1939-1945: World War II Baltimore
Celebrating V-Day in Baltimore
Source: Baltimore Sun
During the Depression and before WWII, African Americans in Baltimore continued to struggle. To help struggling residents, some community organizations rallied for equal rights and equal pay. These organizations included the local chapter of the NAACP and the Cooperative Women’s Civic League, as well as local labor unions, such as The Caulker’s Association, the Railway Men’s Benevolent and Protective Association, the Colored Projectionists’ Association, and the International Longshoreman’s Association (Skotnes, 2014, pp. 24-25, 35). Together with the Black-owned newspaper, the Afro-American, these organizations made progress against segregation in some areas of workers’ rights, housing, and education (Orser, 1994, pp. 69-70).
However, the advent of WWII changed Baltimore drastically and caused a commercial boom that increased housing and labor demand in all sectors of the city. Peitila (2010) wrote that “After Pearl Harbor, Baltimore became a twenty-four-hour city, living according to the peculiar rhythms of shift work…twenty-eighth in population, Maryland ranked as the twelfth state in the value of its war contracts” (p. 75). Due to the worker shortage and despite the state’s history of slavery and systemic racism, African American men and women were hired to help in the war effort. But these workers also needed housing, and Baltimore had few houses to spare for Black people.
An example of the segregated housing in Baltimore during WWII are the communities of Dundalk and Turner Station located on the south eastern side of the city. Dundalk is a small company town originally built by Bethlehem Steel (then one of the world’s largest steel companies) and expanded during WWII to accommodate white workers. However, Bethlehem Steel was unwilling to build similar housing for African Americans moving to Baltimore to support the war effort. These black families were forced to build their own homes in Turner Station, a small neighborhood next to Dundalk.
Sign placed by White residents in a Detroit neighborhood in 1942.
Source: CityLimits.org
By 1942, the high labor demand for the war effort and the accompanying low residential availability for African Americans led to a housing crunch as “three thousand additional blacks [arrived] in the city each month” (Pietila, 2010, p.84). Jobs in the defense industry sparked the “Second Great Migration,” where millions of African Americans fled the south and moved north to cities like Baltimore. The migration of millions of African Americans pushed these northern cities into a housing crisis. So, what at first was an upturn in the economic situation for African Americans in Baltimore during WWII became a housing catastrophe because whites did not want people of color living in or near their neighborhoods. This situation forced African American families to co-occupy homes with other families, and some people of color were even housed in segregated public facilities (Feagin, 2014, p. 58).
Fearing a greater influx of African Americans, however, Baltimore, refused federal money to build permanent public housing for Black families and instead opted for temporary “trailers so that they can be easily moved out after the war is over” (as cited in Pietila, 2010, p. 80). Despite this segregation and systemic racism, large numbers of African Americans also enlisted in the armed services to defend the nation that continued to deny them equal rights and equal participation in American life.