a border State
Despite the abolitionist’s efforts, Baltimore reported 87,189 enslaved persons out of a total state population of 687,049 when the U.S. Census was taken in 1860. This was about 12.7 percent of Maryland’s total population. While not as high as some southern plantation states, Maryland’s enslaved Black population far outnumbered its Northern neighbor, Pennsylvania, which reported no slaves in their census records (Census.gov).
As represented by their census numbers, Maryland had long existed, as The Baltimore Patriot put it, in “the Middle ground” – the space where “wage-labor and slave-labor met” (Harrold, 2010, p. 2). A combination of the large free Black population in Maryland, the state’s geographic location just south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and the mix of agricultural and emerging import-export economy through Baltimore, created an environment filled with mixed allegiances and “debatable ground” (Miller, 2015, p. 257). Historian Richard F. Miller argued
Maryland was often debatable ground, a corridor for combatant armies spearheading or opposing invasions; marauders seeking political advantage, money, revenge, or supplies; smugglers spiriting arms, personnel, and intelligence across de facto national borders—a slave state that was, even without regard to the war, divided into sections that were subject to divergent and often opposing centrifugal forces. (p. 257)
This border identity led to its divided response to the Civil War, which began in 1861 at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. The first fatalities of the war, however, occurred during the Baltimore Civil War Riots on Pratt Street when Confederate sympathizers attacked Union troops from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts traveling south to protect Washington, D.C. (Ezratty, 2010).
The Civil War and Emancipation
The people of Maryland and Baltimore split their allegiance between the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War. However, most Marylanders fought with the Union Army of the North. Between recruitment into the Union Army and large numbers of escapees, slavery in Baltimore during the Civil War declined rapidly (Berlin, Grivno, & Brewer 2007, p. 15; Miller, 2015, p. 267).
President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 only freed enslaved persons that were part of the Confederacy. However, as historian Richard F. Miller (2015) noted “Maryland was not exempt from emancipation, particularly of the self-help variety” (p. 268). Maryland did eventually abolish slavery the following year, through Article 24 of its State Constitution (Berlin, Grivno, & Brewer, 2007, p. 31). Legally abolishing slavery in Maryland allowed African Americans to move closer to claiming their rightful place in the state as equal citizens. However, historians Ira Berlin, Max Grivno, and Herbert Brewer (2007) noted
Emancipation was not the final chapter in the long story of slavery in Maryland. For more than two hundred years, slavery stood at the core of Baltimore life. Slaves grew the tobacco, harvested the wheat, dug the coal, and smelted the iron upon which Baltimore economy rested. (p. 16-7)
Transitioning from a slave-labor to a wage-labor economy remained tenuous at best with African Americans taking the brunt of this transition. The underlying racist attitudes, ideologies, structures and habits of exclusion remained entrenched in the city and across the nation.
Reconstruction
Immediately after the Civil War, the Reconstruction Congress passed Amendments to the Constitution abolishing slavery and indentured servitude (13th), granting African Americans full citizenship and equal rights under the law (14th), and providing voting protection rights regardless of race, color, or previous status as an enslaved man (15th). Early Reconstruction efforts empowered African Americans to own land, build communities, form churches, vote for government officials, and send their children to school (Thompson Fullilove, 2016, p. 22). As historian Eric Foner (2014) noted, “[B]lacks were active agents in the making of Reconstruction” (p. xxii.) He goes further to say that the extent to which free Black men and women engaged in rebuilding their communities “was the most radical development of the Reconstruction years, a massive experience in interracial democracy without precedent in the history of this or any other country that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century” (p. xxiii). Unfortunately, that radical experience did not last long.
Jim Crow
As the South reeled from the loss of the Civil War and sought to rebuild its economic base, sharecropping became the dominant system of labor that replaced the old slave-based plantation structure. Sharecropping agreements divided old plantations into smaller units of land, which were then leased to African American families. These families worked the land (usually 30 to 50 acres) in return for a portion of the crop share. As Edward Royce (1988) noted
Freed people remained dependent on planters, because of the latter’s virtual monopoly of land, and planters remained dependent on their former slaves, because of the latter’s virtual monopoly of labor. Each tried, unsuccessful, to break the monopoly possessed by the other. (Royce, 1988, p. 2-4; 181)
When the federal government withdrew its support of Reconstruction in 1876, the period of post-civil war growth for free Black people ended. Local and state laws were quickly passed that racially segregated blacks from much of white life in the South. Known as “Jim Crow,” laws, regulations, and social requirements relegated Black men and women to second class citizens (Hoelscher, 2003, p. 659; Woodward, 1955). A racial caste system replaced slavery as the new form of control in the South. Mindy Thompson Fullilove (2016) described Jim Crow in the following way: “between 1890 and 1910, Jim Crow laws created an elaborately divided world, such that the domain of resources and power was inhabited by whites, and the domain of deprivation and powerlessness was inhabited by [B]lacks” (pp. 22-23).
Even in the midst of such deprivation, African Americans continued to assert their rights and push back against the Jim Crowism that sought to control their lives in the American South. Their success kept Jim Crow in check. Geographer Steven Hoelscher (2003) noted “its [Jim Crow] power was never monolithic or complete; Jim Crow constantly had to remake itself in response to African-American (and occasionally white) defiance and resistance” (p. 660).
“Separate but equal”
The effects of Jim Crow laws were compounded by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 which held that racial segregation did not violate the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment. Taking a narrow definition of the law, this ruling established the racist “separate but equal” culture that pervaded the South and border states, like Maryland, and that led to gross inequality and violence against African Americans.
As the South struggled to recover economically from the old planation system, white anger grew. African Americans were viewed suspiciously, and brutal, extrajudicial killings were used to control them and keep them in a state of fear and subjugation. Lynching became an especially horrendous tool used by the Ku Klux Klan and other white mobs to instill fear and to ensure that Black individuals followed the racial segregation required by whites (Litwack, 2004).
Historian Amy Wood wrote that “between 1880 and 1940, white mobs in the south killed at least 3,200 [B]lack men” (Woods, 2009, p. 3.). While lynching occurred across the United States and against people other than Black Americans, “most Americans at the turn of the century understood lynching as a Southern practice and as a form of racial violence that white mobs committed against African American men” (p. 4).
The same year Plessy v. Ferguson was decided, statistician Frederick Hoffman (1897) published “Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro.” He argued that recent census number proved African Americans were headed for extinction. Specifically, he wrote, “[a]ll the facts brought together in this work prove that the colored population is gradually parting with the virtues and the moderate degree of economic efficiency developed under the regimé of slavery” (Hoffman, 1897, p. 328). Further, he asserted that the cause of their looming extinction was due to “a low standard of sexual morality” (p. 328).
Hoffman used arrest data to argue that higher Black arrest rates indicated African Americans were naturally drawn toward criminal behavior. Rather than understanding the higher arrest rates to be reflections of racist laws, Hoffman blamed Black individuals for their incarcerations. He represented one of many sources that used biased data to influence 20th century criminology against Black men in particular, thereby deepening systemic racism in America but especially within the law enforcement community (Kendi, 2017; Wolf, 2006).
W.E.B. Du Bois
In 1897, a rising African American leader William Edward Burghardt Du Bois accepted a position at the historically Black college, Atlanta University. Two years later he published one of his seminal works, The Philadelphia Negro, where he discussed his research and findings after spending two years studying African American communities in Philadelphia. His work challenged prevailing racist views and laid out for the sociological field a more scientifically rigorous method of conducting social research.
Du Bois shaped sociology into the scientifically rigorous discipline we know today (Morris, 2015, p. 2). Du Bois described early 1900 sociology as filled with “vague statements and vast generalizations” (Green, Wortham, 2018, p. 58). In contrast to white scholars at the time, Du Bois argued that race was a social construction and asserted that “‘the Negro problem was a matter of systematic investigation and intelligent understanding. … The cure for it was knowledge based on scientific investigation’” (Green, Wortham, 2018, p. 58). As a result of his belief that “social conditions constituted the foundations of race oppression and white supremacy,” he “insisted that the newly emerging social sciences be built on careful empirical research focused on human action in order to pass the test as genuine science” (Morris, 2015, p. 3).
As noted by historian Aldon D. Morris (2015),
Because he believed that an authentic social science was possible and that inferior and superior races did not exist, Du Bois was the first social scientist to establish a sociological laboratory where systematic empirical research was conducted to determine the scientific causes of racial inequality. In this manner, Du Bois treated claims of inherent race superiority as hypotheses to be accepted or rejected on the basis of data collected through the best scientific methods available. Given his approach, Du Bois decried any racial findings stemming from racial prejudice and vested interest. Therefore, as the twentieth century opened, Du Bois continued to develop a sociology whose mission was to interject science into the emerging field by relying on data and the execution of scientific research based on empirical methodologies. (p. 3)
Du Bois, therefore, fundamentally altered the trajectory of modern sociology, and he did so while fighting systemic racism. Through introducing a rigorous empirical methodology, he effectively led the way to dismantle the flawed and racist system that claimed blacks created their own problems. As such, Du Bois remains one of the pre-eminent sociologists of the twentieth century, and his work continues to influence the field today.
Conclusion
It is fitting that we conclude this portion of the history with W.E.B. Du Bois. As a sociologist, he was deeply concerned about the way white academics had approached “the Negro problem” (as he called it). His work sought to address both the root of the “problem” and the means and methods by which sociologists derived their conclusions. Du Bois argued for a more scientifically rigorous observation and analysis of sociological issues. And so, as we turn to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in our narrative, we adopt Du Bois’ perspective. We adopt a more sociologically oriented view that looks at historical events, social shifts, and the data behind these shifts to more empirically demonstrate the existence of systemic racism in the United States.
Two sociologists in particular have shaped the construction of Part 2, Joe Feagin and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. Both scholars have contributed significantly to the systemic/structural theory of racism. Both have influenced the sociological field and have influenced the authors of this article. Part 2 also adopts perspectives from urban studies, legal scholars, and historians of race and labor in the twentieth century. We pick up Du Bois’ inquiry and turn our attention to investigating how systemic racism impacted the lives of African Americans in Baltimore, Maryland, and the United States from 1900 – 2019.