Amidst the grand old houses, some vacant and in disrepair, and important civil rights historic sites in Historic Marble Hill in West Baltimore sits the Henry Highland Garnet Neighborhood Park. It is a leafy green space, with flowers, trees, giant urns, winding paths, and park benches. Plaques to a variety of local leaders are spread throughout. The park, in the Baltimore National Heritage Area, is named for militant abolitionist and minister, Henry Highland Garnet.
Garnet was born into slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1815. He and his family escaped via the Underground Railroad to New York City when he was 9 years old. Although they escaped to a northern state, slave catchers threatened his family. Garnet spent time working on ships and attended several schools established by abolitionists. He became a Presbyterian minister. In 1840 he helped found the . He was known for his captivating and radical speeches encouraging armed uprisings among the enslaved. During the Civil War he helped recruit Black soldiers for the Union Army, and narrowly escaped a white mob during the . On February 12, 1865 he was the first African American to address the United States House of Representatives, encouraging them to adopt the 13th Amendment with a sermon entitled “.”
After the end of the war, he continued to work against slavery in Cuba and Brazil. Although he had first been critical of Liberia, a colony in Africa for Black Americans, toward the end of his life he supported Black emigration. In December 1881 President James Garfield appointed him Ambassador to Liberia, and he died there a few months later on February 13, 1882.
The large historical marker at one of the entrances to the park quotes Garnet’s “” also known as the “Call to Rebellion,” which he gave to the National Negro Convention in 1843:
Brethren, arise, arise! Strike for your lives and liberties. Now is the day and the hour. Let every slave throughout the land do this, and the days of slavery are numbered. You cannot be more oppressed than you have been—you cannot suffer greater cruelties than you have already. Rather die free men than live to be slaves. Remember that you are four million!
In the audience was fellow former Marylander, Frederick Douglass. The address was considered too radical to distribute,but other abolitionists, including John Brown, funded its publication.
In 1969, the Henry Highland Garnet Council, which was made up of 36 block organizations, established the park on the site of a former school. Robert Harding, a MICA professor, designed the park and Lena Boone, president of the Council, coordinated the work. The Neighborhood Improvement Program (a federally funded program of the Department of Labor) provided the labor for the creation of the park. The Baltimore City Department of Public Works furnished the walkways and plumbing for the fountain and the Department of Recreation and Parks provided $15,000 for materials. The construction company, Potts and Callahan (still operating today) donated fill dirt for the landscaping.
Over the decades the park fell into disrepair. In 2016 the park was renovated by the Marble Hill Community Association. Since 2018 it has been maintained by Friends of Henry Highland Garnet Park. In 2021 volunteers planted a rose walk and installed a bronze plaque (sponsored by the Baltimore National Heritage Area and Union Baptist Church) to honor Juanita Jackson Mitchell and Clarence M. Mitchell, Jr. The Mitchells were important civil rights activists who lived and worked in the neighborhood, and who had entertained Jackie Robinson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Lady Bird Johnson in their rose garden. A community composting program currently provides fertilizer for the gardens, continuing the tradition of neighborhood care for, and pride in, the park.
Although the famed African American lawyer and civil rights advocate George McMechen is remembered fondly for his service to the community, he is best remembered for living on McCulloh Street. In June 1910, McMechen and his family moved to 1834 McCulloh Street and the local white community reacted with outrage. The first night McMechen and his family stayed at the house on McCulloh Street, white Baltimoreans vandalized it. In the middle of the night, someone broke all the windows and flung a brick through the third-story skylight. In late 1910, white-owned newspapers reported that the vandalism occurred as a direct result of McMechen family choosing to live on McCulloh Street.
In response to the McMechen family, and several other African American families moving to McCulloh Street, the city responded with a segregation ordinance. The ordinance declared: “No negro may take up his residence in a block within the city limits of Baltimore wherein more than half the residents are white.”
McMechen said of the ordinance, “It is my opinion as a lawyer that it is clearly unconstitutional, unjust, and discriminating against the negro, although on its face it appears to be equally fair to white and black….our people feel very deeply the action taken, and there is no doubt but that this feeling will shortly crystallize into a movement against the ordinance which will result in legal proceedings to have it declared void as it certainly is.”
McMechen, and another lawyer named Ashbie Hawkins (McMechen’s sister’s husband and legal counsel for the Baltimore NAACP), led the crusade in the courts against the ordinance. In the meantime, McMechen was forced out of his house on McCulloh St.
In 1911, Hawkins and another lawyer, Warner T. McGuinn, successfully argued that the West Ordinance was unconstitutional and it was repealed. A pattern then emerged where the Mayor and City Council would tweak the ordinance and re-establish it. McMechen, Hawkins and McGuinn would then successfully argue it was unconstitutional and the ordinance would be repealed. Another segregation ordinance would then be created.
It wouldn’t be until a Supreme Court case coming out of Kentucky that the Baltimore segregation ordinances would be overturned permanently. After 1910, the West Ordinance, often called the “Baltimore idea,” for promoting residential segregation proved so attractive for White Americans that it was copied in a score of other southern and border cities, including Richmond, St. Louis, and Louisville, Kentucky.
It was from Louisville that the case testing the constitutionality of segregation ordinances came to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1916. It was called Warley v. Buchanan. Buchanan was a White individual who sold a house to Warley, a Black individual. Since 8 of 10 houses were occupied by White people, Warley was not allowed to live on the block. Buchanan sued Warley in Jefferson County Circuit Court to complete the sale. Warley cited the city ordinance as the reason for non-completion of the sale.
Baltimore’s own Ashbie Hawkins filed an amicus brief on behalf of the Baltimore Branch of the NAACP and appeared before the Supreme Court for this case. After hearing and rehearing the Court made fast work of it. The Court ruled that the motive for the Louisville ordinance—separation of races for purported reasons—was an inappropriate exercise of police power, and its insufficient purpose also made it unconstitutional.
Buchanan v. Warley is one of the most significant civil rights cases decided before the modern civil rights era. After the Supreme Court case, Maryland courts found the Baltimore segregation ordinances unconstitutional as well.
Hawkins continued to work with George McMechen until he died in 1941. McMechen continued to practice law until his death on February 22, 1961. They made an undeniable impact on our country’s legal system.
As an influential figure in Baltimore’s African American community, George McMechen served in many important appointed positions throughout his life. He served as a trustee of Morgan College from 1921 to 1939. He was also the first African American member appointed to the Board of School Commissioners. Lastly, he was the first Baltimorean elected Grand Exalted Ruler (National President) of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World. In 1972, Morgan State erected its School of Business and named it in McMechen’s honor.
The research and writing of this article was funded by two grants: one from the Maryland Heritage Areas Authority and one from the Baltimore National Heritage Area.
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.Â
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.