The Billie Holiday Monument on Pennsylvania Avenue commemorates the life and legacy of the famed "Lady Day" who was born as Eleanora Fagan in Baltimore on April 7, 1915.
Billie Holiday's childhood was difficult. Both of her parents were teenagers when she was born. In 1925, a ten-year-old Holiday was raped by an older neighbor and was sent to The House of the Good Shepherd, a Catholic penal institution (sometimes known as a "reform school") for Black girls. Holiday was held there for two years. After her release in 1927, she moved to New York City with her mother.
As a teenager, Billie began singing for tips in bars and brothels but soon found opportunities to sing with accomplished jazz musicians including Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, and Count Basie. She returned to Baltimore as a touring musician playing at clubs and restaurants along Pennsylvania Avenue. Unfortunately, after struggles with addiction and a sustained campaign of harassment by law enforcement, Holiday died on July 17, 1959 at age 44 and was buried in an unmarked grave at St. Raymond's Cemetery in New York City.
Planning for a statue in Baltimore began around 1971 as part of the urban renewal redevelopment of Pennsylvania Avenue and the surrounding Upton neighborhood. The original plans included both a statue and a drug treatment center in Holiday's honor but while plans for the center were dropped the Upton Planning Council continued to push for the sculpture.
In 1977, Baltimore commissioned thirty-seven-year-old Black sculptor James Earl Reid to design the monument. A North Carolina native, Reid recieved a master’s degree in sculpture from the University of Maryland College Park in 1970 and stayed at the school as a professor. Unfortunately, by 1983, rising costs of materials due to inflation led to a legal dispute between Reid and the city over payment and delays. The $113,000 eight-foot six-inch high bronze sculpture was unveiled on top of a cement pedestal in 1985 but Reid skipped the ceremony.
Reid's original vision was finally realized in July 2009 when the city found $76,000 to replace the simple pedastal with 20,000-pound solid granite base with incised text and sculptural panels. Inspired by one of Holliday's most famous performances, the haunting anti-lynching song "Strange Fruit," one of the two panels depicts a lynching. The other, inspired by the song "God Bless the Child," includes the image of a black child with an umbilical cord still attached in a visual reference to the rope used in the hanging. At the re-dedication in 2009, Reid celebrated the completion of the work and the life of Billie Holliday explaining, "She gave such a rich credibility to the experiences of black people and the black artist."
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Light and music onced poured out the windows and door of the Sphinx Club on Pennsylvania Avenue but only club members (and musicians) could get inside to enjoy the drinks and entertainment. Today, the building sits boarded-up and waiting on a planned redevelopment by the Druid Heights CDC to bring back music and life to the block.
In December 2002, Sevety-three-year-old jazz singer and educator Ruby Glover gave a tour of the Avenue to a Baltimore Sun reporter lamented the sight of the Sphinx Club sitting vacant. "It was always kept so well. Tilghman must be turning over in his grave." Charles Phillip Tilghman founded the club in 1946 and ran the business as an elegant private club up until his death in 1988. Tilghman recruited Furman L. Templeton, director of the Baltimore Urban League (with offices nearby at 1841 Pennsylvania Avenue), to chair of the club's advisory board. Glover recalled the scene:
There's nothing there that even gives you the image. It was always so pretty, so lit up. It really was a private club. And my impression was that it was for elite blacks. That was where they hung out. And you could always sing when you went in because they kept a house band, Chico Johnson and his organ trio and Earlene Reed, singing in there.
Ruby Glover recalled how musicians always went to the Sphinx Club right after nearby jazz venues, including Club Tijuana on Clifton Avenue, Red Fox on Fulton Avenue, and The Comedy Club and The Ubangi Club on Pennsylvania Avenue, closed for the night. She explained:
And whomever was down The Avenue performing, after the clubs closed that's where you went. Put on a good show in there. If you were a musician all you had to do is ring the bell. They'd tell you, 'Hey, come on in here, give us a little song.'
But four years after Charles Tilghman's death the "old Sphinx Club" shut down. By 2002, the Baltimore Sun described it as "dreary."
The building continued to remain vacant and boarded for over two decades. Fortunately, the Druid Heights Community Development Corporation is seeking to change that. In 2011, the Druid Heights CDC announced their plans to turn the building and an adjoining property into the Negro Baseball Museum and Restaurant—bringing new jobs and visitors to Avenue again.
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Saint Peter Claver Church at Pennsylvania Avenue and Fremont Street takes its’ name from a sixteenth-century Spanish priest who is considered the patron saint of slaves. The building dates back to 1888 making it the city’s second oldest African-American Roman Catholic Church. True to the inspiration of Saint Claver, the congregation and their leaders, have long been active in seeking equal rights for African Americans in Baltimore.
Father Henry Offer led the church from 1960 to 1971 and was a member of the NAACP and Urban League. In 1968, he was one of the city’s African American leaders to speak out after the riots following the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., criticizing Governor Spiro Agnew for laying blame for the unrest on local black activists. Later that same year, the parish chartered buses to transport its members, as well as community residents, to the Poor People’s March on Washington. The march, planned by the by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference before King’s death, was led by Civil Rights activist Ralph Abernathy.
In 1966, Father Philip Berrigan advocated for the disinvested urban neighborhoods from his position at the church. Berrigan, whose long career as a Catholic activist included burning Vietnam War draft cards with his brother Daniel Berrigan and others of the Catonsville Nine. In the years leading up to this, Berrigan worked from St. Peter Claver to establish the Baltimore Interfaith Peace Mission and actively lobbied and demonstrated for the city’s African American communities.
Another Civil Rights activist coming from St. Peter Claver in the 1960s was Father John Harfmann. In 1967, Harfmann, who was white, worked with Black activist Dickey Burke to provide recreation opportunities in West Baltimore through Operation CHAMP. During his tenure at the church, he also participated in integration activities with church members and actively supported efforts of BUILD (Baltimoreans United In Leadership Development) to create housing, provide job opportunities, and rebuild neighborhoods in the city. At his funeral, fellow priests remembered how Harfmann was “wholly dedicated to being a priest in the African American community,” and recalled him as “a tireless fighter for justice who did things that people said were not possible.”
Today, the church continues their long tradition of civil rights and community activism, in part, by hosting the No Boundaries Coalition that works to unite communities around the church that have historically been divided by racial and economic barriers.