to their homes for meals. One Sunday, he walked from the Academy to Mt. Moriah to speak at the Men’s Day afternoon service. 30 Three years after Brown’s arrival, Martin Dyer enrolled as the first black student at St. John’s College. White students who had pressured the college to accept a black student for several years welcomed him to the school. Some tried to take him to the Little Campus restaurant on Maryland Avenue for a meal, but the proprietor would not let Dyer enter. 31 Whites still entered black places. Police periodically raided crap games, episodes of disorderly conduct, and brawls. They investigated murders in Washington Street, Gott’s Court, Calvert Street, Hutton Place, and Pleasant Court. Saturday nights could get loud when residents and visitors fought in Gott’s Court. “People would come into the alley and they would hang out in the backyards, drink the wine or their liquor, half pint. The women would not be involved because all the men would get in different yards. And they would sit, and they would sing hymns . . . there would be gambling, shooting dice. And sometime there would be fighting, once in a while someone would pull out a gun and shoot it. Everybody would fly in the house.” 32 White city officials inspected backyards all around town, part of what was now an annual weeklong cleanup campaign. By 1948, the week opened with a parade. White civic organizations, led by the Chamber of Commerce, supervised and awarded prizes to the cleanup squad whose

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area was the cleanest. The white Kiwanis Club helped in the Fourth Ward, whose block captains were black. 33 At the Star Theatre at Christmastime—following Governor Ritchie’s practice—Governor O’Conor greeted nearly 800 children. Governor O’Conor and Mayor George W. Haley spoke at the black Elks’ first celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation. Mayor McCready appeared at the Northwest Street black YMCA, which took over the USO building in 1948, for a “surprise testimonial dinner” to honor two black leaders, Alderman Charles A. Oliver and William H. Richardson, a clerk at the Naval Academy, who had served as president of the PTA. 34 On school mornings, the movement of black children around the town had changed. In the fall of 1941, some three- to five-year-olds began to attend a preschool program at a small center at College Creek Terrace where older children came after school for their own activities. After school, some children went to their part-time jobs. For boys, “the biggest money maker was hauling groceries to Murray Hill . . . to make a little change for the house.” Other children played on the street, in the courts, or in the tiny backyards. 35 While Stanton was being repaired after the fire in 1939, youngsters attended school in churches, Waltz Dream Hall on Clay Street, and the old Community Center on Calvert Street. When the school reopened in the fall of 1940, the third floor had been removed, reducing the number of classrooms. The old Germantown white school building was moved to Bates to create an annex to accommodate a growing student body. 36 Bates homecoming became one of the two big events of the academic year. For a pep rally held the night before the football game, the recently formed Alumni Association sponsored a parade from Stanton to Bates that included a homecoming queen who rode along with floats of the school clubs. The next day, the alumni met for lunch before the football game. After the game, there was a dance at the Armory. 37 With the opening of College Creek Terrace, blacks were now going to their own library on Clay Street, in the housing complex’s recreation center, built to to keep black Annapolitans out of the new, whites-only library on Church Circle. Crowds of children attended story hour. Eloise Richardson became the librarian there, and National Youth Administration workers assisted her until funding stopped. 38 Familiar street life scenes included the numbers runners collecting bets; blacks “sailing” food stolen from the Academy; people soliciting for church donations; dressed up parishioners attending holiday services, anniversaries, and church suppers; club members going off to meetings and dances; hundreds of fraternal society conventioneers parading the streets and visiting the capitol; white politicians making the rounds before elections; and people piling into taxis and cars for the ride to Sparrows Beach and Carr’s Beach, the resorts owned and frequented by blacks on the Chesapeake Bay. 39

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Black churchgoers attended three new churches. One was the Tabernacle Wayside Spiritual, an evangelical congregation led by Rev. Wilson Dyson. He worked for the Navy during the day and held services on Wednesday and Friday evenings, and on Sundays. He and his wife lived next door and rented the top floor of their house to boarders. The second was Holy Temple United Holy Church (UHC) whose pastor was A. A. Eckels, which held services on Sundays, also on Taylor Street. The Church of God Saints of Christ opened on Clay Street in 1947. 40 In 1946, Catholics laid the cornerstone for a black Catholic Church and school a block off Clay Street, across from College Creek Terrace. The chancellor of the Archdiocese of Baltimore presided over the ceremony; Mayor McGready and Governor O’Conor spoke. The School Sisters of Notre Dame, the students from St. Mary’s Colored School, and parishioners were present. It took several more years to complete construction. 41 Besides the churches, black residents used Waltz Dream Hall—“a fabulous place . . . top society went there,” as well as College Creek Terrace, the Armory, Stanton Elementary School, and the USO, which became a YMCA, for various activities. Whites and blacks could no longer rent the Assembly Rooms so the only place they both frequented, but on separate days, was the Armory. This concentrated—or confined—the movement of blacks largely within their own Fourth Ward neighborhood. The one outside place they regularly visited was Bates High School. 42 One of the most active addresses in town was 63 Northwest Street, first the site of the USO. After the war, the building was converted to the YMCA. One would see a constant file of people, young and old, boys and girls, men and women, military and civilian, and occasionally a white person going in and out of the club day and night. The entire membership could have been seen raising funds. Children delivered or carried groceries, collected soft drink bottles, raked leaves, or picked up trash. Adults attended fundraising teas. 43 New social clubs sprung up. Political clubs were also active. Blacks partied at the several hotels and bars. There were “a lot of little joints . . . Randal’s, the Blue Bird, Bob Breen, a house-restaurant.” Blue Dick Bar, “a bloody joint,” was in “Guttbucket Alley,” more formally known as Calvert Court. One couple came out of Gott’s Court on Saturday nights. She wore “this black crepe dress, with a great big red rose up here, by her heart, and another great big red rose down near the bottom, she would wear the black fishnet stockings with the seam up the back, and the red shoes and, honey, you couldn’t tell her she wasn’t dressed up!” She would go with her husband, who would “dress up in his pinstripe suit and his pointed-toe shoes . . . to places like Stanley Wrights, where they had entertainment . . . [or] to the Elks Club. It was only two or three nice bars that they could go to on Saturdays.” 44

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NOTES 1. EC, August 17, 1940; September 7, 1940. 2. EC, July 5, 1941; May 5, 1938; June 18, 1938; September 10, 1947. 3. EC, July 19, 1941; October 11, 1941. 4. EC, September 11, 1947; March 12, 1946; March 25, 1944; McWilliams, 263; Warren, “Chronology,” 22; EC, May 2, 1949. 5. EC, June 10, 1948; July 28, 1948. Many Annapolitans supported the construction of these new offices because they brought more people who could frequent the town’s businesses. 6. The Mullin-Kille and Capital Gazette, Annapolis City Directory, 1949, 22–57. 7. OHI; EC, May 20, 1949; The Mullin-Kille and Capital Gazette, 22–57. 8. OHI; Mullin-Kille and Capital Gazette, 2–57. 9. Mullin-Kille and Capital Gazette, 54. 10. Mullin-Kille and Capital Gazette, 22–57; OHI. 11. EC, June 1, 1946; July 15, 1948; January 6, 1941; March 10, 1942. 12. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Census, Seventeenth Census, Census Population of 1950 Characteristics of the Population Vol. III Part 20, Maryland, 20–28; U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of Census, Sixteenth Census, Census Population of 1940, Vol. II. Characteristics of the Population, Part 3, Kansas–Michigan, 565; Warren, Then Again, 21–22; EC, December 27, 1940; January 7, 1942; June 2, 1941; August 26, 1942. 13. EC, April 29, 1942; OHI. 14. EC, June 8, 1943. 15. EC, September 25, 1942. These supportive remarks contrasted with the editorial in the Evening Capital at the onset of World War I that attacked black residents for what the newspaper called a lack of patriotism. 16. EC, September 16, 1943; September 29, 1943; May 18, 1944. 17. EC, January 28, 1942. 18. EC, September 21, 1941; July 18, 1942; July 20, 1943. 19. EC, November 27, 1942. 20. AA, April 14, 1942; EC, April 25, 1942. 21. OHI with several people; EC, September 5, 1945. 22. EC, April 1, 1947; May 27, 1947; September 6, 1949. 23. EC, August 23, 1941; January 20, 1947. 24. EC, December 21, 1940; May 6, 1946. The Capital wrote, “Spirituals, sung with the haunting melody and rhythm that can only be attained by colored vocalists,” were the high point of a program. 25. EC, July 23, 1947; August 30, 1947; September 16, 1947; November 8, 1947. 26. EC, February 7, 1948; February 22, 1949. 27. AA, May 4, 1944; EC, April 23, 1948. 28. OHI. 29. AA, April 15, 1941; April 22, 1941; October 21, 1941. Naval officials “were ‘surprised’ to find a colored player on the team,” the Capital reported. The superintendent of the Naval Academy, Rear Admiral Russell Wilson, told Harvard’s athletic director, William J. Bingham, that “Harvard should have informed us of this situation in advance,” although Navy “would play any team that Harvard put on the field.” Bingham told the Harvard Crimson, which was quoted in the Capital’s account, that Admiral Wilson informed him that either “Harvard [would] bench the colored player or Navy would forfeit the game.” EC, April 9, 1941. 30. EC, April 10, 1948; April 13, 1948; OHI. 31. WP, November 18, 2004. 32. EC, February 17, 1940; December 14, 1942; December 6, 1943; February 26, 1945; December 26, 1945; March 6, 1946; July 2, 1946; May 24, 1948; September 24, 1947; OHI. 33. EC, April 21, 1948; April 26, 1948. 34. EC, December 26, 1940; April 8, 1949.

Bird’s-Eye View, 1940–1949 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

EC, September 21, 1944; OHI. EC, August 29, 1940; OHI. EC, November 13, 1945; November 18, 1948. EC, June 17, 1940; September 24, 1943; February 28, 1945. OHI with numerous people. EC, March 11, 1948; May 22, 1948; April 3, 1948; June 26, 1948; OHI. EC, July 24, 1944; August 12, 1950; Worden, St. Mary’s Church, 136–39. OHI. EC, June 3, 1948; May 28, 1948. OHI with three people.

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Blacks’ tenacious efforts to get better schooling, jobs, homes, health care, recreation, and criminal justice for themselves began to pay off ever so slightly during this decade. More blacks now had a high school education. More carried themselves as equal to whites. Bolstered by their service in World War II, by President Truman’s civil rights report and executive order, by the national campaigns of the NAACP, and by the outspokenness of national black leaders, Annapolis blacks banded together more cohesively to claim their rights more forcefully than ever. Whites in Annapolis began to notice these changes. Some altered their racist attitudes or at least some of their discriminatory practices. But many remained intransigent. White residents still ridiculed blacks in their minstrel shows, still popular as fundraising events for a broad array of white organizations. Annapolis High School, the fire stations, Catholic Daughters, Eastern Star, Moose, American Legion, Ladies Auxiliary of the Kneseth Israel Synagogue, and the PTA of St. Mary’s Catholic School all advertised minstrel shows in the Capital. At least the advertisements for the shows were less offensive than in earlier years. During the war, when women had to play the male parts, the Capital referred to the “samboettes” of the Mayo Homemakers Club. 1 A black reader of the Evening Capital would have noticed that the number of demeaning depictions of blacks diminished too. Some days the paper printed no news at all about blacks, as though they were invisible and did not matter. The paper still excluded blacks from the society column and the schedule of weekly events; it only printed pictures of white babies and brides; and it still did not mention black church programs at Easter or Christmastime.

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Not long after he came to Annapolis in 1943, Rev. Leroy Bowman was upset when the Capital referred to his First Baptist Church as “colored” in the paper’s listings. He later recounted that he “stood it as long as I could,” and then wrote a letter telling the editor that the church was not “colored, but Christian. . . . The editor apologized and explained that he had indicated it was colored so that the colored would know where to go to church.” In 1947, the paper changed the categories under which it listed the town’s churches to Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Colored. The word “colored” after the First Baptist Church’s name was dropped in April 1949. 2 Bowman’s letter to the editor was one of at least twelve blacks wrote to the Capital. They were speaking out more frequently, particularly in their letters to the editor, asserting their rights to work at the same jobs as whites as returning veterans, as a manager of College Creek Terrace, as policemen, as well as to live in decent low-cost housing, and to be protected by an alternative road plan. The Capital’s coverage of black involvement in World War II included stories on the achievements of black troops. One story, for example, said, “Part of the spectacular American advance was accomplished by colored troops of the 92nd infantry.” In November 1944, the paper reported that two cousins, William E. Brooks Jr. and Charles S. Davage, son of the upholsterer Edward B. Notis, “both graduates of Wiley H. Bates High School, are now serving overseas.” The paper carried no such reports during World War I. The Capital mentioned the town’s first black WAC, Josephine C. Young, a graduate of Morgan College and a member of the NAACP. 3 In its local coverage, the Capital was torn between old attitudes and new ones. The old were evident in its coverage of a scandal that involved a black man and five whites. The new attitudes were suggested by a new column in the paper that ran for eight months beginning in February 1948. It was a regular feature on events and personalities in the black community, written by a black woman, Eloise Richardson. Also in 1948 the Capital began a news column, “The School Picture,” that covered activities at Bates and Stanton. Information about the scandal emerged slowly starting in March 1946. Over time, the readers learned that the chief steward of the Officers’ Club, Walter W. Rollins, who was black, invited Musician First Class William R. Sima Jr., his wife, his mother, and his father, William R. Sima Sr., the conductor of the Navy band, and another woman, Agnes Ruth Thompson, a hairdresser—all white—to his quarters, where they stayed all night. The group allegedly played poker, danced, and drank liquor that Rollins had taken from the Officers’ Club. 4 The Navy charged Sima Jr. with violating the academy’s liquor and gambling regulations and “exhibiting conduct to the prejudice of good order and discipline.” Sima Sr. was tried for “perjury, extortion, culpable

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inefficiency, neglect of duty and violations of regulations.” Rollins was charged with embezzlement, theft, gambling, and conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline, and stealing eighty-nine bottles of liquor. He was also accused of two morals charges that “alleged scandalous conduct and adultery,” the details of which the Capital would not disclose. 5 The Capital wrote that Rollins was “tall, muscular,” but only readers of the Afro would learn that Rollins was born in St. Croix, Virgin Islands, attended school in Denmark and Norway, joined the Navy in 1920, and had served as the head of officers’ clubs in a number of places before being assigned to the Naval Academy. He was a “friendly, polished individual who speaks French, Spanish, Norwegian, and Danish. He was married and the father of three children, the oldest of whom was a student at City College of New York.” He had served numerous high-ranking naval and governmental dignitaries, including President Warren Harding. Rollins, who had twenty-seven years of good conduct, was acquitted of the charge of lascivious conduct with a white woman and embezzlement of liquor. He was found guilty of theft, gambling, conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline, and one count of adultery with a white woman. 6 The Afro reported that Rollins “would not have been brought to trial had not there been some of his own race working with him who did not like him and made statements against him. He was a hard task-master.” The Afro suggested, “His chief offense appeared to be his familiarity with a 22-year-old white woman . . . and his socializing with white people. . . . The Navy was not interested in simple adultery. It was interested in social equality. Colored seamen must be taught their places. They must not have love affairs with white women who fall in love with them.” Rollins was sentenced to serve two years and demoted to steward’s mate third class with a bad conduct discharge. He was released from Portsmouth Naval Barracks in May 1947 after serving one-third of his sentence. 7 William Sima Sr. was also court-martialed. His sentence was twelve months hard labor and dismissal from the Navy. Sima Jr. received a bad conduct discharge. 8 In February 1948, a year after the scandal disappeared from the pages of the Capital, its readers—blacks and whites—may have been surprised by the appearance of a new column, “Our Negro Community.” Its author was Eloise Richardson, a newly hired black writer. She had been on the staff of the Indiana Recorder, worked as a copy editor of the Afro American and the Scott newspaper chain in Georgia. She had also worked in the press office of the War Department in Washington before moving to Annapolis with her husband, William H. Richardson, a clerk at the Naval Academy and a principal organizer of the YMCA on Northwest Street. If white subscribers read her pieces, which appeared as often as three times a week, they would have learned a great deal about blacks’ rich social

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lives and uplift endeavors. There was no mention of criminality, laziness, or stupidity. 9 Richardson drew a picture of an active people who participated in educational events such as the “St. John’s Seminar on Great Plays,” hosted interesting visitors, such as Dr. Charles Drew, went to meetings of the NAACP, established the new Delta Sigma Theta sorority, and attended many events at Bates High School, from barn dances to meetings on juvenile delinquency. She recognized the community work of individuals, such as Dr. Theodore H. Johnson, who established a maternity clinic. Her description of Johnson—a “brilliant young graduate of Howard University Medical School”—departed from the standard Capital portrait of Annapolis blacks. She candidly described the discriminatory practices of the Emergency Hospital that provoked his establishment of the clinic. She informed her readers of breakthroughs of racial barriers: “Dr. R. L. Richardson and Dr. Aris T. Allen are now taking post-graduate work in obstetrics at Johns Hopkins Hospital and the University of Maryland and are among the first colored physicians to be admitted for graduate study at these institutions.” 10 Her last column, also unexpected, indicated that the “majority of the Negro citizens of Annapolis” did not believe her column and her position on the Capital was advancing them. Members of the reactivated NAACP, though appreciative of her efforts and her position on the Evening Capital, could not “condone the fact that the column as set aside solely for Negro news is following the pattern of this state in general, and of Annapolis in particular in the continuance of Jim Crowism.” They believed that all news should be “printed at anyplace as in all other newspapers throughout the country.” Details of this debate within the black community—to integrate or not—are not known. It revealed the diversity of opinion within the black community on how best to achieve its equal rights. 11 Richardson’s last column appeared on September 14, 1948. The local chapter of the NAACP, of which she was a member, had been reactivated since 1940, when Josephine Young, Annapolis’s black WAC and a member of the original NAACP, helped reestablish the organization. As the national organization grew stronger and more outspoken between the two world wars—the number of chapters increased ten times—the Annapolis chapter actively reengaged in the struggle to achieve equality for blacks. 12 The members of the NAACP—businessmen, ministers, teachers, and others—worked together more effectively than any previous organization, except the teachers’ equal salary campaign. Members of this growing collective included both Eloise and William H. Richardson; Revs. Croll of St. Philip’s, Bowman of First Baptist, and Morgan of Second Baptist; John T. Chambers, the barber; doctors Allen and Richardson, and dentist McNeil; the nurse, Beatrice Abney; and Bates teachers including Rachel Carter Smith and Frank B. Butler, now a science teacher. The

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Capital covered the NAACP, perhaps as a way of informing its white readers about local black civil rights efforts. It is also possible that Eloise Richardson sent in reports to the paper, informing whites and blacks about the organization’s work. The group concentrated on building membership, informing the public about local and national developments in civil rights, and challenging discriminatory education, the prejudiced criminal justice system, and Jim Crow segregation. Members discussed overcrowding at Stanton Elementary School. They attended legislative hearings on the “Jim Crow Bill” to abolish the laws that forced blacks to sit in separate railroad cars that had been introduced at every session, and defeated at each session since 1927. The NAACP also intervened in court cases, for example, the case of Thomas Edwards, accused of murdering a white couple. Lead by Rev. David Croll, the organization raised money for his defense. 13 In July 1946, the NAACP pressed the county police department to hire a black officer. It drew up a list of reasons why a black should be on the police force. One said, “His presence will tend to break down the standard belief that minority group persons are and should be in inferior positions.” Another said, “As citizens and taxpayers of Annapolis, the minority group is entitled to the same consideration, regardless of color, race or creed, as any other race,” according to the Capital’s report. The NAACP solicited applicants from the community, and submitted the names of four candidates, all young World War II veterans, including George Phelps, a member of an old, respected black family. Rev. Bowman and Rev. Croll discussed hiring practices with Police Commissioner Thomas G. Basil. Rev. Bowman recalled, “He responded that as long as he lived, that there would never be a black policeman on the force in Annapolis. . . . We told him, well, you ain’t gonna live forever.” None of the candidates proposed by the NAACP was hired. 14 When Rev. Bowman became the minister of the First Baptist Church, he said years later, “I used to tell my people from the very beginning that everybody ought to be a Christian, an American, and they ought to be a member of the NAACP ’cause the NAACP could do for our people what the church couldn’t do, that the family couldn’t do ’cause it followed the path of legality,” he said. “We had to create and finance our own Department of Justice and that was the NAACP,” Bowman explained. “The Department of Justice should have been working for our freedom. The Department of Justice was helping to keep us segregated. We got to pay for the government that subsidized the people who were keeping us down. And then we got to come up with a NAACP. We’ve got to come up with our own Justice Department. We’ve got to spend our own money to be free. See, that’s the unfairness of the whole darn thing.” 15 The teachers’ campaign for equal salaries was finally resolved in 1941 when the Anne Arundel County delegation introduced a bill in the legis-

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lature to authorize $41,000 for pay equalization—a “long-to-be-remembered headache,” the Capital called it. Two other bills had been introduced to equalize teachers’ salaries statewide; passing these would cost the government about $400,000 a year. “After a four-week battle, during which proponents of the teachers’ equal salary bill fought bitterly against almost overwhelming odds, the measure was passed in the General Assembly,” the Afro-American reported. “Political observers here recalled, as the salary bill was passed, that the uphill battle was begun by the Maryland State Teachers’ association twenty-five years ago.” 16 The statistics about educational achievement in the Maryland 1940 census are telling. The median school year completed for native whites was 8.4; it was 6.8 for foreign-born whites, and 5.6 for blacks. A higher percentage of native white Marylanders had four years of college education—5.6 percent of its population compared with 1.3 percent of blacks and 3.4 percent of the foreign-born population. The disparities between school students aged five to twenty declined: 68.4 percent of native whites were in school compared with 55.6 percent of foreign-born whites, and 64.5 percent of blacks, an increase for blacks from 34.8 percent in 1900. The percentage of black children in school between the ages of ten and fourteen was even higher—nearly 95 percent. 17 The Evening Capital praised the refurbished Stanton as “one of the safest schools in the state,” but after reopening in August 1940, it was soon overcrowded. Now just two stories, the school had eight classrooms. For a few years, grades six and seven were located at the Bates High School Annex. After the war, Bates High School claimed these four classrooms. Stanton students, with the exception of the sixth graders, had to attend half-day sessions. David Jenkins, the superintendent of schools, told an audience of about 300 in the fall of 1947 that a high birthrate and the lack of construction of schools during the war contributed to the overcrowding. “Nothing would be done,” he said, to alleviate the situation at Stanton. Some students again had to attend classes at Mt. Moriah and the Odd Fellows Hall on Clay Street. Stanton, built to accommodate 320 students, now had 544. 18 By 1948, 1,500 students attended Bates High School, which had a capacity of 805. Three-quarters of them lived outside the town. After its annual inspection of the school, the grand jury reported that at “deplorably crowded” Bates High School, “we found the principal and faculty doing an excellent job, with very poor facilities but satisfied that the new high school [to be built in the county] will relieve their congested conditions.” 19 In 1948, the county paid $70.56 per pupil in black elementary schools and $77.51 for whites. For junior and senior high schools, the per pupil cost for black students was $112.14 versus $137.04 for the white students. Black students got secondhand and sometimes out-of-date books. Teachers had to make their own maps, and use publications such as National

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Geographic, the Afro-American, and the Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs to make their own materials. 20 The teachers at Stanton and Bates continued to offer special programs such as Negro History Week to foster pride in black achievements. One year the theme was “Democracy Only through Brotherhood.” The program began with sermons in the churches, followed by a concert of spirituals at Bates. Another day Bates students acted out episodes in the lives of Dr. Mary McCleod Bethune, Lena Horne, Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, and Roland Hayes, a well-known black tenor, George Washington Carver, and Augusta Savage, a black sculptor, for a “tableaux of Negro achievements.” 21 The year before, Lulu C. Hardesty, a Stanton teacher, wrote to the Capital about the importance of Negro History Week, telling its readers, “The purpose of such a week is to acquaint the people with the outstanding works of Negroes both past and present. For indeed it is when we know people that we like them better.” She suggested that when teachers spoke about Abraham Lincoln, why not also mention the accomplishments of Booker T. Washington or Benjamin Banneker? 22 Bates offered vocational training that reflected white administrators’ low expectations for black students. Reporting on a visit of Harold McCann, the white supervisor of the colored schools, known by the teachers for his negative view of them, the Capital printed a long article on the training students were getting: “Girls . . . are turning out excellent dresses. . . . Boys . . . have become expert cabinet makers and their finished products would be a credit to any store.” The paper wrote a lengthy article about the Bates farm, perhaps the state’s first commercial farm connected to a high school. The paper infantilized the students who delivered the chickens: “A polite little colored boy who takes the order for it and delivers it cleaned and dressed and ready for cooking.” The Capital commented, “One of the interesting things about this farm project is that it is self-supporting.” By the summer of 1943, it had sold 1,500 chickens to Annapolis residents. 23 Black professionals gave vocational guidance lectures that stressed better career choices than the ones for which Bates prepared its students. At a three-day conference in March 1947, students learned about agriculture, the ministry, teaching, social work, nursing, the mortuary business, and medicine. 24 By 1946, Bates offered adult evening classes in English, mathematics, history, dressmaking, typing, bricklaying, crocheting, Spanish, business, and recreation leadership. The courses were open to anyone who applied; students could work toward a high school equivalency degree. Nearly 170 attended by 1948. 25 Getting a college degree was still too great a challenge for most in the Fourth Ward. For several years, Pepsi-Cola awarded a full four-year scholarship to one Bates student to attend Howard University, but most

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had to pay their own way. Following the advice of his father, Philip L. Brown and his wife, for example, saved money to attend Morgan State College to get their bachelor’s degrees in 1947, years after they had attended teachers’ college. After the war, more families could afford to send their children to college, and some went on to graduate schools, a significant change in the general educational level of the black population in the town. By 1949, some Bates graduates attended Hampton, Cortez W. Peters Business School, Maryland State Teacher’s College, Boston University, Columbia University, and Morgan State College. 26 The state still paid the expenses for blacks to get advanced degrees outside of Maryland. Some teachers, Sarah V. Jones, Philip and Rachel Brown, and Thelma Sparks among them, took advantage of the state sponsorship program to acquire master’s degrees at New York University, Hampton Institute, University of Pennsylvania, and Temple University. The Browns and Sparks had to commute to New York City to attend special weekend classes at New York University. Half of the credits toward the degree could be earned outside of the university, and they attended special classes in “dingy classrooms” arranged for them in black high schools in Washington, DC and Baltimore. 27 The president of the University of Maryland and the president of the Anne Arundel County Board of Education agreed that “segregation is financially unsound . . . that the biracial educational policy is impossible to shoulder financially and much more expensive than integrated education.” They believed that the only way to “meet the constitutional test” was to admit blacks to the University of Maryland. However, the university was a “creature of the State which must follow the indicated policy of the legislature,” which seemed “to want to continue a biracial policy,” the Capital reported. 28 Blacks in Annapolis took advantage of several opportunities to launch enrichment programs. First was the opening of a preschool at College Creek Terrace, mentioned in chapter 14. The second was the opening of a small library in the housing complex with 500 used books donated by the white library. The staff offered a story hour in the afternoons. One week, 150 children came to hear teachers read “The Selfish Giant” by Oscar Wilde, “Hansel and Gretel,” “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” “A Boy and His Dream” by Charles Dickens, and poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar. Another day, Rev. Croll talked to 200 children about George Washington Carver’s achievements. 29 Young people and adults attended other programs. Summerfield Brown organized a course on the “Great Books.” St. John’s College provided a faculty member and a student to lead discussions. A group initiated an adult book review program. Rachel Carter Smith, the librarian at Bates High School, reviewed the first book, The Story of the Negro by Arna Bontemps. The Library Guild, an organization that supported the library, paid for the books. Every year, the guild held a benefit tea at the

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library. In 1947, the black sociologist Dr. E. Franklin Frazier spoke, the Glee Club from Morgan State College sang, and members of the storyhour read, played the piano, and gave book reports. 30 One reader thought it seemed more like a “semblance of a library, it didn’t have that many books so it wasn’t something you could enjoy.” She joined a book club and ordered books that she read at home. Others found the library dark and dingy. Martha Alsop, a teacher who was light skinned, dignified, and a graduate of the Washington Normal Teachers’ School, “took books out of the white library. . . . I was never stopped.” She also “knew someone who worked at St. John’s College and would take books out” for her. 31 Not all education was strictly segregated. A small group of blacks and whites collaborated in organizing public affairs town meetings at St. John’s College in the spring of 1948. Rev. Bowman and his wife, Alderman Oliver, and John T. Chambers were among the attendees of the interesting panel discussions. One panel discussion included a member of Army commander Gen. A. C. Wedemeyer’s staff who was stationed at the Chinese Communist Headquarters in North China and a professor of international politics at the University of Rochester. 32 Another noteworthy development mentioned in Eloise Richardson’s column in August 1948 was the Board of Education’s appointment of an integrated committee—perhaps its first such gesture—to attend a meeting in Atlantic City, New Jersey, of the American Teachers’ Association, where 800 delegates were to learn about a “Practical Democracy Program.” Among those selected to go to the meeting was Lulu C. Hardesty. 33 The teachers won their lawsuit in 1941, but blacks in Annapolis struggled in the depressed economy. Some found WPA jobs, others went to CCC camps, and some teens worked for the National Youth Administration (NYA), but primarily in low-end jobs. Besides the NAACP’s demand for a black policeman and letters to certain stores asking them to hire blacks, some returning veterans challenged the discriminatory pay scales and lack of opportunities, but with little success. According to Rev. Bowman, at this time in Annapolis, many blacks refrained from getting involved in the NAACP or speaking out because they were afraid they might lose their jobs. 34 With few exceptions—such as training girls as library assistants and funding a chorus—the federal assistance programs only reinforced discriminatory employment practices in Annapolis. In October 1940, another NYA training program opened for twenty-seven black girls at College Creek Terrace to become “skilled domestics . . . to meet a shortage in this field due to the expansion of naval activities in Annapolis,” The next month, another group of girls was learning how to sew bathrobes and dresses to be shipped to Europe by the Red Cross. At the same time, a group of white girls was learning clerical skills. 35

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The 1940 census reveals the disparities in employment opportunities for the two populations in Annapolis. The census listed forty-eight “nonwhite” professionals compared to 396 white professionals, and forty-five white domestics in contrast to 572 nonwhite domestics. Of the working black population, 1.1 percent were proprietors, 30.2 percent service workers, most of them men, and 13.3 percent laborers. By contrast, 18.2 percent of whites were classified as proprietors, service workers 19.6 percent, and laborers 2.3 percent. 36 The Naval Academy continued to hire blacks for unskilled positions in the dorms, laundries, and shops, and on the grounds. One young boy used to visit his father at the machine shop, where he worked as a “general helper. . . . That was a way of screwing you. When a black got a job down there, he had to be a laborer, or a laborer/building attendant, or janitor. The next group was general helper [with grades of] one, two, three. . . . It didn’t lead to anything.” Blacks could not become apprentices or journeymen. “It was like a bottle with a cork on it,” he said. His father kept the machines looking like new. “He could do things well, but was never recognized for it because he was black . . . the way they discriminated to keep you down.” The boy saw that “job discrimination was the most important thing. . . . If you couldn’t make a living, you had to live like a dog.” He saw that “the [white] fellow in charge was a nice man.” But his father “was kept down. He never talked about it. It affected me all my life,” he recalled. 37 On the strength of their contribution to the war, returning black veterans, like other black soldiers around the country, expected to find better jobs, some of which were inaccessible to them. One veteran initially applied for a job at the Naval Engineering Experiment Station, which did not want to hire him “because he was colored,” his wife recounted years later. He planned to report the rejection to Washington because he had been told that as a veteran he could have any job for which he was qualified. He applied for a tool-room attendant position. To qualify, the white supervisor told him he would have to pass a test that involved identifying 350 out of 500 tools, but no one was available to train him. He borrowed the tool manual, which he studied at night, after he had spent his days cleaning the smokestacks of submarines. After a month’s preparation, he took the test, identified 350 tools, and was hired. 38 Another veteran wrote to the editor of the Capital, “I am disappointed in the way Negro veterans are being denied job rights. There are fellows in this town that are qualified electricians and carpenters yet can’t find employment at the Naval Academy where vacancies exist. This is discouraging for we thought we were fighting for a Democracy where all men, regardless of race, color or creed, shared and shared alike.” He asked, “We only ask to be given consideration and a chance to make good in positions that we are qualified to fill. Is that asking too much?” 39

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During the war, some positions had opened up for black women at Fort Meade and elsewhere. One woman managed to get herself a job driving a truck, a position she preferred to her former job as a maid for a white family. At the end of the war, she decided to drive a cab. The Capital commented that some black women, at least, had to return to their domestic jobs: “Annapolis housewives now bring the law of supply and demand to bear on the servant problems that have been confronting them for the past three and a half years,” when they had to do the housework because their maids had found better war-related work. 40 Domestic jobs required great physical stamina, and employers could be very demanding. One young woman had to “wash the twenty-three steps in the house three times a week, and to scrub the kitchen, the living room, and dining room floors.” She would be so tired when she came home from work that she would cry. Some black domestics made strategic choices about their employers. They “would work for good people and would get nice things . . . Navy people who had a reputation [were a] better class of people.” Another said with a chuckle, “They kept my daughter real fine in dresses!” They also quit jobs where their employer was too demanding or dirty. 41 One woman was able to work her way into catering because her employer entertained a great deal, and she learned how to prepare the food and hire the help for the parties. Her uncle, who was a professional chef in charge of parties at the governor’s mansion, taught her “a lot about cooking.” She also took evening cooking classes at Bates and then went to school in Baltimore for additional training. She hired her sisters and her husband, which meant additional money for her household. Eventually, “she did parties all over town.” 42 Finding decent housing remained a challenge. While the first public housing project in Maryland was built to house black residents in Annapolis, five out of eight homes available to blacks not living in College Creek Terrace were substandard: overcrowded, deteriorating, in some cases with only one to three rooms, many without running water, indoor bathrooms, or heat. Blacks’ salaries were so low that much of the decent housing was inaccessible to them. Many landlords with properties outside the Fourth Ward would not rent to them. One teacher remembered looking at numerous rentals, but being turned away by the realtor who said that the unit was already occupied, an excuse for not renting to a black person, he thought. Some returning veterans took advantage of the G.I. bill to buy land and eventually build homes. Many others, however, had to double up with relatives or take in boarders in their small houses to cover the rent. While a number of whites expressed concern about the housing shortage, federal, state, and county government agencies razed properties where blacks lived to build governmental buildings, reducing their housing choices even further. 43

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As workers were completing the College Creek Terrace project in the summer of 1940, it became a kind of tourist attraction. The Evening Capital wrote extensively about it. Visitors from out of town and townspeople came to see it. The Housing Authority thought that Alderman Oliver would be a good role model and appointed him manager of the project. Born in Annapolis in 1883, Oliver was educated at Stanton and Howard University. He had been a star on the baseball team and played professionally for the New Jersey and Cuban Giants. He served in World War I and returned to Annapolis to work at the Naval Academy. From 1936 to 1940, he was employed at the executive offices of the state. He had been an alderman since the late 1920s and an active member in fraternal organizations. His job as manager of College Creek Terrace entailed screening the applicants. 44 The Capital wrote feature stories on some of the tenants. Reid Abney, a messenger at Gilbert’s Drug Store, who with his wife, Beatrice, a nurse and member of the NAACP, and two children had doubled up with another family, and was the first to receive his notification. “As he read it his face broke into a broad grin. The Housing Authority considers the Abneys a good example of the type of young family which low rent housing is designed to benefit: industrious and thrifty, with aspirations for better living standards than have heretofore been available to people of their circumstances.” 45 The Capital devoted a special section to the opening of College Creek Terrace. It printed prominent figures’ views on the benefits of slum clearance, the correlation between slums and crime, poor health, and behavior, and black contamination of whites. The president of the Anne Arundel County Tuberculosis Association claimed, “Getting rid of slum houses is particularly important in Annapolis because of the large colored population. Colored people are subject to tuberculosis more than any other racial group. Because the colored people come in close contact with white people as domestic servants the disease can be easily spread from its breeding place in the slums to other residential sections.” 46 Black leaders—local doctors and ministers—were also quoted. They emphasized the benefits and opportunities the project provided for incoming residents. Rev. A. Lincoln Criglar, minister of Mt. Moriah, said, “From a spiritual as well as a material point of view . . . it will give our people not only comfort but hope, in a chance to escape from some of the depressing conditions under which they have been forced to live.” 47 The Capital gave a detailed, condescending account of moving day, implying that the rest of the town was doing the blacks a big favor. The story was voyeuristic, describing the furniture and decor of the homes as though they were a spectacle: “It was evident that there has been a good deal of furniture refinishing going on recently. Everybody wanted his belongings to be in keeping with the new surroundings.” The reporter spied a “comfortable wooden rocking chair resplendent in a new coat of

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apple green,” and said that “curtains that weren’t brand new had been laundered within an inch of their lives” to “dress up” the house. 48 The Housing Authority announced that the public was invited to attend the dedication ceremonies and “open house” on September 22, 1940. The new residents planned the ceremony themselves. Several thousand spectators joined in singing the opening song, “America.” Speakers, predominantly black leaders from Annapolis and Baltimore, reminded the new residents to “take care of the project.” Several black speakers remarked on the progress and loyalty of blacks. Another flattered the whites in the audience by saying, “The American white man is the best friend the black man ever had.” In the afternoon, many of Annapolis’s residents, visitors from New England, Baltimore, and Frederick, Maryland, and U.S. Housing officials from Washington, DC, attended the open house. 49 Rents ranged from $17.25 to $18.50 a month, less than the $23 to $26.50 rents that many of the tenants had been paying. The new families made from $416 to about $1,000 a year. A third of the families were employed at the Naval Academy, and many of the women were domestics. In writing its profile of the tenants, the Capital took delight in the fact that “there are ‘human interest’ stories galore.” 50 The same summer the tenants moved into College Creek Terrace, the city council debated what constituted a “decent, safe and sanitary dwelling” for a proposed ordinance drafted by the Housing Authority. Alderman Fisher, who was white, did not think a kitchen sink was a necessity. “We are not living in Russia yet.” He also objected to the hot water requirement. “Everyone is not born with a silver spoon in their mouth. Some have to heat water on a stove.” 51 The Housing Authority responded that it wanted the indoor sink and shower because “in the eradication of slums one of the principal things is to teach people the necessity of cleanliness. There has got to be some provision for the occupants to bathe if they are expected to be clean.” The Housing Authority also disagreed that electric lights were a luxury; they would reduce the risk of fires in the homes. 52 One white property owner, Charles W. Smith, Jr., who suggested that “Stalin must have dictated the specifications” proposed by the Housing Authority, claimed that landlords could not afford to renovate their properties to meet the new specifications and still make money on a monthly rent of $10, the Capital reported. Alderman Oliver countered that landlords had not spent any money on their properties for twenty years, and the costs of improvements would not be that great. 53 In 1941, as the Naval Academy acquired the Hell Point neighborhood to expand its athletic facilities, an assessor surveyed the area to ascertain the value of the sixty-two land lots. He described a hierarchy of place and residents. “An infiltration of Negroes and Filipinos and intermarriage with white persons tends to develop inharmonious characteristics and

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create an undesirable environment. The trend is, therefore, towards a less desirable residential section” in Holland Street. The houses on Prince George Street, where the better-off whites resided, were “better in type, construction, repair and occupancy than those opposite [emphasis added].” The impression the appraiser recorded after interviewing residents of the alley Block Street was that they were the “typical ‘alley’ type, rather shiftless and lacking in stability.” He noted that some of the homes were in poor condition, the toilets were situated in the back of the houses, and people lived without electricity. 54 In October 1941, the Hell’s Point properties were condemned; the more than one hundred families were told to leave by mid-December. The council had not objected to the project, probably afraid that the academy would move out of town, something it periodically threatened. Perhaps for the first time, a Capital editorial expressed concern about residents being forced out of their homes: “Certainly there should be some organized system arranged to help them as a group rather than leave it to each one to work things out as best he can. It appears that this aid and guidance is a duty of the municipality.” It continued, “A considerable block of citizens who for years have contributed to the support of the city are involved. Certainly it is their right to look to the city to help them in their difficulty.” The deadline was extended to mid-March. The Navy demolished the buildings that summer. 55 The Housing Authority and county and state governments initiated condemnation proceedings of other structures to clear land for new projects. Land on Chestnut and Compromise streets, the location of a store, apartment house, and tenements where blacks lived, was selected as the site of the Community Recreation Center for whites. In March 1944, the council voted 8–1 to approve the demolition of the buildings. By the fall, over the objections of the two black aldermen, the council voted to pay the court costs to eject black tenants who had not moved out of the Chestnut Street tenements. One family moved into one of the vacated apartments after it had been condemned. Alderman Addison defended their unwillingness to move: “These people are human. . . . Some work at the Naval Academy and don’t earn much money. One family has ten or twelve children. This is no time for these people, or those in other hazardous houses to evacuate. They have no place to go.” 56 In the fall of 1945, Dr. William French, the white city health officer, reported that Paca Street, where working-class blacks lived in dilapidated houses, was “not fit for human habitation” because the sewage pipes drained into College Creek, a “health hazard to St. John’s students and to midshipmen who use the Navy boathouse.” French recommended that either the homes be razed or repaired. He would have suggested this earlier, he said, but “places to live in Annapolis are extremely scarce.” 57 The next month, Henry F. Sturdy, the white chairman of “Clean-Up Week,” inspected the town with an Evening Capital reporter and found

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that living conditions on certain streets of the city were terrible. Some houses leaked, were “flimsily constructed or reconverted two by four chicken houses with curtains hanging over the doorways. . . . [They] have outside toilets to which water must be carried in order that they function properly.” Others were near a garbage dump. 58 Blacks probably resided in most of these houses, and for years, unnoticed until the federal government enacted its housing laws. Attempts to alleviate the situation moved slowly at best. The council discussed these complaints and those of Dr. French. Israel Legum, one of the sons of Morris Legum, the developer of much of the Fourth Ward, mentioned earlier, owned one of the “disgraceful” properties described in French’s report. Legum told the city council he would tear down three of the eight properties on Paca Street and build fifteen new houses there if the city would install a sewer line. 59 C. H. Rawlins, the city sanitarian, a white woman, also inspected parts of the city during “Clean-Up Week.” She often noticed that two black families lived in one house with no running water—there were 133 such homes in the town. Water had to be carried upstairs, and because there were no drains, the dirty water had to be thrown out the windows, exacerbating unsanitary conditions. However, she was encouraged by “the number of clean and orderly yards which I found,” the Capital reported. Black and white veterans groups reported that many enlisted men’s families awaited housing. In some cases as many as three black families lived in one house. 60 John T. Chambers, the president of the NAACP and the owner of a barbershop, wrote to the mayor in early 1946 to complain about the shortage of decent housing for blacks in general and returning black veterans in particular. In his blunt letter, which was quoted extensively in the Evening Capital, he remarked, “Years of discrimination and segregation have resulted in the confining of Negroes to old houses and to the worst slum areas of our city. Here in Annapolis the situation requires immediate correction. The inadequate housing facilities available for Negroes are already overcrowded.” He declared the “plight of Negro veterans and service men is so much more desperate that we ask you to give it your special consideration.” 61 As city officials debated the problems of the housing shortage and housing stock, private citizens began to discuss these issues. In May 1947, members of the local Council of Church Women, a white group, organized a meeting that was attended by members of Mt. Moriah, Asbury, First Baptist, and St. Philip’s churches. It is unclear from the account whether the black churchgoers were invited, or if they came on their own to an open meeting, but this was the first community effort involving both groups as equals since blacks and whites challenged the municipal voting law in 1909. It was a collaboration of the two populations, instead of each population running parallel and separate projects. 62

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Mrs. Francis H. Morton, the white executive secretary of the Citizen’s Housing and Planning Commission of Baltimore, formed in 1941, was the guest speaker. Two hundred blacks, she said, were on the waiting list at College Creek Terrace, which had about two vacancies a year. She recommended clearing one block at a time, constructing public housing, and encouraging private development through governmental subsidies. 63 While the citizens group was getting organized, more houses were condemned, reducing the housing stock even further, such as eight properties on Dock and Paca streets. The tenants, however, were not moving out. The town planned to develop a park in the Dock Street area. The eight houses on Paca Street that Legum wanted to rebuild were scheduled for demolition because the council decided to eliminate the sewer lines that were emptying into College Creek. These houses were still standing a year later, in 1948, when French told the council they should be torn down “immediately. As it is now, nondescript individuals are moving into these houses, creating a nuisance [emphasis added],” the Capital reported. 64 Another wave of destruction of black properties took place from the spring of 1948 until the winter of 1949. The county planned to construct an addition to its courthouse and an office building, and developer W. W. Townsend wanted to build an office building in the small triangular block off Church Circle. The county commissioners gave the ten black families living on South Street about two months to move out of their homes. These residents, many of them prominent members of the community and homeowners, wrote a letter to the county commissioners; an excerpt was published in the Capital: “We the occupants of these houses find that we don’t have ample time. We are sure you will take this into consideration. We are sure that you are aware of the acute housing problem and as well thinking persons, realize that it is almost impossible to rent or buy. It is possible that some few of us could find places with sympathetic relatives, temporarily.” They went on to say, “This, however, would create another problem, a health problem.” 65 Later that spring, concerned blacks and whites debated a third initiative that could alter the Annapolis landscape drastically, particularly in the Fourth Ward. The State Roads Commission was studying where to build a better access road to Annapolis. Initially proposed in 1945, the route would go down Clay Street and cut right through the Fourth Ward. An alternative plan involved the widening of West Street, already one of the main entry points into the town. Annapolis blacks participated actively in the ensuing public debate, not as sideline witnesses. McNeil, the dentist, wrote a letter to the paper, noting the increasing shortage of decent housing for blacks, a serious problem that would only be aggravated by the construction of this road. “I cannot understand why the various civic groups and organizations have not endorsed the alternative road plan,” he wrote. The next day, Dr.

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Johnson angrily protested the planned road in a letter to the Capital: “This is a shameful situation, and a very poor reflection upon our city administration, namely the mayor and the city council, to permit the State to come in our city and make such a plan.” He put himself on a par with white citizens. “This is not a protest as a colored citizen, but a protest as a citizen of the City of Annapolis. Certainly, the citizens in the Fourth Ward are a part of the city. Again, the city administration should be reminded if the proposed plan is carried out, there will be hundreds of colored citizens rendered homeless, and no place provided in which they may readjust themselves.” 66 The Evening Capital published an editorial that expressed more concern for black residents than it had previously: “The heart has been torn out of the colored home area on South Street, first for an office building and then for the extension of the courthouse. . . . Should people be forced out of homes without a place to go? A situation of this kind would not only be a confession of inadequacy upon the part of the community, but would mean suffering to many of its citizens, some of the native born Annapolitans, some who have never known another home.” 67 This was a municipal-election year, and the issue came up in campaigns. The Metropolitan Republican Club, presumably white, endorsed the black doctor, Theodore S. Johnson, and dentist, Norman H. Williams, as their candidates for city aldermen. The club also passed a resolution objecting to the State Road Commission’s plan for the connector road to go through the Fourth Ward. Three mayoral candidates favored the West Street route, as did the West Street Businessmen’s Association. A few days later, more than 175 people from the Fourth Ward, the Businessmen’s Association of West Street Extended, and other organizations of blacks and whites appeared before the city council to encourage the street committee to persuade the State Roads Commission to find another route. The mayor told the group that the city council had opposed the plan in 1945. The council approved a resolution opposing the Clay Street route. 68 But the road debate continued. Archibald Coleman Rogers, a white architect, wrote a letter to the Capital supporting the Clay Street route for future development. For him, there was no trade-off. The road was more important than a “slum area.” Joseph Armstrong, a white Republican, wrote the Capital, “I object to the language Mr. Rogers uses in reference to the area in question—I took the trouble to look up the definition of the word “slum. . . . ‘A back street of a city, especially one filled with a poor, dirty and vicious population.’” He then asked that the paper “retract that statement for those living on Clay Street,” and said that the “U.S. government spent millions of dollars on displaced people of Europe but not building homes for displaced persons of Annapolis.” It would be several more years before the route was selected. 69

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During this decade, blacks in Annapolis were beneficiaries rather than victims of government initiatives in recreation. Recreation for children became synonymous with good conduct and civic behavior. The College Creek Terrace project created Annapolis’s first playground for black children. The WPA office trained and paid black staff to run the programs, which, as mentioned earlier, included the playground for preschool children and evening classes for adults in the community building, where the library was also located. The Housing Authority gave the center a good secondhand piano. 70 By August 1943, a group of black leaders including ministers Bowman, Morgan, Croll, and Criglar, Dr. Richardson, civic leaders Carroll Hynson, Emma Hall Stepney, William Fletcher, Ida Harris, and Alderman Oliver formed the Citizen’s Recreational Council. It sponsored weekly activities at Bates High School and at the College Creek Terrace playground. The activities at Bates included volleyball and softball games, marbles tournaments, and dances. The Negro Interurban League organized a basketball league and junior and senior softball teams, which played at Bates High School and College Creek Terrace. 71 While they initially did not collaborate, concerned blacks and whites wanted to find larger spaces for segregated playgrounds to prevent juvenile delinquency, which the townspeople now associated with idle youth who had no place to play. In these discussions, blacks were not seen as more prone to delinquency than whites. 72 The Armory, churches, fraternal organizations, Bates, the Assembly Rooms, and now College Creek Terrace community center were the locations for large indoor black adult entertainment and dances. After the war began, the black USO on Northwest Street became another center of education and entertainment. A number of committed blacks organized USO recreation programs, including Drs. Johnson, McNeil, and Garcia, Alderman Addison, teacher Frank B. Butler, and naval employee William H. Richardson, the husband of Eloise Richardson. 73 The city received a grant of $70,300 to build and equip two centers for veterans. It allocated $50,000 for the construction costs of a white center and $10,000 to buy equipment, and gave the black USO $10,000 to purchase and refurbish the Anchor Club and $300 to buy equipment. At the end of March 1942, the white USO opened in the newly constructed Community Center at the corner of Compromise and Chestnut streets, where black tenements had been razed. The black USO at the converted Anchor Club opened in July. After the war, the USO continued to operate for another two and a half years, when the building was converted to a YMCA. Blacks maintained it as a center for intellectual, cultural, social, and athletic endeavors for themselves. 74 In the summer of 1947, the Greater Annapolis Recreation Group, a coalition of white organizations formed in 1940, voted to include blacks on its executive board. This was the first organization to expand its mem-

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bership to include blacks. While the two population groups discussed recreational needs for the city and ways to raise money for playground equipment, they still planned for separate, segregated facilities. 75 Health issues, like recreation concerns, brought blacks and whites together and kept them apart. While segregated health initiatives continued, some boundaries between the two populations became slightly porous. Until 1948, the Red Cross reinforced the segregation. It held separate fundraising drives, and it segregated its health classes. It taught black students first aid at its offices in the old high school building on Green Street, and a white teacher taught blacks nutrition in March 1945 at College Creek Terrace. In 1947, it offered its first twelve-hour home-nursing class for black women; thirteen students graduated. Two white registered nurses were the instructors. In November of that year, it opened its board to blacks, the fourth white organization to desegregate that year. The black appointee was Mary Campbell, a vocational counselor at Bates High School. By 1948, after much criticism from black organizations, the Red Cross’s national office announced that it would no longer segregate black and white blood donations. 76 Blacks still held Negro Health Week each year, even during the war. Its “special objective” in 1943 was “Health on the Home Front—Victory on the War Front.” The campaign’s goal that year was to educate blacks about their own health problems, “which remain with them constantly.” In 1948, Dr. Charles Drew, one of the creators of the blood bank during World War II and a professor at Howard University Medical School, spoke candidly about black health problems at Asbury. The Capital reported that Drew listed the “loss of too many mothers and babies, of poor economic conditions, improper feeding, poor housing and improper clothing” as problems for the government to deal with. 77 During this period, two new black doctors came to town, and with their guidance, blacks in Annapolis established their own health clinic in Parole. After three years of fundraising, it opened in 1947. Dr. Theodore S. Johnson opened his maternity clinic in January 1945 with two nurses, Agnes Johnson and Dorothy Addison, wife of the alderman. Both women were graduates of the St. Paul Practical Nurses School in Baltimore. The clinic had a reception room, an examination room, a delivery room, a ward for in-patients, a nursery, a kitchen, a physical therapy room, and the doctor’s private office. 78 Eloise Richardson argued in her Capital column that the high infant mortality rate of black babies was more related to a lack of proper medical care “than racial or physical [causes].” She mentioned that “the one community hospital which serves Annapolis and a radius outside of Annapolis makes no facilities available for Negro births.” This was a problem for some mothers who had difficult deliveries that were more than Dr. Johnson could handle. After being refused help at the local hospital,

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they would have to rush to Washington, DC or Baltimore. Sometimes the trip took too long, and the baby suffered. 79 Black doctors still could not practice at the Emergency Hospital in Annapolis. The doctor could request admission for his patient, but a white staff physician would provide care. To be admitted as a staff physician of the hospital, a doctor had to be a member of the Anne Arundel County Medical Society, which required recommendations from other society members, all of whom were white. No black had yet been recommended. This professional isolation took its toll. Dr. Allen recollected to his biographer, “There is a certain respect that one has as a result of being a part of a hospital; a certain standing and a certain self-confidence. I missed all of that during those first years. . . . I found myself wondering, ‘Can I really measure up? Do I have the skills of the white doctors?’ It was a profoundly difficult situation.” He said, “I was made to feel inferior. Many of us still carry this . . . when you are out there all alone, you begin to develop a feeling of isolation; a sense that you do not belong. You miss the very motivating factor that keeps a professional going—on the outside there is no one to compare yourself to or compete with.” He “wanted very much to demonstrate to them that I could produce. I had a responsibility to do it; and a desire to show that I was not inferior.” 80 Whites in Annapolis wanted segregated medical facilities. In a speech before the Civitan Club in 1946, Dr. French remarked, “I hope someday provision will be made to enlarge the hospital in order to take care of the colored population” with its own maternity ward, the Capital reported. He said the hospital was inadequate. It could only care for six black female patients, and was still not able to accept black maternity cases. The state-sponsored maternal and child health clinic still saw black and white patients at different times of the day. Dr. Allen now worked at the clinic for blacks. Whites maintained separate campaigns for cancer, March of Dimes, and tuberculosis. 81 Rev. Bowman and Dr. Allen both had unpleasant experiences when they tried to register with their political party. Rev. Bowman intended to register as a Democrat, but he was told “by the Democrats that they didn’t need black people’s votes cause there were enough of them to take care of their own business.” Bowman also learned that among black Republicans in the town, “if they knew another black or other blacks had become Democrats, they wouldn’t speak to them for the rest of their lives. So I was caught between a rock and a hard place. So I became a Republican,” he recalled many years later. 82 Allen had the opposite experience. He tried to register as a Republican at the courthouse. He was received cordially, his biographer wrote, but he was told that he “could not register as a Republican; that I would have to register as a Democrat.” He had heard that “Democratic appointees were firmly entrenched in the Court House, but he did not anticipate such a blatant demonstration.” He registered as a Democrat. After a

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while he realized that white Democrats were almost indifferent to black voters. Other black leaders who were Republicans told him that local “Republican officials were more responsive to the needs and concerns of the black community.” By early 1949, Allen switched his registration to the Republican Party. 83 Municipal elections continued to be lively in the black community. Though women were active in many civic organizations, they had not yet put themselves forward as candidates in the elections. The 1941 Hatch Act required that aldermen holding government jobs had to run as independents. This meant that Charles A. Oliver, who was head of the College Creek Terrace housing project, had to get 500 signatures on a petition to qualify to run as an independent. The Capital described him as “one of the most active colored residents of the community.” The NAACP, on the other hand, had criticized him for being an “Uncle Tom,” as described previously. 84 Not long after Oliver filed his petition, two other black men, both Republicans, entered the race against him and the other incumbent, Charles L. Spriggs. One of the new candidates was James J. Brown, age sixty-two. A graduate of Stanton, he had worked at the Maryland Inn. Brown was a Mason and a member of Mt. Moriah. Alphonse George Addison, age thirty-seven, also a native of Annapolis, was the other new candidate. He attended St. Mary’s School, Bates High School, and Bowie State Normal School. A former schoolteacher, he worked for the Consolidated Gas and Electric Company, and was active in Republican organizations and the Catholic Church. Spriggs and Addison won the Republican primary and the general election that year. 85 When Spriggs died in office in 1942, voters from the Fourth Ward submitted letters and petitions to the city council supporting Oliver, Dr. George Thomas, Dr. Ambrose Garcia, and Walter W. Adams as candidates to replace Spriggs. Addison said he would have preferred that residents of the Fourth Ward made the final selection and not the council. He nominated Adams, whose petition got 273 signatures, more than any other candidate. Adams worked as a steward at the Annapolis Yacht Club. He was also the secretary of the organization that was setting up the USO on Northwest Street. A white alderman, Bernard Hoff, nominated Thomas. The council voted by secret ballot and Adams won. 86 In the 1945 municipal election, Dr. Oliver W. H. NcNeil, the dentist, entered the race. He graduated from Morgan College in Baltimore and Howard University Dental College. A second new candidate was Rev. Benjamin Holt. A barber, he was a lay preacher at Asbury, sometimes an officiate at NAACP meetings, and a counselor to John Snowden, hanged for the murder of Lottie May Brandon. Other entrants were the two incumbents, Walter W. Adams, who had to take a leave of absence from the council to serve in the Navy, and Alphonse G. Addison. Charles A. Oliver ran again. He and Adams won. 87

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More black players entered the stage in 1949. The Metropolitan Republican Club endorsed two newcomers, Dr. Theodore Johnson and Norman Williams, a dentist, for alderman from the Fourth Ward. A week later, McNeil, who announced his candidacy, objected to the committee’s endorsement in a letter to the editor of the Capital. He complained that the organization “didn’t consult Fourth Ward . . . many citizens of Fourth Ward protest any political groups selecting candidates without their consent.” 88 Oliver, who entered the race in March, also objected to the endorsement of his rivals in a letter to the editor of the Capital. The “Metropolitan Republican Club feels that it has a mandate to come into the Fourth Ward and out of a number of candidates without due regard for the essential things necessary for ‘office’ holders . . . experience, political ability and wisdom, to select men who, they think, should satisfy the residents,” he said. “Their endorsement may bring about a spirit of resentment and create division.” 89 Black aldermen were still the minority on the council and had difficulty persuading their white colleagues to improve conditions in the Fourth Ward. For example, limiting the number of stores that sold liquor in the Fourth Ward and getting sufficient support from the police to curtail drunken behavior received little to no white support. Each year white aldermen granted liquor licenses to stores in the neighborhood and rejected motions to add more foot patrols in the Fourth Ward. 90 By 1944, black high school students who were interested in politics and civics could participate in the model legislature. The Hi-Y Clubs, a “citizenship training project of the YMCA in high schools” around the state, sponsored the program. The 154 student legislators included eleven students from Douglass High School and Dunbar High School of Baltimore, and five students from Bates. Governor Herbert O’Conor welcomed them at the opening of the mock session. That evening, the boys attended a dinner at Carvel Hall, normally off-limits to black diners. The students sat in both the Senate and House of Delegates, debated and voted on bills that were proposed by Hi-Y clubs throughout the state. While a civil rights bill, which would have “guaranteed civil rights to all citizens without regard to race,” was rejected, the model legislature passed a bill to repeal the Jim Crow laws mandating separate transportation facilities. 91 Their adult counterparts were not able to accomplish this for some time. Like the teachers’ pay bill, the Jim Crow repeal bill came up for debate in each legislature. The first “repealer” was introduced in 1922. People came to the capitol to register their support or opposition at the committee hearings. In 1945, many people converged at the statehouse to urge the repeal of the law. Representatives of the Anne Arundel County NAACP, the Anne Arundel group of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and the local Elks were among them. Governor

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O’Conor spoke in favor of its repeal. Nearly 300 whites and blacks appeared at a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee. Whites expressed new concerns about the impact of Jim Crow—a fear of racial anger and the need for labor. The president of the Association of Commerce said, “The world is finding out it can’t get along with a master race and an inferior one. The negro is doing his share on the home front and at the battle front,” the Capital reported. As was the biannual practice, however, the House killed the bill. 92 Blacks remembered the Jim Crow experience in the town, years later. “It never dawned on you that you could eat in there,” said one about restaurants in Annapolis. One mother walked her children by the restaurant where their father worked. She “told her kids to look in, but that they could not go in.” She had to explain, “There were laws that black people can’t go in white restaurants.” Another recalled that she “didn’t go to stores . . . person would holler at you when you came in.” 93 Others recollected the petty insults whites inflicted on them. Martha Alsop, a fourth-grade teacher and wife of the new restaurant owner, Mason Alsop, recalled that when a nurse called her Martha, she “took it as an insult and lack of respect.” She did not complain because “I was afraid I wouldn’t get her medicine.” Instead, she corrected her by saying, “Thank you, Sally.” The nurse replied, “I didn’t know you were a teacher.” 94 NOTES 1. EC, April 11, 1944. 2. Bowman, interview; EC, September 27, 1947; April 16, 1949. 3. EC, September 2, 1944; November 28, 1944; April 14, 1943; March 11, 1948. 4. EC, March 13, 1946; March 14, 1946. 5. EC, March 13, 1946; April 10, 1946; July 1, 1946; May 1, 1946. 6. EC, June 11, 1946; AA, March 30, 1946; April 6, 1946; April 13, 1946; EC, July 1, 1946; August 27, 1946. Rollins had served numerous high-ranking naval and governmental dignitaries, including President Warren Harding. He had become acquainted with many of the officers at the academy and knew members of the U.S. Senate Naval Affairs Committee, including Senator David L. Walsh, a Democrat from Massachusetts, who visited him while he was awaiting his court-martial in the Reina Mercedes, a ship docked off the academy, where he was confined. EC, June 14, 1946; AA, April 13, 1946, June 22, 1946. 7. AA, July 6, 1946; August 31, 1946; September 7, 1946; May 11, 1946; EC, August 4, 1946; June 25, 1947. 8. EC, October 1, 1946; January 11, 1947. 9. EC, October 22, 1947; February 7, 1948. 10. EC, March 2, 1948; March 9, 1948; May 5, 1948; June 22, 1948; June 12, 1948. 11. EC, September 14, 1948. 12. Letter from Josephine C. Young, April 26, 1940 to National Office, NAACP Records; Brown, The Other Annapolis, 119; Woodward, The Strange Career, 124. 13. EC, August 8, 1947; March 7, 1945; January 27, 1949. 14. EC, July 24, 1946; July 12, 1946; August 12, 1946; Bowman, interview. 15. Bowman, interview.

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16. EC, April 1, 1941; February 8, 1941; AA, Apri1 1, 1941. 17. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Census. 1943. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940. Census Population of 1940, Vol. II. Characteristics of the Population, Part 3, Kansas–Michigan, 521. 18. EC, October 28, 1947; February 20, 1947, Brown, A Century, 49. 19. EC, May 17, 1948; December 6, 1948. 20. EC, March 4, 1948; Brown, A Century, 56–58, 50. 21. EC, February 8, 1947; February 12, 1947. 22. EC, February 17, 1946. 23. EC, April 4, 1940; May 13, 1946; June 8, 1943. 24. EC, March 21, 1947. 25. EC, October 22, 1946; October 17, 1947; December 6, 1948. 26. EC, June 14, 1946; June 13, 1947; September 11, 1948. 27. OHI with three people. 28. EC, April 20, 1949. 29. EC, September 24, 1943; February 6, 1946; February 18, 1944. 30. EC, August 28, 1942; October 28, 1948; March 28, 1947. 31. OHI; Alsop, interview. 32. EC, April 27, 1948. The historian C. Vann Woodward points out that there was a perceptible growth of “urban liberal strength in the South” at this time, which may have also begun in Annapolis among some faculty at St. John’s and among some white civic leaders who started collaborating with blacks. Woodward, 124–40. 33. EC, August 11, 1948. 34. Bowman, interview. 35. EC, July 9, 1940; December 20, 1940; October 12, 1940; November 28, 1940; February 15, 1941; Jones, Labor of Love, 217. 36. U.S. Department of Commerce. Bureau of Census. 1943. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940. Census Population of 1940, Vol. II. Characteristics of the Population, Part 3, Kansas–Michigan. 37. OHI. 38. OHI. 39. EC, May 1, 1946. 40. OHI; EC, June 22, 1945. 41. OHI. 42. OHI. 43. One-third of the public housing units constructed in the United States during this time were for blacks, who benefited more from this program than any other federal program. Franklin and Moss, From Slavery to Freedom, 397; OHI. 44. EC, January 10, 1940; February 3, 1940; February 1, 1940; February 26, 1940. 45. EC, April 17, 1940; April 23, 1940. 46. EC, August 12, 1940. 47. Ibid. 48. EC, August 17, 1940. 49. Ibid.; EC, September 23, 1940. 50. EC, September 10, 1940. 51. EC, July 9, 1940. 52. EC, July 10, 1940. 53. EC, July 16, 1940. 54. “Appraisal of Hell Point, Annapolis, Maryland, 1941”; Jopling and Matthews, “The Spatial Discourse of Hell Point.” 55. McWilliams, 294; EC, October 11, 1941; October 16, 1941. 56. EC, January 13, 1942; January 6, 1942; March 25, 1944; October 10, 1944. 57. EC, November 15, 1945. 58. EC, November 3, 1945. 59. EC, November 15, 1945. 60. Ibid.; EC, December 12, 1945; March 14, 1946.

Struggles, 1940–1949 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 1949. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

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EC, February 12, 1946. EC, May 3, 1947. Ibid. EC, September 10, 1947; September 11, 1947; November 11, 1947; April 16, 1948. EC, March 3, 1948; March 31, 1948; July 28, 1948; December 22, 1948; January 27, EC, April 27, 1949; April 28, 1949. EC, May 2, 1949. EC, April 30, 1949; May 7, 1949; May 10, 1949. EC, May 11, 1949; May 13, 1949. EC, September 7, 1940. EC, August 6, 1943; April 27, 1945; March 13, 1946. EC, December 10, 1945; December 12, 1945; December 17, 1945. EC, September 5, 1941. EC, October 15, 1941; November 21, 1941; January 6, 1942. EC, July 23, 1947; August 30, 1947; September 17, 1947. AA, April 3, 1948; EC, January 18, 1940; March 1, 1945; February 1, 1947. EC, March 13, 1940; March 31, 1943; April 10, 1948. EC, June 22, 1948. Ibid.; OHI. May, Achieving the American Dream, 185–88, emphasis added. EC, November 1, 1946; August 17, 1949; April 14, 1949; December 17, 1948. Bowman, interview. May, 196, 214–16. EC, May 30, 1941; July 5, 1941. EC, June 14, 1941; June 17, 1941; July 5, 1941. EC, April 14, 1942. EC, May 15, 1945; June 19, 1945. EC, April 30, 1949; May 4, 1949. EC, March 29, 1949; May 6, 1949. EC, September 10, 1946. AA, May 9, 1944. EC, March 21, 1945; March 9, 1945. OHI with three people. Alsop, interview.

SIXTEEN Own Worlds, 1940–1949

As Rev. Bowman described life in the Fourth Ward after his arrival from Washington, DC, “Lots of people [lived] in that area and it was a more or less self-contained society. We had everything over there that people needed. We had shops, we had churches, we had schools, we had hotels, we had businesses, all kinds of businesses, drugstores. . . . So it was a well-contained community but it was a city, I guess, with a kind of country atmosphere.” 1 Rev. Bowman’s mother cried when she came to Annapolis and saw First Baptist Church, where her son would preach. “It is a wonder the city didn’t make them tear it down. It was leaning on one side. There were two restrooms, but one wasn’t functioning. Plaster was coming off the wall. The members of the Sunday school sat on four chairs.” Bowman recalled. So he “had the building straightened up . . . had brick siding put on and made it look real good . . . little by little, they fixed it up.” He talked with his congregation—120 of them at the beginning—about expanding their missionary work. After services on Sundays, they visited homes throughout the town to talk about the church. Sometimes, they visited the family of a church member for a small meal or hot chocolate, and to evangelize. “Little by little the church became crowded.” Bowman and his First Baptist Church choir “became radio personalities” after they started broadcasting services on WANN, the local radio station Blum launched and within a short time played rhythm and blues songs popular among blacks. “We were a little struggling, striving church, and I wanted to send a message out to encourage those listeners.” 2 Bowman, a tall, handsome man with a dark moustache and a kindly demeanor, taught that the church really was “what we might call the shock absorber. It helped us to absorb that shock, took some of the hurt out of it all.” Helping his congregation live with white discrimination 251

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was a challenge. “That’s a terrible thing to have to deal with . . . segregation . . . robs people of their self-esteem and sense of personal worth. That’s one of the reasons why we are so religious,” he explained. 3 Other churches engaged in advancement. A campaign to build a new Catholic Church, St. Augustine’s, in the Fourth Ward began in 1944. The rector of St. Mary’s announced that the church had become overcrowded so the diocese would build a new church exclusively for the 400 black parishioners. But this redbrick “colonial-style” church took six years to complete. Its estimated cost—$35,000 in 1944—rose to $75,000 by March 1948, not including the classrooms for the church school. 4 The black parishioners worked hard to raise this daunting sum. The building campaign committee included the Addisons, Mary Wiseman and Eloise Duvall, two schoolteachers involved with the Girl Scouts, Joseph Duvall, a member of an old Annapolis family, and Marcellus Hall, a well-known figure in town who worked as bell captain at Carvel Hall, showed tourists around, and published a guidebook in 1936. Members of the Drexmore Club held picnics, rummage sales, and barn dances, showed the film The Living Story of the Bible, and organized a benefit dance at the Armory. Bates High School teachers read from the works of black poets at a talent night that also brought in funds. The St. Augustine’s choir sang spirituals at another benefit. 5 But the black Catholic congregation was shrinking. By April 1949, only about forty-two were attending church. Perhaps some felt pushed out and disillusioned by the white church. The committee “had to depend on non-Catholics and lapsed Catholics” as well as white Catholics to raise the money. The committee organized interracial events, such as a basketball games, movies, game parties, a variety show, and chicken dinners. Donations “began pouring in from all over the country,” the Capital reported, as well as from black and white contributors in Annapolis. 6 Other black congregations raised funds for their churches. In 1944, Mt. Moriah held an elaborate mortgage burning service to celebrate paying off a $4,000 mortgage, almost twice the amount Asbury parishioners raised in 1905. One Asbury parishioner remembered taking “her envelope around to raise money” for Women’s Day. She “used to make cakes and sell them, but that was taking from you to help me,” she realized. After she “got older, I stopped going around, and sacrificed and put my own money in the envelope.” 7 Parishioners celebrated black accomplishments. Purnell Duncan, a county teacher, gave a talk on “Outstanding Men and Women of the Colored Race” at Mt. Moriah. Second Baptist Church held a special program on “The Achievement of the American Negro in World War Two.” The Wayside Tabernacle Church on Taylor Street observed the eightysixth anniversary of Emancipation Day. 8 Congregations worked to improve life in the Fourth Ward. At Second Baptist, they heard from Dr. Allen and John T. Chambers, who talked

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about “A Healthy Home in a Healthy Community” for Negro Health Week. Some attended monthly NAACP meetings at different churches and joined its campaigns against unequal employment opportunities and the housing shortage for blacks. Churchgoers raised money to help graduating Bates seniors get to college. Churches aided families displaced by fires in their homes. They bought clothing for families whose children had no “Sunday best” outfits. Sometimes they helped members pay a month’s rent. Each week, ministers and members of congregations visited the sick and shut-in. 9 The fraternal organizations also enhanced services in the black community. The Elks, whose jukebox neighbors could hear every night, sponsored an Education Week and held an oratorical contest for Bates students. They collaborated with other organizations to raise funds for Stanton, for scholarships for graduating Bates seniors, and for the YMCA. The Masons were among the donors to the Better Health Campaign, which raised more than $4,000 for the Parole Health Clinic in 1945. 10 Other adults worked to help the youth. A group of businessmen and women including Mason Alsop, restaurant owner, John Chambers, the barber and head of the NAACP, morticians Reese and Hicks, Dr. Thomas, the pharmacist, Wardell Mowbry, the cobbler, and Jackson Cab Company donated money for Christmas treats for the Stanton students. Two brothers, Philip Brown (no relation of the teacher) and John H. Brown, a former drummer at the Star Theatre when it showed silent films, organized the popular marching bands for youngsters—the Marching Club and the Annapolitan Drum and Bugle Corps. Growing numbers of graduates formed alumni associations for Stanton and Bates schools and Morgan State College. They held annual dances to raise money for scholarships. 11 Blacks established clubs for everything. After the war, two groups of professional women formed sororities. Under the leadership of Rachel Carter Smith, a group of teachers organized the Alpha Mu Chapter of Phi Delta Kappa in 1946 “to promote the highest teaching ideas and to encourage the development of the potential of our youth,” Brown wrote. Among its members were Martha Alsop, Mary Baden, and Rachel Brown. The Alpha Mu chapter organized panel discussions on childrearing at the YMCA. It held coffees, year-end picnics for its members, and dances at the state Armory to raise money for graduating high school seniors. In 1948, another group of women formed the Annapolis Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta, a sorority established at Howard University, which emphasized educational and cultural activities. The Deltas sponsored several speakers at Bates who discussed careers in social work, cosmetology, library sciences, nursing, teaching, medicine, agriculture, and mechanical arts. 12 In May 1947, at the instigation of Rev. Croll, a group of business and professional men, including Walter T. Mills, J. B. Johnson, owner of the

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funeral parlor, doctors Allen and Johnson, Henry Bynum, director of the YMCA, William H. Richardson, a Naval Academy employee and husband of Eloise Richardson, and businessman Carroll Hynson, formed a “small informal fraternal organization.” Similar in membership to the early Banneker Literary Association of 1900 and the Business League, this group tackled the pressing problems of the day rather than the intellectual or economic uplift of the community. Like their predecessors, these men were involved in many civic and social activities in Annapolis. This group became a chapter of the Frontiers International of America, a black organization that resembled the Rotary or Lions. Rev. Croll hoped that the local chapter would focus on problems such as poor housing conditions. 13 Later that year, the black beauticians in Annapolis established a professional society to improve the cultural, moral, and spiritual standards in the community. Initially, the women concentrated on the prevention of juvenile delinquency. They raised money for the YMCA by holding a charity tea. Among its members were Carrie Johnson, Catherine Gray, and Mary Hamilton. These women, and the members of the sororities, resembled the women who formed the Mothers’ League in 1917. Active in many efforts to better conditions in the Fourth Ward, they worked to improve the life chances of youngsters through fundraising rather than provide direct services as their predecessors had. 14 Black adults belonged to organizations to better inform themselves. Members of the Negro Forum, under the leadership of Rachel Carter Smith, heard talks about elections, juvenile delinquency, and education. One evening, several educators and Dr. Allen discussed the theme of “Strengthening the Foundations of Freedom.” 15 Just as blacks took advantage of the opening of the Community Center for returning World War I veterans to organize more activities for themselves, at the start of World War II, blacks used the establishment of the USO, and then the YMCA, to launch more enrichment and entertainment programs for their community. Even before the Anchor Club had been refurbished, blacks organized events at various churches, the College Creek Terrace community center, and the Armory. Emmett Nelson taught saxophone, brass instruments, piano, and glee club singing. Others organized games, social hours, and talent nights. The Girls Service Organization (GSO) held discussions, Frank B. Butler, the science teacher at Bates, prepared students to take the high school equivalency examination and taught pinochle and bridge, and sailors formed a basketball team. The GSO and the Baltimore Girls Club held a dance, “A Night in Harlem.” According to the Afro, the Armory was turned into a nightclub with a floor show, a conga dance, and a balloon dance. 16 Once the USO opened in the Anchor Club, singing groups gave concerts; seminar groups discussed Pride and Prejudice and Plato’s Republic. The Interurban Recreation Association organized a softball league. The

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club showed movies including The Song of Bernadette. It observed Lincoln’s birthday. One year, an enlisted man read the Gettysburg Address. Tommy Baden’s “Aristocrats of Swing” played for some of the dances. One summer evening, the club held a “Night in the Jungle” party with “head hunters, medicine men, wild beasts and a voo doo band.” 17 With the conversion of the USO to the YMCA after the war, the club’s leaders developed programs for people of all ages and a place for the many community groups to meet. The schedule included young children 3:30–6 p.m.; teenagers 6–9:30 p.m.; and adults 9–11:30 p.m. Frank Smith, a noted black photographer, and his wife, Lois, started a camera club. Charlotte Johnson, who had grown up in the household of three wealthy white sisters and in the home of her refined parents, taught knitting. The Afro described her as “not pretty, but intelligent, well-educated and welldressed.” Eloise Richardson, a talented pianist as well as writer, held a music appreciation class for youngsters, and George Belt, a well-known prizefighter, taught boxing. 18 “You had to belong to a club to have a social life,” said a member of the Red Rose Club, which met monthly at different women’s homes. New social clubs sprang up with names like Orchids in Bloom, Purple Derby Social Club, and the Annapolis Gold and Social Club, while others faded. One woman got together with her friends and organized the “Bowettes.” They “met the third Monday of every month . . . they helped people, they had drinks and ate food, and they lay around and ran their mouths,” she recalled with a laugh. The members of the No Trump Bridge Club enjoyed a “delicious two-course turkey dinner” at a home decorated with spring flowers. One hostess of the Guess Who We Are Club offered a delicious repast at her home. She decorated the table with the club’s colors of pink, blue, and white. 19 Entre-Nous, another exclusive women’s club, composed largely of teachers, among them Lulu Hardesty, Charlotte Ruddock, Rachel Carter Smith, and Emma Hall Stepney, held monthly bridge games. They “got dressed up” for their evenings together, wearing nice dresses or suits, but didn’t hold dances. “They did not believe in drawing money from the public.” One woman, who worked as a domestic, could not afford to join a club. She said “mostly nice people” belonged to the Entre Nous. Her husband had a poker club. “They got together monthly at different homes for poker parties.” When the club came to her house, she prepared the food and retreated to another room, where she could hear quiet laughter. 20 Other men formed singing groups such as the Harmoneers and the Unknown Four. They gave concerts around town. Men organized sports teams, for example, the Peerless Rens Sport Club and Reese’s Stags basketball team. Anthony Brown, proprietor of Brown’s Hotel, started a football team known as the Red Devils, which competed with teams from other black communities. 21

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Some married couples gave parties in their basements, transformed into a small club with card tables covered in checked tablecloths. Naval Academy workers would party at the Naval Academy House when the white officers were not there. The El Progresso Club organized trips out of town. One year, it arranged a big expedition to Niagara Falls, traveling by train in seventeen coaches and three dining cars, according to Eloise Richardson’s column. 22 “Ladies would strut,” one remembered. It seemed that almost every weekend, clubs would have dances at the Armory and Waltz Dream Hall. “You put your best clothes on, music was good,” recalled one of the club-goers. A particular favorite was the valentine dance sponsored by the Rio Chelsea, another group of elite women, including Mary Hamilton, a beautician. “That went on for years. . . . People got all dressed up.” It was an “occasion, very orderly, exclusive. . . . Just because we lived segregated didn’t mean we didn’t dress up,” explained a woman who went every year. 23 Some blacks partied at the several hotels and little joints owned by blacks. One partier recalled Brown’s Hotel on Clay Street, which Anthony Brown had converted from a pool room. “Upstairs there were meeting rooms. Downstairs was the bar on one side where he sold whiskey. The other side was a cabaret with a three-, four-, or five-piece band,” she said. “Mr. Brown had a big stomach that hung down and cigar hanging out of his mouth. You had to respect women in his place. He would not allow bad language to be used. There was no fooling around. He didn’t allow youngsters in there either.” 24 Some dined at Mason Alsop’s restaurant, “a place where you could take your mother,” his wife recalled. Described as a “genial host” by Afro reporter Ollie Stewart, Alsop prepared him the “best piece of steak seen or eaten in a long, long time.” He opened the restaurant in 1946 after getting a loan from a bank to fix it up and eventually bought the place. He had learned the food business when he worked at Carvel Hall. His wife, Martha the teacher, and their children helped out. Another restaurant, Knight’s Barbeque, also opened in 1946. Its proprietor, Leonard Knight, was a Navy veteran whose wife, Corinne Knight, operated Milady’s Beauty Parlor next door to the restaurant on Northwest Street. She was a member of the Beauticians. 25 Parents engaged in school events of many kinds. At the College Creek Terrace preschool, they put on Halloween parties; they saw their children perform “Mother Goose Wedding.” At Stanton, they watched students read selections such as “Life” by Paul Laurence Dunbar, or put on sketches about Phillis Wheatley, Booker T. Washington, and Marian Anderson. Mothers came for Mothers’ Club meetings, like those of the Mothers’ League thirty years earlier. Parents of high school students went to Bates to watch their children perform skits, to participate in discussions, to listen to lectures and band concerts. 26

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Bates students organized many activities for themselves including a county fair, a Christmas party, a barn dance, a society dance, homecoming, and spring fiestas. The fine arts committee organized special evenings, some of which took place in the Armory to accommodate the large crowd. One year, Roland Hayes, a well-known tenor, performed. 27 Graduation had become a more elaborate community project. The schedule included a senior class play, an oratorical contest at First Baptist Church, a song and dance contest at the Armory, a sermon to the graduates at the Armory, class night at Bates High School, presentation of special awards and honors at Bates High School, and commencement at the Armory. By 1947, 125 students were graduating each year. A growing number were attending professional schools and college. Students received recognition from organizations such as the American Legion, the Elks, the St. Teresa Society, the Drexmore Club, and the El Progresso Club, as well as from individuals including Drs. Theodore H. Johnson, Raymond Richardson, and Norman H. Williams and the Anthony Browns. 28 At the Bates graduation in 1946, the president of Cheyney State Teachers College told the graduates to think of themselves as citizens, not Negroes. “We of the Negro race must stop thinking of ourselves as a minority group,” he said. “We must break through the confines of a racial group and become citizens of the world,” the Capital reported. 29 Some black citizens seemed more affluent after the war. They went on vacations. Businessman Carroll Hynson and Douglas King, the principal of Bates High School, went with their wives to Cleveland, then visited Greenfield Village built by Henry Ford, where they also saw the George Washington Carver House. They drove up to Ontario and Quebec, where King visited schools, before seeing Niagara Falls on the way south. 30 Hynson was becoming a successful realtor and bondsmen. He was born in Hynsontown on the Eastern Shore, a town named after his ancestors who helped build the town. Hynson came to Annapolis in 1919. He first worked as a huckster selling coal and wood. For fourteen years, he worked “with the Railroad Division of Mails at the Post Office.” He opened a bailbond business and may have been the only licensed black real estate broker and appraiser in the county. A member of the Asbury Church board, Hynson served on the management committee of the USO. 31 Some families could afford to host grand weddings, which signaled their high status. In June 1946, Adele Johnson and Solomon Offer, children of two old Annapolis black families, married at St. Mary’s. The altar was “banked with a profusion of spring flowers. The bride wore a white net gown of bouffant lines with a two-yard train and finger-tip veil arranged with a crown of seed pearls and single strand of pearls. . . . Her attendants were also in long bouffant style dresses,” Eloise Richardson reported in the Capital. The maid of honor and the mother of the bride

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wore blue, and the bridesmaids and the mother of the groom wore pink. The 125 guests went to St. Mary’s Hall for the reception, where they were served a piece of the four-tiered wedding cake. 32 Two months later, the children of two other prominent families married at Asbury—Delores Brown and Jerry H. Luck. Her godmother gave the reception at Northwest Street. Eloise Richardson’s detailed account reveals something of the wealth of the families. “Hundreds of gifts” were on display, including Gorham’s silver flatware and crystal ware. The bride wore a pink gabardine going-away suit with navy blue accessories and a set of earrings, brooch, and bracelet of aquamarine stones that her husband gave her. The couple drove off in a 1949 Buick sedan that was a gift of the groom’s father. 33 The illicit and disruptive side of life in the black world was still evident. One prostitute ran her business out of her home in downtown Annapolis. A man who had a sandwich shop ran a numbers operation on the side. His sister wondered if he paid off the police because he was never arrested, though others were caught up in police sweeps. Other men were arrested for playing craps. The owner of Cozy Cabin shot another man in the knee in the summer of 1943. The next summer, an argument between a local black man and a soldier resulted in the local hitting the soldier on the head with an ax. A woman cut a man badly with a broken bottle in Hutton Place in the fall of 1947. A few years later, a woman was murdered in Gott’s Court. 34 Blacks noticed more distinctions among themselves, and they divided themselves into more social classes. The “few affluent were those who worked in the Naval Academy, then the blue-collar workers, then the poor—those who had nothing—who worked part-time, and then those who sat on their buns and begged. . . . There was a bunch that used to hang around Dr. Thomas’s drugstore.” This was one teacher’s version of the social hierarchy of the black community. 35 Some thought “the dignified went to St. Philip’s.” The men of stature were the doctors and ministers, though one married pastor with several children had other children out of wedlock. People also respected midwives and teachers. Members of old Annapolis families such as the McPhersons, Browns, Badens, Phelps, Chases, Blackstones, and Grandisons were well regarded. Alderman Oliver was a “nice man. . . . He didn’t do very much for you,” thought one of his constituents. He was “a very graceful person, dignified, always in a suit,” said a member of an old family who wanted to dress well himself when he grew up. Rachel Carter Smith and Emma Hall Stepney were among the women leaders— ”one big and square and the other petite.” A girl from an elite family who grew up in the South Street area “thought everyone owned their own home.” She “wasn’t aware until her teens” of a social hierarchy, when she “discovered that some had outdoor toilets.” 36

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Color played a role too. Some thought lighter-skinned blacks attended St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, the higher-status church. Others commented that Rev. Norris Morgan, the pastor of Second Baptist, where church members were known to “shout,” “looked white.” His wife was a Bishop, the town’s most prominent black family in the early part of the century. Children noticed some people went to extremes to look paler. Sarah V. Jones, the supervisor of colored schools, “looked like a ghost with white powder,” or had “flour on her face,” they observed. They wondered if she used the same color powder as her sister, who was much paler. 37 Poorer people, who tended to see fewer economic and social distinctions between groups, differentiated people by style. “We were all in the same boat,” many still thought, which was literally true. They were all discriminated against and denied their equal rights. They would comment that teachers and ministers “would speak to us” when they passed each other on the street, a comment that conveys a recognition that there were different status groups after all, and that they deferred to members of the professional class. Some thought the Masons were “more aloof” than Elks. They carried themselves as though “they were something special.” 38 One teacher remarked, “The poor had more problems, more squabbles and disorder in the family.” Some parents, the teacher knew, “were overwhelmed with ten to twelve children. Some mothers never left the house, some were active in the church.” The boy who was impressed by Alderman Oliver’s outfits also noticed that “some kids were really refined.” He also thought that the “better off” went to college, something he could not afford to do. He saw others wearing hand-me-down Naval Academy blue pants. “Everyone knew where they came from.” It “made you feel bad if you had to wear them,” he said. He also saw people who had it “tougher” than he did. Family members were involved in fights, maybe getting drunk, and their houses were more dilapidated. They were “worse off, their clothing worse off.” 39 A young woman came to realize that determining family wealth was complicated. “Some people had more . . . both husband and wife worked. Some people had less, and some people had even less. Some might be where you didn’t know. You could tell by pretty dresses . . . but some might have shoes all busted and worn without getting a new pair. . . . If your mother did domestic work, she might bring home clothes or shoes.” If that was the case, you might look “higher class,” she reasoned. She noticed that the families that had “less lived in four-room houses and used their living room at night to sleep.” 40 Status was also determined by what you had—indoor toilet, electricity, telephone, porch, front steps with handrail, paved street. One young, gentle-mannered girl who never went far from her home noticed the different stoves families had. Her family had an “oil stove,” which was better than a wood-burning stove. Her aunt who lived a few doors away

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also had an “oil stove. And a lady who lived down the street had a cast iron stove.” Her future mother-in-law had a “wood-burning cookstove.” Status and residence were intertwined for many blacks. Where you lived told others a lot. Some considered Northwest Street a high-status address. Naval Academy employees and Drs. Garcia and Johnson lived there. Dr. Allen lived on Carroll Street, “a little narrow street” around the corner. On the other hand, a resident of a crowded and rundown house on Northwest, thought “living on Northwest didn’t mean anything. A lot of people lived in places that they didn’t want to live in.” Monument was a tough street, he thought, because he saw that “people were drinking, women in and out of their homes with different sailors during this time.” Washington Street had “nice places” and “joints mixed with beat-up places.” Some “refined families lived on Clay Street,” but a teacher also saw “a beehive house or two that was open day and night with girls living with different men.” There was “good, bad, and ugly in all families” and on many of the streets. Many more blacks—144—owned property on these streets than in 1900 when a total of seventy-one blacks owned their homes. 41 Acton Lane, which became Larkin Street, was a place where many children were not allowed to play. It was “kind of rugged . . . sailors were up there, all kinds of people . . . some good people” though. For others, Larkin Street “didn’t have a bad reputation. Working people lived up there, people working at the Naval Academy lived in there, church was in there and I think they had a little printing shop in there,” said a neighbor. Water Street was another small street many avoided and scorned. Some thought there were “wild” people back there. “They were really poor, little different, drinking, living in run-down shacks.” People’s perceptions depended in part on where they lived and their own status. Black residents realized that they were not a monolithic, homogeneous community. They were becoming more differentiated. Those who were able to go further in school, find the better jobs, hold more than one job, or live in a household in which several members were employed began to acquire more wealth. As a young mother who worked as a domestic noticed, “After the Depression, well then, people got work . . . and people got more money. Then people could live a little better, and people could buy lot of things that they were denied of. And a lot of things changed. Even people began to get cars who never thought they would ever have automobiles, and people begin to live in better houses, and people begin to get furniture and buy better clothes for themselves and their children.” 42 Even so, young black men and women coming of age in the 1930s and 1940s faced limited life chances. Many wanted to be better educated, hold less demeaning jobs, and live more comfortably than their parents, but realizing these ambitions was not easy. White discrimination restricted their choices of employment and level of achievement. Some could nego-

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tiate these constraints better than others because of family support, education, their own determination, resilience, or imagination. Financial constraints held back many; others limited their own opportunities by dropping out of school. Nevertheless, many found ways to take advantage of tiny opportunities and expand them to support and sometimes push themselves forward. 43 Vignettes of some of these young blacks drawn from the sample of the thirty-three interviewed—ten men and twenty-three women—that were discussed in chapter 12 illustrate the different career paths they chose. These accounts tell something of the lessons they learned as they grew up in Annapolis from the 1920s through the 1940s. Three of the five—two woman and three men—who got to college right after graduating from Bates, or later in their lives, acquired better jobs. One woman got a “government job in Washington, two of the men and one of the women became teachers, and the third had a desk job at Fort Meade. Some benefited from the foresight and frugality of their families who saved money for their education while others had to scrimp and save to pay their own way. One of the three young men, a reserved person, lived with his grandparents near Mt. Moriah. His grandmother was a homemaker, and his grandfather worked as a laborer at the Naval Academy. While neither of his grandparents had much education, many evenings he listened to his grandmother read stories in the Saturday Evening Post to his grandfather, who was illiterate. Other evenings they listened to classical music. His grandmother told him stories about her parents, who were born into slavery. As a boy, he earned spending money running errands for neighbors. While he was in high school, he worked part-time delivering orders for the corner store. Attendance was not compulsory when he was going to school, and a number of his classmates dropped out to work while they were in elementary school and high school. His determined grandmother “saved every penny and patched and mended his clothes,” so that she could send him to Bowie Normal School. Four or five members of his graduating class at Stanton High School went on to college, including the future doctor, Theodore H. Johnson. After he became a teacher, he had to supplement his limited income by working in the summers. He waited on tables at Carvel Hall and at the Annapolis Yacht Club. When Emmett J. Nelson formed the WPA chorus, he performed with the group. Eventually he saved enough money to buy a home and raise his children with his wife, also a schoolteacher. Of the eight women who graduated from high school but could not afford a college education, two became homemakers who were supported by their husbands. One became a nurse when training opportunities opened up for blacks years later. Four others chose to work in food

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service positions that earned them more money and status than domestic work. The eighth was the youngest child of divorced parents. Her father worked at a store at the Naval Academy and brought her candy. Her mother was a waitress at a white restaurant, where she “made good money. Her apron would be tied so nice,” she recalled. After school, she would go to the restaurant, have something to eat, and help her mother. Her parents sent her to Margaret Murray Washington School, a vocational high school in Washington, DC, named for the widow of Booker T. Washington. She stayed with two of the school’s teachers, or with an aunt, and enjoyed living in the city. Occasionally, she “would go to the movies,” she admitted with a throaty laugh, instead of her classes. She studied dressmaking. Her aunt, a “professional” dressmaker taught her how to make her own clothes. In choosing a career, she first thought about what she did not want to do. She decided that unlike her grandmother, she “was not going to be cooking in someone’s kitchen . . . not my bag all day serving white people and then come home. It was all right to be black . . . just don’t want to be treated like one.” She decided she “would work for blacks.” She tried her hand at singing in Baltimore, Washington, and New York. She was briefly a backup singer for Lena Horne. Then she returned to Annapolis and had a cleaning job for a brief time for a black lady who lived upstairs from her. Not satisfied with the work, she decided she wanted “fast money.” She took a job as a waitress, like her mother, but at Brown’s Hotel. After a short time, she became a barmaid because she thought she could get better tips. A friendly woman with “good hair,” she was “so good that I was put behind the bar.” She lived in a room upstairs. Then she went to work at another bar, where she would “look for people who would tip you . . . mostly strangers . . . always give you $2.” When she married, her mother lived with her. But the marriage did not last long, and she “put him out.” Because she wanted a child, she arranged to adopt a friend’s baby. One of the five young men who graduated from Bates grew up with eight siblings in a family that lacked the resources to send him to college. Affable and handsome, he understood that “education played a big part in status . . . the better off went to college.” But he “didn’t have anyone to instill how important” college education was. His father had “maybe a fifth-grade education . . . never talked much about education.” “When you come up like I did, you want to live better.” He did not “ask too many questions”; he “had to learn for himself. Some people put things together wrong, they made bad choices,” was the lesson he learned for himself. As a teen he worked at a liquor store, then as a busboy in the dining room at Carvel Hall on the weekends. The cooks would give him some

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food. Living in a large household, he often wanted more to eat than was offered at meals, though he never went hungry. The waiters shared their tips with him. He made about $2 a day. He liked to buy a crab cake and cracker for ten cents at Gray’s Crab Cakes on Calvert Street. When he graduated from high school, “there were not a lot of places where I could work. . . . I would take anything.” He went to work at the Naval Academy. First he worked at the laundry. He “hated it. Women much older chasing you, you had to take out the hot wet clothes in one room and go in another and extract the water and put them in the dryer.” He quit after a few months and found a job at the Naval Engineering Experiment Station across the Severn River from the academy. There he worked in the welding shop as a “general helper,” the highest rank a black could achieve. The white workers taught him the skills of an “apprentice,” but he never achieved that rank because it was only for white employees. He had to give his father some of his salary, but he was able to dress more stylishly, the way he wanted, and feel self-reliant. When he turned eighteen, he had to decide about enlisting in the service. He heard about the mistreatment of blacks in the Army from two of his brothers who had served in World War II. When they “came back home, they told horror stories.” He “didn’t want any part of it . . . who wants to go to Mississippi?” And he “didn’t want to be a sailor—knew then that they were mess attendants.” He “wouldn’t have minded being a real sailor.” If he enlisted he wanted to get a “job that he could be proud of.” He decided to become a merchant seaman. After training in Shepherd’s Bay, New York, he went to Europe, where his ship delivered coal to bombed-out cities including Marseille, Amsterdam, and Palermo. After he completed his service, he returned to Annapolis and a job at the Experiment Station. Because he was not a war veteran, he was let go in 1948. When he could not find work, he decided to enlist in the Air Force. He got a position in personnel, acquiring skills that he used later in a civilian job at Fort Meade, where he went to work after coming out of the Air Force as a clerk typist. Eight of the young women and two young men failed to complete high school. They dropped out either to help their families or to provide for themselves. One of the young women had “just wanted education and didn’t know how she was going to get it. [She] never thought about college” though she “loved school. There was no way to get there with just fifteen cents. None of my family went to high school, most of my friends didn’t finish . . . they wanted money or went into the service. Most had to get out and work during the war. It was just expected of me” to drop out and make her own living, which she did. “Later,” she said, “people started to finish.” For most of her life she worked as a domestic, but tried to find the jobs with the most favorable conditions. Women had other reasons for dropping out of school, and some managed better than others without the education. One thought that she

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“didn’t have much to go into . . . not the opportunities . . . education was just wasted.” So she dropped out, much to her mother’s disappointment, and worked as a domestic. Another did not go back to school one fall because she had become attached to the white children she was looking after at the Naval Academy that summer, and the family asked her to work full-time. She “just liked to work.” Eventually she got a job as a cleaning lady at the Naval Academy nurses’ quarters, working her way up to supervisor, the first black woman in that position, she said proudly many years later. A third dropped out to help her mother who was not well. She worked as a domestic, then in the pantry at Carvel Hall. She decided to become a beautician opening a beauty parlor in the back of her house after attending a training program in Baltimore. The fourth young girl, who was very bright, was suspended from Stanton in sixth grade after throwing an inkwell at a teacher. The truant officer never came to reenroll her, and no one in her family insisted she return to school. So she worked as a domestic from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. getting about $3 a week. “You did the best you were able to do to let them see that you are not as dumb as they think you are. You try to be nice and kind and humble, but don’t let people step all over you.” Four other female teenagers in the group got pregnant and had to leave school. One had a boyfriend who was six years older and had a car, a big attraction. He would have broken up with her if she did not have sex with him, and she “was afraid of the humiliation.” These young women brought great shame to their families and themselves. They limited their future prospects. One teen’s baby died; two others were either adopted or raised for a few years by a family member. A teacher of one of these students offered to help her get an abortion, but she refused. She married the father of her child, and the other young women eventually married other men with whom all but one had other children. All had to “go knock on doors” to get jobs after having the baby. Despite the constraints they faced, they looked for work that gave them some sense of control, less harsh working conditions, more material goods, access to food, or independence from white supervision. They sought advantages—no matter how small—to better themselves. Years later, one summed up her strategy for bettering her situation: “Be around upper-class people . . . [because you] could learn more from them.” Her family “had right good heads.” We “didn’t have much going for us, but [I needed to] find people to teach me.” She “respected ladies— certain teachers.” She would work for “good people and would get nice things.” One of the two young men who dropped out of high school was raised by his grandmother and aunts because his mother had moved to Virginia and his father was often away on jobs. His relatives had limited

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education, but his grandmother was “concerned about my learning.” She managed to send him to Mattie Holt’s kindergarten. Despite that beginning, he noticed that some “children were brought up with parents who were more education minded . . . how to go further was not instilled in me. I did not know how . . . all I learned I had to grab it as it came.” He believed that “it was about 1945 when low-class people got a taste of education.” His “first thirty-five to forty years,” he had “no idea of how to live,” he recollected later, embarrassed by his lack of education. As a youngster, he worked part-time as an order boy for a corner grocery. He dropped out of school and worked delivering ice for Legum’s coal yard. Then he delivered groceries for a meat market. He was doing “bad things”—playing pool, cards, getting into fights. During the war, he joined the Marines and served in Okinawa. After the war, he got a job at a laundry as a presser and married. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, he “started to figure things out.” He decided to go into the ministry, and went to seminary for four summers to become a “local preacher” who worked under the supervision of the church’s minister. NOTES 1. Bowman, interview. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Worden, St. Mary’s Church, 137–39. 5. EC, July 24, 1944; October 15, 1943; March 18, 1948; September 11, 1948; January 6, 1949; January 14, 1949. 6. Worden, 138. 7. EC, January 29, 1944; OHI. 8. EC, February 10, 1940; February 7, 1942; December 15, 1945; December 27, 1948. 9. EC, March 30, 1946; OHI with two people. 10. EC, June 29, 1948; January 14, 1948; June 17, 1948; May 14, 1945. 11. EC, December 23, 1948; April 16, 1949; OHI. 12. EC, June 23, 1947; February 17, 1948; May 13, 1948; Brown, The Other Annapolis, 115–17. 13. Organized first in Columbus, Ohio, in 1936, the group wanted to deal with social, civic, and racial issues. EC, August 3, 1948; May, Achieving the American Dream, 204. 14. EC, February 28, 1948; March 6, 1948; April 3, 1948; June 26, 1948. 15. EC, November 6, 1945; November 4, 1944; November 29, 1947; November 10, 1948. 16. EC, July 28, 1941; October 9, 1941; AA, January 6, 1942; EC, January 28, 1942; AA, March 24, 1942; March 31, 1942. 17. EC, February 27, 1946; March 15, 1946; February 20, 1946; March 13, 1946; August 19, 1947. 18. EC, February 7, 1948; February 24, 1948; February 28, 1948; AA, March 2, 1929; interview with Janice Hayes Williams. 19. OHI with two people; EC, April 22, 1948; April 27, 1948. 20. OHI. 21. EC, May 8, 1948; Brown, The Other Annapolis, 98–101; OHI.

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22. EC, August 7, 1948. 23. OHI with two people. 24. OHI with two people. 25. AA, February 8, 1947; Alsop, interview. 26. EC, October 27, 1948; April 29, 1949; April 23, 1945; November 3, 1945; April 1, 1946. 27. EC, October 29, 1947; December 20, 1946; February 19, 1948; November 13, 1945; April 11, 1942; April 14, 1949. 28. EC, May 27, 1946; June 13, 1947; June 14, 1946; June 16, 1948. 29. EC, May 27, 1946. 30. EC, August 26, 1948. 31. EC, February 13, 1946. 32. EC, June 16, 1948. 33. EC, August 10, 1948. 34. OHI with two people; EC, January 30, 1941; February 17, 1940; March 6, 1946; July 14, 1943; July 17, 1944; September 27, 1947; May 24, 1948. 35. I don’t think the rise of the black middle class in Annapolis is synonymous with the rise of the “New Negro” in Chicago as described by Baldwin. The Fourth Ward did not experience an influx of black migrants. Moreover, the growing numbers of blacks who became a part of the middle class were not “new.” They resembled their predecessors—many fewer in number—who were also educated and aspired to and in some cases actively worked for their equal citizenship. However, like in Chicago, there is the growth of black enterprises in the Fourth Ward between the two world wars and beyond that fostered race pride and consciousness. Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negros, 2–19. 36. OHI with seven people. 37. OHI with three people. 38. OHI with three people. 39. OHI with two people. 40. OHI. 41. OHI with three people; U.S. Department of Interior, Bureau of Census, Twelfth Census of the United States, Population Schedules, Anne Arundel County, City of Annapolis; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States, Anne Arundel County, City of Annapolis. 42. OHI. 43. This discussion is a sequel to the one in chapter 12 about the childhood experiences of thirty-three Annapolis blacks, ten men and twenty-three women. To protect their privacy, their names are not mentioned.

V

“This was the development stage.” —Rev. Leroy Bowman

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SEVENTEEN Encounter, A Demolition, 1952

In July and August 1952, workers demolished the twenty-four clapboard houses in Gott’s Court, the homes of more than eighty black citizens. On August 27, the Evening Capital recorded the progress of the destruction with a photo and this caption: “Shambles of splintered wood flood Gott’s Court as workmen continue the 60 day job of razing marginal homes there, the first step toward the realization of a new, off-street municipal parking lot to serve the West Street business area. . . . Planned at a cost of $140,000, the lot is being designed to provide space for 110 to 120 automobiles.” 1 All the residents—almost the same number as cars that would be parked in the space—had to be out by July 15, when the demolition was scheduled to begin. One woman who grew up in the court recalled that the workmen did not demolish the playhouse, or “dollhouse” as she called it, in the backyard that her grandfather had built for her and her three cousins. She said with the wonder of it all still in her voice: “I can remember when we moved from Gott’s Court. Mr. Lewis Hyde was the one that tore the houses down. He was an old white man that did construction work. And he just picked our dollhouse right up and put it on his car and took it to his kids. And didn’t destroy it. That’s a memory that I’ll never forget.” 2 The story of the demolition of Gott’s Court reveals the conflicting interests at play in the development of the town, and their repercussions for its low-income residents, particularly blacks. The two most vocal factions at council meetings to discuss its future were the business community and the housing reformers. The businessmen saw the alley space as a potential parking lot that could lure more customers. Housing reformers considered Gott’s Court a slum that should be cleared and replaced with decent housing. The neighbors of the court considered it “a disgrace.” 269

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Residents of the court “might be drunk, disorderly,” one neighbor remembered. Politicians disagreed over what to do about it. And Gott’s Court residents saw themselves as a proud, self-contained community, more a “family,” that others ignored or looked down upon. “People thought that we was living in what people call the slums. They just thought that we were a little different than what they were. Like the kids on Washington Street, we could go visit our families that lived there, but we couldn’t go play with them . . . to them we were dirt. Because their streets were paved, and we had a dirt street. And they looked down on us. We wasn’t like shunned, but we felt a little different,” explained a woman who spent her childhood in the court. 3 “Gott’s Court was off bounds,” a former resident said. “You could come down West Street and walk right past Gott’s Court and wouldn’t know nobody lived up there. If you looked, you didn’t see a house; you would see some garages. You would have to come into this place and you make a little turn, and there was a community of people.” 4 Gott’s Court was reached by walking through a narrow passageway between two buildings in the middle of the first block of West Street, off Church Circle. By 1951, this commercial block of West Street, always one of the city’s main thoroughfares, was lined with clothing stores, a bakery, lawyers’ offices, banks, barbershops, hardware stores, and shoe stores. These were white businesses, some frequented by black customers. Black-run businesses, including Holt’s barbershop, Service Center Barber shop, Charlene Marie’s House of Beauty, Vordell’s Beauty Salon, Day’s Vegetables, Dr. William H. Norman’s dentist office, the Park Lunch, Susie’s Tea Room, the New Grill Restaurant, Mid-Town Laundry, Gray’s Crab Cake Shop, and Carroll Hynson’s real estate office, stood along Calvert Street, a busy thoroughfare in the Fourth Ward. At the end of Calvert Street stood the city jail. At the corner of Calvert and Northwest, Mason Alsop ran his restaurant. A few doors up Northwest Street were the YMCA, St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, and the Hicks Funeral Home. Milady Beauty Salon, Dr. Theodore Johnson’s clinic, dressmaker Sara Johnson’s place, the Elks, and the American Legion Cook Pinkney Post, and several dozen residences of black families lined the rest of Northwest Street, the third street that bordered Gott’s Court. 5 In the dirt alley, two rows of small, neglected houses faced each other. The two-story homes measured about twelve feet wide and twenty-five feet deep. Harry Ivrey owned the last six houses on the right, which were covered with shingles instead of wooden siding. The unpainted houses, many with patched shingle roofs, were attached to each other. A small alley cut through every other house to the backyards, which were about twenty-five to thirty-five feet deep. A former resident reported that Mr. Gott, the owner of most of the buildings, had moved the outside toilets from the back of the yard to a small shed adjoining the houses while Ivrey “left his down in the back of the yard.” 6

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By the time the demolition crew began its work in the summer of 1952, the town stretched out in every direction. The year before, it had annexed Eastport, West Annapolis, Wardour, Parole, and other surrounding communities. The city council was now composed of sixteen aldermen, representing eight wards, twice the original number. Some townspeople drove out of town for work, shopping, or entertainment, while nonresidents came into town to work at the new state and county government buildings. The town was connected to Washington, Baltimore, and the Eastern Shore by road. Annapolis merchants faced more competition out of town and wanted more parking spaces to make their stores more accessible to the new people who lived outside the traditional town. A year earlier, the legislature passed an emergency bill that enabled the mayor and the city council to condemn property for the construction of several parking lots and allocated $300,000 to finance the acquisition and development of the land. One of the sites selected was Gott’s Court. 7 In July, the aldermen commissioned a survey of the site and its cost, and discussed the need for the parking lot. Perhaps for the first time, the council considered the challenge of finding new places for people to live who were about to be dislocated by government destruction of their homes. The aldermen “promised,” the Capital said, that demolition would not begin until all the residents had found a new place to live, the first time the council had made such a pledge. 8 As the city council deliberated, the Capital complained, “When the city council meets Monday night it is hoped that an end will be put to the dawdling that has marked development of off-street parking lots, and that action will replace talk and lethargy.” At the same time, the paper wanted homes located for the residents before the court was demolished. It had not expressed such a concern for earlier displaced citizens. 9 In August, the “Inquiring Reporter” column of the Capital asked aldermen about the parking situation. Roland William Brown, a white alderman, said, “We should go along with building at Gott’s Court,” while another white alderman, Robert Campbell, whose grandmother had been displaced by the Naval Academy’s destruction of the Hell Point neighborhood, said that the “cost of Gott’s Court must be carefully considered before any definite action is taken.” And Norwood Brown, a black man who represented a new ward from the annexed part of the town, said he was “bitterly opposed to building any lot which requires destroying homes before we know where we’re going to put the people. It’s nice to get rid of a place like Gott’s Court, but those people have to have someplace to live. The housing situation is acute.” He pointed out, “The city must be responsible for relocating those people if it is going to destroy their homes. You can find a place to stick an automobile much easier than you can find a home for a family. . . . When these people are relocated that’s the time to go ahead on the parking project.” 10

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At the council meeting on August 13, Elmer M. Jackson Jr., vice president and general manager of the Capital-Gazette Press, told the council that “a great deal of business was driven from the city due to a lack of parking facilities.” He claimed, “A prosperous town depends on prosperous merchants . . . the delay in getting off-street parking has caused merchants to lose money and customers, some of whom they may not get back.” As for Gott’s Court, he said, “I know many are concerned over the housing situation. Yet you have a proposed housing project for Parole . . . a private concern is ready to erect housing for hundreds of people if the city would extend sewer and water service,” the Capital reported. 11 The next day, the council discussed an ordinance that would permit the establishment of the Gott’s Court lot. During the debate, several aldermen expressed their concern about where the thirty-six families living in Gott’s Court would go. McNeil told his colleagues that eighteen families had applied for units in the new Obery Court housing project, but some had been rejected. “What are you going to do toward providing homes of the people involved?” he asked. A white alderman, Arthur Ellington, proposed that he, McNeil, and Alderman Charles A. Oliver meet with the Housing Authority officials. Alderman Remaley told his colleagues, “I don’t believe we should turn people out in the street.” He thought about eighteen of the families could move into the new project. The Housing Authority would give Gott’s Court residents priority, and private landlords were also being asked to consider Gott’s Court tenants. 12 Alderman Oliver supported the parking ordinance because, he said, the city had been trying to “remedy conditions in Gott’s Court for twenty-five years.” He had tried repeatedly to get the town to pave the street, making requests almost every year since 1927. The problem was that for a number of years, the property owners had not turned the deed to the street bed over to the city. Once that was accomplished, the council never allocated the necessary funds. Conditions he described as “horrible and a health menace” persisted despite his efforts. 13 Alderman Oliver noted that some of the residents were ineligible for public housing because they earned too much. A common laborer, he said, made $42 a week, over the salary limit for public housing. He explained to his colleagues, “Thirty-six families live there and there are no sanitary provisions in the 24 houses. . . . They owed a moral obligation to the people of Gott’s Court and they should assist the Annapolis Housing Authority to arrange for those people’s welfare.” When the aldermen voted for the passage of the parking lot ordinance, only Alderman McNeil opposed it. 14 That November, about twenty-two families from Gott’s Court started moving into the new Obery Court housing project. When the city council authorized the purchase of Gott’s Court properties in January 1952, McNeil reported that all the houses in the court were again occupied. As

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soon as one family moved out of Gott’s Court, another had moved in. By March, the council authorized a $1,140,000 bond issue to cover the cost of the parking lot and a sewer and water system for the recently annexed areas. McNeil said he voted for the measure “with great reluctance” because he wanted the water and sewer measure to pass, but was concerned about losing the houses. 15 By April, only four of the houses were empty. A dozen Gott’s Court residents appeared before the council to complain that they had been evicted from their houses without a place to go. They had been told to leave their homes by the night before so that the city could raze them. One married woman with three children, who had spent her entire life in Gott’s Court, told the council that “she had gone to see the Executive Director of the Housing Authority who told her that the new housing project was filled, and there would be nothing for her. Mayor Ellington asked her to come to his office to see if he could solve her problem,” the Capital reported. Another resident described an unsuccessful search for an affordable house within a ten-mile radius of the city. 16 Mayor Ellington said the deadline would be extended an additional two weeks and asked McNeil to organize a meeting with the residents and the Housing Authority. Two nights later, the council held a special hearing for the Gott’s Court residents. Housing Authority officials explained that another 150 people needed housing, cases that were “just as bad” as the ones from Gott’s Court. Alderman Martin replied that he would never have supported a proposal to tear down the homes unless there was someplace for the occupants to go. Alderman McNeil pointed out that homes were already very crowded. “You might have from six to eight families in one house. I know of a man and wife and three children who are living in one room.” 17 At the meeting, city officials ruled on the eligibility of some of the residents remaining in the court for public housing. One woman was declared eligible and put on a waiting list for one of the projects. In another case, if a father agreed to move into an apartment with his daughter, they would also be considered eligible for public housing. The mayor offered to help the woman who had lived in the court for twentyfive years and could not find a place. He complimented the Housing Authority on its “excellent job.” He said the city could no longer be responsible for anyone else who might move into the houses in Gott’s Court because a notice that they would be razed had been posted. By June, nine families were still living in the court. In the beginning of July, they were notified that they had to move by July 15, the day when the demolition was scheduled to begin. The Capital did not report on where they went. 18 Rain and snow delayed the completion of the parking lot for its scheduled opening on December 10. It opened December 20 for “unofficial use.” Motorists were not charged for parking until the light fixtures were

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installed. The Capital reported that by 11 a.m. that morning, thirty-three cars were parked in the new lot. 19 This was an unusual encounter between blacks and whites. There was no clear demarcation between the two groups in the debate over the future of Gott’s Court and the dispersal of its residents. Blacks and whites were on both sides of the dispute. Only one of the three black aldermen, McNeil, voted against the ordinance to convert the alley into a parking lot. Martin, a white alderman, supported McNeil. The other black aldermen, Oliver and Brown, sided with the housing reformers and developers. A similar relaxation of the color line had marked the effort to save Snowden from hanging, when groups of whites and blacks signed petitions asking the governor to change his sentence. The concern shown for the alley’s residents by white politicians, the newspaper, and housing officials was a departure from past practices. The integrated citizen housing group’s agitation brought the deplorable housing conditions in Gott’s Court to the town’s attention and had an impact. Previously, when the city, county, state, or federal government wanted land on which black residences sat, the governments condemned the properties, and the residents had to find new places to live without any government help or interest from the Capital, with one exception. In October 1941, an editorial asked the city to help the residents of Hell Point find homes after their properties had been seized by the Academy. 20 Some Gott’s Court residents tenaciously asserted their rights to decent housing, not unlike the county teachers’ insistence on equal pay. Residents who were not immediately placed in Obery Court, and some who had not found places to live on their own, stayed beyond the eviction date and forced city politicians and housing officials to help them find places to live. Their defiance effectively advanced the argument that they had rights as tenants displaced by slum clearance. This was quite a change from the genteel approach of the women who insisted, nine years earlier, that they had a right to form a black Girl Scout troop. Those blacks who boldly moved into the vacated houses in Gott’s Court were claiming their right to housing, a public assertion that may have reflected the changing status of blacks around the country. Their claims for equal citizenship were becoming more outspoken and persistent. 21 This encounter foreshadowed future events, especially the destruction of a significant portion of the Fourth Ward to make room for new road and urban renewal projects. These gave the county more office space and the townspeople easier access into the town. They created more parking places and middle-income housing for whites and a small public housing project for blacks. But they also removed the black homes and businesses on Northwest Street, O’Bryan Court, Calvert Court, Baer’s Court, Feldmeyer’s Court, West Washington Street, Calvert Street, Clay Street, and Acton Lane. Such demolition occurred in many urban communities

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around the country. As blacks gained their civil rights, they lost their “space of control” and were scattered. 22 NOTES 1. EC, August 27, 1952; U.S. Department of Interior, Bureau of Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States, Anne Arundel County, City of Annapolis. 2. OHI. 3. OHI. 4. The material for this chapter is based on group discussions and individual interviews with about a dozen former residents of Gott’s Court. 5. Polk’s Annapolis City Directory 1954, 309–48. 6. OHI. 7. EC, August 8, 1951. 8. EC, July 31, 1951. 9. EC, August 8, 1951. 10. EC, August 10, 1951. 11. AMA, “Proceedings,” 1947–1953, 244, MSA M49–27; EC, August 14, 1951. 12. EC, August 15, 1951. 13. AMA, Proceedings,” 1926–1931, MSA M49–23, August 8, 1927, 136; April 8, 1929, 270; July 20, 1930, 401; August 12, 1930; AMA, “Proceedings,” 1931–1935, MSA M49–24; April 4, 1935, 414, May 13, 1935, 424; September 9, 1935, 15; AMA, “Proceedings,” 1947–1953, MSA M49–27, July 19, 1949, 113; September 12, 1949, 128; EC, September 13, 1949. 14. AMA, “Proceedings,” 1947–1953, MSA M49–27, August 14, 1951, 249–50; EC, August 15, 1951. 15. EC, November 27, 1951; AMA, “Proceedings,” 1947–1953, MSA M49–27, January 22, 1952, 286; March 10, 1952, 295; EC, March 11, 1952. 16. EC, April 22, 1952. 17. EC, April 22, 1952; April 25, 1952. Federal regulations complicated the application process. Ineligibility included situations in which family members were unmarried, their had an income above the standard for low-rent housing, or their family status was doubtful. A single person could not get an apartment, and marriage certificates were required for couples. If the salary of a housing project’s resident went above the income requirement, he would be evicted, in some cases with no place to go. Some applicants, such as veterans and families forced out of their homes for slum clearance, were given priority over others who had been on a waiting list. Federal laws required that siblings of different sexes older than the age of seven or eight have separate rooms. Applicants had to pay a $10 exterminator fee to have their belongings treated before moving into an apartment. 18. EC, June 11, 1952; July 2, 1952. 19. EC, December 4, 1952; December 20, 1952. 20. EC, October 16, 1941. 21. Tilly, “Afterword,” 246–47; Franklin and Moss, From Slavery to Freedom, 464–65. 22. Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion, 76.

EIGHTEEN Bird’s-Eye View, 1949–1952

As the Gott’s Court parking lot was opening for business, the Annapolis landscape had a new look. The town now covered three peninsulas, not just one. Annapolis annexed the smaller town of Eastport to the south, bounded by Back Creek and Spa Creek, and West Annapolis, Germantown, and Cedar Park to the north, bounded by College Creek and Weems Creek. The town extended out West Street, Spa Road, and Bay Ridge Avenue, and incorporated Parole and other areas. The population

Figure 18.1.

Map of Annapolis, 1952

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of the town increased by more than 9,000 people. The focus of this study, however, remains on the original town of Annapolis, where blacks were contracting even more into their own Fourth Ward from other parts of the old town. Other blacks were moving out to the developing area of Spa Road and Parole. In 1950, blacks made up 36.3 percent of the town’s population, not including the Naval Academy. 1 After the new Obery Court public housing project opened in December 1951, its nine mustard colored stucco and siding buildings gave a section of Clay Street a different appearance. Some of the larger families from College Creek Terrace and nineteen families from Gott’s Court were among the new residents. A one-story community building with management offices, kitchen facilities, and a meeting hall stood at the corner of Clay and Obery streets. 2 After February 1950, only freight trains came into the Bladen Street station. Passenger trains no longer served Annapolis. Little boys with their shoe shine boxes that used to serve train travelers had moved on. The next month, a fire damaged the popular Wright’s Hotel, and it was razed that November. A year later, a fire ruined part of Carvel Hall. In April 1952, the large extension of the courthouse and a health and welfare office building, built to accommodate the expanding state and county governments, stood on South and Cathedral streets and Bellis Court in the place where blacks previously occupied rows of small clapboard houses. 3 A new parking lot was visible down by Dock Street. Off Main Street, sixty-two cars would fit into another new parking lot built where seven houses had stood, in Hyde Alley. Working-class whites had lived in the houses until the summer of 1951, when Samuel Lerner tore them down. Farther up Main Street and off Conduit Street, a third new parking lot had opened before the one in Gott’s Court was finished. 4 As blacks concentrated more densely in the Fourth Ward, downtown became more white (see figure 18.1). More had moved into houses on Shaw and Morris streets, and a few, including Rev. Bowman, Charlotte Ruddock, the home economics teacher at Bates, and mortician J. B. Johnson, had homes on Lafayette Avenue. 5 Blacks could now seek medical help from four doctors after Faye Allen, the wife of Aris T. Allen, joined her husband’s practice. Men could be seen going to five additional barbers to get a haircut, a choice between nine shops. The new ones were the Service, Star, Chambers, Sam’s, and Green’s. Women also had five new beauty parlors to try out in addition to four older ones: Charm Center, Glowing Star Beauty Shop, Jeanette’s Beauty Shop, and Verdell’s. Blacks could seek the assistance of Roscoe Parker, who ran Roscoe’s Employment Agency. They could shop at the same grocery stores, get their shoes repaired, or their furniture upholstered, at the same shops as before. They could have their teeth cleaned by the same two dentists, Williams and McNeil, do business with Carroll

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Hynson, the bail bondsman and realtor, as well as the three morticians, Johnson, Reese, and Hicks. But they had to go to white lawyers near State Circle for legal assistance because no black lawyer had opened in Annapolis since the death of William Howard in 1929. 6 Blacks ate meals, drank at bars, and attended events at more blackoperated places than ever. New entertainment and refreshment establishments opened. Black residents could be seen entering a new pool hall and a new small hotel called the Dixie Hotel on West Washington Street. In the market area, they went for a drink at the Downtown Tavern. Lodgers stayed at the Ideal Hotel and Edith Pran’s home downtown. Customers frequented the several new black-run eateries that opened for business including the New Grill, Triple E Lunch Room, and the Victory Lunch. But the number of black-owned cab services declined to two. 7 Blacks now went to meetings, social gatherings, dances, concerts, and lectures at Stanton, Bates High School Theater and gymnasium, the churches, the Star Theatre, the busy YMCA on Northwest Street, the new Obery Community Center, the College Creek Terrace center, and the old standby, Waltz Dream Hall. Blacks could be seen expanding their churches. A first midnight mass at St. Augustine’s Catholic Church on Christmas in 1950 attracted a crowd of black worshipers. The following year, the congregation at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church dedicated its new Bishop Helfenstein Memorial Hall. A new storefront church opened in College Creek Terrace, the St. James Spiritual Church. Its pastor, Rev. James A. Greene, gave the invocation at the opening of the Obery Court Housing Project. 8 “People [were] going, coming, buying and selling.” Small loan operators did their business on the street. People were running numbers. Groups of men gathered in certain corners to shoot craps and drink. Churchgoers approached their neighbors for donations. In the summer, families went to Sparrows Beach. Others frequented Carr’s Beach to see the singers and bands that performed there. 9 An observer would have seen distinguished black visitors in town. In August 1950, Larry Doby, of the Cleveland Indians, the first black to play in the American League, paid a visit to Annapolis. Joe Louis attended the St. Mary’s Church Carnival while training at Carr’s Beach in the summer of 1951. The next year, W. E. B. Du Bois spoke at St. John’s College on “The Present Status of the Negro Problems in the United States.” 10 During these few years after the tercentenary parade, relations between blacks and whites that were observable on the landscape altered in certain respects. Contradictory movements were apparent. On one hand, from a bird’s-eye view, there were now sights of blacks acting as equal citizens and “making room” for themselves in whites-only places. Blacks and whites participated as equals in several public events. The barriers separating blacks and whites were weakening. These changes were the

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result of blacks’ own initiatives, new white receptivity, or the passage of the law outlawing segregation on intrastate ferries and trains in 1951. 11 But, most white-imposed boundaries remained impenetrable. Most long-established segregation and discrimination practices were still apparent. Blacks still could not be seen in apprentice or white-collar jobs, in decent houses in certain neighborhoods, at the hospital giving birth, or eating in hotels and restaurants outside the Fourth Ward. And black elementary school children could be seen going to Stanton, Waltz Dream Hall, the Masonic Temple, and College Creek Terrace to attend classes, some for half a day. 12 Whites and blacks continued to cross paths as they went their different ways to workplaces, shops, and offices on the principal streets. As the town expanded, so did the job locations and shops. People walked, took a taxi, boat, or bus, and some drove to work. Others rode the bus to jobs out of town in Washington, DC, Fort Meade, and elsewhere. For their social lives, whites and blacks continued to alternate the use of the Armory for dances, concerts, and sporting events, while most of their activities occurred at their separate schools, clubs, recreation centers, theaters, and churches. Despite the one integrated Girl Scout float in the tercentenary parade, blacks and whites generally still marched separately. Just a few days after the tercentenary celebrations, separate Memorial Day parades marched as usual around the streets of Annapolis. Whites marched first. At 2:30 p.m., the blacks set out from their Masonic Temple on Clay Street and included veterans groups, the Elks, and a float made by the State Beauticians Organization. William Fletcher, the camp commander of the United Spanish American War Veterans and a prominent black citizen, now eighty-five, led the parade. 13 One departure from past practice was apparent in August 1951. Leading a parade, sponsored by the Annapolis Recreation Parks Commission, itself an integrated group now, was a Buick convertible with a white boy sitting on the left front fender and a black boy riding atop the right one. They held up a banner that read, “First Annual Playground Parade, Annapolis Recreation and Parks Commission.” Two bands, a big green fire truck from Waterwitch Hook and Ladder Company and approximately 200 excited children took part. Despite this small display of integration on the fenders of the Buick, playgrounds and recreation programs remained segregated. 14 Though whites still held the upper hand in the town, the success of some blacks’ strategy to advance themselves through education to “get what whites had” was now more evident on the landscape. Several more educated blacks entered formerly off-limits white spaces and engaged with whites as peers. Because these encounters were exceptional, they were still an unexpected sight.

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A few more blacks had joined the local governing boards of formerly white-controlled organizations. By 1950, Dr. Aris T. Allen attended Red Cross board meetings. He and Rev. David Croll of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church attended the monthly board meetings of the Citizens Planning and Housing Association, which sometimes met at white churches about town. Several blacks participated in the Community Chest campaign. Even more significant was the sight of Rev. Leroy Bowman and Emma Hall Stepney attending Housing Authority meetings as members. Dr. Allen represented the Fourth Ward on the Annapolis Annexation Charter Commission. By 1952, Robert Green, the well-known graduate of Bates and a semi-pro football player, went to the meetings of the Annapolis Recreation and Parks Commission. 15 Dr. Allen now frequented the Annapolis Hospital, the first time a black doctor had been invited to observe procedures in the hospital since Dr. Bishop died in 1904. Dr. Allen was not yet a member of the staff, however. That would take a few more years. Beatrice Jones entered the hospital as the first black nurse. In 1951, a black Girl Scout, Delmar Spriggs of Troop Number 40, Thelma Sparks’s troop, attended planning meetings with white scouts for the thirty-ninth anniversary of the organization. The following year, black Girl Scout troop leaders went to a training course with white troop leaders at the white Calvary Methodist Church. 16 There was an even more startling sight on Church Circle starting in May 1952: black patrons frequenting the previously whites-only library. Eloise Richardson soon entered the building as the children’s librarian. The year before, black Annapolitans checked out books at a newer library of their own, which opened in the community building of Obery Court, a move from the even smaller two-room library in College Creek Terrace. 17 Another surprising sight was a large group of black women from the Alpha Mu chapter of the Phi Delta Kappa sorority visiting the governor’s mansion for tea with Claire McKeldin, the wife of the governor, in May 1951. More than 300 black women from Annapolis, other parts of Maryland, Washington, DC, and Philadelphia attended the tea. 18 At the statehouse, Bates High School students still participated in the Hi-Y model legislature with white students. Some years they went on tours of the Naval Academy. Now, black and white girls from Annapolis were model legislators for Girls’ State, sponsored by the American Legion Women’s Auxiliary. 19 A more familiar sight was the troops of black and white Girl Scouts who still serenaded together around town at Christmastime. They went to the Chase House, where elderly white women lived, and then they serenaded Mayor Rowe and Josephine Riordan, the former commissioner of the scouts. They ended up at the governor’s mansion, where Governor Theodore R. McKeldin, a Republican, received them in 1950, and played the piano. 20

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In 1950, a crowd of more than 2,500 black and white children swarmed the statehouse hill for an Easter egg hunt. Both the black Elks boys’ band and the Bates band played during the festivities not far from the statue of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the author of the Dred Scott decision. The following year, 3,000 children looked for eggs on the fields of Annapolis High School, perhaps the first time blacks were on those fields. 21 Other events that might have been all-white affairs in the past now included blacks. The Bates band played at the ceremony that marked the opening of the new courthouse extension. After the governor formally opened the spring season at Sandy Point State Park north of town, Rev. John M. Gibson of Mt. Moriah gave the benediction. In October 1951, at the dedication ceremony of Obery Court, Mayor Roscoe C. Rowe participated with his newly appointed housing commissioners, Emma Hall Stepney and Rev. Leroy Bowman. The following year, the Bates band, dressed in yellow shirts, blue trousers, and capes, played several numbers during the ceremony that marked the opening of part of Route 50. 22 Most sporting events remained segregated, but a few now involved black and white competitors. In 1951, at least one black, Harold McPherson, went to the Jewish Community Center to participate in a ping pong tournament sponsored by the Jewish War Veterans. And he won the championship. In 1952, two Bates students competed in a “Jaycee Roadeo,” a driving contest with twelve other contestants from Annapolis High School. It was part of a national project to “promote better driving and safety-consciousness.” They had to complete six driving skills tests. Neither won. 23 Perhaps the most unexpected sight occurred in February 1952, during “Brotherhood Week,” a national campaign to promote racial and religious cooperation. Members of the Bates student body and the band walked down Smithville Street and across Spa Road a few blocks to Annapolis High School and presented a program before its white students, the first exchange of its kind. At the end of that week, several choral groups and a girls’ precision team from Annapolis High School walked over to Bates High School for a “return ‘exchange’ assembly.” 24 Fights or assaults occurring between blacks and whites became rare. Black-on-white crime declined to a low level. A young black boy snatched the pocketbook of the sixteen-year-old daughter of Albert J. Goodman, the state’s attorney, as she was walking up East Street. White police still entered black neighborhoods to break up fights and crap games and to make arrests for crimes ranging from robbery to murder. In the summer of 1949, in the course of investigating a break-in at Lill’s Lunchroom on Calvert Street, a white police officer shot a thirteen-yearold black boy. 25 Other whites continued to make appearances in black spaces. In 1951, Governor McKeldin gave a speech at the Bates graduation, the first time a

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governor spoke at the high school, which was now seventeen years old. McKeldin also gave a talk at a Men’s Day at Mt. Moriah. Mayor Ellington and Alderman Martin spoke at Second Baptist Church at a Rally Day. Claire McKeldin was invited to a meeting of the Council of Negro Women at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church. Dr. David Jenkins, the county superintendent of schools, went to First Baptist Church to talk about “Better School-Community Relationships” to the Colored Teachers Association. The Citizens Planning and Housing Association, a predominantly white organization that Dr. Allen and Rev. Croll helped organize, held one of its monthly meetings at Asbury. 26 Segregation remained the norm. Although during the Korean War, draftees may not have reported for induction separately. In its articles the Capital did not mention separate registration locations for blacks and whites or specify whether the recruits were black or white when they left town. But black and white soldiers and sailors went to segregated USOs. Black enlisted men went to the Northwest Street YMCA/USO building for social programs—band concerts, special birthday parties, and dances—as well as study and discussion groups and church services. 27 The Red Cross continued to run segregated swimming programs. On a Saturday that the mayor designated “Kids Day,” sponsored by the Kiwanis Club, black and white children went to the Star and the Circle theaters, respectively, to watch a free movie. This event, like the summer recreation programs and the earlier Christmas movie tradition, reinforced segregation practices for the next generation. 28 In 1949, a new playground for black children opened in the Fourth Ward after the Board of Education’s bulldozers leveled the land on Clay Street across from College Creek Terrace, and a group of young black males known as the Ravens helped smooth out the ground. Equipment came from surplus Navy supplies. 29 In Gott’s Court in the summers, children played basketball with an old straw basket that they nailed to a post. To play baseball, they used a flat board and a tennis ball and made the bases out of cardboard or brick. In the dirt court on “Saturdays, the men would get together and have a big football game. Everybody would clear out of the way and step back and watch.” 30 One girl and her friends played in her backyard in the dollhouse that Lewis Hyde took away when the houses were demolished. “It was a oneroom regular house, with the windows, doors.” Her grandmother put old curtains up. The girls made “mud cakes, played with dolls . . . and dressed up in their mother’s old shoes, straw hats.” 31

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NOTES 1. AA, June 3, 1950. According to the 1950 census, the population of Annapolis before the annexation census was 10,047 of which 36 percent were “non-white,” or 3,617 people, a figure that may have included Filipinos as well as blacks. U.S. Department of Commerce. Bureau of Census. 1952. Seventeenth Census of the United States, 20–29; McWilliams, 310. 2. EC, November 27, 1951; December 14, 1951; OHI. 3. Warren, Then Again, xxii; EC, November 17, 1950; April 23, 1952. 4. EC, October 5, 1950; August 1, 1951. 5. Polk’s Annapolis Directory 1954, 309–48. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. EC, August 12, 1950; December 21, 1951; June 16, 1951. 9. OHI with two people. 10. AA, August 12, 1950; EC, August 14, 1951; April 11, 1952; Worden, Saint Mary’s Church, 141. 11. Brown, interview. 12. EC, September 13, 1949; OHI. 13. EC, May 31, 1949; May 30, 1950; May 29, 1951. 14. EC, August 22, 1951. 15. EC, July 19, 1950; April 18, 1952; October 20, 1952; September 25, 1951; January 11, 1946; September 17, 1947; September, 13, 1952l; McWilliams, 309 16. May, Achieving the American Dream, 225; Beatrice Jones, interview; OHI; EC, March 13, 1951; April 23, 1952. 17. EC, May 30, 1952; McWilliams, 285. 18. AA, May 5, 1951; May 19, 1951. 19. AA, May 5, 1951; EC, April 14, 1950; June 30, 1950. 20. EC, December 21, 1950. 21. EC, April 10, 1950; March 26, 1951. 22. EC, April 23, 1952; June 24, 1952; December 10, 1951; November 28, 1952. 23. EC, March 2, 1951; May 14, 1952. 24. EC, February 20, 1952; February 23, 1952; The National Conference of Christians and Jews sponsored these events since the 1940s. “National Brotherhood Week.” 25. At least much less crime was reported in the Capital. EC, December 26, 1952; February 20, 1950; October 19, 1950; December 23, 1949; June 5, 1950; August 2, 1949. 26. EC, June 15, 1951; March 21, 1952; February 16, 1952; October 25, 1952; November 7, 1949; December 12, 1951. 27. EC, December 12, 1950; January 16, 1951; January 24, 1951; October 6, 1949; April 5, 1951; August 2, 1951. 28. EC, September 25, 1952; August 7, 1951. 29. EC, September 29, 1949. 30. OHI, with two people. 31. OHI.

NINETEEN Struggles, 1949–1952

“There was so much due us we were always battling on one front or another, housing, employment . . .” This was how Rev. Bowman described blacks’ struggle for equality during these years. They made small gains—small achievements compared to what they thought they deserved as citizens of a democracy. More often than not, they faced obdurate whites who could not recognize them as equals. 1 What they did accomplish may have been the result of the interaction between the growing group of more poised, educated black residents, who had become more visible and vocal in the town, and concerned white citizens. Perhaps some whites reconsidered their own segregationist stance when they heard about the opening up of some universities, stores, and public accommodations to blacks in other parts of the country, the result of campaigns by the NAACP and the Urban League to end segregation. 2 These trends may have influenced the Capital coverage of the black community too. The editors in Annapolis published fewer sensational crime stories. Not that old habits disappeared. One short article made fun of a local black street sweeper: “Johnson is so serious about looking tidy himself that, when the first day on which the new uniforms were to be worn turned out to be a wet sloppy one, Mr. Johnson went home and changed into his old uniform. He appeared in immaculate whites the next day.” But the writer was more respectful because he referred to his subject as Mr. Johnson instead of Charlie, as an earlier writer would have. Another article referred to John Wesley Chapman as John in a story about him that was nostalgic about the “ol’ time Negro.” It said, “A man of oldworld courtly manners, John has played a colorful part in the life of the family and recalls many incidents of the ‘old days.’” 3

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Stories still sent messages to white and black readers—perhaps contradictory ones. Warnings to blacks may have been implied in the headline, “Crowd Stones Negro’s Home in White District.” But the same day, the paper printed a photo of James W. Green, a black resident of College Creek Terrace, playing checkers with a white sailor on the USS Wisconsin that was in Korean waters during the war. 4 The Capital kept its readers more informed about civil rights developments beyond Annapolis. Blacks and whites may have reacted differently when they read that the attorney general of Maryland said, “Baltimore department stores are within their rights in refusing to serve African Americans or deny them permission to try on clothing.” The Capital published an Associated Press story about the school desegregation case that became known as Brown v. Board of Education, which reached the U.S. Supreme Court in early December 1952, just as Gott’s Court was being paved over. 5 Sometimes the Capital seemed to reflect more favorable attitudes toward blacks, even as it continued to ridicule them. In 1951, it published a photo of the homecoming queen at Bates High School and a full-page photo spread about the USO-YMCA on Northwest Street. It ran a picture of Mt. Moriah and Rev. S. W. Williams in its church column—a first. During the Korean War, the paper reported on soldiers—blacks and whites—who were wounded, captured, killed, or awarded medals for their service. The reporter writing the “Inquiring Reporter” column now queried more blacks, who sometimes raised civil rights concerns. Asked about the possibility of a new park at Truxton, William Booze, a black man, responded, “It would be nice if there wouldn’t be any prejudice.” 6 Whites still staged regular minstrel shows at both Annapolis High School and St. Mary’s Church, a reminder of the enduring influence of these demeaning stereotypes. In May 1950, the Community Chest sponsored a minstrel show to raise funds for the programs it financed including the Parole Health Center and the Northwest Street YMCA, both for black residents. A popular, black-faced song and dance team performed at Annapolis High School and furnished “plenty of hilarity,” according to the Capital. 7 Some blacks enjoyed small improvements in housing conditions. Many of those living in Gott’s Court managed to move to new, comfortable homes with modern conveniences. But surveys revealed that most other blacks still lived in overcrowded and, in some cases, dilapidated houses. The waiting list to get into black public housing projects included 150 families. Black ministers and doctors “saw the problem daily” when they visited patients and parishioners who lived in “Hooverville” homes, like the shanties people had to build for themselves during the Depression. 8 At this time, the Public Housing Authority received funding to develop two new projects—one for blacks at Obery Court and one for whites in

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Eastport Terrace. Out in Parole, private developers constructed modest homes for blacks who could afford the down payment. 9 Rev. David Croll, the black pastor of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, prodded a group of concerned citizens—perhaps the first formally instituted, integrated group in Annapolis—to monitor housing conditions. Croll’s initiative grew out of early meetings of the newly formed Frontiers Club. He believed that this group should “describe the problem in fairly exact terms,” so they contracted for a survey to learn how many houses lacked electricity and plumbing, how many were overcrowded, and what sorts of people lived in the homes. Using his connections in the white community, Rev. Croll succeeded in organizing an integrated committee. 10 At a November 1949 town meeting, participants disagreed about Annapolis’s housing. A planner from Prince George’s County told the audience that Annapolis should have a master plan “to remove blighted areas . . . those sections no longer economic or social assets . . . and to create a harmonious well-integrated community for all,” according to the Capital. Rev. Croll objected, “I am opposed to the kind of improvements, which look only on the physical aspect or for the physical good only, and fail to take into consideration the psychological effect. . . . Destroying homes and removing people from their friends and families may seem a trifling thing. But it helps to people our mental hospital,” he said according to the Capital. 11 Another person proposed that the town should fix up its old buildings to transform Annapolis into a historic center. The audience saw slides of the dilapidated houses with “rat-infested toilets” and malnourished residents on Cornhill and Fleet streets, “all within two and three blocks of the state capitol,” and learned that the homes on “our darling little Cornhill Street” were undergoing restoration for the “smart set.” 12 The Capital entered the debate. Readers saw a photo spread of Larkin and Water streets in the summertime. On display in the photos, like animals in the zoo, were the residents, with the headline “Slums Breed Disease, Social Problems.” Dr. Allen thought it was “one of the worst slum areas that you have ever seen in any city. There were no streetlights. Many homes had no electricity and those that did were connected to a neighbor’s house with one of those little extension cords. When there was in-door plumbing (which was not often), it often did not work. Many of the people had only a little wood stove to supply both heat and cooking purposes,” his biographer Jude Thomas May reported. 13 The Capital showed its readers pictures of Gott’s Court backyards with the caption, “Trash accumulation and filth are only the more obvious of the unsanitary conditions prevailing in these alleys to the rear of homes on Gott’s Court.” Readers saw a series of backyards, the first with debris scattered about, and the rest with laundry hanging from the lines. The yards further down the row looked less cluttered. 14

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Years later, Gott’s Court residents protested this depiction. One woman asserted, “We had decent fences. They weren’t dilapidated, fallingdown fences. The men whitewashed the fences in the spring, they whitewashed the outside toilets. Our toilets were milk white inside and out, you know, and there was no smell to them or anything.” 15 Landlords neglected the houses, and the Gott’s Court residents suffered. When it rained, one resident recalled, “our roof sometime was so holey, till the water would be dropping through. They would have buckets, pots, and pans everywhere.” The tenants had to put in their own electricity. “The electricians [would] come and put it in the front room. But [my father] would buy the extension wires and run it through the whole house,” one former resident of the court explained. 16 The month after the article about Gott’s Court appeared in the Capital, Rev. Croll, Dr. Allen, and other interested blacks and concerned whites, including the United Council of Church Women, formed the integrated Citizen’s Planning and Housing Association (CPHA), perhaps modeling themselves after a similar organization in Baltimore. Collaborating with the slum residents, landlords, private developers, and city officials, the association had a “three-pronged goal: the construction of public housing, the encouragement of construction of private housing, and the use of law enforcement to correct housing ills.” 17 It convened community meetings to tell slum residents about the association’s project and organize tenants who could repair some of the buildings. Based on its surveys, the association was able to “make projections about the size and cost of affordable new housing.” Rev. Croll said, “The housing dilemma stemmed less from the fact that the residents were unemployed and impoverished. In fact, many held jobs which were steady, albeit low paying.” Instead, he suggested that the “opportunity to purchase adequate housing was blocked by inadequate savings to use as down payment or collateral for financing.” 18 The association encouraged contractors and bankers to build low-cost housing for Annapolis. Dr. Allen believed that “the bias against constructing and financing housing for black families had been based on prejudice and outdated stereotypes,” according to May. Looking back years later, his biographer reported, “Nothing tangible came out of it. There were many meetings and a lot of talk, but that was all. No one was really interested at all in venturing into that part of the market.” 19 The organization was slightly more successful in its attempt to improve the town’s housing “block by block.” Cornhill, Fleet, and East streets surrounded the first block the group selected. A survey revealed that about sixteen of the homes, some of which were more than 200 years old, could be “brought up to standard without much expense.” Three others needed “major repairs,” and five were “unfit for human habitation.” The CPHA wrote the owners of the first type and told them they needed to bring their properties up to standard. If the landlords failed to

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fix them up, the group planned to report them to the health, fire, and police departments. 20 The CPHA told the city council that the city’s housing codes were inadequate. The trial magistrate claimed that only four cases had been filed in the past four years. The city counselor suggested that the association work with the Greater Annapolis Planning Commission to revise the city charter. He believed that the postwar conditions made it impossible to get rid of the slums. He remarked, “There has never been as active a group as this,” the Capital reported. 21 At an August meeting to discuss the housing situation, the association president said that the 5,000 blacks in Annapolis lived in 899 homes, 691 of them substandard. At this meeting, the group learned that a Baltimore firm planned to construct a $3 million housing project and shopping center at Camp Parole. The new homes “would be for sale for $6,000 with a down payment of $600. The company expected to build between 400 and 500 homes in sections of twenty-five.” 22 A newly formed city agency called the Board of Public Health and Safety created an inspection group to report housing code violations. Once notified of any violations, the owner of a building would have a month to make the necessary repairs, or the building would be condemned. The new board condemned Wright’s Hotel on Calvert Street, once a lively hotel, now an apartment house that had been damaged by a fire, and 4 Vansant Street, which it described as “dilapidated, unsanitary and unfit for human habitation.” It told the owner of a Washington Street property to repair the building or tear it down. It also condemned 19 Larkin Street. 23 Early in 1951, Dr. Allen, Rev. Croll, and Emma Hall Stepney, the music director at Asbury who was remembered as “a very good person . . . dignified, well-spoken,” all served on the executive committee of the CPHA. The association referred three houses in the Fleet-Cornhill block to the Bureau of Public Health and Safety for condemnation, and it went before the city council in September 1951 to complain about a house on Cornhill Street that it wanted condemned. 24 By the end of 1951, the CPHA had become even more vigilant and assertive. The group appointed an eight-person research committee to investigate and report on several reportedly “substandard” homes. The organization repeatedly asked the landlord of an East Street building to make repairs. It monitored conditions at a building on Fleet Street and planned to contact the Health Department because the landlord had ignored its complaints. 25 At an April meeting, when the association elected Dr. Aris T. Allen vice president and put Dr. Allen, Rev. Croll, John T. Chambers, and Douglas King—all blacks—on the board, the group learned that more than one hundred homes in which blacks lived were in danger of being demolished to make room for a connecter road to the Washington-An-

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napolis Highway. The group learned that 40 percent of the homes in Annapolis were substandard; blacks occupied 69.2 percent of these houses. The executive secretary, Mrs. D. Ellwood Williams, informed the group that under a 1938 law, homes must not have leaky roofs, poor wiring, or malfunctioning toilets. She told the association that in these substandard homes where blacks had to live, some of the toilets had not worked for six months to two years; some had outdoor toilets that had never been cleaned. Others had “a roof leaking so badly that tenants would move from spot to spot to avoid the water.” The inspection found “a single room in which six people were living—eating, sleeping and cooking—with the floor so damp chickens couldn’t live that way and adjacent to a room where a woman had died of tuberculosis.” She reported that 35 percent of the city fires, 45 percent of the major crimes, 55 percent of the juvenile delinquency, and 60 percent of the city’s tuberculosis cases were found to originate in these substandard homes. The Capital quoted the executive secretary as saying, “So you see, bad housing can be very expensive to taxpayers.” 26 “First Court Test of City Housing Law to Be Made,” the Capital headline read on July 2, 1952. The case involved Minnie Blum, who lived in Baltimore and owned 91 Fleet Street, where at one time, thirty-three people lived. She had difficulty fixing up the place with so many tenants. The inspectors found that the floors were rotting in some areas, the steps were pulling away from the sidewall, electrical wiring was exposed, and there were other problems, a total of twenty-nine violations, which would have cost $1,000 to repair. By the end of August, after Blum entered a guilty plea, she was fined for court costs and $20, the maximum for one day’s violation. Nevertheless, the Citizen’s Planning and Housing Association said the case was an “important milestone”—the first time the statute had been enforced since it had been enacted fourteen years earlier. 27 Years later, Dr. Allen believed that they had “only a minimal impact on the condition of housing for blacks in Annapolis. The Fourth Ward remained blight and the deteriorated conditions continued to debase and brutalize the residents. Occasional repairs were obvious and interspersed within the neighborhood was an occasional home with a new surface of paint.” His biographer, however, argued, that the CPHA had “a more profound effect stemming from this effort which went well beyond physical renovation and access to modern plumbing . . . there had developed a renewed sense of community and an enhanced level of organization. For the first time, individuals within the black community found that they could group together and achieve a common goal, however limited.” Further, he suggested, “the concerns of the black community had elicited the interest of several leading white citizens. The attempt at establishing a biracial organization to address these concerns, while only marginally successful in achieving its stated goals, had expanded the contacts and allegiances between blacks and whites.” May explained, “For young

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black professionals like Aris, this experience was invaluable. It provided not only the visibility within the broader community, but also a sense of confidence in his own ability to function as a leader in community civic affairs.” It brought blacks into white institutions as equals to their white counterparts. 28 Two positive developments occurred. The Obery Court housing project for blacks opened. Mayor Roscoe Rowe appointed Emma Hall Stepney and Rev. Leroy Bowman to the Housing Commission. Rev. Bowman believed the mayor made the appointment because he knew that the federal government would soon tell him to integrate the commission. After Mayor Rowe died, Rev. Bowman went to pay a call on acting Mayor Ellington to discuss the housing situation. “So when I came in and he told me right away, ‘Rev. Bowman, I’m a redneck from Georgia. Colored people don’t vote for me and I don’t do nothing for them so ain’t no need of you coming in here asking me to do anything for black people ’cause I don’t do it.’” Bowman replied, “‘Mr. Mayor, I didn’t come in here to talk to you about politics, but I learned that you are a Southern Baptist. I am a National Baptist and the Lord told me to come over and talk to you and to tell you that if you didn’t build some houses for those people who needed housing, that you’re gonna have to deal with Him.’ And he became my best friend.” 29 Efforts by blacks to improve their children’s educational opportunities also had only limited success. In 1950, the median years of schooling completed for all Annapolis residents was 10.6, but just 6.9 for nonwhites. Because of the overcrowding at Stanton, all but the sixth graders now attended school for half a day, which meant that children were receiving only “half an education.” Recess still took place in Washington Street, which was roped off. The Stanton PTA, of which Dr. Allen became president, brought the problems before the Board of Education, but to no avail. 30 The teachers tried their best. They still had to use secondhand books, and make their own materials. Some teachers taught their pupils about savings, business, and good behavior. Some took students on trips. Community figures gave talks. The Stanton PTA sponsored a program on “Negro History” at the First Baptist Church, where Haley Douglass—the grandson of Frederick Douglass—gave a talk, and the Dramatic Club put on the play The Two Races. 31 By the fall of 1949, more than 1,100 students attended Bates High School. The state refused to fund the expansion of Stanton, but it did provide $2 million to build an addition at Bates. At the opening ceremony of the annex, the president of Morgan State College described it as a “symbol of growing recognition in America of the Negro’s right to become a first-class citizen. . . . One of the most hopeful trends of our time is the change in the attitude of the American people in the field of race relations . . . [there is] the growing realization by the people of Maryland

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that an educated Negro community will benefit the state in the long run.” 32 The day after the ceremony, the Capital published an editorial that praised the hard work of the teachers, saying, “It is a monument to the progressive thinking of the community and a tribute to the many colored teachers and students who have worked hard over the years. . . . Now the county has given them a school of which they can be proud—one of the finest in the county’s school system.” It also pointed out, “The number of graduates of Bates entering college surpasses the average college attendance by high school graduates of the county. . . . The teaching staff of the school also rates high. About 20 percent of the teachers hold master’s degrees and several are studying for their doctor’s degree.” The paper did not point out that those degrees could not be obtained at the University of Maryland. 33 For the school community, an important task was gaining accreditation of Bates. In December 1952, Bates was admitted to the Middle States Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, an accomplishment, the Capital reported, “long sought by its administration and faculty.” The paper wrote an editorial praising Principal Douglas S. King and the faculty for their work. “Mr. King and his faculty have worked long and hard to have their school accredited. . . . The county board, as well as the State Board of Education, assisted them in their efforts.” 34 Prior to the visit from the Middle States Association, a group from the Maryland State Board of Education evaluated Bates and informed the school that its library facilities had to be improved. King, the faculty, the students, and First Baptist Church and others raised $4,000 so that the library could meet the association’s standards. Among the events they held were a tea, a barn dance, and an oratorical contest. 35 Adults and returning veterans took advantage of evening courses offered at Bates in industrial education, homemaking, agriculture, retail, math, and English. In the spring of 1950, a number of veterans participated in a building trades training program financed through the GI Bill. They constructed a home for one of their classmates, James Booth, who worked on the grounds of the Naval Academy and who helped furnish the materials and acted as “superintendent of construction.” 36 Members of the Fourth Ward also contributed to the Clay Street Library, now located at the Obery Court Community Center. Teachers from Stanton School brought their students to the library for readings. Lulu Hardesty organized the annual tea that drew well-known speakers, Haley G. Douglass, a historian and teacher at a Washington public school, and Dr. John Hope Franklin, a graduate of Harvard University and professor of history at Howard University, among them. More than 200 people came to hear Franklin’s talk at St. Philip’s Hall. 37 In February 1952, the Annapolis and Anne Arundel County Public Library Association voted to close the Clay Street branch and consolidate

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the black and white libraries to reduce expenses. The Reynolds Tavern building, where the white library was located, had been renovated, alterations that opened up additional space in the building. When the remodeling was completed at the end of May, the Clay Street branch closed, and blacks could check books out of the previously whites-only library on Church Circle. 38 The two populations occasionally came together then in the library and elsewhere as those two young men, one white and one black, riding on the fenders of the Buick in the recreation parade implied, but these were exceptional moments. Generally, the young remained segregated on their separate playgrounds even though the board of the Greater Recreation Association of Annapolis that supervised and supported these divisions had been integrated since 1947. 39 Other integrated recreational committees formed. In August 1950, the Evening Capital sports editor, Hyman Cohen, organized a committee of four men to draft an ordinance to create a recreation plan for the city. He included two blacks, Henry Bynum, the director of the Armed Services YMCA, and Cecil C. Burton, now the supervisor of Obery Court. By the summer of 1952, “Friends of Recreation” formed as “a medium through which civic organizations and individuals could advise and support the Annapolis Parks and Recreation Commission.” Dr. Aris T. Allen and Douglas S. King were among its board members. Robert Green, who was very active in recreation programs, served now on the Annapolis Recreation and Parks Commission. 40 The Girl Scouts, who still met in their segregated troops, mingled as equals at various functions throughout the year. Both groups now jointly prepared the summer campsite, Camp Woodlands, sang before the governor at Christmastime, and celebrated the anniversaries of their organization. In the spring of 1952, all the troops of the county assembled at St. John’s College for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Maryland Girl Scouts. About 1,000 people came to see 900 county scouts. That fall, black troop leaders attended a planning meeting for the fortieth anniversary of the national organization at the home of one of the white troop leaders. 41 A significant achievement was the selection of Delmar Spriggs, member of Troop 45, and a senior at Bates, to go to the International Encampment of Girl Scouts at Wind Mountain in Oregon. She was one of four delegates chosen out of twenty-two candidates from surrounding states. She was selected “because of her high qualifications and her fine record in scouting.” A month before leaving, she went to Washington, DC, for a conference on international scout encampments at the State Department, accompanied by Mrs. J. G. Stevens, a white scout leader. 42 Both groups continued their separate and parallel campaigns for better health facilities and services. The most important of these efforts was the hospital drive. At Asbury M.E. Church in the spring of 1949, blacks heard about plans to enlarge the hospital to include a separate black

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maternity ward. Seven hundred volunteers—perhaps including some of the 200 members of the black teams—attended a “kick-off” dinner at the Armory. William H. Richardson went to a second event, a “Victory Dinner” at the Armory. The Capital reported that he “was introduced with loud applause.” He reported “a grand total of $15,988” of pledges from the black volunteers. 43 The Capital published a history of the hospital, which omitted any mention of Dr. William Bishop, the black doctor who practiced there when it first opened. The paper did recognize the difficulties, and in some cases, dangers, pregnant black women had faced as a result of their exclusion from the hospital. A maternity ward for black mothers was “a real need,” the paper stated. 44 Dr. Aris T. Allen won access to the hospital beginning around 1949, an important breakthrough. Several young, liberal, white doctors whom he had impressed conspired, without informing him, to add him to the hospital staff. They invited him to observe their operations on his patients when he still could not treat them at the hospital. Not realizing what they were trying to do, Dr. Allen found the experience humiliating because the hospital staff and other doctors largely ignored him. At one point, he wanted to stop coming, but the doctors urged him to stay. As his young white colleagues anticipated, the staff and other doctors began consulting with him. He was a “very suave man, very respectable,” who made a good impression on people. “He asserted himself in his role, and people saw that he was intelligent.” Once he was admitted to the Maryland Medical Society in the mid-1950s, he could then practice at the hospital. 45 The first integrated training class for mental health workers was probably a six-week training program at the School of Rehabilitation Therapy open to blacks as well as whites at the Crownsville State Hospital, where black mental patients were treated. One of the black students was Electa Holland, who was on a required one-year maternity leave from her teaching job. The black students, who were better educated than their white counterparts, rode the bus with the white students, and could sit anywhere on the bus. They thought the white students were “genuine and nice.” 46 The annual campaigns of the March of Dimes, Red Cross, and Community Chest were still segregated, though Dr. Allen began to serve on the Red Cross board in 1950. In the Fourth Ward, everyone got involved. Community figures, students from Stanton and Bates schools, members of sororities and fraternal organizations, and churchgoers participated. They attended their own benefit teas, concerts, and sports events and helped solicit money. Blacks and whites still held their separate March of Dimes dances each January. By 1951, Thomas Baden, a Naval Academy employee and member of a well-known family, served on a nominating committee of the Community Chest to name candidates of the board. It is unknown if there were black members on the board. 47

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Housing and health were only two of many problems the black leaders wanted to confront. In October 1950, at the board meeting of the CPHA, Rev. Croll suggested that the group publicly support the hiring of a black policeman to patrol black neighborhoods. A white board member told him that “favorable public sentiment would have to be aroused before such action could be taken,” the Capital reported. The president of the CPHA board, who was also white, questioned whether the group should involve itself in the issue, but others argued that it should be interested in the “general welfare of a substandard area.” The board voted unanimously to support Dr. Croll’s recommendation. 48 The Anne Arundel NAACP, now more than ten years old, supported hiring black policemen. It also agitated for improved housing and education, and the elimination of Jim Crow practices. Typically, the NAACP raised its concerns with predominantly white city officials and politicians, who responded cordially to their requests, then explained why such requests could not be acted upon at that particular time. Or officials simply neglected to make any change. NAACP members began to consider filing lawsuits. That was the strategy the NAACP settled on in the summer of 1952 when it filed a lawsuit to end the segregated beach at Sandy Point because the conditions in the black section were so bad. 49 At the end of his year as president of the NAACP in February 1951, Rev. Croll remarked that he thought the organization had made some progress, but that it “could not afford to become slothful.” Attendance at meetings declined, and “interest was reported to have lagged,” the Capital reported. Some people did not join because they had more pressing responsibilities, such as raising children and holding two jobs. Some thought it was a risk to join at that time. They had “too much to lose,” Rev. Bowman thought. They were afraid they might get fired for speaking out. Rev. Bowman explained, “The NAACP was usually headed by a preacher because as a general thing they had more time than anybody. And the other thing was that ministers generally were self-supporting. They didn’t have to rely on the white people for support.” In looking back, some saw the organization as not very strong. While the slowness of change discouraged members of the local organization, people dealt with Jim Crow discrimination in different ways. As Rev. Bowman explained, “One of the ways they’ve tried to work around it or work with it has been through politics.” 50 Political life in the Fourth Ward, like the community itself, was a world of its own, now more varied and complex than at the beginning of the century. In the national election in November 1952, the town’s black wards split their votes between both parties. In the Fourth Ward, 431 voted for the Republican, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, and 335 for Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate; in the Seventh Ward, in the newly annexed Parole area, 529 voted for Eisenhower and 262 for Stevenson.

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Support for Eisenhower reflected the continuing national predominance of black Republican Party members and supporters. 51 The black candidates for local elections were more diverse. In the primary for the municipal election of 1949, six men competed for the Republican nominations for city alderman from the Fourth Ward, including Marcellus Hall, a waiter at Carvel Hall Hotel well-known among whites and blacks. Dr. McNeil and Charles A. Oliver received the most votes—209 and 152, respectively—while Dr. Johnson got 149, Addison 101, Williams 98, and Hall 79. Alderman Oliver was less popular among the voters but still managed to retain his seat. Some blacks thought that “he talked out of both sides of his mouth,” trying to placate blacks and whites. 52 Black aldermen had difficulty accomplishing anything to improve the lives of their constituents. For example, Alderman Oliver tried to persuade the city council to paint the outside of the USO/YMCA. (The town helped finance the operation of the program.) In July 1949, Henry J. Bynum, then secretary of the YMCA, asked the city council to support the paint job because the building was “in very bad condition.” Alderman Ellington referred the matter to the mayor and Public Property Committee, a frequently used delay tactic. Two months later, Bynum submitted to the council three bids he had received for the paint job. Alderman England, the chairman of the Public Property Committee, said that “he had not authorized anyone to secure bids on this work.” The bids were “therefore rejected and the matter rests with the Public Committee,” according to the Capital. 53 By seeking those bids, Bynum had stepped out of his role as a black supplicant before the council, which may have had no intention of allocating funds for the paint job anyway. Or, the council may have acted like white shopkeepers, who often ignored black customers until all the white customers had been served, even if they entered the store after them. For whites on the council, the painting of the black YMCA apparently had the lowest priority. Alderman Oliver took up the challenge and commented at a meeting the following February, “there was a job long past due . . . if something was not done in the near future, that would be the worst looking property in the City of Annapolis. He hoped that as soon as money could be allocated, the painting would be done.” His request was “referred to Property Committee.” Again in October and December, Oliver brought the matter up, reminding the council that “the front of the USO should be painted.” There is no indication in the minutes that the committee ever approved the paint job during this time. 54 Such delaying tactics and dismissals of their concerns must have been demeaning and frustrating both for the aldermen and blacks who followed civic affairs. But the council and mayor now appointed more blacks to commissions, either because of pressure from the federal

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government or from blacks themselves, or to have representatives from each ward. In addition to Rev. Bowman and Emma Hall Stepney on the Housing Authority Commission and Robert Green on the Recreation and Parks Commission, Dr. Aris T. Allen was appointed a member of the Annapolis Annexation Charter Commission, and William B. Butler, the former principal and now science teacher at Bates, was nominated to the Planning Commission. As a Republican, the mayor depended on the black vote for his election, which may explain his willingness to appoint blacks to positions on commissions. In the past, the black Republican aldermen, as the only Republicans on the council, had served on various commissions that required aldermen from both political parties. 55 In November 1950, a month after Rev. Croll had gotten the support of the CPHA, a delegation of blacks that included Rev. Croll, Walter S. Mills, and Dr. Allen, asked the council to “consider the appointment of colored policemen in view of the fact that additional policemen were being appointed for the territory to be annexed after January 2, 1951.” The council unanimously agreed to recommend that the police commissioner give the request “the fullest consideration.” This was probably a delaying tactic. The issue was not mentioned again in the minutes of the council for a year and a half, when all three black aldermen, Oliver, Brown, and McNeil, “spoke in favor of having colored policemen on the city police force.” 56 The shortage of meeting places for integrated groups was raised in the council. Several such groups had wanted to meet at the white recreation center on Compromise Street and Newman Street (formerly Chestnut Street), but they were turned down. The Council of Church Women complained to the county commissioners that the segregation policy was “unjust and undemocratic, especially considering that this building is tax supported,” according to the Capital. At a city council meeting, Alderman Oliver deplored the fact that action had to be taken to lift an “inter-racial ban.” Alderman McNeil also spoke on the subject, and the mayor stated that the “matter would be taken under consideration.” 57 Rev. Bowman worked in Washington, DC, as a clerk for the secretary of the treasury during the week. His exposure to black residents there persuaded him that people in Annapolis were more “docile” and “submissive” than blacks in Washington, DC. He had heard that Annapolis was referred to as “the plantation and the Naval Academy was the big house. And one of the things that enabled us to make it is because we know what kind of situation we’re in, just got to be wise enough, got to figure our way out of it without hurting ourselves and without hurting anybody else.” Besides dealing with the unjust constraints through politics, Rev. Bowman said, blacks in Annapolis “just kept quiet, they didn’t rock the boat.” They “knew what the system required of them and they conformed. Some might have displayed their anger and I guess they did at times.” 58

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The “big house” aspect of the Naval Academy was obvious. One young man who worked at the academy at this time first noticed the discrimination when, as a young boy, he visited his father, who also worked there. He could see that the jobs blacks performed were not the same as the work white civilians did. He “knew there were openings I couldn’t apply to” because they were reserved for white men. “Do you understand ‘pie in the sky’ or ‘you can’t get there from here,’ he queried.” 59 Black women fared no better than men. One woman, who grew up in Gott’s Court seeing her grandmother come home each day exhausted from cleaning a white family’s house, was determined to do better. A few years after graduating from Bates, she managed to get a job as a housekeeper at the governor’s mansion, a “good position.” It meant “you were someone.” She was told to keep her eyes lowered and not speak until spoken to. Eventually she was promoted to cook, then went to work at a restaurant. 60 Data from the 1950 census confirm how hard it was for blacks to find work commensurate with their education. The number of black professionals grew by just five between 1940 and 1950. The workforce was composed largely of unskilled black workers—274 men were service workers and 213 were laborers, while 278 women were domestics, and 149 were service workers. Only five blacks reported an income above $10,000; twenty-five made between $4,500 and $7,000; while 260 earned less than $5,000; and 295 were paid between $500 and $1,500. In contrast to the five black families, 120 white families made $10,000 or more. 61 Electa Holland, a teacher and a New Yorker, experienced Jim Crow restrictions for the first time when she came to Annapolis in 1951 and married Henry Holland, also a teacher. A native of the Bronx, she could not get used to the idea that she could not go anywhere she pleased. She saw signs for restrooms and drinking fountains “for colored only” near the market. Her husband taught her how to behave. He told her that she could not go into restaurants to eat. On her first Sunday in Annapolis, after years of attending an Episcopal church in the Bronx, she went to St. Anne’s, the white Episcopal church on Church Circle. The next morning the telephone rang. “Don’t you know that is not our church?” the caller inquired. 62 She learned that blacks in Annapolis tended to stay within their own area and frequent the stores and businesses within the Fourth Ward. She was taught that people in Annapolis “did not create a ruckus,” and noticed that people acted complacent while they might have “boiled inside and talked amongst themselves.” Her “compensation” was that she knew that she could go to New York on the holidays and “didn’t have to put up with this way of life” all the time. 63 Blacks developed different strategies for coping with the insults from white shopkeepers who treated them as second-class citizens. Some or-

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dered clothing through the Montgomery Ward catalog because they did not want to go into stores where they were not permitted to try on items they might want to purchase. When, one woman arrived in Annapolis after World War II, she “couldn’t get used to how she would be treated at Montgomery Ward.” The clerk “couldn’t call her Mrs. Louise Smith like they would a white person, but ‘Louise.’” She “would correct him, because I felt I was due some courtesy.” 64 Others “never tried on clothes anywhere,” as one woman said. They knew their size and could pick out what they wanted to avoid the problem and humiliation. Some bought clothes from salesmen from Baltimore who still came regularly into the neighborhoods with trunk loads of items and catalogs. Recollected one shopper, “Big heavy-set man would come to your door and you would buy the dresses. He even had underclothes you could buy from him, stockings, everything. Same with furniture and pots and pans. Anything for the house. Just like the insurance man would come knock on your door. And they would beat you down if you owed him money. It was crazy. But that’s the way that you lived.” 65 A child who grew up in Gott’s Court sometimes got angry with the way the white clerks in the drugstore would ignore her. “We used to always go into this drugstore to get ice cream, but we used to have to stand in the corner because we couldn’t sit down. One day I went in there, and I wasn’t thinking. I wasn’t trying to be smart or anything. I always wanted to get up on one of them stools and go round and round, and I got up on the stool and was going round and the woman said something to me.” She went on to say, “I can’t recall what she said, but it can’t be nice because I know I cussed her out. And they put me out of the store.” 66 She learned where to shop from her grandmother. Many of the Jewish merchants were “nice to blacks.” Others recalled with a chuckle that they suspected one Jewish shopkeeper “put a finger on the scale to increase the price. At Rookies, the customers took numbers so that the people who waited on you were fair.” On Maryland Avenue, there was a store where “you could try on clothes.” She explained, “We knew that we couldn’t try the clothes on when we went in the stores. We would buy the clothes, hoping that they would fit us. Some of the stores were very nice and take your measurements so that you would pick out the right size. We couldn’t go in Lipman’s down on Main Street. . . . They would show you a few things around the back door, and you came out. Parson’s that was a store down on Main Street. You knew that you couldn’t go in and try on their hats.” If someone wanted a hat, you “would tell the lady you were working for that you had seen this hat in Parson’s, and she would get it for you.” At the “five-and-dime—you couldn’t touch too much. It was crazy.” 67

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NOTES 1. Bowman, interview. 2. Franklin and Moss, From Slavery to Freedom 427, 462. 3. EC, January 25, 1952; January 10, 1952. According to C. Vann Woodward, southern newspapers’ coverage of blacks became less biased during this period. Woodward, The Strange Career, 143. 4. EC, March 6, 1952. 5. EC, August 6, 1952; December 9, 1952. 6. EC, November 9, 1951; September 20, 1951; April 15, 1950; January 28, 1952; April 11, 1952; June 30, 1951; July 7, 1951; November 15, 1951; May 16, 1951. 7. EC, December 9, 1949; May 8, 1950; February 20, 1951; OHI. 8. May, Achieving the American Dream, 205–06. 9. EC, July 31, 1950; November 30, 1950; January 19, 1951. 10. May, 206–7. 11. EC, November 16, 1949. 12. Ibid. 13. EC, January 5, 1950; May, 205. 14. EC, January 11, 1950. 15. OHI. 16. OHI with four people. 17. EC, February 15, 1950; November 21, 1952. 18. Dr. Allen’s biographer, Jude Thomas May, quoted Croll as saying. May, 208. 19. May, 200, 209. 20. EC, May 18, 1950; June 16, 1950; June 17, 1950. 21. EC, July 13, 1950. 22. EC, August 15, 1950. About six months later, the prices for the houses increased, and the down payment more than doubled, thus making them inaccessible to some potential black purchasers. EC, January 19, 1951. 23. EC, October 16, 1950; November 17, 1950. 24. EC, February 16, 1951; September 21, 1951. 25. EC, December 15, 1951. 26. EC, April 18, 1952. 27. EC, July 2, 1952; August 29, 1952. 28. May, 211. 29. EC, December 14, 1951; September 27, 1951; Bowman, interview. 30. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Census, Seventeenth Census of the United States: Census Population of 1950 Characteristics of the Population Vol. III Part 20, Maryland, 20–41, 20–44; EC, September 13, 1949; OHI; EC, October 6, 1951; October 4, 1952; November 13, 1952; Brown, The Stanton Elementary School Story, 49. 31. OHI; EC, February 10, 1950. 32. EC, September 17, 1949; October 23, 1950. 33. EC, October 24, 1950. 34. EC, December 5, 1952; December 9, 1952. 35. EC, May 4, 1950; January 14, 1950; May 25, 1951. 36. EC, March 16, 1950. 37. EC, April 6, 1950; March 22, 1951; September 25, 1951. 38. EC, February 21, 1952; May 30, 1952. 39. EC, September 16, 1947. 40. EC, August 1, 1950; June 5, 1952; July 1, 1952; September 13, 1952. 41. EC, May 5, 1950; July 11, 1952; December 12, 1950; March 10, 1952; March 24, 1952; September 22, 1952. 42. EC, April 4, 1951; April 5, 1951; July 19, 1951; June 12, 1951. 43. EC, June 20, 1949; June 23, 1949; June 24, 1949; July 7, 1949; July 19, 1949. 44. July 6, 1949; OHI.

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45. May wrote that Allen was admitted into the Anne Arundel County Medical Society in 1949; May, 221. By 1955, he and his wife were accepted into the Maryland Medical Society, which according to her meant that they could practice at the hospital from that time. Dr. Faye Allen interview with author. 46. EC, November 19, 1952; Electa Holland, interview with author. 47. EC, March 21, 1952; April 14, 1949; December 20, 1951; January 27, 1951. 48. EC, October 9, 1950. 49. Bowman, interview; OHI. The outcome was the integration of the beaches in the summer of 1953. EC, June 3, 1953. 50. EC, January 29, 1951; February 1, 1951; Bowman, interview; OHI. 51. EC, November 5, 1952. 52. EC, June 18, 1949; June 21, 1949; OHI. 53. AMA, “Proceedings,” 1947–1953, MSA M49–27, 110, 112. 54. Ibid., 238, 291, 338, 349. 55. McWilliams, 309; AMA, “Proceedings,” 1947–1953, September 11, 1950, MSA M49–27, 190. 56. AMA, “Proceedings,” 1947–1953, November 13, 1950, 198; March 10, 1952, 295, MSA M49–27. 57. EC, March 15, 1950; AMA, “Proceedings,” 1947–1953, April 10, 1950, 163–164, MSA M49–27. 58. Bowman, interview. 59. OHI with three people. 60. OHI. 61. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Census, Seventeenth Census of the United States, 20-38–20-42; 20-6, 20-8. 62. Holland, interview. 63. Ibid. 64. OHI, the name is fictitious. 65. OHI. 66. OHI. 67. OHI.

TWENTY Own Worlds, 1949–1952

Addie Hobbs showed her new granddaughter-in-law, Electa Holland, around the Fourth Ward soon after she moved to Annapolis during this time, Holland recalled many years later. She pointed out the shops, small restaurants, Susie’s Tea Room, “owned by two Negro sisters on West Washington Street, next to the beauty parlor” that Mrs. Hobbs frequented. To many, the Fourth Ward seemed almost self-contained. “We were more or less self-sufficient over there. . . . We had hucksters selling watermelons, fish, chicken, whatever, vegetables. We had our restaurants, we had our barbershops, drugstore, beauty parlors, hotels . . . little clothing store, a beauty parlor in there and a restaurant . . . on Calvert. There were taverns, pool hall, funeral parlors, and churches,” recalled a resident of Gott’s Court with pride. 1 After being told that St. Anne’s was not “ours,” Electa Holland decided to join Asbury Church. Rev. Isaac R. Berry invited her to attend a Sunday service. Both her husband and grandmother-in-law were members. Addie Hobbs was one of the “pillars of the church.” She taught Sunday school, played the organ, and sang in the choir. 2 Churches maintained their important place in the lives of black Annapolitans. As Rev. Bowman put it, “If it hadn’t been for the church, people wouldn’t be able to make it. It encouraged people to understand that God loves them, that he gave his only begotten son. . . . God is going to see to it that we are going to make it.” This was an important part of his Sunday message. At the close of his sermon, he “hoped they’d feel good. I hoped they’d bring their burdens to the Lord, and leave them there, go away feeling better than they did when they came, and fired up and encouraged and ready to work.” 3 Annual church events occurred with the regularity of red and yellow leaves in the fall, frosty windows in the winter, crocuses in the spring, 303

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and fireflies in the summer. Churches held their Youth Days, when little girls dressed all in white and boys wore dark pants, and Men’s and Women’s Days, when women wore large hats and dressed in white, outfits that some now went to Baltimore to buy. Many children got new clothes for Easter Sunday. Mothers and grandmothers fussed over Gott’s Court children before they left for church. “We would go to Sunday school, and our dresses, slips, and our ribbon bows, they were starched. And they were tied to the minute,” remembered one woman who grew up in the court. Camp meetings and revivals still drew crowds to the two Baptist churches. At Thanksgiving and Christmas, people brought canned goods to fill gift baskets for the poor. In 1952, many went to Asbury to hear the choir’s performance of “Messiah.” Parishioners of First and Second Baptist went to New Year’s Eve Watch Nights, followed by a repast. 4 WNAV, another local radio station, now broadcast Mt. Moriah’s monthly “Community Night” programs. Teachers were the guests for one program to discuss the “Responsibility of the Community in Education and Developing the Total Child.” Cecelia Green, superintendent of the Sunday school and a well-liked teacher at Stanton, welcomed the guests, and Rachel Carter Smith, now vice principal of Bates High School and active in civic affairs, responded to the speakers. Smith was a “big cheese—everyone respected her for everything. . . . If she spoke, everybody listened . . . she didn’t let anything get sloppy. She was the founder of many things. . . . She was not high and mighty but very intelligent,” recalled one admirer. 5 Blacks went to Second Baptist in February for its observation of Negro History Week. One year, the church invited as “honored guests” several white officials, including Noah Hillman, the attorney who represented the Board of Education against the black teachers in their lawsuit. John Chambers, the owner of a black barbershop and member of the NAACP, was another guest. 6 Blacks interested in the 1952 presidential election could go to First Baptist and Mt. Moriah to hear representatives from the Eisenhower and Stevenson campaigns speak for their candidates. Later that winter, others attended a forum at Second Baptist on the topic, “How Can Military Spending Be Cut?” 7 Parishioners fulfilled their fundraising responsibilities, but made them enjoyable. One popular way to raise money was the “Trip around the World.” Six or seven hostesses would prepare a meal from different countries. One would “have a Chinese party at her home, someone else would have [an] England party, someone else German. . . . It would all take place the same night. You would go from house to house and pay seventy-five cents.” King and queen contests were another popular gimmick. The contestants would solicit money from people on the street. Everyone would get dressed up, and the royal contestants wore formal

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attire for the elegant crowning of the king and queen—those who raised the most money. 8 First Baptist’s congregation began an ambitious campaign to raise money for a new building. Black Catholics still needed funds to finish the construction of St. Augustine’s. St. Philips’s new Bishop Helfenstein Memorial Hall was “being built on a pay as you go basis.” 9 Church members promoted the education of their children. Churches gave $50 in prize money at graduation to outstanding students, and a Bible and $5 to each Bates graduate from their congregations. First Baptist held its annual oratorical contest for Bates seniors and a dinner to recognize the teachers. The modest church was transformed into a banquet hall with long tables covered with white tablecloths for a special repast. 10 Residents of the Fourth Ward supported their children’s schools. Some parents attended the monthly PTA meetings. In the fall of 1949, Stanton held a week-long open house when public figures spoke to the students. Among the many presenters were Carroll Hynson, mortician Charles Hicks, Drs. Allen, Richardson, and Johnson, Lovely Blackstone, of the cleanup campaigns, Mason Alsop, proprietor of Alsop’s Restaurant, Henry Bynum of the YMCA, and ministers and their wives. 11 Blacks frequented Bates concerts and plays that the Fine Arts Committee organized. In 1950, Hazel Scott, the jazz pianist and singer and wife of Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., performed. Football games, the homecoming parade, and theatrical productions drew crowds. Students staged an adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women just before the 1951 commencement. Governor McKeldin was the guest speaker at that occasion. “The time must come,” he said, “where there will be only one kind of citizenship in America, first-class citizenship. . . . We have got to accept the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man,” the Capital reported. 12 Civic leaders regularly spoke to the Bates students. For example, Dr. Allen, Rev. Croll, and David S. Jenkins, the white school superintendent, talked to the sociology class students about their futures. In 1952, career week, which seemed to occur every couple of years, exposed the students to many professions including catering, dressmaking, skilled work, medical, social work, teaching, office work, and legal work. 13 The extracurricular schedule for the 1951–1952 school year indicates the breadth of the school’s offerings: the Bates Fair, the crowning of “Sweetheart of Bates Fair,” a homecoming celebration, Halloween dance, bimonthly movies and biweekly club activities, Thanksgiving and Christmas parties, a spring operetta and cultural arts concert, and graduation events. Students could join clubs devoted to journalism, photography, dramatics, gymnastics, first aid, homemaking, art, and modern and folk dancing. The school had a band, sports teams, yearbook, and newspaper. 14

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Many residents of the Fourth Ward and the enlisted men, whose numbers increased again during the Korean War, attended daytime and evening programs at the USO/YMCA, the other community center for blacks. Its 1949 summer schedule included “wiener roasts, straw rides, boxing matches, movies, beach parties, sight-seeing tours, Fun nites, banquets, a shipwreck party,” and “an old fashioned box social.” One of the biggest events of the summer was the block party, when the whole community turned out for a miniature Mardi Gras. The YMCA had nearly 90,000 visits in 1949. 15 In 1951, the director of the YMCA, Henry Bynum, was a graduate of Wilberforce University. Each month he met with the volunteer staff and men appointed from the ship then docked at the Naval Academy to plan a schedule that included square dances, amateur theatricals, movies, broadcast programs, name band concerts, cabaret nights, swimming parties, roller skating, and birthday parties. Members and enlisted men could also attend boxing and wrestling matches, reading and discussion groups, church services, a marriage and family relations clinic, and study courses. 16 According to an article about the YMCA in the Capital, which might have been written by Eloise Richardson, “many thousands of colored civilian and armed services personnel enjoy its inspirational, educational and spiritual activities.” Approximately two dozen social and educational clubs met at the YMCA including some of the sororities and fraternities, the City Taxi Cab Association, the Beauticians Association, the PTA, the Frontiers, and a number of youth groups. 17 Around the Fourth Ward, clubs of every kind met, raised funds, and enjoyed dances and parties. The NAACP met monthly in different churches. Members of the Elks held special dances to raise funds for the March of Dimes campaign and benefits for the Community Chest that drew crowds. Elks played Santa Claus at Christmastime and treated children to a movie at the Star Theatre, a ritual no longer practiced by the governor. 18 The Mothers’ Club, organized in 1947 and affiliated with Stanton School, had its monthly discussions on child rearing. Teachers held a “Better Breakfast Contest.” At one meeting, Margaret Wohlegmuth, a well-regarded white supervisor of the county nurses, spoke about preschool children. 19 By fall 1952, some prominent women had established a local affiliate of the National Council of Negro Women that Mary McLeod Bethune founded in 1935 to advance black women. Eloise Richardson was president of the Annapolis council. Other members were Electa Holland, Dr. Faye Allen, and Rachel Carter Smith. Unlike their early predecessors in the Mothers’ League, they were all highly educated professionals. They held a forum on WNAV to acquaint the community with the purpose of their new organization. 20

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The new men’s organization, Frontiers Club, that helped establish the Citizen’s Planning and Housing Association, focused on advancing black youth. It encouraged leadership and academic excellence among Bates students, handed out “boys of the year awards” at Bates graduation, and raised the award money at its popular annual fishing contest. Some of the Fourth Ward’s principal leaders were members including Rev. Croll, Drs. Allen and Johnson, Walter Mills, and Carroll Hynson. 21 Bates seniors were among the beneficiaries of the popular social events that sororities arranged. Delta Pi Omega chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority raised funds to give a scholarship of $100 to a female Bates graduate, held a yearly Christmas party for underprivileged children, paid for a book subscription from the Literary Guild of America for the library at College Creek Terrace, and sponsored health meetings for blacks. The Alpha Mu chapter of the Phi Delta Kappa sorority organized a girls group called “Zenos,” and met with them regularly to enhance their academic and social skills. To raise money for scholarships for Bates graduates, the sorority held a well-attended grand tea and fashion show at the Armory. 22 “Society” enjoyed the dances at Waltz Dream Hall and the Armory as they supported the causes of different clubs and sororities, including the June dance of the Bates Alumni Association, of which Dr. Johnson was the president. The Rio Chelsea held “beautiful dances” that were well attended, one of its guests recalled. The Alpha Mus used to hold their dance on St. Patrick’s Day. The Delta Sigma Theta women held a Halloween dance at Waltz Dream Hall that was also popular. 23 Members of small social clubs entertained in their homes. Dr. Allen organized the Weekenders, a group of professional people that socialized together. They “got together on Saturday nights because they couldn’t get into [white] clubs. One member had a club basement . . . with a bar, pool table. They liked to play cards . . . that was how social life was carried on. People got dressed up.” Others could not afford to entertain in their homes, or had other responsibilities. 24 One of the rare black social events mentioned in the Capital occurred in April 1952. The Thomas Badens celebrated their golden wedding anniversary with seventy-five guests in their home out West Street. The paper wrote up their lavish wedding in 1902, which is described in chapter 4. She had been a schoolteacher, and he had retired from the Naval Academy. 25 Singers formed in musical groups. The Socialites Club, composed of men and women, staged shows to raise money for Christmas baskets and fire victims. The Pipe Dreamers, a group of musicians who first got together in high school, “played all around. . . . They all had jobs and did the band in their spare time.” The Unknown Four and the Van Dykes, two groups of male singers, used to sing on radio programs. 26

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The white-owned movie theater, the Star, was still a popular spot though the movies were “somewhat dated. The Fourth Ward did not provide sufficient patrons to support first-run films,” one resident explained. “Bank nights” on Thursdays drew the biggest crowd. A winning number was drawn from the ticket stubs collected for the week. One night a young married woman won $400. When she got home, she “laid it out on the table for her husband to see. He thought it was play money.” They used it to buy a house off West Street outside the old town limits. 27 Clay Street was “buzzing” in the evenings and on weekends. Residents of the Fourth Ward could hear the music playing around the neighborhood. They went to Brown’s Hotel on Clay Street and the Dixie Hotel on Washington Street, which sometimes had live bands that drew crowds. Others frequented Susie’s Tea Room and Cozy Cabin. Some dined at Alsop’s or grabbed crab cake sandwiches at Gray’s Cake Shop. 28 Teachers, ministers, and others would not frequent the “good time places” in the Fourth Ward. They “had to keep to themselves, they couldn’t mix with a crowd, to keep their stature,” as one of their admirers put it. Some drove to Washington to see the shows at the Howard or Lincoln theaters, or movies at the Dunbar and to Baltimore for shows at the Royal. 29 Residents of the Fourth Ward saw themselves as more diversified and hierarchical as they spread out among the worlds they had established for themselves. With the founding of new clubs, plus the stability of the NAACP and the YMCA, more opportunities for collaboration and leadership opened within the Fourth Ward. During this brief period, they felt like a more self-sufficient and accomplished community, even as they pressed on for better education, jobs, and housing because “there was so much due them,” in Rev. Bowman’s words. 30 Blacks thought they were now divided into three quite distinct social classes. The professionals—the doctors, lawyers, and successful business people—occupied the top layer. The second level included teachers and some Naval Academy employees. The third group consisted of the workers, domestics, and laborers in town. Class hierarchy was reflected in shopping habits, some thought. The less well-off “would go in the five-and-ten.” They knew, however, where the better-off shopped. One alley dweller reported, “We didn’t have much money to go into Parson’s or Leader’s or those stores. Now there was a store down on Maryland Avenue . . . when you went down there and bought your clothes, you were from ‘uptown.’” She explained, “Those were supposed to be the elegant clothes. The ladies on Clay Street would buy there and at Lena Miller’s on West Street. Some of them would go to the back door of Parson’s and buy their hats. . . . You were considered a big shot if you wore clothes from Lipman’s.” 31 Blacks included the residents of the new housing development into their social hierarchy. Living in College Creek Terrace did not have a

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stigma. Rev. Bowman noticed, “We had some substantial people living in public housing at the outset. One of our aldermen lived there. We had a pastor and his wife lived there.” 32 With the construction of Obery Court and the destruction of Gott’s Court, the composition of the population around the Clay Street area changed. Many of Gott’s Court residents moved into Obery Court in close proximity to the upper-class residents of Clay Street. No longer were these alley dwellers out of sight, hidden behind other buildings. They were across the street or around the corner. This was cause for some consternation among the Clay Street residents, some of whom fought the placement of Obery Court and the community center. “They kicked on it,” explained one homeowner. Some Clay Street homeowners were afraid that the new residents would “cause the neighborhood to deteriorate,” one civic leader said. Renters in Obery Court considered the families that owned their own homes on Clay Street “snobbish,” because they “made it known that they owned their house.” 33 “People always attach a stigma to people who live in an alley or court,” concluded a woman who grew up on Northwest Street. “People think that just because you live in a court, you live in ramshackle place that was run down. . . . The landlord didn’t keep them up. Some kept their places nice even though it might look bad on the outside. . . . Most had linoleum floors . . . the floors would be scrubbed and shining.” She pointed out, “People didn’t want to live in an alley . . . better to call where you lived a court than an alley.” “I would not want to have to say that I spent my life staying in O’Brien Alley,” confirmed another resident of Northwest Street. 34 Residents ranked the alleys by condition of the houses and the behavior of the residents. One man noticed that in parts of O’Brien Alley and Calvert Court, “people were worse off,” and some were rough. He could hear shouting and disagreements. He would not visit Gott’s Court because it was “a pretty rough place.” Of all the alleys, Gott’s Court was considered the worst. It was a “night neighborhood” for prostitution and gambling, one neighbor said. One small, shy woman boarded in Gott’s Court for a few years and played cards with some of her neighbors, but mostly stayed to herself because it was a “little rough up there.” Gott’s Court “got most of the publicity. A lot of people crowded back in there. I think they had a lot of social problems.” 35 Although one teacher’s worst student came from Gott’s Court, she believed that “kids from Gott’s Court weren’t really bad.” In her visits to the homes of her students, she saw that she “could see outdoors. The plain board floors were all rotten. There was no wallpaper.” But she thought the “people were clean, washed, and ironed. The children appeared looked-after. Their parents gave the best they had.” 36

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Rev. Bowman recollected that Gott’s Court was a “very substandard area. They didn’t have any conveniences in those places.” Baer’s Court, or Calvert Court, “was one of those little dirty places where people crowded in. The street wasn’t paved, no sidewalk. The rain, you’d have mud holes, puddles.” Because the coal yard was nearby, coal dust was “all over their porch . . . almost inundated the floor.” 37 O’Brien’s Alley was seen as a “little fast place.” A domestic who lived on Fleet Street with her husband thought that nearby Taylor Street was “like Calcutta” and Hutton Place, off Market Street, was a “right bad little place.” In contrast, some people considered Hardesty Court, the former Feldmeyer’s Court, whose houses were substandard like those in Gott’s Court, “a nice little place . . . the way they lived and carried themselves. They had more manners,” thought a woman who lived nearby. 38 Pleasant Court was “good size with nice people.” One young man who lived in several alleys as a child liked Calvert Court best because of its high porches that gave the homes a higher-status look. 39 Crimes and misconduct—at least those reported in the Evening Capital—did occur with greater frequency in some alleys than others, and in contrast to the “better” streets in the Fourth Ward. The crime incidents reported in the Capital show which streets had the highest number of crimes mentioned in the paper over this fifty-year period. Gott’s Court was the scene of more than any other alley. Twenty-five reported crimes occurred in Gott’s Court, compared with thirteen in O’Brien’s Alley, fifteen in Buzzards’ Roost, or White’s Row, eleven in Block Street, fifteen in Chestnut Street, and twenty-six in Acton Lane, the other “notorious” places during these fifty years. While the statistics based on newspaper reports validate the reputations of the courts and alleys, they do not tell the whole story. “Reputable,” “striver,” and “lowlife” types tended to be found everywhere, certain types perhaps more concentrated in certain places. The residents of Gott’s Court knew they were stigmatized by their address. “We had some people who lived on streets in Annapolis that had maybe blacktop and sidewalk and big beautiful homes . . . six-room house with a basement, and a big yard, and a porch and hedge. Those people [that] lived on Clay Street, some lived on Northwest Street, some lived on Cornhill Street would speak to us, but those people . . . thought they were just a little bit above us.” 40 Contrary to the impression conveyed in the Capital, most residents of Gott’s Court “kept them houses clean.” One woman recalled that her “grandmother scrubbed the floors, on [her] hands and knees.” They decorated the inside of their houses. “Older people would take newspaper. And they would cut all designs in that paper and put it on shelves. But those shelves looked like they had little lace curtains or something on them. And it looked beautiful.” One woman said, “Your living room was your best room. I remember some older people; they called it your ‘front

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room’ and you didn’t go in there, only on Sundays. Because you always used the back door.” Residents’ recollections of life in Gott’s Court emphasize that they all got along and that they were in the “same boat.” They described themselves as being “like a big, happy family.” “Family” in this larger context meant a number of things. Many households were indeed all members of the same family. They could relate to each other the way members of an actual family do—fight, entertain, help, or ignore each other. Large or extended families lived in many of the Gott’s Court homes. In one home, three generations lived together—mother and father, their three daughters and a son-in-law, and four granddaughters. The parents slept in the front bedroom; two of their daughters slept in a bed in the back bedroom with the four granddaughters, who slept in another large bed; the third daughter slept downstairs on the “front room” couch with her husband. Another mother with her three sons and daughter and a grandchild lived down the row of houses. In another house, a couple and their three children lived with two boarders. Another couple boarded with a single man. The connections among the Gott’s Court residents were extensive and intricate, like a map of the train routes around the country. “Everybody up there were cousins or further down the line.” At least five Gott’s Court families had relatives living in other homes in the alley. For example, the former husband and the brother of the mother in the three-generation family mentioned above also rented homes in Gott’s Court. Four siblings of one particular Gott’s Court family lived in four different homes in the court with their own families. A mother and her two daughters lived in three separate houses. A brother and a sister of one family and their spouses shared one home in Gott’s Court, while their other brother and his wife were three doors down. “Family” meant different things to different families. Some families were better off and more self-reliant, while other families depended more on the assistance of their neighbors. In some households, as many as five people worked. In other homes, only one member of the family was a wage earner. Those who were skilled workers or Naval Academy employees earned more. Some had fewer family members to support than others. One couple only had to provide for themselves. Like other residents in the court, they earned extra income by taking in boarders, a strategy discussed earlier. Others had to move in with parents because they could not afford to live on their own. The residents were aware of their differences. They can recall still who had electricity and who did not. The family that first got electricity and telephone was also the first to buy a television, which drew a crowd of spectators from the court. “When they would have the fights or Milton Berle on television, we would have the grown-ups sitting on the floors,

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looking in the windows, standing in the doors, to look at the small screen,” said a resident of the home. Some residents noticed that the hierarchy among the families in Gott’s Court was evident in their furnishings. One of the more prosperous families had a linoleum “rug” in its front room, an overstuffed couch decorated with crocheted doilies, two sitting chairs, and a coffee table densely covered with knick-knacks. Several doors down lived a woman whose house, as one Gott’s Court resident described it, “smelt like a white person’s house.” The front room felt stuffy with red velvet drapes and lace curtains, a carpet on the floor, overstuffed couch and chairs. A white metal table and chair set was in the kitchen. Other houses farther down this row were more modestly furnished. One seemed dark and dingy with no curtains and a lot of junk everywhere in the kitchen. Another resident had little furniture and a bare wooden floor in her front room and used wooden crates for chairs in the kitchen. One lady lived in what the children called the “white house” because she was an “uppity lady.” “She didn’t socialize with the people in Gott’s Court. She would speak, but she was to herself. When she came out of her house, she was all dressed in her lace and in her satins and her high heel shoes and her great big fancy hats. She thought she was more than everyone, she was light, bright, damn near white.” Her house smelled “musty.” The children tried to peek inside, and they saw that she “had this pretty, flower, like velvet furniture with these great big portraits on the wall,” a Gott’s Court resident said. Color prejudice influenced other relationships. One child was “sent out of Gott’s Court so that she wouldn’t play with the kids in Gott’s Court because of her light complexion. She played with lighter-skinned children on West Washington Street. And when she came back home, it was time to go to bed. So she didn’t really play with us too much in the court,” recollected her dark-skinned playmate. Some families had relatives they visited in other parts of Annapolis, on Clay Street, or Washington Street. As a result of these connections to the “better streets,” some felt less stigmatized. Another felt like the poor relation in the home of more middle-class relatives on Clay Street. “It was a brick house with a great big cinder-block porch and Grandfather used to keep it painted green and white with the green and white awnings and big pillars, two big steps. And Nannie had porch furniture and stuff. That was the front, and out back Grandfather had built a patio. We used to call it the big house.” 41 Some experienced a hierarchy within their own extended families in the court. One child watched her grandmother, who worked as a domestic, whose husband was a carpenter, and whose daughters also worked, had to feed ten people dinner each night. She would “take a dollar and go down to Rookies and get a bundle. A bundle was kind of scraps. Bring it home and you might have three or four pieces of the ends of pork chop,

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you might have two pig tails, you might have six chicken feet. You might have enough meat to feed your family the whole week.” But if her granddaughter did not want to eat chicken feet soup, she crossed the court to have a dinner of pork chops with her own mother and stepfather, who spent most evenings with the girl’s grandfather and step-grandmother. “Little Daddy could go to the American Store and get the fresh-cut pork chops or the fresh chickens . . . because he was a plumber.” Though differences among them were apparent to the Gott’s Court residents, when they shared their recollections, they stressed their togetherness and the ways they tried to help each other. A woman with young children who moved into Gott’s Court to live with her mother and sisters after she separated from her husband recollected, “I will say those people in Gott’s Court were part of the family regardless of what trouble they had. When you went back up in Gott’s Court, they would make room for you . . . they would take you in. Everybody helped everybody.” The residents of Gott’s Court claim that they all got along. In the warmer weather, adults would come outside in the evenings and set up card tables. “We would play cards, we would play pinochle, we would play baseball. And people would bring radios out and listen to Joe Louis’s fights. And that whole little street would be quiet as a pin, even the children kept quiet, when Joe Louis’s fights used to come on. To me, it was just like a little island that we had all of our own,” remembered one woman who lived in the court from the time she was a teenager until she was moved out in 1952. Sometimes, they had their “little disputes,” but these never lasted long. “And they would sit out back and drink the wine, they’d talk, and then an argument would start up and they would fight. And then they would get [into a] fistfight, I mean blood would be every which way, and they would patch each other after they got done fistfighting and next thing you know they’re singing hymns. . . . It started on Fridays and Saturdays. Sundays, no,” recalled one woman with a laugh. Gott’s Court residents sometimes put up with but did not condone the drinking, fighting, and craps shooting that were part of the life of this alley. At one home, and perhaps more, a man freely sold bootlegged liquor on Saturday nights. White-owned liquor stores gave residents in Gott’s Court, and probably in other streets, half-pint bottles of liquor that they would sell on weekend nights, and reimburse the store owner on Mondays, taking a percentage of the proceeds. One man hid his liquor bottles under the floor of a shed in his backyard. Some residents called another home, near the end of one row, a “good time” house. Sailors visited the house in the evening. Some knew to sneak in through a hole in a fence at the back of the court. Other sailors walked the length of the alley in full view. Female tenants in two other houses were probably running “whorehouses,” a Gott’s Court resident conjectures today. Her grandmother forbade her from going into any of

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these homes. In the summer evenings, this young girl and her friends stood out in the court in front of the “good time” house to look through the open door at the sailors dancing with the women who lived there. One woman “did everything—bootlegged, played cards, rented the two rooms upstairs to anybody who wanted a room for the night or whatever. They would use the back door for that.” The residents of Gott’s Court saw themselves as no worse off than many of those living in the larger black neighborhood. Many did not think that they lived in a slum, or were poor. It angered them when outsiders classified them as low, dirty people. “They would call me dirty and black, pickaninny,” recalled one former resident about her classmates at school. Another asserted with pride, “People thought that we were living in what people call the slums. And, um, you know, when we came out of Gott’s Court, we were all dressed, starched.” Though stigmatized by where they lived, they replaced the identity ascribed to them with their own—a “big happy family”—that was based on the relationships among them in the confined space of Gott’s Court. The friendly relationships among them created a sense of belonging to a group. The unfriendly relations a number of them experienced outside the court with residents of the other streets strengthened the bonds within Gott’s Court. They could overlook their class and color differences. 42 The recollections of a dozen former residents of Gott’s Court with whom I spoke were both a performance and a “countermemory.” The way they told their stories helped create an identity as members of a family of decent, hard working people who helped each other, took good care of themselves, and kept Gott’s Court clean. They saw themselves as similar to other families in the town—contradicting other residents’ memories of them and their status. Living in a stigmatized, but collaborative and contentious space had shaped their memories. Their struggle with Jim Crow discrimination also influenced the recollections that they wanted to share with me. They challenged the social order of the past that kept them on the margins. They saw themselves as full and equal participants in the life of the city. Their stories also challenged today’s social order which misrepresents them in the history of the town. 43 I interviewed the former residents in 1993 in conjunction with an exhibit on “The Maryland Black Experience as Understood in Archaeology,” at Shiplap House in Annapolis. Archaeology in Annapolis, a project of the University of Maryland and the Historic Annapolis Foundation, and the Banneker-Douglass Museum sponsored the exhibit. It displayed artifacts found in Gott’s Court and other sites in Annapolis where blacks had lived. I questioned the Gott’s Court residents about these items, including bits of pottery, porcelain, and bottles, which were sometimes used for bootlegged liquor or may have been half-pints. Excerpts from their comments were displayed in the exhibit next to the artifacts. I inter-

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viewed some of the residents in subsequent years when I conducted my fieldwork. Both the former residents of Gott’s Court and participants in weekly, then monthly, meetings of “Memory Hour” groups that I formed at two different senior centers often shared or reinforced each other’s memories because they were the ones they wanted me to commemorate. Present and past events and the social and economic relationships between the group and other groups in the town all influenced the formation of collective memory. They recalled a time of demeaning, unequal relations between themselves and whites, a time not familiar to their children. They wanted to tell me how they put up with, and overcame difficulties—a time that made them laugh, feel angry, proud, or ashamed. 44 Others, however, told me secrets that contradicted the group commemoration. For example, one former resident of Gott’s Court whom I met in her house was the first to mention drinking. She said, “Everybody up there didn’t drink. There were just a few people [who drank], and in my mother’s house, my sisters and brothers and I were there, and we drank. Next door neighbor, maybe they didn’t have a drink, and I’d call them and give them a drink. We would drink whiskey and home brew beer for a long time before liquor was legal. People were selling it.” When I met with the group again and mentioned her account, they agreed that on Saturday nights, some people drank a lot and had a “good time.” They were aware that everyone knew that—even people living outside Gott’s Court. Because they thought the quote inaccurately implied that more people drank in the alley than they thought was the case, they did not think it appropriate to include her recollection in the Maryland Black Experience exhibit at Shiplap House. This omission of a collective memory about life in the court for the exhibit perhaps reflected the group’s views of its past and present—their feeling of being shunned and wanting to remember how hard they worked and how clean they kept the court. They saw the exhibit as an opportunity to set the record straight. The present also influenced their omission of stories about drinking. Daily life around them in College Creek Terrace and Obery Court, where many of them lived, troubled them in the 1990s. Young men whom they had never seen before sold drugs. Children did not respect them the way they had been taught to respect elders. Their collective memories described a daily life that challenged the present deterioration around them and helped them assert that they should be seen differently than the drug dealers. Their memories also evoked a nostalgia for an Annapolis past, which they mourned. Because of the changes around them, the destruction of Gott’s Court, and the dismantling of much of the old Fourth Ward, they felt disconnected from their history, of which they remained proud. Their commemorations were a way to re-create their history and also a sense of possibility. 45

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The woman’s description of the drinking in Gott’s Court was part of her account of how people in the alley shared things, from the clothes they got from their “work lady” to food, alcohol, and homemade wine. She was also telling her own story, a narrative of being stigmatized, poor, and uneducated, and overcoming adversity. She used her vivid memories and one of Gott’s Court’s “secrets” to assert what she had become. She was proud of her good memory, which she saw as a sign of her intelligence. She was comfortable with having found wisdom and wealth in the Bible and the Lord, and the companionship of her second husband. 46 The persons who told me secrets breached the group’s cohesion by undermining the accepted version of the past to reveal an alternative narrative that discomfits others because the secret could undermine the impression they want to make. Secrets can be part of collective memory. Other secrets revealed to me included the story of a murder, and accounts of taking food out of the Naval Academy, the prevalence of bedbugs, and ice on the inside of windows in winter. Such secrets revealed conditions of poverty that many endured, but which others may have been too proud to acknowledge. The secret-tellers, primarily people who had achieved middle-class status, wanted to graphically explain to me—someone they correctly perceived had not experienced the same hardships—what they had been through. They also wanted to contrast their childhoods with their present, comfortable lives. Among all the people I interviewed, only one person mentioned the bedbugs. A very proud woman from a well-regarded family, though her immediate family was one of the “poor relations,” she liked to describe the modest meals she ate and clothes she wore. She told how she tried to advance herself by watching the higher-class people in her family and church, and quizzing her work ladies. When I mentioned the bedbugs to others, they nodded in embarrassment or told me funny stories of seeing one come out of a lady’s hat in church. The man who first told me about black Naval Academy employees taking food out of the academy was angry about the prejudice and discrimination he had endured as a child. He was making a point that stealing the academy’s food, or buying it from someone else, was the only way to survive during the Depression, because the academy did not pay its workers enough to live on. This was not a story about the nobility of the poor, but about a successful survival strategy. These “countermemories” were revealed so that others, from an interested interviewer to their own children who were often not interested, would know what they had endured. 47

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NOTES 1. Holland, interview; OHI with three people. 2. Holland, interview. 3. Bowman, interview. 4. OHI; EC, March 24, 1950; May 23, 1951; December 13, 1951; December 16, 1952; December 30, 1952. 5. EC, September 24, 1949; OHI. 6. EC, February 11, 1950. 7. EC, October 25, 1952; December 27, 1952. 8. OHI with two people. 9. Bowman, interview; EC, August 12, 1950; December 21, 1951. 10. OHI. The First Baptist dinner for teachers that occurred in 1943 is pictured on the cover of this book. 11. EC, November 12, 1949. 12. EC, October 30, 1950; June 5, 1951; June 15, 1951. 13. EC, February 25, 1950; April 29, 1952. 14. EC, October 9, 1951; May 18, 1950; April 3, 1951. 15. EC, October 6, 1949. 16. EC, February 7, 1948; April 5, 1951; October 6, 1949. 17. EC, April 21, 1950. 18. EC, January 27, 1950; March 9, 1950; December 15, 1951. 19. EC, June 11, 1947; August 30, 1950; February 16, 1952; December 4, 1951. 20. EC, October 23, 1952; October 25, 1952; National Council of Negro Women. 21. EC, April, 21 1950; June 13, 1952; February 27, 1952; Brown, Other Annapolis, 114. 22. EC, February 16, 1952; May 15, 1950. 23. OHI with three people. 24. OHI. 25. EC, April 3, 1952. 26. OHI; Brown, Other Annapolis, 88. 27. OHI with three people; Brown, Other Annapolis, 88. 28. OHI. 29. OHI. 30. Bowman, interview. 31. OHI. 32. OHI with two people. 33. OHI. 34. OHI. 35. OHI with three people. 36. OHI. 37. Bowman, interview; OHI with three people. 38. OHI with four people. 39. OHI with four people. 40. This discussion about Gott’s Court is based on my interviews with a dozen former residents of the court in 1993 in conjunction with part of the exhibit, “The Maryland Black Experience as Understood in Archaeology,” at Shiplap House in Annapolis. Archaeology in Annapolis, which is a University of Maryland and Historic Annapolis Foundation project, and the Banneker-Douglass Museum sponsored the exhibit. It displayed artifacts found in Gott’s Court and other sites in Annapolis where blacks had lived. I questioned the Gott’s Court residents about the articles found including bits of pottery, porcelain, and bottles, which were sometimes used for bootlegged liquor or may have been half-pints. Excerpts from their comments were displayed in the exhibit next to the artifacts. Some of the residents I interviewed in subsequent years when I conducted my fieldwork. 41. Rodman, Empowering Place, 640–57.

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42. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 7. The following discussion is based in part on Jopling, “Remembered Communities”; Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, 9–37; Smith, “The Production of Culture in Local Rebellion,” 180–208. 43. Bauman, Story, Performance, and Event, 86; Blight, “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Struggle for American Historical Memory,” 50–51; Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, 15, 52. 44. Crapazano, Imaginative Horizons, 158–59; Boyarin, Remapping Memories, 26. 45. Mullings, “After Drugs,” 173–74. 46. Portelli, 63; Blight, 50–52. 47. Blight, 50–52; Crapanzano, 158–61.

TWENTY-ONE Conclusion

The four narratives of this book are based in part on the memories of black residents of Annapolis. Their stories, newspaper accounts, minutes of city council meetings, census records, and other archival documents form the basis of these four versions of the relations between whites and blacks during this half century in Annapolis. The first narrative of encounters between blacks and whites, the story of the Harvard baseball team’s 1902 visit to Annapolis, suggests how blacks could sometimes transgress the strict and unequal lines that whites tried to establish and maintain. It illustrates Woodward’s statement that “segregation was not absolute,” and shows how blacks sometimes acted on their assumption of equal citizenship, challenged white supremacy, and made room for themselves. 1 The visit of the Harvard baseball team at a time when whites were legislating disfranchisement and segregation revealed that certain blacks could be treated differently than others—that segregation could be selectively applied. William Clarence Matthews, the “Negro with a brain,” could stay in the same hotel with the white guests, unlike any black citizen in the town, with the possible exception of Dr. William Bishop. But Matthews could not eat in the public dining room. Harvard’s changing reaction to the Naval Academy’s refusal to play against an integrated team also shows a range of white reactions to Jim Crow segregation, from acceptance to avoidance to rejection. The interplay between the two baseball teams shows that the lines and positions separating whites and blacks were in fact malleable, not immutable. The arrest, trial, and hanging of John Snowden is a more familiar tale, an unfortunate story that was repeated many hundreds of times throughout the South. But this version of the familiar story had several striking features. One was the black challenge in public to the verdict and sen319

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tence. Another was the attempt of some whites, including prominent citizens of the town, to overturn the verdict or Snowden’s sentence by collecting more convincing evidence of his innocence. This was a whiteon-white confrontation. It does not appear that blacks and whites collaborated with each other, crossing the divide between them, but they complemented each other’s efforts. The night before Snowden’s hanging, the blacks acknowledged their secondary and unequal position by allowing whites to speak to the governor. The blacks knew that the governor was more apt to listen to the whites’ appeals than to theirs. This was an example of how blacks maneuvered within narrow confines to try to gain some advantage. Blacks lost this battle. But in 1940 the black teachers won their fight for equal pay after a long struggle. In this encounter, they spoke on their own behalf, challenged, and slightly eroded white discriminatory practices by winning higher salaries. The lines between the two populations were strictly drawn. The white school board acted in its white supremacist, paternalistic fashion, supported by the Capital. With the assistance of Thurgood Marshall, the teachers called into question the legality of the white position. This was a tactic employed by the NAACP in its legal campaign to gain equal rights for blacks in many arenas. The confrontation occurred at a time when the local NAACP chapter was forming, and exemplified what blacks were beginning to achieve through the courts around the country. The teachers’ victory seemed almost premature. At a time when segregation and inequality were still well entrenched, such confrontations seemed more the exception than the rule. No other group of blacks adopted similar tactics or used the teachers’ precedent to insist on their rights. Blacks in Annapolis did not file another lawsuit to gain equal rights until the NAACP sued for equal beaches at Sandy Point in 1952. While the teachers’ victory was a significant early achievement, the integration of the Girl Scout float in 1949 seemed almost a serendipitous accomplishment. Yet that encounter demonstrates that blacks had started to make themselves equal citizens in the larger white society and gain what whites had. Just the approval and formation of the black Girl Scout troop were considered a major feat. Perhaps because the black scout leaders were as educated and polished as their white counterparts, whites eventually accepted them, a gain through educational advancement that Du Bois had advocated years earlier. The demolition of Gott’s Court was a different kind of encounter between blacks and whites. It foretold what was to happen to the Fourth Ward later, when much of the neighborhood was torn down and blacks scattered across the larger Annapolis landscape. The lines between the two populations were blurred in the discussion of Gott’s Court destruction. Black aldermen joined with white aldermen and businessmen to urge, generally for different reasons, that the court be torn down. Black

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and white housing advocates expressed similar views, not as members of parallel groups, but as members of the integrated Housing Authority and CPHA. By refusing to leave their homes, some of the residents of Gott’s Court forced city officials to help them find new places to live, a first. While black and white housing advocates were concerned about the deplorable conditions of the homes and thought that the residents of Gott’s Court and many other streets and alleys needed better places to live, their agitation was not the major impetus for tearing down Gott’s Court. That came from white businessmen who wanted new parking lots to lure customers back into town. Economic forces continued to shape the landscape of the Fourth Ward. Would the bird’s-eye view narrative during these fifty years, from 1902 to 1952, reveal any changes in the landscape of the relations between blacks and whites? The answer would have to be yes and no. Some views stayed remarkably constant, especially the morning view. Young people walked to their separate and still unequal schools, black men walked to menial jobs, and most black women continued to walk to the homes of whites. But whites had a rich variety of destinations for work. This picture was just beginning to change because of the slowly increasing number of black professionals—businessmen and women, teachers, and doctors. The evening scene did not change much either. Blacks and whites generally went their separate ways for entertainment, worship, and social and civic activities. Very occasionally, white faces were seen at black functions or services. But blacks were almost never welcome at white functions. They did not enter white-owned restaurants or hotels as anything but employees. With the exception of the Girl Scout float in the tercentenary parade and the car that led the recreation parade with black and white young men perched on its front fenders, parades remained as segregated as the restaurants. By 1952, a significant change visible from above was the concentration of blacks in the area north and west of Church Circle and the dispersal of others out of town to the Parole and Spa Road areas. Blacks had been removed from the dock area, from parts of “downtown,” and South and Cathedral streets. City, county, or state buildings replaced their homes. St. John’s College and the Naval Academy demolished others. Gott’s Court, of course, became a parking lot. These alterations expressed the power of government entities and business interests to dispossess the poor, black residents of the town. 2 There were changes on the landscape—some discernable and some subtle—revealing that blacks had made limited progress in achieving equality, but also suffered some setbacks. Hangings and lynchings ceased, and fights between whites and blacks became rarer and smaller, a sign of less overt antagonism between them. Minstrel shows became rare. Both black and white high school students now went out Spa Road for school, but to separate buildings across the road from each other. The

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most important visible change in education that took twenty years to accomplish was that blacks now attended school the same number of days as white students—sharp contrast to 1902, when their school year lasted only a few months. But black elementary schoolchildren were spread out among a number of buildings and attended school part-time, while white students had a full day. One unusual sight was the black midshipman Wesley Brown on the Naval Academy grounds from 1944 to 1948 and a black student named Martin Dyer on the St. John’s campus from 1948 to 1952. Most significantly, a few blacks succeeded in making themselves equal citizens. Black Girl Scouts joined their white counterparts at the annual jamboree at the State Armory. A black doctor could be seen entering the hospital, though still not as a full member of the staff. Blacks became leaders of civic bodies previously closed to them—housing, recreation, ministerial, and other organizations that often met at white churches and in other traditionally white settings. Jim Crow was weakening, slowly and slightly. As Philip L. Brown put it, blacks “made room” for themselves in some places from which they had long been barred. 3 They confronted white institutions over specific instances of discrimination. They worked for their equality in many arenas—at the State House, in the courthouses, at the governor’s mansion, in the city council, before the Board of Education, in the newspapers, and on the street. They sought jobs that gave them some sense of dignity or opportunity. They advanced themselves and their children through education. They formed organizations to challenge white supremacy. They took advantage of small opportunities as they came along. News coverage of black life changed. By the early 1950s, demeaning portraits of black citizens appeared infrequently in the Evening Capital. The paper provided less specific coverage of life in the black community, but included blacks in its stories about of schools and sports activities. In society news, blacks were still invisible. After Eloise Richardson stopped writing her column in the fall of 1948, there was only the occasional mention of what was happening in the Fourth Ward. The paper no longer printed crime stories from out of town that perpetuated an image of blacks as criminals. Did this mean that whites were comfortable with the inferior status of blacks and did not have to constantly remind readers what bunglers, criminals, and second-class citizens they were? Or were whites forming new impressions of blacks that included educated, highachieving people, not just maids and janitors? Both were probably involved. So were President Truman’s civil rights policies. U.S. engagement against Hitler and his policies of racist extermination and then the promotion of U.S. democracy against the Soviet Union’s totalitarianism both undermined white racism. So did the successes of black demonstrations and the NAACP’s campaign to overturn white supremacy.

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Besides the strengthening of their education, blacks gained access to the white library. Another major success was regaining the right to vote, accomplished with the help of some white Republicans. Blacks made small but important breakthroughs in employment. Black teachers received the same pay as white teachers, but other black workers labored in jobs that paid less than whites earned. Blacks were gaining access to positions in the hospital. They tried to get on the police force, but they did not challenge other discriminatory employment practices in the town. To some degree, the “uplift” strategy of Du Bois and the NAACP was working, if slowly. Educated blacks did gain primary roles in a number of organizations and institutions in Annapolis. The establishment of the NAACP further galvanized black residents. Successful strategies were petition campaigns, letters to the editor, attendance at hearings, and direct challenges to Jim Crow through the courts. All contributed to what amounted to a nascent social movement. 4 These inchoate efforts long predated what was to become the civil rights movement in the 1960s. This was the “development stage,” according to Rev. Bowman. “We had civil rights problems of one kind or another. So when we weren’t working for one thing, it was something else. Usually maybe jobs or health or education or police but we were becoming very sensitive to our dearth of civil rights and so that civil rights movement was in the air. . . . So what happened back in that era, it was just the beginning . . . ‘buckle up’ as it were.” 5 The black community became more self-reliant. Blacks improved their churches, built three new ones, and opened a number of “storefront” churches. They could eat in more of their own restaurants, bars, and hotels. There were now two black health clinics, and a number of barbershops, beauticians, groceries, and funeral parlors. Blacks formed sports leagues, organized scout troops, ran a community center for a few years, and eventually established their own YMCA and library. Fraternal organizations multiplied and built their own clubhouses. Fraternities and sororities and many social clubs flourished. While blacks no longer went down Duke of Gloucester Street to the Assembly Rooms for dances, they did go to the Armory on Bladen Street, to their own YMCA, and to the Bates High School auditorium for meetings and entertainment. For some, life was more prosperous. Excursions on ferryboats had ceased, but black residents went to beaches on the Chesapeake Bay and to Baltimore, Washington, DC, and elsewhere—but by bus and car rather than train. Their community became more differentiated. As the years passed, members of the same class or same profession tended to associate with one another, so differences between the classes became more apparent. Certain groups attended certain social functions while others formed more informal associations. Their worlds, for the most part, provided a respite from white oppression. In Annapolis, black men and women

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could assume roles of leadership and prominence in many arenas—in churches, politics, recreation, education, civil rights organizations, and social clubs. Some were active in several. Many worked to advance themselves and those less well-off. 6 Family struggles and survival strategies ranged widely. An examination of different households over time reveals that many black families needed more than one income to survive. Some households required even more than two incomes, so families took in boarders. Some relied on children to work, or on relatives or neighbors to give them food and clothing. They adjusted the composition of their households to cope with economic and social constraints. 7 Some accommodated segregation and discrimination. Some were defeated by it. Some got lost in alcohol or shirked responsibilities. Rev. Bowman speculated, “They were submissive. They knew what the system required of them and they conformed. So many of us paused, controlled themselves by resorting to some sort of props. Alcohol has played a pretty big role with our people. Not only to just black people, I guess, all people in dealing with their hurts.” 8 It took determination, luck, money, resilience, and ingenuity to advance beyond the boundaries whites continued to try to impose, particularly in the labor market. Many blacks lived within them, but some figured out or were taught ways of living with some sort of dignity, to lead lives that were less oppressive than their parents’. They knew they were entitled to equal citizenship as members of a democracy, and they pressed to get it. To repeat what Doris Moses thought, “They took small opportunities and expanded them.” 9 In December 1952, as the parking lot built on the site of Gott’s Court was nearing completion, Thurgood Marshall was preparing to argue the unconstitutionality of segregation in schools before the U.S. Supreme Court. The court heard his arguments the next year and handed down its ruling in March of 1954. In the fall of 1958, some Stanton Elementary School students moved to Adams Park Elementary, out Clay Street and on the other side of College Creek, a new school that had been constructed to relieve the crowded conditions. This was the first year since 1946 that black elementary schoolchildren had a full day of school. But Annapolis’s schools were not integrated until the fall of 1966. By 1955, Drs. Aris T. and Faye Allen became members of the Maryland Medical Society and were able to treat their own patients at the hospital. These were significant gains. 10 In November 1960, Rev. Bowman challenged the Jim Crow practices at one of the town’s restaurants. One morning on his way to work in Washington, DC, taking a cue from the student sit-ins occurring in the South, he decided to get something to eat at the Terminal Restaurant where he caught the bus. “I just went in there and sat down and the proprietor to whom I had been talking looked over and saw me, pulled

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off his apron and came over to the counter and he was about to assault me, so I just left, but I was so humiliated. Nobody had ever offered to fight me before.” The next Sunday, he told his congregation what happened. After the service, some went “right up to that restaurant and sat down.” The police were called and arrested them. “Then we started picketing everything in sight” to gain access to all the public accommodations in town. 11 To look again today from the capitol dome might surprise the viewer—or not. Much of the Fourth Ward area has changed dramatically because of urban renewal, highway construction, and state and county office building construction that posed new problems for blacks, problems that prove that the struggle for equality is such a “varying, uneven and tenuous process,” as historian Barbara J. Fields says. Only the Mt. Moriah building, which now houses the Banneker-Douglass Museum, and the few buildings near it stand in the triangular block that was home to “better off Negroes.” The rest is taken up with an even larger extension of the courthouse. No more houses or small black-owned shops line the first block of Calvert Street, one side of West Washington Street, and the first block of Clay Street. The jail is gone too, replaced by a county office building on one side of Calvert Street; there is a park in front of a parking garage that also replaced all the small buildings in the first block of Clay and the homes and businesses on West Washington across from the First Baptist Church. The church demolished a few houses as well when it expanded. A small public housing project is at the other end of the block. On the church’s other side, stands Timothy House, a multistory apartment house for seniors. Another office building has replaced the buildings on the corner where Thomas’s drugstore was located. Stanton School became a community center. Brick homes for people who could afford them—mostly whites—replaced the wooden clapboard houses on Larkin Street where blacks lived. 12 More dramatically, the construction of the highway connector to Annapolis from Route 50 in the late 1950s stripped about 111 homes on Calvert Street Extended, Northwest Street, Carroll Street, O’Brien Alley, Calvert Court, and Bladen Street. Another state office building and a new double-lane Bladen Street have replaced them. As Rev. Bowman put it, “We didn’t have anything to do with the blacks moving out of the Fourth Ward, that’s urban renewal.” In describing what he thought happened across the street from his church, he said, “That parking building is Whitmore Parking. That was all housing through there . . . but they tore all that down and you see what they put there. They were supposed to put housing there. . . . But that’s what happened [when] the local authorities take charge of a federal program. They used the grant to do whatever they want to do. . . . I guess they needed it to provide parking for the county complex over there.”

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The repercussions were long lasting. “There were so many people who had lived in that area and then had to go and live in the public housing somewhere another, way over yonder somewhere. And they had transportation problems and all that kind of thing. So it unsettled the city quite a bit, that is, the black man. And I don’t think we’ve ever recovered . . . and also it diffused [us] politically,” Bowman said. Fifty years later, black former residents are still angry about it. 13 Some residents of College Creek Terrace and Obery Court are pleased with the latest changes to their homes which began in 2009. A private management company is redeveloping them. The mixed housing units consist of “project-based voucher, tax-credit, and traditional public units.” To make room for larger units, the company will demolish the community center, basketball court, and playground blacks pressed for so long to get built. 14 NOTES 1. Woodward, The Strange Career, vi, xi. 2. Harvey, New Imperialism. 3. Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 19, 52–53. 4. Harvey, Spaces of Capital, 192–207. 5. Bowman, interview. 6. Gilkes, Building in Many Places, 53–76. 7. Rapp, “Urban Kinship in Contemporary America,” 222; Baca Zinn and Dill, “Women of Color. 8. Bowman, interview. 9. Moses, interview. 10. Brown, The Stanton Elementary School Story, 54; Allen, interview; May, Achieving the American Dream. 11. Bowman, interview. 12. Fields, 5. 13. Bowman, interview. 14. EC, November 30, 2014; interview with John Lambert.

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WEBSITES Alcorn State University. http://www.alcorn.edu/discover-alcorn/index.aspx . Afro-American. http://www.afro.com/aboutus.htm . Bishop Family of Annapolis. http://www.vts.edu/ftpimages/95/download/ RGA12BishopFindingAid.pdf . Caldwell, Arthur B., ed., History of the American Negro and His Institutions. Atlanta: A. B. Caldwell Publishing Co., 1917. Google Books: http://books.google.com/books?id= 3kErAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+negro+in+chicago&hl=en&sa=X& ei=Z0txVMudLuXnsASb54KACA&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q= the%20negro%20in%20chicago&f=false ; http://books.google.com/books?id=

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Index

Abney, Beatrice, 216, 228, 236 Abney, Reid, 236 Adams, Alberta, 148 Adams, Beulah, 113, 122, 186 Adams, Charles W., 219 Adams, J. Albert, 44, 69, 79, 81, 94, 96, 110, 111, 114, 131, 148, 164, 167, 184 Adams, Louise, 148 Adams, Walter W., 206, 245 Adams, W. H., 110 Addison, Alphonse G., 215–216, 245 Addison, Alphonzo, 187, 191 Addison, Dorothy, 243 African Americans: boycott of railroad travel by, 28; business development among, 183; in Catholic Church, 39, 118; challenges to law enforcement, 90, 155; charity organizations for, 169–170; churches for, 13–14, 35–39; coming of age for, 260–265; in Democratic Party, 165–166; development for community by, 7; disease rates for, 166–167; as domestics, 23, 235; elitism among, 41, 115; employment choices for, 21–22; employment of, 12–13, 101, 194–196; in The Evening Capital, public admonishment of, 71; expansion of businesses for, 79; funding for schools and education of, 19; health care for, 31, 102, 243; homeownership for, 46–47; housing shortages for, 235–242; infant mortality rates for, 243; as jurors, 30, 90, 154, 167; in justice system, unequal treatment for, 30–31, 88–91; literacy rates for, 46, 46–47, 93; migration to Washington, D. C., 23; in newspapers, negative depictions of, 20–21, 91, 168–169, 225–227,

285–286, 322; in 1910 census, 120; patriotism of, 102–103, 106n65; political involvement for, 40, 163–166; poor living conditions for, 101; population of, 10; prohibition of marriage to whites, 19, 167–168; as property owners, 148; public reaction to Matthews, 4, 6, 7; public reaction to Snowden murder charges, 59; rejection of white supremacy arguments by, 31; in Republican Party, 25–27, 186; selection as jurors, 30; self-reliance for, 323; shopping discrimination against, 178; skin color for, public perceptions of, 58; social hierarchy among, 45; social life for, 40, 113–114, 151; vocational education for, white support for, 97–98; voter registration attempts by, 93–94, 95; voting participation for, 81; voting rights for, 25–27; weddings for, 37; during World War I, 103–104; during World War II, war effort by, 217. See also black neighborhoods; lynching; social clubs, for African Americans; social relationships, between black and whites African Methodist Episcopal (AME) congregations, 35–36 Afro-American: on African American literacy rates, 93; on equal pay for black teachers, 131, 139; Rollins case in, 227; voting rights editorials in, 26 Alexis, Lucian, Jr., 219 Allen, Aris, 216, 218, 228, 278, 281, 289, 293, 294, 297 Allen, Faye, 278, 301n45, 306 Allen, Joseph, 23 Alpha Kappa Alpha, 307 337

338

Index

Alsop, Martha, 140, 247, 253 Alsop, Mason, 215, 247, 253, 256, 305 AME congregations. See African Methodist Episcopal congregations American Library Association, 185 Anderson, John B., 94 Anderson, Marian, 231, 256 Andrews, Alexander, 130 Andrews, Charlotte Cushman, 82 Andrews, Charlotte Johnson, 148 Andrews, Flora, 208 Annapolis, Maryland: access roads through, public debate over, 240–241, 325; childhood memories of, 193–199, 200n55; expansion of neighborhoods in, 77–80, 146, 277–278; during Great Depression, 170–172; as legislative center, 147; slums in, development of, 174–176; tercentenary parade, 205–210. See also geography, of Annapolis; population, of Annapolis; slums, in Annapolis Armstrong, Joseph, 241 Armstrong, S. C., 98 Asbury Community Center, 185–186 Asbury M.E. Church, 116 auxiliary organizations, African American women in, 111–113 Baden, Agnes, 190 Baden, Gertrude, 190 Baden, Martha, 253 Baden, Mary, 209 Baden, Thomas, 37, 209, 255, 294, 307 Baer, Louis, 30 Bailey, Pearl, 149, 189 Banneker Literary and Musical Association, 41–44, 45–46, 109; goals of, 43; members of, 42; social events, 113; “talented tenth” as part of, 41 baseball, segregation in, 7n2 Basil, Thomas G., 229 Bates, Peg-Leg, 149 Bates, Wiley H., 12, 29, 32n21, 43, 93, 103, 118, 149; in Colored Business and Professional Men’s League, 110; death of, 184; employment history of, 22; funding of black schools by,

161; as juror, 30, 90, 154, 167; as property owner, 148; on voting rights, 92 Bates High School: accreditation of, 292; as community center, 186; construction of, 160–161; expansion of, 230–231; funding of, 161; graduation ceremonies at, 257; overcrowding at, 230, 291; as social center, 220; special programs at, 231 Bell, Charles H., 164 Bell, Nannie, 122 Bellis, Joseph H., 90 Belt, George, 255 Bethune, Mary McLeod, 231, 306 Bias, Mary, 62 Bingham, William J., 222n29 Birth of a Nation, 92 Bishop, James, 42 Bishop, Martha, 121 Bishop, William, 12, 31, 42–43, 110, 112, 294 Bishop, William H., Jr., 42, 43 black children: on economic differences between families, 196–197; on family employment history, 194–196; on knowledge of white prejudice, 197–199; personal memories of, 193–199, 200n55; recreation initiatives for, 173–174, 242; social activities for, 151. See also black schools black doctors, 216, 243–244, 278; at Johns Hopkins Hospital, 228, 294 Blackistone, Garfield, 101 black neighborhoods: black-owned businesses in, 149, 215, 278–279; expansion of, 78–80, 214–215, 321; in Fourth Ward, 215, 278; Jewish shopowners in, 149; social status and, 193, 260, 309 black-on-white crime, 282 blacks. See African Americans black schools, 150–151; Bates, W. H., and, 161; black Republicans and, 25; in College Creek Terrace housing project, 232; construction of high schools, 160–161; county funding for, 23, 24, 230; discrimination

Index against, 100; equal pay for teachers in, legal challenges to, 129–142; Home and School Association and, 159; inequality of funding for, 19, 24, 98, 291–292; length of school year, 99, 159; Maryland State Federation of Negro Parent Teachers Association and, 132; National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools, 132; Negro State Parent Teachers’ Association, 161; Negro State Parent Teachers’ Association and, 161; Rosenwald’s funding of, 179n8. See also Stanton School black sororities: Alpha Kappa Alpha, 307; Delta Sigma Theta, 228; founding of, 228; Phi Delta Kappa, 253, 281, 307 Blackstone, Lovely, 305 black veterans, 234; community centers for, 242 Bloom, Jake, 148 Bloom, Louis, 148 Blum, Jacob, 178 Blum, Minnie, 290 Blum, Morris, 219 Boardley, James, 35 Bolden, Solomon, 24, 30, 110 Bonaparte, Charles, 68, 96 Bontemps, Arna, 232 Bosley, R. E. Lee, 66 Boston, Georgia, 38, 65, 89, 111, 113, 121, 152, 164, 167, 185 Boston, Sarah, 38, 111, 112, 113, 121, 122 Bowen, Mattie, 117 Bowman, Leroy, 215, 218, 226, 251, 267, 281, 282, 291 Boyd, Lloyd, 15 Bradford, Morgan, 54 Brady, A. Theodore, 59, 61–62, 89, 93 Brandon, Lottie May, 245; murder of, 53–54; in newspaper accounts, 54; public perception of, 69. See also Snowden, John Brandon, Valentine, 53–54, 61, 63 Brice, Carrie, 113, 122, 164 Brice, Frances, 121

339

Brice, Richard B., 102 Briscoe, Fanny, 112 Briscoe, James A., 61, 112, 116, 119 Briscoe, J. E., 103 Brooks, John, 89 Brooks, J. W., 215 Brooks, Robert A., 161 Brooks, William E., 226 Brown, Ann Norwood, 271 Brown, Anthony, 148, 149, 189, 255, 256, 257 Brown, Cynthia, 135, 141 Brown, Delores, 258 Brown, James, 165, 187, 245 Brown, John H., 253 Brown, Philip L., 32n21, 45, 73, 127, 129, 135, 161, 209, 232, 253, 322 Brown, Rachel, 129, 209, 232, 253 Brown, Robert, 94 Brown, Roland William, 271 Brown, Summerfield, 187, 232 Brown, Wesley, 219, 322 Brown, William E., 110 Brown, William H., 129 Brown v. Board of Education, 286 Brugger, Robert J., 11 Bryan, William Jennings, 119 Bunche, Ralph, 186 Burch, Ida, 55 Burley, James, 167 Burley, Joseph, 154 Burrell, Lillian, 208 Burton, Cecil C., 293 business development, among African Americans, 183; in Fourth Ward, 266n35. See also shops and shop owners Butler, Charles A., 43, 98, 109, 118 Butler, Frank B., 141, 159, 161, 228 Butler, Jennie, 121 Butler, William B., 297 Butler, William H., Jr., 29, 41, 43, 96, 120, 164 Bynum, Henry, 254, 293, 305 Callcott, Margaret Law, 28 Campbell, Robert, 271 Carpenter, Blanche, 191 Carr, Frederick, 43, 209

340

Index

Carroll, Nathaniel M., 37, 39, 87 Carter, Elizabeth, 153, 163–164, 165 Carter, Lewis E., 190 Carter, Lizzie, 61, 113 Carter, Robert G., 70 Carver, George Washington, 231 Catholic Church: black churches, construction of, 221, 252, 305; decreases in black congregations, 252; St. Theresa’s Beneficial Society, 39, 118 Caucasians. See whites census. See U.S. census A Century of “Separate but Equal”: Education in Ann Arundel County (Brown, P. L.), 129 Chambers, John, 161, 228, 233, 239, 253, 289, 304 Chapman, John W., 79, 285 charity aid, through churches, 191 Charity Aid Circle, 112 Chase, J. Saunders, 164, 165 Chase, J. Wesley, 24, 42, 43, 44, 109, 110, 118 Chase, Lewis, 42 Chesnut, W. Calvin, 136 Chesnutt, Charles W., 5 Chew, Annie, 123 children. See black children; black schools; schooling and education chocolate sip, 189 churches, 9; for African Americans, 13–14, 35–39; AME congregations, 35–36; for black Catholics, 221, 252, 305; camp meetings and, 152; charity aid through, 191; fundraising for, 37–38, 117–118, 252–253, 304–305; funerals in, 37; new, 221; New Deal programs and, 191; organizational societies through, 38; social importance of, 115–119, 303–305; as social welfare organizations, 118–119, 191; weddings in, 37 Citizen’s Planning and Housing Association (CPHA), 288–289 civil rights movement, 323 Civitan Club, 174, 175, 181n70 Clark, Linwood L., 162

Clarke, William, 5–6 Claude, W. Clement, 87 clubs. See Civitan Club; organizations, social; social clubs Coates, Beatrice, 208, 209 Coates, Orville, 190 Cohen, Hyman, 293 College Creek Terrace housing project, 214, 220; assessment of dwelling requirements in, 237; in newspapers, 236; rents in, 237; schools in, 232; as tourist attraction, 236 Colored Business and Professional Men’s League, 109–111, 110 commercial developments, 148 Community Chest, 294 Community Welfare Association, 171 Compulsory Education Act, 100 Coolidge, Calvin, 8n20, 146 Cooper, Henry, 35 Cooper, Julius “Tots,” 15, 31 Corman, Arthur P., 25 Council of Church Women, 239, 297 CPHA. See Citizen’s Planning and Housing Association Crampton, R. B., 216 Creditt, Edith, 55, 56, 61, 66 Criglar, A. Lincoln, 236 crime, in Gott’s Court, 310 Croll, David, 218, 229, 281, 287 Crothers, Austin L., 93 Cully, Harriet, 117 Cully, Norman, 167, 186 Cummings, Harry S., 44 Davage, Charles S., 226 Davis, Helen A., 165 Davis, Henry, 83 Davis, Robert M., 42, 79, 96, 109–110, 110, 165 Davis, Victoria, 149, 183 Decoration Day, 15 Delta Sigma Theta, 228 Democratic Party: African Americans in, 165–166; discrimination in registration for, 244; discriminatory laws enacted by, 27; in Maryland, 25–27

Index Dennis, Alexander, 37, 112 Dennis, Amelia, 112 Dennis, Gillis, 188 Dennis, Mary E., 191 DePriest, Oscar, 152 desegregation: of Girls Scouts, 210, 293; as national trend, 210; of public events, 279–280; of public libraries, 281, 323; of recreation initiatives, 293; through religious cooperation, 282; social relationships between black and whites influenced by, 279–280, 321; of tercentenary parade, 206–207 Dickerson, Emma, 154 Digges, Walter M., 95 Diggs, Francis, 149, 161, 163, 187 Diggs, James, 83 diseases, rates of: among African Americans, 166–167; within slums, 176 Dobson, Perry, 98, 110, 115 Doby, Larry, 279 doctors. See black doctors domestic employment: blacks and, 23; difficulty of, 235 Dorsey, Joseph A., 161 Douglass, Frederick, 5, 36, 118, 291 Douglass, Haley, 291, 292 Drew, Charles, 228, 243 Drew, Simon P. W., 65, 119 Drexel, Katherine, 191 Drummond, Lee F., 168 Dubois, Charles, 30 Du Bois, W. E. B., 5, 279; “talented tenth” and, 41; uplift strategy of, 323 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 256 Duncan, Frank R., 61 Duvall, Eloise, 252 Duvall, Joseph, 252 Dyer, Martin, 219, 322 Dyson, Wilson, 221 Earhart, Amelia, 146 Eckstine, Billy, 149 education. See schooling and education; teachers, salaries for Edwards, Thomas, 229 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 295

341

Eisenstein, Lena, 149 Eisenstein, Sam, 149 elections, 93; black candidates in, 245–246, 296; under Hatch Act, 245; Supreme Court rulings for, 96; timing of, 152. See also voter registration; voting participation; voting rights Ellington, Arthur, 272 Ellington, Duke, 216 employment: for African Americans, limitations of, 12–13, 101, 194–196; as domestics, for African Americans, 23, 235; during Great Depression, 150; at Naval Academy, 10, 13, 234; through NYA, 233; for women, 122, 298 Eney, H. Vernon, 138 Enforced Labor Law, 103 Ennis, Jane, 42 entertainment. See organizations, social; social clubs; sporting events Equalization Act, 131, 136 Evans, John Henry, 90 Evans, John N., 83 The Evening Capital, 4, 6; College Creek Terrace housing project in, 236; depictions of blacks in, 20–21, 91, 225–227, 285–286, 322; public admonishment of blacks in, 71 executions, 88. See also public hangings family structure: classic nuclear families, 121; women as heads of households, 47, 49n49 Feldmeyer, Harry E., 215 Feldmeyer, William, 78, 149 Fields, Barbara, 325 Fifteenth Amendment, 25 Fisher, Jesse, 175 Fletcher, Edward, 148 Fletcher, Eliza, 112, 113, 148, 166, 167 Fletcher, William A., 111, 242 Fletcher, William E., 110, 112, 161, 280 Flippen, James, 154 Folkes, Charity, 42 Folkes, Thomas, 35 Foote, Charles, 191 Ford, Henry, 257

342

Index

Foster, E. W., 208 Fourteenth Amendment, 136, 138 Fourth Ward: black-owned business in, 215; destruction of, 274; expansion of businesses in, 266n35; funding for schools in, 305; political life in, 295–297; as predominately black neighborhood, 278; social status in, 308 Fox, George, 131, 133, 152 Franklin, John Hope, 292 fraternal organizations, 39–40, 111; expanded facilities for, 150; segregation of, 40; social services through, 253 Frazier, E. Franklin, 233 French, William J., 166, 238 Frere, William J., 95 Frontiers Club, 307 funerals, 37 Gable, Clark, 216 Gaines, Wesley J., 117, 119 Gaither, William, 167 gambling. See numbers rackets Garcia, Ambrose, 56, 78, 102, 112, 165, 183, 245 Garcia, Audrey, 112, 113 Gardiner, Carrie, 84n7 Gardiner, William B., 84n7, 147, 148 Garver, Dorsey, 153, 160, 164, 168, 184 Garver, Hester, 121 Garver, R. P. D., 164 Garvey, Marcus, 8n20 Gaskins, Cassie, 208 gender. See women geography, of Annapolis, 9–10; expansion of neighborhoods, 77–80, 146; maps, 9, 77, 145, 213, 277. See also Naval Academy Gibbs, William B., 134 Gibson, John M., 282 Girls Scouts: black troops, 208–210, 281, 322; desegregation of, 210, 293; social segregation within, 209; in tercentenary parade, 207, 320 Girls Service Organization (GSO), 254 Glendening, Parris, 73 Golden Age, of Annapolis, 10

Goodman, Hannah, 14 Goodman, J. Albert, 282 Goodman, Moses, 14 Goodnow, Frank, 102 Gorman, Arthur P., 25, 26 Gott, Winson, 78, 84n7 Gott’s Court: black businesses in, 270; collective memories of residents, 311–316, 317n40; color prejudice in, 312; CPHA and, 288–289; criminal activity in, 310; demolition of, 269–274, 320; emergency bills for, 271; illegal activity in, 309; landlord neglect in, 288; Oliver, C. A., and, 272; political repercussions from, 269–270; public opinions on, 287–291, 309–316; relocation of residents, 272–274; social status in, 312 Grant, Ulysses S., 22 Gray, Catherine, 254 Gray, Ellen, 122 Grayson, C. Gus, 61 Great Depression: economic disruption as result of, 170–172; educational opportunities during, 162; employment during, 150; Naval Academy during, 171; New Deal programs during, 172; PWA during, 148; recreation initiatives during, 173–174; Red Cross during, 171, 172; WPA during, 150 Greater Annapolis Recreation Group, 242 Green, Cecelia, 193, 304 Green, Nicholas H., 147 Green, Nicholas H., Jr., 56, 57 Green, Robert, 218, 297 Greene, James A., 279 GSO. See Girls Service Organization Haley, George W., 220 Hall, John W., 35 Hall, Marcellus, 35, 252, 296 Hall, Prince, 39 Halleck, A. C., 209 Hamilton, Mary, 254, 256 Harder, Earle S., 177 Hardesty, Emma, 121

Index Hardesty, Joseph, 133 Hardesty, Lulu, 133, 218, 231, 255, 292 Harding, Warren G., 227, 247n6 Harrington, Emerson C., 53, 64–65, 82; requests for clemency, 64–69 Harris, Charles L., 35 Harris, George, 15, 31 Harris, Ida, 242 Hart, Walter, 148 Hartman, George, 61, 63 Harvard University: black students at, 5; Matthews at, 3–7, 5 Hatch Act, 245 Hawkins, William, 60 Hayes, Roland, 231 health care: for African Americans, 102, 243; campaigns for improvement of, 293–294; through hospital drives, 293–294; infant mortality rates, for African Americans, 243; mental, 294; Negro Health Week and, 166, 217, 243; Red Cross campaigns by, 170; segregation in, 155; under “separate but equal” laws, 31. See also black doctors; hospitals Hebron, Dennis, 43, 109 Hebron, Henry, 110 Hebron, William H., 164 Henderson, E. H. L., 43 Herndon, Henry, 215 Hicks, Charles, 149, 305 Hicks, Eleanor, 171 Hicks, John L., 215 high schools: graduation from, as accomplishment, 187; graduations as social event, 257. See also Bates High School; Stanton School Hillman, Noah, 137, 304 Hobbs, Addie, 303 Hoff, Bernard, 245 Holland, Electa, 298, 303, 306 Holly, James T., 38 Holt, Benjamin S., 89, 245 Holt, Mattie, 149, 265 Holy Temple United Holy Church (UHC), 221 Home and School Association, 159

343

homeownership: among African Americans, 46–47; for women, 46–47. See also housing Horne, Lena, 231 hospitals: discrimination against black doctors in, 216, 228, 294; funding drives for, 293–294; Johns Hopkins Hospital, 228, 294; segregation of, 244 hotels. See Jim Crow laws housing: African American landlords and, 148; Council of Church Women and, 239; under CPHA, 288–289; development of, 10–11; government involvement in, 176; shortage of, for African Americans, 235–242; social status as influence on, 193; white landlords and, 147. See also black neighborhoods; Fourth Ward; Gott’s Court; public housing projects; slums housing projects. See public housing projects Houston, Charles H., 135 Howard, Allen B., 164 Howard, J. E., 45 Howard, William H., 42, 43, 94, 96, 98, 115, 118, 131, 152, 164, 183, 279; death of, 184 Howard University, 23 Hughes, W. A. C., 135, 137 Humiston, Grace, 54–55, 57–58 Hyde, Lewis, 283 Hynson, Carroll, 133, 148, 149, 242, 254, 257, 270, 279, 305 infant mortality rates, for African Americans, 243 integration. See desegregation interracial marriage, 19, 167–168 Isaacs, Archie, 83, 89, 112 Ivrey, Harry, 148, 175, 270; arrest of, 175 Jackson, Elmer M., Jr., 271 Jackson, Napoleon, 88 Jacobs, Bessie, 161 Jacobs, James, 83, 89 Jenkins, David S., 209, 230, 283, 305

344

Index

Jennings, Moses, 42, 112 Jennings, Moses H., Jr., 42 Jennings, Sarah, 112 Jim Crow laws, 3–4, 7; legal challenges to, 97, 324; Matthews under, 3–4; NAACP fight against, 96, 229; Plessy v. Ferguson and, 20; public debate over, 28; repeal bills, 246–247; segregation of railroad cars under, 27–29; during World War II, 217. See also Poe Amendment Johns, Lucy, 115 Johns Hopkins Hospital, black doctors at, 228, 294 Johnson, Adele, 257 Johnson, Agnes, 243 Johnson, Carrie, 111, 112, 254 Johnson, Charles, 190; as juror, 30 Johnson, Charlotte, 255 Johnson, Frank “Bluebird,” 165 Johnson, Frank H., 29 Johnson, Hester, 61, 82, 89, 112, 148 Johnson, James Lee, 154, 163 Johnson, J. B., 171, 215, 253 Johnson, Moses, 148 Johnson, Napoleon, 44, 109–110 Johnson, Sara, 270 Johnson, Sodonia R., 29 Johnson, Theodore H., 257, 261, 270 Johnson, Theodore S., 216, 228, 241, 243, 246 Jones, Beatrice, 281 Jones, John Paul, 80 Jones, Sarah V., 135, 208, 232, 259 Jordan, J. J., 156 judges, racism of, 167 jurors: African Americans as, 30, 90, 154, 167; for Snowden trial, 60 justice system: African American treatment under, 30–31, 88–91; discrimination in, African American challenges to, 167; executions, 88; prosecution of whites under, 91. See also Snowden, John Keesee, R. P., 102, 110 Kennard, Priscilla, 21 Kerr, T. Henderson, 113 King, Douglas S., 208, 257, 289, 293

King, John H., 159, 183, 188 King, John W., 112, 114, 148 King, Mary, 54, 55, 112, 113, 114 King, Richard E., 22, 43, 44 King, Thomas, 54 Knight, Corinne, 256 Knight, Leonard, 256 Korean War, 283 Ku Klux Klan, 92, 156–157 Lane, W. Preston, Jr., 205 Larkin, Thomas, 215 law enforcement: by black officers, 295; challenges to, by African Americans, 90, 155; raids of black establishments by, 82, 153, 219. See also crime Leazer, William R., 83, 88 Lee, Euel, 147, 167 Lee, I. S., 39, 43 Lee, John W., 43 Legum, Edward, 147, 149, 189 Legum, Israel, 239 Legum, Morris, 147, 149, 175, 239 Lewis, William H., 8n20 libraries. See public libraries literacy rates: for African Americans, 46, 46–47, 93; for women, 46, 121 Locke, Alain, 5 Lomax, C. C., 110 Lombard, Carole, 216 Louis, Joe, 151, 216, 279 Lovett, Edward P., 135 Lowry, George B., 42 Luck, Jerry H., 258 Lyceum Debating Society, 22 lynchings, 104n1; legality of, 105n11; newspaper editorials about, 21 Lyon, Abbie Wright, 38, 118 Lyon, Ernest, 38, 111 Lyon, George D., 208 Magruder, Daniel R., 31 Makell, Marie, 207 maps, 9 Marchand, Gaynell, 208, 209, 218 March of Dimes, 294 Marie, Charlene, 270

Index marriage: legislative regulation of, 167–168. See also interracial marriage; weddings Marshall, Thurgood, 133, 135–136, 140, 161, 322 Martin, Arnold, 83, 89 Maryland: Democratic Party in, 25–27; Republican Party in, 25–27 Maryland Code, 19 Maryland Medical Society, 301n45 Maryland State Federation of Negro Parent Teachers Association, 132 Matthews, William Clarence, 3–7, 35, 319; black reactions to, 4, 6, 7; education of, 4–5; under Jim Crow laws, 3–4; post-collegiate history of, 8n20; Washington as mentor to, 4; white reactions to, 4, 5–6 McCann, Harold R., 141, 231 McCoy, H. C., 119 McCready, William U., 205 McKeldin, Clare, 283 McKeldin, Theodore R., 281 McNeil, Oliver W. H., 149, 183, 216, 245 McPherson, Harold, 282 mental health care, 294 Meredith, Carey L., 178 Michaelson, Benjamin M., 138 middle class, emergence of, 115, 266n35 Miller, Kelly, 110, 118 Milliner, Rodney, 79, 164 Mills, Walter S., 134, 297 Mills, Walter T., 253 minstrel shows, 20, 80, 91–92, 156, 225, 286 Mitchell, Arthur W., 163 Monroe, James, 66 Moore, R. N., 190 Morgan, Bertie Bishop, 215 Morgan, Bittie (Martha), 112 Morgan, Norris, 112, 121, 215, 259 Morgan College, 20 Morrell, Louise Drexel, 191 Morris, Thomas J., 95 Morrow, W. Donald, 176 Morton, Francis H., 240 Moses, Doris, 51, 73 Moss, Robert, 60, 90, 167

345

Mother’s Club, 306 Mother’s League, 89, 103, 112, 120–123; political involvement of, 163–164 Mowbry, Wardell, 253 Mt. Moriah Church, 116 Murphy, J. J., 174 Murray, Donald, 133–134 Murray, Ella Rush, 55–56, 66, 72, 112 Murray, W. Spencer, 56 Myers et al v. Anderson, 96 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP): Annapolis chapter of, 161, 228–229, 320; expansion of membership for, 229; Jim Crow laws and, response to, 96, 229; support for hiring black police officers, 295; support for increase of teachers’ salaries, 133–134, 137, 138, 229; uplift strategy of, 323 National Association of Base Ball Players, 7n2 National Association of Colored Women, 80 National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools, 132 National Council of Negro Women, 306 National Youth Administration (NYA), 233 Naval Academy: black enrollment in, 154, 219, 222n29; discrimination against black students in, 163; as employer, 10, 13, 234; expansion of, 11, 78; during Great Depression, 171; hiring of blacks at, 234, 298; segregation at sporting events, 81 Negro Health Week, 166, 217, 243 Negro History Week, 231, 304 Negro Northern League, 8n20 Negro State Parent Teachers’ Association, 161 neighborhoods. See black neighborhoods Nelson, Emmett, 149, 188, 191, 217, 218, 261 New Deal programs: church involvement in, 191; during Great

346

Index

Depression, 172; PWA, 148; WPA, 150, 173 New Negro, 266n35 newspapers: depiction of Snowden, J., in, 58; lynching in, 21; murder of Brandon, L. M., in, 54; negative depictions of African Americans in, 20–21, 91, 168–169; teachers’ salary challenges in, 139 Nice, Harry W., 134, 135, 153 Nichols, E. H., 5 1910 census, 120 1940 census, educational achievement levels in, 230 1950 census, 284n1 Norman, William H., 270 Norwood, Harold, 102 Norwood, Howard, 79, 111 Norwood, Rosa, 61, 89, 113, 114 Notis, Edward B., 149, 226 numbers rackets, 153, 185, 220 NYA. See National Youth Administration Obery Court housing project, 274, 278, 279, 291; public library in, 292–293 Offer, Solomon, 257 Oliver, Charles A., 133, 152, 154, 161, 164, 165–166, 167, 171, 175, 188, 206, 220; as alderman, 245–246, 296; demolition of Gott’s Court and, 272 Oliver, Mary, 188 Olmstead, Frederick Law, 80 Order, Isaac, 43 Order, Rebecca, 43 organizations, social: through black churches, 38; fraternal organizations, 39–40; YMCA as, 254–255. See also Banneker Literary and Musical Association Pack, William H., 115 Palmer, Matilda, 205 parades: segregation during, 155–156, 280; tercentenary, 205–210 Parker, Ellen, 44, 80, 111, 112, 121, 122 Parker, James, 190 Parker, Roscoe, 278 Parlett, Morgan O., 61

patriotism, of African Americans, 102–103; white perceptions of, 106n65 Pendleton, George, 43, 88 Pendleton, George L., 65 Perkins, Mary, 55, 61, 64, 66, 78 Pettigen, Enolia, 134 Phelps, George, 229 Phi Delta Kappa, 253, 281, 307 Phillips, Benjamin, 110 Phipps, Louis, 162, 166, 177 Pierce, H. U., 156 Pindell, Howard, 132, 143n56 Pinkney, Loundon, 35 Pinkney, Rachel, 149 Plessy v. Ferguson, 20 Poe, John Prentiss, 26 Poe Amendment, 27, 28, 28–29, 92–94 police. See law enforcement politics: African American involvement in, 40, 163–166; in Fourth Ward, 295–297; Mother’s League and, 163–164; student involvement in, 246. See also Democratic Party; Republican Party population, of Annapolis: for African Americans, 10; in 1910 census, 120; in 1950 census, 284n1; total, changes in, 79, 146, 216 Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr., 217, 305 Price, Henry, 36 Price, Smith, 35 Prince Hall Masons, 39 Proctor, 146 prostitution, 258 public hangings, 155; of Snowden, 53, 64–71 public housing projects: application criteria for, 275n17; for blacks, 248n43, 286–291; College Creek Terrace, 214, 220; CPHA and, 288–289; development of, 213–214; housing code violations in, 289; Obery Court, 274, 278, 279, 291; public opinions on, 287–291; for whites, 286 public libraries: for blacks, 220; desegregation of, 281, 323; in Obery Court housing project, 292–293

Index Public Works Administration (PWA), 148 Queen, Fannie, 122 Queen, Margaret, 55, 62, 66 Queen, Thomas, 79 Quenstedt, Walter E., 152, 165 race. See African Americans; whites race riots, 125n51 railroad travel: boycott of, by blacks, 28; segregation of passenger cars, under Jim Crow laws, 27–29 Raley, Joseph L., 61 Randal, J. Wirt, 93 Ransom, Leon A., 135 Rawlins, C. H., 239 recreation initiatives, 173–174, 242; desegregation of, 293; Greater Annapolis Recreation Group, 242 Red Cross: child health campaigns by, 170; desegregation of, 281; during Great Depression, 171, 172; segregation and, 103, 113, 243, 283, 294; during World War I, 113 Reed, George H., 43 Reed, J. T., 39 Reese, William, 215 Reid, Hattie, 37 Reid, Sedonia, 37 Republican Party: African Americans in, 25–27, 186; discrimination in registration for, 244; in Maryland, 25–27 Richardson, Eloise, 208, 209, 217, 228, 254, 255, 257, 306; as columnist, 218, 226, 227–228, 233, 243; as librarian, 281 Richardson, Raymond L., 149, 228, 257 Richardson, Thomas, 149 Richardson, William H., 133, 161, 217, 218, 220, 227, 228, 242, 254, 294 Ridgley, Cornelius, 102, 110 Ridgley, Louis, 110 Ridout, John, 14, 56 Riordan, Josephine, 281 Ritchie, Albert C., 132, 153 Robeson, Paul, 231 Robinson, Robert, 155

347

Rogers, Archibald Coleman, 241 Rollins, Walter, 226–227, 247n6 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 146, 216 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 146. See also New Deal programs Roosevelt, Theodore, 54, 80 Rosenwald, Julius, 179n8 Rowe, Roscoe C., 282 Ruddock, Charlotte, 255 Russell, John A., 164 Savage, Augusta, 231 schooling and education, 13; under Brown v. Board of Education, 286; compulsory education laws and, 99–100; educational achievement levels, in 1940 census, 230; enrichment programs, 232; in Fourth Ward, funding for, 305; during Great Depression, 162; inequality of, between black and whites, 19; postgraduate education, county funding for, 232; vocational, for blacks, 97–98; Washington, B. T., on, 32n10, 106n43. See also Bates High School; black schools; Stanton School; teachers, salaries for Schumann, R. W., 184 Scott, Hazel, 305 Scott, James, 200n57 segregation: in baseball, 7n2; of fraternal organizations, 40; with Girls Scouts, 209; in health care facilities, 155; of hospitals, 244; at Naval Academy sporting events, 81; during parades, 155–156, 280; after Plessy v. Ferguson, 20; Plessy v. Ferguson and, 20; Red Cross and, 103, 113, 243, 283, 294; “separate but equal” status and, 20; in sporting events, 155; of USOs, 217, 283. See also Jim Crow laws “separate but equal” laws, 20; funding of black schools under, 19, 24; health care for blacks under, 31; Plessy v. Ferguson and, 20. See also Jim Crow laws shops and shop owners: in black neighborhoods, 149, 215; black-

348

Index

owned businesses, 149, 215, 278–279; discrimination against African Americans, 178, 298–299; in Fourth Ward, 266n35; in Gott’s Court, 270; Jewish, in black neighborhoods, 149 Shorter, Charles, 36 Sima, William, Jr., 226–227 Sima, William, Sr., 226 Simmons, J. H., 15 Simms, Hattie, 121 Simms, Pauline, 149 Simons, John H., 39 Simpson, Carrie, 113, 121 Sisco, Leroy, 61 skin color: Gott’s Court and, 312; public perceptions of, among blacks and whites, 58; social status and, 192, 259 slave trade, 10 slums, in Annapolis, 174–176, 237–239; clearance of, federal assistance for, 176, 177; condemnation of, 238; disease rates in, 176. See also Gott’s Court Smith, Alfred E., 165 Smith, Charles W., 153, 178, 237 Smith, Elizabeth Carr, 209 Smith, Frank, 255 Smith, John Walter, 25 Smith, Lois, 255 Smith, Rachel Carter, 133, 135, 187, 188, 215, 218, 228, 232, 253, 255, 306; social status of, 258 Smith, Thomas, 187 Snowden, Elizabeth D., 112, 113 Snowden, John, 56–63, 89, 104, 112, 145, 245, 319; appeals process for, 63–64; Brady as counsel for, 59, 61–62; fundraising for defense of, 60; guilty verdict for, 63; hanging of, 53, 64–71; jury deliberations for, 63; jury selection for, 60; murder indictment for, 59; newspapers’ depiction of, 58; posthumous pardon for, 73; public funeral for, 72; racial tension from murder charges, 59; requests for clemency for, 64–69; trial for, 59–63. See also

Brandon, Lottie May social clubs, for African Americans, 183, 188–189; entrenchment of, 255–256; exclusivity of, 255; USO as, 217; women in, 188 social organizations. See organizations, social social relationships, between black and whites, 11–16; desegregation as influence on, 279–280, 321; in Girl Scout troops, 210; at illegal events, 81; prohibition of marriage, 19; at sporting events, 80, 84n20 social status, 115; community fellowship influenced by, 192; in Fourth Ward, 308; in Gott’s Court, 312; hierarchy for, 45, 258–260, 308–309, 323; by neighborhood, 193, 260, 309; through personal style, 259; through possessions, 259; skin color and, 192, 259; of weddings, 257–258 Song of the Severn, 205 sororities. See black sororities Sparks, Thelma, 208, 210, 232, 281 Sparks, Vernon, 207, 210 speakeasies, 185 sporting events: segregation in, 155; social relationships between black and whites at, 80, 84n20. See also baseball sports teams, development of, 187–188 Spriggs, Agnes, 112, 114, 121, 122, 164 Spriggs, Charles, 152, 164, 165–166, 190; as candidate, 245–246 Spriggs, Delmar, 281, 293 Spriggs, Harry, 101, 110, 112, 164 Stanton, Edwin, 24 Stanton School, 24, 184; community fundraising for, 24; establishment of, 32n21; expansion of, 291; improvements to, 160; physical condition of, 160; repairs to, 220, 230; special programs at, 231; white support for, 98–99 State Equalization Law, 130 Stehle, Fred, 101 Stepney, Emma Hall, 149, 152, 171, 186, 188, 218, 242, 255, 258, 281, 282, 289,

Index 291, 297 Stepney, John F., 164, 184 Stepney, John T., 148, 183, 186, 190 Stevens, J. G., 293 Stevenson, Adlai, 295 Stewart, Ollie, 256 Stewart, Rachel, 61 Stewart, William, 24 St. Mary’s Colored School, 118 The Story of the Negro (Bontemps), 232 Straus, Isaac Lobe, 93 Straus Amendment, 94–95 St. Theresa’s Beneficial Society, 39, 118 Sturdy, Henry F., 238 Suffrage League, 26, 92; voter registration and, 95 Sullivan, John R., 54 Sun, 3–4, 6, 54 Taft, William Howard, 80, 119 “talented tenth,” 41 Taylor, Andrew, 83, 88 Taylor, Sidney, 149 teachers, salaries for: in Afro-American, 131, 139; appeasement offers for, 137; dismissal of legal suit, 136–137; dual scale system for, 130; under Equalization Act, 131; Fourteenth Amendment and, 136, 138; inequality in, legal challenges to, 129–142, 140, 320; NAACP and, 133–134, 137, 138, 229; in newspapers, 139; under State Equalization Law, 130 tercentenary parade, 205–210; desegregation of, 206–207; Girls Scouts in, 207, 320; variety of floats during, 206–207 Thackston, Albert, 207 Thomas, George, 102, 183, 184, 245 Thomas, Mattie, 114 Thomas, Rachel, 44, 121, 123 Thompson, Agnes Ruth, 226 Thompson, T. A., 14, 28, 29–30, 43, 81, 93, 94, 110 Thompson, Thomas G., 29 Townsend, W. W., 240 Traverse, M. W., 26, 39 Truman, Bess, 206

349

Tunnell, William, 118 Twain, Mark, 80 UHC. See Holy Temple United Holy Church United Negro Improvement Association, 8n20 United Service Organizations (USO): enrichment programs through, 254–255; segregation of, 217, 283; as social club, 217; World War II and, 217 University of Maryland: desegregation strategies of, 232; discrimination against black students at, 163 U.S. census: 1910, Annapolis population, 120; 1940, educational achievement levels in, 230; 1950, Annapolis population, 284n1 USO. See United Service Organizations Valentine, Henry, 43, 44, 110, 148, 164, 167 violence, 15–16, 82 vocational education, for African Americans, 97–98 voter registration: for African Americans, 93–94, 95; lawsuits for, 94; Suffrage League and, 95 voting participation, for blacks, 81 voting rights: in Afro-American, 26; Bates, W. H., on, 92; for blacks, 25–27; disenfranchisement of, 94–96; under Fifteenth Amendment, 25; under Poe Amendment, 27, 28, 28–29, 92–94; under Straus Amendment, 94–95; Suffrage League and, 26, 92; for women, 152 Wallace, Edna, 57, 59, 62 Walsh, David L., 247n6 Walsh, William C., 136, 137, 138 Warfield, Edwin, 25, 88 Warren, Alice, 38, 121 war veterans. See black veterans Washington, Booker T., 8n20, 156, 256; Matthews and, 4; Negro Health Week and, 166; on schooling and education for African Americans,

350

Index

32n10, 106n43; visit to Annapolis, 80, 110 Washington, D.C., African American migration to, 23 Washington Post, 6, 54 Washington Times, 54 Watkins, Noble, 37, 43, 44, 46, 109 Watkins, Sarah, 149, 183 weddings, 37; social status of, 257–258 Wedemeyer, A. C., 233 Weems, Ethel, 122 Weems, Sarah, 14 Wells, Emma, 112, 114, 121 Wheatley, Phillis, 256 Wheeler, John, 35 White, Walter, 161 whites: charity organizations for, 169–170; children’s knowledge of prejudiced behavior by, 197–199; churches for, 13–14; as landlords, 147; perceptions of African American patriotism, 106n65; prohibition of marriage to African Americans, 19, 167–168; public reactions to Matthews, 4, 5–6; public reaction to Snowden murder charges, 59; segregation of fraternal organizations, 40; skin color of blacks and, public perceptions of, 58; support for Stanton School, 98–99; treatment within justice system, 91; veteran centers for, 242; on vocational education for blacks, 97–98. See also social relationships, between black and whites Williams, Charles, 60 Williams, D. Ellwood, 290 Williams, E. S., 57, 60, 61, 62, 83, 89, 103, 112, 116, 119; as juror, 90 Williams, M. J., 112

Williams, Norman, 216, 241, 246, 257 Wilson, Russell, 219, 222n29 Wilson, Woodrow, 80 Wiseman, Mary, 208, 209, 252 women: in auxiliary organizations, 111–113; employment during World War II, 235; employment for, 122, 298; as heads of households, 47, 49n49; homeownership for, 46–47; literacy rates for, 46, 121; in Mother’s League, 120–123; in 1910 census, 120; in social clubs, 188; voting rights for, 152 Women’s Relief Corps, 111 Woodward, C. Vann, 84n20, 248n32 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 150, 173 World War I: African American participation during, 103–104; African American veterans of, public perception of, 169; Red Cross support during, 113 World War II, 216–217; blacks during, war effort by, 217; black veterans, 234, 242; female employment during, 235; Jim Crow laws during, 217; Negro Health Week during, 217; USO and, 217 Wormley, S. S., 116 Wortham, R. W., 110 WPA. See Works Progress Administration Wright, Stanley, 152 YMCA. See Young Men’s Christian Association Young, Josephine C., 161, 226 Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), 254–255, 306 Young People’s Republican Party, 186

About the Author

Hannah Jopling received a PhD in anthropology from City University of New York. She teaches anthropology at Fordham University and Hunter College. Prior to graduate school, Jopling was a social activist dealing with urban problems particularly those related to the black family in Washington, DC. She worked for a number of organizations including the Brookings Institution, the Kerner Commission on Civil Disorders, and the Urban Coalition. She founded Sentencing Services, a nonprofit organization that recommended special rehabilitative programs of probation for convicted offenders as an alternative to incarceration. She has served on the boards for the Board of Professional Responsibility of the DC Bar, the Council for Court Excellence, the Public Defender Service, the Frederick B. Abramson Memorial Foundation, and the Visitor Services Center.

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