I am a self taught artist living here in Baltimore City. Despite our history, which includes saving the country from an invading British force (Fort McHenry 1814), the underlying sense of despair pervades the place.
It's like Baltimore is one of the bastard stepchildren cities on the East Coast. No matter how much we try to earn unconditional love, no effort seems to be enough. Our bastardy disqualifies us from any recognition as a vibrant and unique place with so much to offer, if we only had encouragement.
Our strengths are not like other cities strengths. We may not possess the glamor of New York or Hollywood. We may not have much of the electic Art Deco exoctism of Miami or the gleaming high tech hub like San Francisco.
We're more of a earthy, out of the box sort of types that doesn't conform easily.
Rather than feel ashamed of that, the time has come once again to see this pulsing, animal vitality and lack of polish as a strength and not as a weakness to be suppressed. It's time to save the nation again.
This is a historic photograph of some of Baltimore's first generation pioneering black attorneys and civil rights leaders of the 1900-1910s. Standing tall in front, hat in hand is Harry Cummings. In 1892 he was the first black Baltimorean elected to the City Council . Hence when a bill was introduced in 1910 to mandate racially segregated housing, Harry Cummings was the only voice to speak out against it. It passed anyway, but Harry appealed to the state.
Behind Harry, also holding hat in hand, is the formidable figure of W. Ashby Hawkins. He and fellow attorney George McMechen ran a successful law practice in the downtown area. When George McMechen tried to move into a house he bought in Bolton Hill while black, Hawkins and his fellow friends had to rescue McMechen from being beaten to death by hostile "upright" neighbors!
Hence the segregated housing bill.
Behind Hawkins, Warner T. McGuinn is a little harder to see. He was always camera shy. But, as one of the first black students at Yale, and was tops in his class despite working three jobs, in 1885 he was able to greet Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) when he came to lecture.
Clemens was so impressed, he sent a check to cover Warner's lodging expenses. Clemens wrote that he was unwilling to help a white student, "...I do not feel so about the other color. For we have ground the manhood out of them, and the fault is ours, not theirs, and we should pay. " (Reparations anyone?)
With that support, Warner T. McGuinn had no trouble graduating with honors. He opened his practice in Baltimore. When the city's segregated housing law was challenged in State vs. Gilley, McGuinn demolished every rationale for having such a statute. The bill was overturned.
In 1917, a similar law from Kentucky came before the Supreme Court, Buchanan vs Warbey. Using the Maryland case as a precedent, W. Ashby Hawkins wrote an amicus brief detailing the same painstaking logic and legal reason, and without mentioning "God's will " anywhere, why government segregation housing laws are unconstitutional. That statute was overturned. This case could have so much to say to us now if we knew more about it. (Maybe there should be a momument somewhere?... Do we have space available?)
As the rough and ready soldiers and sailors turned the nation around in the 1810s, and the civic black activists and attorneys laid the groundwork in the 1910s for the civil rights movement of the 1950s-today, there are signs that Baltimore is ready to embrace its bastardy.
This time it will be our women especially mothers, our artists, and active small denomination clergy that springs the next Baltimore Renaissance. This goes for every city in America that feels marginalized as of no importance.
Because we are rejecting the status quo, because the sham that's the American Dream has been exposed, Baltimore and the other bastard cities of America are set to redefine what a truly human America could be.
Onward, Ordinary People!