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Signs of segregation

Maryland Historical Society

Segregation, separation of groups based on religion or other characteristics, but most often race, permeated nearly every institution in early- to mid-twentieth-century Maryland. Segregation in neighborhoods and workplaces could be hidden and proved difficult to combat, but when it came to public accommodations, such as parks, pools, restaurants, and stores, segregation was highly visible, taking center stage at the height of the civil rights movement.

Jim Crow Takes Hold
During the years before the Civil War, black Marylanders,slaves and free blacks alike, were quite visible in the public sphere. For whites, the institution of slavery (and enslavement was always a threat to free blacks) made physical separation between the races unnecessary. The Civil War changed this, but as late as the 1880s there was still some intermingling between blacks and whites, particularly in Baltimore. Then, quite rapidly, segregationist "Jim Crow" laws spread across all the states below the Mason-Dixon Line, Maryland included.

Indeed, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) the Supreme Court case originating in Louisiana that made segregation the law of the land, involved a key public accommodation, railroad trains. Earlier in Maryland, segregation of public accommodations had been accomplished by custom and intimidation rather than by law. As whites became ever more intent on enforcing the separation of the races, segregation in the public sphere was written into law. After Plessy, a flurry of such laws passed on the local, county, and state levels. A benchmark was a 1904 Maryland statute segregating all railroads and steamship lines in the state. By the 1920s, Jim Crow had reached its apex, relegating 17 percent of the state's population to separate railroad cars and buses, parks and sporting events, restaurants, water fountains, hospitals, and jails.

Black Marylanders fought back as early as the turn of the century, but not until the 1930s did the institutions that would ultimately undermine Jim Crow, such as the Maryland NAACP, and the Afro-American Newspaper, began to flourish. World War II brought a boom in war work and rural-to-urban migration that made old patterns of segregation increasingly difficult to uphold. Some gains were notable in housing and the workplace, but the line between white and black in public accommodations held firm for a time.

The war, however, marked the birth of the modern civil rights movement in Maryland and America and brought growing black political involvement. By the 1950s, activists, encouraged by the Supreme Court's renunciation of Plessy in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), teamed up with white liberals to begin to roll back segregation in public accommodations, first in Baltimore and the urban counties, and later on the Eastern Shore and Southern Maryland.

Breaking Barriers in the Civil Rights Era
Segregated stores were among the first to go. In Baltimore, blacks who could afford to shop in department stores had long been forbidden to try on clothes. Some even traveled to Philadelphia to shop. By 1955, most department stores had reversed that policy, and theaters had begun to open to black patrons. In 1957 Montgomery County opened most of its restaurants, and in 1958 first-class hotels there and in Baltimore began to desegregate. In 1959 restaurants in Western Maryland and Prince George's County began to integrate.

Although state parks had been opened to blacks in 1953, they remained contested, especially where pools and beaches were involved, as whites used intimidation to keep blacks from "their" areas. Swimming pools in Baltimore were officially desegregated in 1956, but typically most blacks stuck to the Druid Hill Park pool. As late as 1962, it took protestors willing to brave local resistance to claim the right to swim in the officially, but not practically, desegregated Riverside pool in South Baltimore.

Efforts to integrate lunch counters provided some of the most indelible images of the civil rights movement. In 1960, black students from Baltimore's Morgan State College, assisted by whites from the Johns Hopkins University and Goucher College staged "sit-ins" to open lunch counters at nearby Northwood Shopping Center. Maryland State College students did the same at Salisbury lunch counters that fall. White college students in College Park staged a boycott to integrate the Little Tavern on Route 1, the last segregated restaurant in College Park in 1961.

As a border state, Maryland was less a battleground in the civil rights movement than its counterparts farther south. Still, its fitful renunciation of Jim Crow accommodations gave rise to a few highly publicized incidents. For years, African diplomats making the journey from Washington northward had been kept out of roadside restaurants along Route 40. In 1961 President Kennedy made this an issue. After the restaurants were opened to African diplomats, African Americans protestors drew attention to the obvious double standard. Pressured by civil rights groups, the Kennedy administration, and liberal voters, Governor J. Millard Tawes pursued an open accommodations law. His first effort, in 1963, fell victim to tradition. The legislation passed only after staunchly segregationist Southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore were exempted from its provisions.

In July of that year national religious leaders made headlines when, despite violent counter protest, they picketed and ultimately integrated the "whites only" Gwynn Oak Amusement Park on the west side of Baltimore. Increasingly vicious opposition by segregation's champions, coupled with the death of President Kennedy, finally convinced middle Americans that segregation had to go. In Maryland that became evident in 1964 when the legislature finally passed a statewide open accommodations law, just before the 1964 Civil Rights Act desegregated public accommodations throughout the nation.

—Kenneth D. Durr