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Here Lies Jim Crow: Civil Rights in Maryland
Though he lived throughout much of the South―and even worked his way into parts of the North for a time―Jim Crow was conceived and buried in Maryland. From Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney's infamous decision in the Dred Scott case to Thurgood Marshall's eloquent and effective work on Brown v. Board of Education , the battle for black equality is very much the story of Free State women and men. Here, Baltimore Sun columnist C. Fraser Smith recounts that tale through the stories, words, and deeds of famous, infamous, and little-known Marylanders. He traces the roots of Jim Crow laws from Dred Scott to Plessy v. Ferguson and describes the parallel and opposite early efforts of those who struggled to establish freedom and basic rights for African Americans. Following the historical trail of evidence, Smith relates latter-day examples of Maryland residents who trod those same steps, from the thrice-failed attempt to deny black people the vote in the early twentieth century to nascent demonstrations for open access to lunch counters, movie theaters, stores, golf courses, and other public and private institutions―struggles that occurred decades before the now-celebrated historical figures strode onto the national civil rights scene.
Smith's lively account includes the grand themes and the state's major players in the movement―Frederick Douglass, Harriett Tubman, Thurgood Marshall, and Lillie May Jackson, among others―and also tells the story of the struggle via several of Maryland's important but relatively unknown men and women―such as Gloria Richardson, John Prentiss Poe, William L. "Little Willie" Adams, and Walter Sondheim―who prepared Jim Crow's grave and waited for the nation to deliver the body.
Smith's lively account includes the grand themes and the state's major players in the movement―Frederick Douglass, Harriett Tubman, Thurgood Marshall, and Lillie May Jackson, among others―and also tells the story of the struggle via several of Maryland's important but relatively unknown men and women―such as Gloria Richardson, John Prentiss Poe, William L. "Little Willie" Adams, and Walter Sondheim―who prepared Jim Crow's grave and waited for the nation to deliver the body.
- GenresHistory
344 pages, Hardcover
First published May 30, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 16, 2015
Here is a book that shows that the fight for civil rights could be as difficult and intense in a border state like Maryland as it was on the better-known civil-rights battlegrounds of the Deep South. C. Fraser Smith, a former Baltimore Sun journalist, has crafted a thoughtful and well-written history of the fight for civil rights in the Old Line State.
Here Lies Jim Crow: Civil Rights in Maryland begins with a striking observation: that two of the most important Americans of the 19th-century history of race in America, on opposite sides of the civil-rights fight, were both Marylanders. Roger Brooke Taney, a native of Calvert County in Southern Maryland, was the Supreme Court chief justice who wrote the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, with its chilling declaration that African Americans, as far as Taney was concerned, had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect” (p. 39). At the same difficult time in history, standing up for the freedom and the rights of African Americans was Frederick Douglass, who was born into slavery on an Eastern Shore plantation in Talbot County but escaped from slavery to become the greatest civil-rights leader of his time, and who never forgot his ties to Maryland. At the September 1865 dedication of a civil-rights institute in downtown Baltimore that bore his name, Douglass said, “When I left Maryland 27 years ago…I did so with the firm resolve never to forget my brothers and sisters in bondage. And to do whatever might be in my power to accomplish their emancipation. In whatever else I may have failed, in this I have not failed” (p. 49). That tension between Taney’s and Douglass’s views of what American society should be is a theme sustained throughout Smith’s book.
Maryland remained with the Union during the American Civil War, and abolished slavery in 1864, one year before the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution ended slavery throughout the United States. Yet just as in the Deep South, Democratic Party politicians worked hard in the postwar years to fix a separate and unequal system of segregation upon every aspect of Maryland life – a system that remained in place for many bitter decades. Nonetheless, even before the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s brought lasting change to American life, there were those who fought back against the injustice of the Jim Crow system. Aptly, Smith focuses on the 1940’s partnership of longtime civil-rights activist Lillie May Jackson and Republican mayor Theodore McKeldin of Baltimore: “They were a remarkable twosome, a man and a woman, one white, one black. They were products of Baltimore’s loving, salt-of-the-earth culture. They were churchgoing optimists, patient and grittily determined, not easily turned around” – and they tirelessly worked together “to speechify, hector, cajole, and sue Baltimore into living up to the more tolerant and progressive posture it had been pleased to claim for itself in spite of its commitment to impose second-class status on black citizens” (pp. 100-01).
As Maryland and the nation made their way through the 1950’s, change came slowly, and through the efforts of some very brave people who faced many difficult obstacles, as when Johns Hopkins University chaplain Chester Wickwire led a successful effort to force landlords in the neighborhood around Johns Hopkins to cease discriminating against African-American and Jewish students. Predictably, in the 1950’s climate of segregationist racism coupled with Cold War paranoia, Wickwire’s efforts to ensure universal recognition of human dignity and equal treatment for all meant that, as Wickwire put it, “we were often accused of being Communists” (p. 151).
Even in the climate of new hope that followed the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954 and early civil-rights efforts like the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, things remained tense in a number of parts of Maryland – particularly in the Eastern Shore city of Cambridge, where civil-rights demonstrations led by Gloria Richardson “prompted police dogs, baton wielding, and water-cannon action” (p. 201) of the kind that television viewers of the time were seeing in Deep South cities like Birmingham and Selma.
Of the many striking photographs that Smith includes in this book, one stood out to me, taken in front of a restaurant in Cambridge in 1963. The restaurant owner – a balding, pot-bellied, middle-aged man, cigarette dangling sideways from his closed lips – is pouring something over the head of a young man, one of many kneeling before the restaurant in silent protest of the restaurant’s segregationist policies. Just behind the restaurant owner’s right shoulder is a sign that reads “Sandwiches – we have your favorites” (“if you’re white,” the sign would have said, if the owner believed in truth in advertising). It is the kind of picture that one could often see in early 1960’s newspapers – this one originally appeared in the Baltimore News-American -- but this picture was taken not in Alabama or Mississippi, but rather in an East Coast state that is now generally regarded as one of the bluest and most liberal in the Union. It is a telling indicator of how times have changed.
Smith closes by pointing out how the State House in Annapolis now has two statues that speak to Maryland’s ambiguous legacy with regard to civil rights. One, of Dred Scott author Roger Taney, seems to look back. The other, of Thurgood Marshall – a Baltimorean who grew up in segregation times, and who became the lawyer who won the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court case that ended school segregation in the United States, and later the first African-American justice of the Supreme Court – seems to look forward. Smith suggests that “Adversaries across the decades, Justice Marshall and Chief Justice Taney might have agreed it was fitting for both of them to be honored on hallowed ground where the laws of their state are made, where Marylanders strive to perfect their democracy” (p. 250). It is an appropriate image with which to conclude this well-written work of modern civil-rights history.
Here Lies Jim Crow: Civil Rights in Maryland begins with a striking observation: that two of the most important Americans of the 19th-century history of race in America, on opposite sides of the civil-rights fight, were both Marylanders. Roger Brooke Taney, a native of Calvert County in Southern Maryland, was the Supreme Court chief justice who wrote the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, with its chilling declaration that African Americans, as far as Taney was concerned, had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect” (p. 39). At the same difficult time in history, standing up for the freedom and the rights of African Americans was Frederick Douglass, who was born into slavery on an Eastern Shore plantation in Talbot County but escaped from slavery to become the greatest civil-rights leader of his time, and who never forgot his ties to Maryland. At the September 1865 dedication of a civil-rights institute in downtown Baltimore that bore his name, Douglass said, “When I left Maryland 27 years ago…I did so with the firm resolve never to forget my brothers and sisters in bondage. And to do whatever might be in my power to accomplish their emancipation. In whatever else I may have failed, in this I have not failed” (p. 49). That tension between Taney’s and Douglass’s views of what American society should be is a theme sustained throughout Smith’s book.
Maryland remained with the Union during the American Civil War, and abolished slavery in 1864, one year before the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution ended slavery throughout the United States. Yet just as in the Deep South, Democratic Party politicians worked hard in the postwar years to fix a separate and unequal system of segregation upon every aspect of Maryland life – a system that remained in place for many bitter decades. Nonetheless, even before the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s brought lasting change to American life, there were those who fought back against the injustice of the Jim Crow system. Aptly, Smith focuses on the 1940’s partnership of longtime civil-rights activist Lillie May Jackson and Republican mayor Theodore McKeldin of Baltimore: “They were a remarkable twosome, a man and a woman, one white, one black. They were products of Baltimore’s loving, salt-of-the-earth culture. They were churchgoing optimists, patient and grittily determined, not easily turned around” – and they tirelessly worked together “to speechify, hector, cajole, and sue Baltimore into living up to the more tolerant and progressive posture it had been pleased to claim for itself in spite of its commitment to impose second-class status on black citizens” (pp. 100-01).
As Maryland and the nation made their way through the 1950’s, change came slowly, and through the efforts of some very brave people who faced many difficult obstacles, as when Johns Hopkins University chaplain Chester Wickwire led a successful effort to force landlords in the neighborhood around Johns Hopkins to cease discriminating against African-American and Jewish students. Predictably, in the 1950’s climate of segregationist racism coupled with Cold War paranoia, Wickwire’s efforts to ensure universal recognition of human dignity and equal treatment for all meant that, as Wickwire put it, “we were often accused of being Communists” (p. 151).
Even in the climate of new hope that followed the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954 and early civil-rights efforts like the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, things remained tense in a number of parts of Maryland – particularly in the Eastern Shore city of Cambridge, where civil-rights demonstrations led by Gloria Richardson “prompted police dogs, baton wielding, and water-cannon action” (p. 201) of the kind that television viewers of the time were seeing in Deep South cities like Birmingham and Selma.
Of the many striking photographs that Smith includes in this book, one stood out to me, taken in front of a restaurant in Cambridge in 1963. The restaurant owner – a balding, pot-bellied, middle-aged man, cigarette dangling sideways from his closed lips – is pouring something over the head of a young man, one of many kneeling before the restaurant in silent protest of the restaurant’s segregationist policies. Just behind the restaurant owner’s right shoulder is a sign that reads “Sandwiches – we have your favorites” (“if you’re white,” the sign would have said, if the owner believed in truth in advertising). It is the kind of picture that one could often see in early 1960’s newspapers – this one originally appeared in the Baltimore News-American -- but this picture was taken not in Alabama or Mississippi, but rather in an East Coast state that is now generally regarded as one of the bluest and most liberal in the Union. It is a telling indicator of how times have changed.
Smith closes by pointing out how the State House in Annapolis now has two statues that speak to Maryland’s ambiguous legacy with regard to civil rights. One, of Dred Scott author Roger Taney, seems to look back. The other, of Thurgood Marshall – a Baltimorean who grew up in segregation times, and who became the lawyer who won the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court case that ended school segregation in the United States, and later the first African-American justice of the Supreme Court – seems to look forward. Smith suggests that “Adversaries across the decades, Justice Marshall and Chief Justice Taney might have agreed it was fitting for both of them to be honored on hallowed ground where the laws of their state are made, where Marylanders strive to perfect their democracy” (p. 250). It is an appropriate image with which to conclude this well-written work of modern civil-rights history.
May 23, 2023
As a Maryland resident, I read this book to learn more about the local history of civil rights movement. The book was informative with a lot of historical materials, and it was a nice touch to be able to recognize the places where the events took place. However, I found this book to be very poorly written. It does not seem to have much of an organization or logic flow. Details about the same stories/people are scattered all over the places. After a while it starts to feel like things are just looping and looping. Even within the same paragraph, it is unclear what the author wanted to say and it took effort to figure out what the point is, as sentences may almost read like they are in conflict to each other.
June 6, 2012
As a person who grew up on Long Island I really liked this book. It gave me a nice view of the history of Maryland and gave me some insight into the city and state I'm currently living in.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews