A Brotherhood of Liberty

Black Reconstruction and Its Legacies in Baltimore, 1865-1920

Dennis Patrick Halpin

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780812296211
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: History

In A Brotherhood of Liberty, Dennis Patrick Halpin shifts the focus of the black freedom struggle from the Deep South to argue that Baltimore is key to understanding the trajectory of civil rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1870s and early 1880s, a dynamic group of black political leaders migrated to Baltimore from rural Virginia and Maryland. These activists, mostly former slaves who subsequently trained in the ministry, pushed Baltimore to fulfill Reconstruction's promise of racial equality. In doing so, they were part of a larger effort among African Americans to create new forms of black politics by founding churches, starting businesses, establishing community centers, and creating newspapers. Black Baltimoreans successfully challenged Jim Crow regulations on public transit, in the courts, in the voting booth, and on the streets of residential neighborhoods. They formed some of the nation's earliest civil rights organizations, including the United Mutual Brotherhood of Liberty, to define their own freedom in the period after the Civil War.Halpin shows how black Baltimoreans' successes prompted segregationists to reformulate their tactics. He examines how segregationists countered activists' victories by using Progressive Era concerns over urban order and corruption to criminalize and disenfranchise African Americans. Indeed, he argues the Progressive Era was crucial in establishing the racialized carceral state of the twentieth-century United States. Tracing the civil rights victories scored by black Baltimoreans that inspired activists throughout the nation and subsequent generations, A Brotherhood of Liberty highlights the strategies that can continue to be useful today, as well as the challenges that may be faced.

CHAPTER 1

African Americans’ Struggle to Define Freedom on the Border

On 29 September 1865, Baltimoreans gathered at the old Newton University building amid much fanfare and celebration. The night marked a notable achievement. Just over four months after the Civil War ended, and less than a year after Maryland abolished slavery, a group of thirty to forty African Americans pooled their money to purchase the building for $16,000. The new owners spent an additional $5,000 to transform the structure into a multipurpose community center, which they named the Douglass Institute in honor of Frederick Douglass. The building’s new owners hoped that the institute would serve as the preeminent center of black political, social, and educational activities. Located on Lexington Avenue in the heart of the city’s downtown, the renovated building, according to the Baltimore Sun, had a “fine hall for lectures or exhibitions, a library, musical department, school rooms, &c.”¹

Approximately eight hundred Baltimoreans (including two hundred white residents) attended the Douglass Institute’s dedication to hear its namesake deliver the keynote address. “The establishment of an Institute bearing my name by the colored people in the city of my boyhood, so soon after the act of emancipation in this state,” Douglass remarked, “looms before me as a first grand indication of progress.” Douglass recognized the importance and potential of the space. “Here we can assemble,” he proudly proclaimed, “and have our minds enlightened upon the whole circle of social, moral, political and education duties.” But the building’s value, as Douglass recognized, extended beyond its physical presence. It held symbolic importance. “The building,” Douglass observed, “is an indication of the rise of a people long oppressed, enslaved and bound in the chains of ignorance, to a freer and higher plane of life, manhood, usefulness and civilization.” Even the institute’s name was emblematic of a new era. Douglass’s life story represented the journey from slavery to freedom, a road down which many black Baltimoreans were now traveling. His achievements signified the new possibilities open to black Americans in the realms of education, politics, and society as the nation rebuilt itself following the Civil War.²

The founding of the Douglass Institute came at an important moment. In 1865 African Americans living in a free Baltimore saw tremendous opportunity and encountered great uncertainty. Black Baltimoreans sought to define their newly gained freedom by transforming struggles that reached back generations to fit the new realities of life following Emancipation. They organized labor unions, defied segregation, and challenged discriminatory laws in the city’s courtrooms. They played vital roles in establishing a statewide public education system for African American students. They also helped organize, and participated in, some of the first post-Emancipation civil rights meetings. Their resolve and dedication created, in the words of historian Charles M. Payne, an “organizing tradition” that made Baltimore the epicenter for movements that challenged Jim Crow as it emerged in response to black claims of equality in the late nineteenth century.³

Maryland’s antebellum era cast a long shadow over the rest of the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the century, free blacks looked to Baltimore as a sanctuary. Even though it was a slave city in a slave state, Baltimore offered comparatively relaxed race relations and a large black community. In the 1830s, however, the tenor of race relations began to change in marked ways. As slavery’s importance declined in Maryland, Baltimore became home to the largest population of free blacks residing in a slave state. Slaveholders viewed this population as a threat. At the same moment, Irish and German immigration swelled Baltimore’s population. These recent arrivals competed with African Americans for jobs during a period when the city’s economy was particularly turbulent. Racial antagonism grew as Marylanders resorted to a number of schemes to maintain white supremacy, including colonization, violence, and an effort in the late 1850s to re-enslave African Americans.⁴

Black Baltimoreans did not allow rising racial hostility to go unchallenged and fought restrictions on their freedoms with increasing sophistication. In the antebellum era, black Baltimoreans targeted the institution of slavery as well as colonization schemes. Ministers condemned slavery from the pulpit and rallied community support. In response to slavers kidnapping black city residents and selling them into slavery, African Americans organized neighborhood watch patrols. Teacher and activist William Watkins became the leading voice against colonization. Throughout the 1830s, Watkins—assuming the pen name “A Colored Baltimorean”—wrote a series of letters to William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator. In one letter, he denounced the Maryland State Colonization Society’s plan as a “cruel alternative” and “pseudo-philanthropy.” These protests continued into the 1850s when, for instance, African Americans gathered to voice their ardent opposition at an 1852 colonization convention in Baltimore called by a group of black community leaders.⁵

Black Baltimoreans also built a long tradition of fighting for educational rights during the antebellum era. Prior to 1826, Baltimore did not operate public schools. When it did open its first public schools in the late 1820s, it barred black students from attending. Nevertheless, the city taxed white and black residents to fund the schools. Beginning in the 1830s, black Baltimoreans demanded the city reform its public education system. Initially, black residents petitioned the city to exempt them from the tax before expanding their demands. On at least two other occasions, black Baltimoreans petitioned Baltimore’s government to fund African American schools. In the 1850s, they once again pushed the city to open public education to black students. Their efforts ultimately failed to move the recalcitrant city and state governments before the Civil War, but African Americans would continue to fight for educational rights.⁶

Unable to attend public schools, African Americans provided for their own education. Black Baltimoreans (at times with the help of white individuals or philanthropic institutions) had operated several schools or sent their children to private instructors. In the early nineteenth century, a group of black Methodists established a church and school on Sharp Street. Activist and community leader Daniel Coker ran the school that came to be known as the African Academy. As an adolescent, Coker fled to New York to escape his enslavement before returning to the state of his birth. Throughout its existence, the African Academy provided black Baltimoreans an opportunity to educate their children. By the early 1820s, it boasted an enrollment of 150 students, including some who traveled from Washington, DC, to attend.⁷

Following in the footsteps of the African Academy, black churches across the city began to offer classes. Saint James Episcopal Church, Waters AME, and the Saratoga Street Church all operated schools. Rev. W. Livingston conducted a school in his church on Saratoga and North Streets. The Oblate Sisters of Providence, an order of black nuns who had migrated from San Domingo in the 1820s, ran a school for African American girls that boasted an enrollment of 150 students prior to the Civil War. Other individuals augmented these efforts. William Watkins administered one of the city’s longest-running schools. In his youth, Watkins attended Coker’s school. In 1819 Coker accepted the American Colonization Society’s invitation to move to Liberia, and Watkins assumed his position. For the next twenty-five years, Watkins, his wife, and his son operated what came to be known as the Watkins Academy. Finally, African Methodist Episcopal (AME) minster Daniel Payne conducted classes from Bethel Church.⁸

By the end of the antebellum era, black Baltimoreans operated and maintained approximately fifteen schools. Many employed black teachers who worked diligently to overcome a lack of resources and white indifference. African Americans valued this loose network of institutions and charitable initiatives. Free blacks needed an education to help them navigate the antebellum job market where basic literacy proved a valuable commodity. Antebellum schools nurtured a sense of racial pride and promoted abolitionism. In addition, they established a culture that valued education. Youth literacy rates in the city attested to the success of these endeavors. At the start of the Civil War, nearly 70 percent of black Baltimoreans between the ages of thirteen and twenty-nine possessed some degree of literacy, a feat made all the more remarkable by the complete lack of state support.⁹

African Americans also sustained a tradition of organizing to protect their employment options and status. Unlike Charleston and New Orleans, free black Baltimoreans were largely excluded from skilled or semiskilled occupations. Ship caulking proved to be one notable exception. Throughout the early nineteenth century, African Americans dominated the ship-caulking trade and accumulated a remarkable amount of power over their working lives. In 1838 black caulkers formed a Caulkers’ Association, a union that provided benefits and served as a literary society. Through the Caulkers’ Association, workers collectively bargained and exercised control over their working conditions throughout the 1830s and 1840s.¹⁰ In the next decade, Baltimore’s waterfront labor market underwent important shifts. As the city’s African American population declined, European immigration, especially from Germany and Ireland, accelerated. In 1850 the foreign-born population of Baltimore stood at 35,492. Ten years later it had grown to 52,497 residents. Many of these immigrants sought employment as caulkers, often working at lower rates than their black counterparts.¹¹

As more immigrants arrived, job competition and racial tensions intensified. Beginning in 1858, white workers rioted against their black counterparts across Baltimore’s workplaces. In May, white workers attacked African Americans at a Federal Hill brickyard. The next month, the violence spilled onto the waterfront. Over a two-year period, white laborers periodically assaulted black workers in an effort to force them off the job. White attacks on African American caulkers struck at the heart of black organization, employment, and status. The occupation was a point of pride for African Americans, a source of decent income, and one of the few semiskilled trades where they could find employment. The occupation also held historical resonance for black Baltimoreans: Frederick Douglass had worked as a caulker.¹²

African Americans reacted to white violence in numerous ways. The Baltimore Sun reported that some African Americans left the city, but others continued to organize for mutual protection. White workers complained that black caulkers zealously guarded their employment. One white worker contended, “When the proprietor of any yard employed a white Caulker the negroes would not work for that employer till he discharged the white man.” Despite the violence and recriminations, black Baltimoreans maintained a strong presence in the shipyards during the war years. The years of racial strife, however, left the city’s docks and labor organizations segregated along racial lines.¹³

In the late 1850s, black Baltimoreans put the organizational experience they had gained over the previous decades to good use when they rallied against the Jacobs Bill. Passed in 1859, the Jacobs Bill sought to prohibit manumissions and re-enslave free blacks in Maryland. In response, African Americans gathered signatures to petition the state, held protest meetings, and formed organizations to fight the bill. Their efforts paid off as public opinion turned against the measure and the state legislature passed two compromise bills in its stead. Voters across the state later rejected these measures by an overwhelming margin.¹⁴

During the Civil War years, black Baltimoreans continued to organize. As the loyalist Union Party hammered out the details of a new state constitution in 1864, African Americans conducted meetings to draw attention to issues of unequal pay and treatment accorded to black soldiers. When racial tensions flared up along the waterfront shortly after the state abolished slavery, black labor organizations wrote to the Baltimore American to complain about the “indefinable apprehension of an antagonism on the part of the white working men.” Then at the end of 1865, black Baltimoreans demanded a voice in the state’s affairs by convening a multiday “State Convention of Colored Men” at the Douglass Institute. In addition to agitating for the franchise, the group demanded that black teachers teach in African American schools, that the state end discriminatory apprenticeship laws that extended the life of slavery, and that the government protect laborers regardless of race. Attendees also authored an address to the “colored people of Maryland,” which advised African Americans to focus on becoming self-supporting, “virtuous,” and “industrious.” These guidelines, the group explained, were political. “We advise you to use every exertion to contradict the predictions of your enemies,” the writers proclaimed, “which were uttered previous to the emancipation of the State—that if the slaves were freed they would become a pest to society, and paupers dependent on public charities.”¹⁵

With the end of the Civil War, the city would experience even more change. Following the South’s surrender, former slaves in the Virginia and Maryland countryside streamed into Baltimore, already the largest city in the Border States. During the 1860s, Baltimore’s African American population grew approximately 40 percent, from 27,898 to 39,558. During the next decade, it reached 53,716.¹⁶ Together, black Baltimoreans—longtime residents and new arrivals, recently emancipated and those who spent their lives free—would define the contours of their own freedom. They would do so, however, in an increasingly volatile and inhospitable political context, at both the state and national levels.

In 1865 Maryland’s fragile post–Civil War society already hung in the balance just months after hostilities ended. The schisms in the Union Party between its radical and conservative wings became more pronounced against the backdrop of national debates over Reconstruction policy. The Unconditional Unionists supported Radical Republicans’ efforts to pass the Fourteenth Amendment while conservatives backed President Andrew Johnson’s more lenient version of Reconstruction. As the relationship between Johnson and Congress unraveled on the national stage, Conservative Unionists increasingly allied with Democrats in Maryland.¹⁷

Throughout 1865, the Union Party teetered on the brink of collapse. Local political machinations hastened their demise. The party’s tenuous grasp on power rested on Maryland’s enforcement of the registry law and loyalty oath that barred many ex-Confederates from voting. Following the war, Democrats campaigned to end these laws that stymied their chances for electoral success in the state. They found their...