Civil Rights
Old West Baltimore Becomes a Fountain

The Old West Baltimore community became the center for the local and national Civil Rights Movements, often meeting in churches. Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey visited churches here. Dr. Harvey Johnson founded the Mutual United Brotherhood of Liberty in 1886 “to use all legal means within our power to procure and maintain our rights as citizens.”

Picketers in front of Ford's Theatre, ca. 1951

Johnson and Mason Albert Hawkins, Ph.D., organized a national Race Betterment Movement in 1902. Hawkins, a close friend of W. E.B. DuBois, held many prestigious positions within the community, including professor at Morgan State College, principal of Douglass High School, director of Baltimore’s Provident Hospital, and president of the Maryland Colored Public Health Association. Between 1910 and 1917, the Race Betterment Movement worked in cooperation with the Maryland Suffrage Movement and the Just Government League—founded by Edith Houghton Hooker and Elizabeth King Walcott—to fight for women’s right to vote, organize petition drives, sponsor boycotts, and send delegations to Annapolis to protest segregation.

The Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, which included ministers from all parts of the city, was often led by prominent ministers from Old West Baltimore. The alliance collected money, printed and distributed literature, and urged black men to register and vote. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) established its local chapter—one of the nation’s largest—on Dolphin Street.

By the 1910s, blacks owned residences in the heart of the Pennsylvania Avenue corridor, from Bloom and Dolphin streets to the north and south, and Fremont Avenue and McCulloh Street to the east and west. Whites rioted and held mass meetings protesting black “encroachment.” Still the march towards black empowerment continued. Soon the Baltimore City Council debated and passed bills prohibiting African Americans to live on predominantly white blocks. The city’s ordinances to prevent black “encroachment” were copied as far away as South Africa. In 1917, with the help of African American lawyers such as W. Ashbie Hawkins, the U.S. Supreme Court declared local ordinances like those in Baltimore unconstitutional.

In 1933 African American leaders, including Juanita Jackson Mitchell and future U. S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, helped foster a movement to demand jobs at locally owned stores that sold products to blacks but refused to hire them. Belford Vance Lawson, Jr., an African American attorney who attended Yale Law School but received his law degree from Howard University, founded The New Negro Alliance (NNA) in Washington, D.C. with John A. Davis and N. Franklin Thorne. The NNA confronted white-owned businesses in black neighborhoods that refused to hire black workers. Soon the NNA’s “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaign made its way to Baltimore. It ignited a fierce wave of resistance from white business owners. Lawson and Marshall brought the fight all the way to the Supreme Court, winning New Negro Alliance v. Sanitary Grocery Co. in 1938 and guaranteeing the right to boycott. It was hailed as a landmark case in the black struggle against discrimination in hiring.

In 1941 A. Philip Randolph, founding president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, put out “A Call to Negro America to March on Washington for Jobs and Equal Participation in National Defense.” An estimated 100,000 pledged to participate, including 500 from Baltimore. In response, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 barring discrimination in defense industries and federal bureaus. As a result Randolph called off the march. In the years that followed many Baltimoreans participated in protests, including Randolph’s 1963 March on Washington.