Archaeology

Arts

Economy

Education

Historical Overviews

Science, & Technology

Sports & Recreation

Transportation

Wildlife & Natural Resources

Search:

Protestors of Jim Crow laws

Maryland Historical Society

Segregation is the act of isolating or setting groups of people apart, whether by religion, race, or other criteria. In the history of Maryland, segregation is best known as the chief agent of racial discrimination in the twentieth century.

Slavery and Freedom to "Jim Crow"
Before the Civil War, Maryland had the largest free black population in the nation. But it was also a southern state, and the slave codes, plus the threat of return to slavery for free blacks, provided the legal separation between races that whites desired. Free blacks lived near whites, though they resided in alleyways rather than on main streets, and for a time they had a firm place in local economies. In Baltimore, for example, free blacks (and a few slaves such as Frederick Douglass) numbered heavily in occupations like ship caulking. After 1830, however, white workers claimed the work and used intimidation to get it.

Segregation can assume two forms. De facto (from the fact) segregation, like that used by white caulkers, was established by practice and maintained by custom. De jure (from the law) instruments like the pre-Civil War slave codes were much more direct. After the war white Marylanders devised new de jure methods of segregation, their efforts intended, in part, to open workplaces to new immigrants and to control rural blacks moving into towns and cities.

By 1896, when the Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson made "separate but equal" the law of the land, state, county, and municipal "Jim Crow" public accommodations laws were proliferating in Maryland. A 1904 state law directed railroad and steamship lines to provide, and enforce use of, white and colored sections. In Maryland as elsewhere, these efforts to curtail the rights of blacks came as "Progressives" were extending the rights of other Americans, and many Jim Crow laws were seen as Progressive measures.

Facing and Fighting Segregation
The onslaught left Maryland blacks with two choices: adapt, as Booker T. Washington suggested, and build black communities from the ground up, or fight back, as W.E.B. DuBois urged. Ironically, segregation fostered the emergence of a black middle class (which DuBois called the "talented tenth") that did both: turning back efforts to disenfranchise black voters and building strong communities behind racial boundaries.

Starting in the late nineteenth century, Baltimore's blacks began moving to west side neighborhoods. By the 1920s "Old West Baltimore" was the black capital of the state, dominated by a professional class that took a dim view of the storied nightlife on Pennsylvania Avenue. Nevertheless, the glitter did draw growing numbers of impoverished blacks from the Eastern Shore and Southern Maryland.

But work rather than play was Baltimore's chief attraction. It offered opportunities for domestics there, and the worst jobs at fertilizer, chemical, and steel plants in Baltimore seemed better than sharecropping. War mobilization brought industrial boom throughout the state. At first employers observed local custom and combed Appalachia for white workers rather than hire blacks into skilled jobs. Eventually sheer necessity pried open Maryland's industries, although blacks fought for every gain. Whites adapted to working with blacks but usually opposed efforts to train them for skilled work.

Blacks made fewer gains in the neighborhoods. Overcrowding became a crisis in black Baltimore, still hemmed in but home to ever more rural and southern blacks. By 1945, the black citizens who composed 20 percent of the city's population were crowded into 2 percent of its space. World War II presented an even greater challenge to Maryland's segregated institutions. Military service offered a glimpse of the world beyond Jim Crow to would-be black activists, and Nazism discredited racialist ideas in the eyes of most whites.

Although Maryland's civil rights movement took root during the war years, the seed had been planted in the 1930s when Maryland's staunchest opponents of segregation emerged. They included Lillie Carroll Jackson, an inspiring speaker and industrious organizer who made the Maryland NAACP the largest in the nation; Thurgood Marshall the young Baltimore lawyer who, in 1934, convinced the Maryland Court of Appeals to integrate the University of Maryland law school; and the Murphy family, owners of the Afro-American, one of nation's premier black newspapers.

These pioneers remained to lead Maryland's postwar civil rights movement. They believed, and convinced black voters whose numbers doubled in the 1940s, that defeat of de jure segregation was the key to creating an equitable society. Liberal white Marylanders agreed, and leaders like Governor Theodore McKeldin united both groups in a coalition that challenged legal segregation.

Postwar Achievements
Some wartime gains proved lasting for black industrial workers?their ranks increased from 7 to 17 percent of the manufacturing workforce statewide. But hiring practices still offered opportunities for advancement to whites and shunted blacks into dead end jobs. These indirect means of workplace segregation were hard to combat. Neither a 1956 Baltimore equal employment ordinance nor a 1965 Maryland Fair Employment Act dislodged segregation. More effective federal "affirmative action" initiatives came in the 1970s, after manufacturing in the state had begun to decline.

School integration saw similar achievements and setbacks. In the 1930s Maryland spent a third as much on black schools as on white ones. Twenty years later its separate systems were highly unequal, bearing out Thurgood Marshall's arguments in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case. Just months after Brown, Baltimore City opened admission to all district schools. At the same time the University of Maryland at College Park became the first such institution below the Mason-Dixon Line to integrate. Districts in Southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore were characteristically slower to move, remaining segregated until the 1960s.

In the 1950s Maryland's black activists and white liberals chipped away at segregation in public accommodations. In 1953 state parks were desegregated. By 1956 blacks could try on clothes in Baltimore department stores and most theaters were opened. Montgomery County desegregated its restaurants in 1957, but eating establishments elsewhere took longer. In 1960 college students in Baltimore and Salisbury integrated lunch counters with "sit ins" like those made famous in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Much attention in the early 1960s focused on public and private parks. Although they were officially desegregated, local youths still fought over them. In 1963 local and national religious leaders successfully picketed the all-white Gwynn Oak amusement park near Baltimore. The national spotlight also fixed on Maryland when African diplomats were refused service at an incident in Route 40 restaurants and the Kennedy administration protested. Governor Millard Tawes promised, and in 1964 delivered, a statewide public accommodations bill.

Housing and the Limits of Desegregation
White Marylanders gradually accepted integration elsewhere, but when it came to segregation in Baltimore housing, class concerns reinforced and sometimes even trumped racial resentments. In 1945 the boundaries of black Baltimore began to give way. Whites, having observed that property values tended to drop when areas "went colored" (though due more to lending practices and poverty than to race), pushed back. The breakout came on black Baltimore's western edge where a pattern appeared that became depressingly familiar: "blockbusting" real estate agents bought low from frightened whites and sold high to desperate blacks, turning over entire neighborhoods in a few years or even months.

Segregation was unfortunately furthered by urban renewal and project housing initiatives. The first segregated housing projects were built in the 1930s. As impoverished populations grew and slum clearance (later called urban renewal) proceeded, projects seemed essential. From 1951 to 1971 optimistic Baltimore planners displaced 25,000 residents and relocated them in ever larger projects. A 1967 Maryland law and the 1968 Federal Fair Housing Act outlawed segregated housing, projects included, but with low-income blacks then greatly outnumbering low-income whites in the city, these were hollow victories.

By the late 1960s, racial segregation in all of its de jure and many of its de facto forms had been uprooted. But segregation by class remained, a barrier that was in some ways even higher. The expansive postwar economy ushered working white Marylanders, and not a few blacks, into the middle class; their neighborhoods and their jobs increasingly located in suburban areas like Baltimore County and Montgomery County. Left behind were lower-income blacks, their movement now limited more by income than by race.

The results were predictable. In Baltimore, integrated schools had become re-segregated in a decade as working whites moved out by the thousands. When in the 1970s federal authorities reviewed Maryland's progress toward school desegregation, they found that the greatest lasting change had come in historically more segregationist small towns and rural areas where the income gap was not as wide as in metropolitan areas. Those same authorities mandated busing initiatives for Baltimore City and Prince Georges County which only furthered the flight of the affluent before being unceremoniously dropped.

In Maryland as in America, the defeat of racial segregation was a huge accomplishment. But while American political culture today rejects racial segregation outright, segregation by class and wealth remains.

—Kenneth D. Durr