Trinity Baptist Church at the corner of Druid Hill Avenue and McMechen Street tells the story of Baltimore's connections to the national civil rights movement and radical Black activism in the early twentieth century.
One of the church's influential early activist leaders was Reverend Garnett Russell Waller. In July 1905, Waller joined fellow activists W.E.B. Du Bois, William Monroe Trotter at the Erie Beach Hotel in Ontario, Canada in founding the Niagara Movement—a new civil rights organization that ultimately developed into the NAACP.
Trinity Baptist Church was then located at Charles and 20th Streets and Waller, who served as the Niagara Movement’s Maryland secretary, lived nearby at 325 E. 23rd Street. James Robert Lincoln Diggs, educator and succeeded Waller as pastor of Trinity Baptist Church beginning around early 1915. Diggs shared Waller's commitment to activism and was also a participant in the 1905 founding of the Niagara Movement.
In 1918, Diggs helped to establish the Baltimore chapter of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL) in 1918. The UNIA-ACL was first established in Ohio in 1914 by Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican-born activist. Diggs was close with Garvey and presided over his marriage to Amy Jacques Garvey in 1922.
In May 1920, Diggs led the congregation's move to Druid Hill Avenue after the congregation purchased the 1872 St. Paul's English Evangelical Lutheran Church for $40,000. The church quickly put their new building to work—hosting the 1920 annual convention for the National Equal Rights League in October. The conference was presided over by Rev. J. H. Taylor, secretary of the Maryland Association for Social Service, with speakers including founding member Monroe Trotter, lawyer Nathan S. Taylor from Chicago, and Trinity’s own Rev. Diggs.
The church also served as a center for local activism. For example, on February 1, 1921, 500 people gathered at Trinity Baptist Church at Druid Hill Avenue and Mosher Street to protest the release of a white man, Harry Feldenheimer, on a $500 bail soon after police arrested him for an attempted assault on a 10-year-old black girl named Esther Short. The Afro-American reported that participants in the meeting criticized the “brutality of the local police, exclusion of qualified men from the police force and from juries in the city, and the Jim Crow arrangements for colored people in the Criminal and Juvenile Courts.”
Regrettably, Diggs health began to decline around the fall of 1922 and he soon entered a hospital. On April 14, 1923, he died at home and was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery. Rev. Garnett R. Waller died in Baltimore in 1941 but the church both individuals supported continues to this day.
Union Baptist Church traces its origins to 1852 and a group of fifty-seven worshipers meeting in a small building on Lewis Street. It was the fifth oldest African American congregation in Baltimore and financed entirely by African Americans. The first pastor of the church was the Reverend John Carey. In 1866, the Lewis Street congregation merged with members of Saratoga Street African Baptist Church, forming Union Baptist Church. When Rev. Harvey Johnson arrived in 1872, he found a modest congregation of perhaps 270 members.
Harvey Johnson’s dealings with the Maryland Baptist Maryland Baptist Union Association (MBUA) in particular, and with prejudiced white Baptists in general, served as a proving ground for his leadership and vision. He took the skills honed in the battle for equality among all Baptists and transfered those skills as he entered the fight for equaliy among all people. Johnson’s original cause of friction with the MBUA stemmed from its paternalistic approach to black people and black Baptist churches. Not only did black ministers categorically receive less pay than white counterparts, but black churches were slow to realize full and equal political priviledges within the state denomination governing apparati. This problem was more troubling once, thanks in no small part to Johnson himself, black numbers in the state’s Baptist churches began grow. By 1885, Union Baptist's membership surpassed two thousand members for the first time.
Rev. Johnson's response to this discrimination was two-fold: economic independence and institutional autonomy. This situation exploded throughout the 1890s as Johnson urged black congregations to free themselves of white purse strings, and to get out of the Union Association altogether. One of Rev. Johnson's most controversal speeches brought this issue to fore. In September 1897, speeking in Boston, Johnson made, "A Plea For Our Work As Colored Baptists, Apart From the Whites." Johnson called for black Baptists to move as a group toward self-determination.
The Union Baptist Church’s Gothic design features stained glass windows created by John LeFarge, the renowned artist known as the inventor of the art of using opalescent stained glass.
A neglected brick rowhouse at 1318 Druid Hill Avenue was once the residence of Baltimore’s first black City Councilman Harry S. Cummings.
Harry S. Cummings, his wife Blanche Teresa Conklin and their two children Louise Virginia and Harry Sythe Cummings, Jr. moved to 1318 Druid Hill Avenue in 1911. The family hadn't moved far. They had moved to 1234 Druid Hill Avenue in 1898 and Cummings' sister continued to live in the house up through the 1950s. This house, later known as Freedom House for its' role as offices for the local chapter of the NAACP, was torn down by Bethel AME Church in November 2015.
The rowhouse at 1318 Druid Hill Avenue was not only a family home but also a place for politics. Cummings campaigned and won re-election to the City Council in 1911 and 1915. In 1912, Cummings hosted the Seventeenth Ward Organization at his home where local Republicans met to endorse President William Howard Taft. Unfortunately, Cummings fell ill at age fifty-one and, on September 5, 1917, the Sun reported that Cummings was "critically ill at his home, 1318 Druid Hill Avenue, of a complication of diseases and a blood clot on the brain. It was said last night that he had not spoken since last Friday."
Cummings died on September 7, 1917, at his home. On Monday, September 10, thousands of people, both white and black, visited the Metropolitan M.E. Church on Orchard Street to see the “remains lay in state” and hundreds of people visited his home. Rev. Leonard Z. Johnson, the pastor of Madison Street Presbyterian Church, conducted a brief service at 1318 Druid Hill Avenue, remarking:
“This life is a token and a proof of Negro possibility in the sphere of life achievement, if given its chances to fulfil itself, and while such Negro possibility shows there shall none, of right reason, decry the Negro people and race and reuse right and a place of common human respect and equal opportunity of strong life in the citizen life of the nation.”
Blanche T. Cummings continued to live in the house up until her death on January 12, 1955, and the property remained in family ownership up until 2005. Despite the deteriorated condition of the building today, the backyard still holds a reminder of the Cummings family—a rare American Elm planted on Harry S. Cummings, Jr.’s seventh birthday. Neighbors hope to see the history of this home and memories of the Cummings family preserved of for generations to come.