The nation's largest free Black community before the Civil War, Frederick Douglass and Thurgood Marshall.
A Free Black City
On the eve of the Civil War, Baltimore had the largest free Black community in the nation. In 1892 John H. Murphy Sr. founded the Afro-American newspaper there, and it became the longest-running African American family-owned newspaper in the United States.
Frederick Douglass
As a boy, Frederick Douglass was sent to Baltimore to serve Hugh and Sophia Auld. Sophia Auld began teaching him the alphabet, and when her husband stopped her, Douglass kept teaching himself in secret, later writing that knowledge unfits a child to be a slave. As a young man he worked as a ship caulker in a Fell's Point shipyard, and on September 3, 1838 he escaped on a northbound train.
Thurgood Marshall
Thurgood Marshall was born in Baltimore on July 2, 1908 and graduated with honors from the city's Colored High and Training School, later Frederick Douglass High School. With Charles Hamilton Houston he sued the University of Maryland for Donald Gaines Murray, who had been turned away from its law school because of his race, and won. He went on to argue Brown v. Board of Education and, in 1967, became the first African American justice of the Supreme Court. Since 2005 Baltimore's airport has carried his name.
Pennsylvania Avenue
On West Baltimore's Pennsylvania Avenue, the most famous stage was the Royal Theatre, which first opened in 1922 as the Black-owned Douglass Theatre. The civil rights pioneer Lillie Mae Carroll Jackson helped organize the Baltimore branch of the NAACP.
Black Baltimore Today
Since 2005 the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture, a Smithsonian affiliate on East Pratt Street, has told 400 years of Black Maryland history. It is named for a man from humble Baltimore beginnings who became the first African American to build a billion-dollar company. Black-owned restaurants, salons, shops and brands are part of everyday Baltimore.
Shop Black-owned businesses in Baltimore on CashBlack.
Photo Credits
Rowhouses on Pennsylvania Avenue, West Baltimore. Photo: Baltimore Heritage from Baltimore, MD, USA, CC0, Wikimedia Commons