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Celebration of the African-American Lawyer The Road to Brown v. Board of Education
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A letter from the
Publisher
Friends, The AFRO has been publishing the news for and about the African-American community for 112 years. Perhaps no other period during that time reflects the battles African Americans have had to endure as the 20-year period immediately preceding the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Over the past several months, the AFRO has been privileged to run an important series of articles relating to a series of cases that laid the groundwork for success in Brown. The name of this series is the AFRO Signature Series – the Road to Brown v. Board of Education. Most of the cases in this series involved Thurgood Marshall and his mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston, the chief architect of the Brown decision. Enclosed in this special publication are exerpts of the Afro-American newspapers’ coverage that disclose this little known part of our history. This series gives a sobering picture of the intensity of the battles we had to initiate during the period from 1933 until 1954 to win the rights many of us today take for granted. We at the AFRO hope you will enjoy the Signature Series as much as the many AFRO readers who have been educated by it over the past several months.
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Affiliated Publications: Baltimore Afro-American — (USPS 040-800) is published every Saturday; (EW) Every Wednesday, 2519 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD. 21218-4602; Washington Afro-American, (USPS 667-020) 1612 14th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20009-4307, Subscription Rate: Baltimore - 1 Year - $27.30, Washington - 1 Year - $27.48. Checks for subscriptions should be made payable to: The Afro-American Newspaper Company, 2519 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 212184602. POSTMASTER: Baltimore postage paid in Baltimore, MD. D.C. postage paid in Washington, D.C. EW free distribution. Send addresses changes to: Address Change, The Afro-American Newspaper Company, 2519 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218-4602.
Sincerely,
John J. Oliver Jr. Publisher / CEO Afro-American Newspapers
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Letters from our
Sponsors
At General Motors and GMAC we make it our business to reach out to the communities where we do business. We’re proud to serve as a sponsor for the Afro-American Newspapers’ AFRO Signature Series — The Road to Brown v. Board of Education. As we continue to celebrate the 50-year Anniversary of the landmark court victory, it’s important that we understand the path that was traveled to get to that mountaintop. What better vehicle to tell that story than the Afro-American newspaper. Not only did the AFRO cover the events closely, but as you read this publication you’ll find it also served as a catalyst and soundboard for the strategy behind that historic May 14, 1954 triumph. General Motors and GMAC are honored to serve as sponsors in the Afro-American newspapers’ effort to share fascinating first-hand history.
Roderick D. Gillum Vice President Corporate Responsibility and Diversity
James E. Farmer GMAC Vice President Communications and Public Affairs
Michael Parker VP & GM Baltimore City Comcast
Connecting to the Community is more than just a tagline for Comcast. It’s our mandate. As the leading cable company in the country, we connect people to what’s important in their lives each and every day. Our employees play an integral part not only at work but in our neighborhoods as mentors, coaches and community volunteers. We’re pleased to sponsor the Afro-American newspapers’ AFRO Signature Series. For several months this series has educated and entertained AFRO readers with historic content, which highlighted the framework for the strategy used in winning the important Brown v. Board of Education courtroom battle. As this series is presented in one complete anthology, we at Comcast are extremely proud to assist in providing you with content that should never be forgotten — our history.
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Table of contents
‘The nigger has applied for admission’......................................................................................6 ‘What about the Negroes’..........................................................................................................9 Segregate or integrate, but educate at all costs ........................................................................12 ‘Equal work warranted equal pay’ ..........................................................................................15 The battle for the links: ‘Nine holes could never be equal to eighteen’ ..................................19 Making Enoch Pratt the free library for everyone ..................................................................24 Fighting for freedom on the courts ........................................................................................27 Ending exile education in Maryland ......................................................................................30 University of Maryland, breaking a legacy of intolerance ......................................................33 On the brink of Brown............................................................................................................36 Brown 1954: How the AFRO saw it ........................................................................................39 Professor Larry Gibson: Notes on Brown................................................................................42 Our contributors ....................................................................................................................43
As reported in the AFRO circa 1938
As reported in the 1948 AFRO
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The Road to Brown
An
enduring problem,
an enduring
partnership
swift and unambiguous. “The “nigger” [Harold Arthur Seaborne] has applied for admission,” read the first line of a letter dated July 13, 1933, from W.M. Hillegeist, registrar for the University of Maryland, to Dr. Roger Howell, dean of the University of Maryland School of Law. This was the opening salvo on the “Road to Brown.”
n 1896, the United States Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson established “separate but equal” as the law of the land pertaining to the legal equality of Blacks and Whites. However, for Black Americans, separate was almost never equal in any arena, law, housing, employment or education. In January 1933, the burgeoning Baltimore branch of the NAACP and the Baltimore Afro-American implemented a plan that was months in the making to directly attack the fallacy of separate but equal. The point of attack was education and the battleground was the state of Maryland. On Jan. 21, 1933, the AFRO published a story with a banner headline: “Two Apply at MD. U.” The supposed two applicants were
The Road to Brown
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Clarence Mitchell Jr., who would become the legendary civil rights activist and Washington lobbyist, and another young man named Harold Seaborne. They were both members of the CityWide Young People’s Forum, a group of young Black activists that sparked the renaissance of the Baltimore branch of the NAACP. But the truth was, neither had applied to the University of Maryland in January 1933. The story was a “shot across the bow,” perhaps to rally support from the larger Black community and elicit a response from the University of Maryland. It worked! The leadership at the University of Maryland stumbled on the story in March 1933. However, when the application was officially filed, the response of the school was
Afro-American Newspapers Black History
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Celebration of the African-American Lawyer
The Road to Brown v. Board of Education
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‘The nigger…
has applied for admission.’
W.M. Hillegeist Registrar
By Sean Yoes Special to the AFRO THE FIRST APPLICANT IN THE SHADOWS OF HISTORY On a brisk, sparkling November morning, 92-year-old Harold Arthur Seaborne sits in his small Roland Park apartment, reflecting on his life. His apartment tells part of the story. His shelves are filled with books, at least two Bibles, many novels, several volumes of history and two Oxford dictionaries, the accumulated arsenal of a man who spent 40 years as an educator in Baltimore City. The dozen or so trophies for Bridge (the card game) that collect dust on Seaborne’s shelves reveal a chapter. “That was back in my youth,” he says. “I stopped abruptly and for some reason, I never got back to it. Most of the people I played with are no longer around.” There is a Robert Goulet CD that appears to be in heavy rotation musically. Seaborne describes an attractive young woman in a framed photograph as “an old friend.” But there is nothing - at least not in sight - that suggests this small, softspoken man helped spark perhaps the most important chapter in 20th century African-American history. There is nothing in Seaborne’s appearance or conversation that seems to warrant the presence of Larry S. Gibson, professor of law at the University of Maryland, who is prodding the elder man’s memory with photos and anecdotes, many of which begin with the phrase, “Do you remember when...?” Prof. Gibson has a digital camera set up in a corner of Seaborne’s living room, hoping to capture a magical moment from this man who seems so unassuming, perhaps even oblivious, to events 70 years ago. In 1933, Harold Seaborne applied for admission to the University of Maryland School of Law, the first African American in the 20th century to do so. It was at the height of the Great Depression and the way he tells the story today, 22-year-old Seaborne was simply trying to make a better life for himself. “There wasn’t really any work. Grown men were organizing gangs to march to Washington. Plants were being closed all over the place,” remembers Seaborne. But at age 92, Seaborne’s memories of the young, robust man that he was must have faded, because history tells a slightly different story. It is clear that the Depression was choking the life out of many of the country’s citizens and the impact on the Colored community was perhaps even more devastating. But maybe those hard, desperate times served as the perfect catalyst for a partnership between two pillars of the Black community, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Baltimore AfroAmerican, a partnership forged to challenge the system as it had never been challenged before. THE FIRST STEPS Harold Seaborne attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania with two legends, Clarence Mitchell Jr., the great power broker for the NAACP, and Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP’s chief legal counsel, who much later was named to the Supreme Court. In 1932, Marshall was a junior at Lincoln when Seaborne and Mitchell graduated. That next year, the decision was made during a meeting in January 1933 by the Baltimore branch of the NAACP for Seaborne and Mitchell to apply to the all-White University of Maryland. The AFRO reported the story the week of January 21, 1933: “First steps of the local NAACP in
A
Storm clouds on the horizon. In 1933, Dr. Raymond A. Pearson, president of the University of Maryland, Dr. Roger Howell, the dean of the Law School, and W.M. Hillegeist, the school’s registrar, wrote a series of internal memos. A First came the warning of trouble on the horizon. B Then came the bold proclamation, “The “nigger” (Harold Arthur Seaborne) has applied for admission.” (Note: Bernard Ades was a well-known communist lawyer with a penchant for railing against racism, demonsrations, etc.)
B
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its newly organized program to test the legality of the laws that prohibit Colored students from attending the University of Maryland were taken this week when Clarence Mitchell, 712 Carrollton Ave., filed application for admission. “Mr. Mitchell, who is a graduate of Lincoln University, where he majored in sociology, seeks to continue his course and obtain a master’s degree in the graduate school of the institution. “Harold A. Seaborne, 1127 Carrollton Ave., also a graduate of
from the Afro-American, a Baltimore newspaper published by Colored people. Seaborne has not filed his application, although he has been mailed a blank.” But, by July 1933, Seaborne had, indeed, applied to Maryland’s law school, the gauntlet had officially been thrown down, and it was on. “The “nigger” [Harold Seaborne] has applied for admission,” lamented Hillegeist in a letter to Dr. Roger Howell, dean of Maryland’s law school, dated July 13, 1933.
In essence, the University of Maryland would rather pay for Black students to go out of state to school instead of admitting those students onto its campus.
Lincoln, sought admission to the law department of the same institution,” reported the AFRO. “Now, whether Clarence, in fact did apply, I don’t know. I have no evidence that he in fact did apply. But, we know that Seaborne did,” says Prof. Gibson. However, Seaborne didn’t actually file his application to the law school until the summer of 1933. The AFRO story in January seems to have been a preliminary shot across the bow, a tactic to test the waters of intolerance. And it worked. In March 1933, W.M. Hillegeist, the University of Maryland’s registrar, fired off a terse letter to the school’s president, Dr. Raymond A. Pearson. “There are enclosed two clippings So, of course, Seaborne was denied admission to the university, but he wasn’t the only one. Over the next two years, there were several others, among them J. Arnett Frisby, William Proctor and Benjamin Price, all Black men, all denied admission to Maryland’s law school, based strictly on their race. But, in 1935, it was Donald Gaines Murray’s turn at bat. Like Seaborne, Murray was a man small in stature; however, his academic credentials were prodigious. “He had credentials that absolutely no one could refute. They were impeccable,” says Prof. Gibson. Yet, like Seaborne and all the others, Murray, a graduate of Amherst College, Continued on page 8
Above the text of “Mitchell and Seaborn file applications” as printed in the Jan. 21, 1935, issue of the AFRO.
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Continued from page 7 was rejected. And also like the others, he was sent a letter explaining why he could not be admitted into Maryland’s hallowed halls. “I am in receipt of your application for admission to the school of law. The University of Maryland does not admit Negro students and your application is accordingly rejected. I direct your attention, however, to Art. 77, Sec. 214 A, Code of Public General Laws of Maryland (Acts 1933, Chapter 234)...” This law basically said that Blacks could not attend the University of Maryland, but because of the Plessey v. Ferguson (1896) doctrine of “separate, but equal,” the state had to provide an alternative for African Americans who wanted to pursue higher education, and was obligated to provide scholarships for Black students to attend school out of state. In essence, the University of Maryland would rather pay for Black students to go out of state to school instead of admitting those students onto its campus. But Murray, who lived in the 1500
As reported in the AFRO 1935
Murray Wins Suit against U. of Md.
Court rules that he must not be barred because he is colored. Photo shows NAACP attorneys with client shortly after the decision was rendered in Baltimore, Tuesday. Left to right: Thurgood Marshall, Donald Murray and Dr. Charles Houston, chief counsel for the NAACP, who declared that the university had violated the U.S. Constitution by barring Murray, who is a graduate of Amherst College.
block of McCulloh Street, said he simply wanted to practice law in Baltimore and for that reason, he wanted to study at a state university. This time, the NAACP was ready to fight for Murray’s right to do just that. This was going to be the first big “test case.” And one of the men that would lead that fight was young Thurgood Marshall, who had been an underclassman behind Seaborne and Mitchell at Lincoln University. Marshall and attorney, Dr. Charles H. Houston, executed a flawless game plan and won the decision in just three days. So perhaps Harold Arthur Seaborne was simply a man of circumstances. He never became a lawyer, and he was never lauded as a leader of the civil rights movement, as were Clarence Mitchell Jr. and Thurgood Marshall. Perhaps his contribution has been obscured by the shadows of history. Nevertheless, he laid the first bricks in the road that led to Brown v. Board of Education. And that makes him more than just a footnote to history.
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‘What about
the Negroes?’
Larry S. Gibson, professor of law at the University of Maryland. But there were many in 1935 who anticipated trouble when Murray entered the university, including the law school’s dean, Roger Howell. “The dean suggested that in order to prevent Mr. Murray’s entrance from seeming forced, it might be a good idea to have him refrain from sitting next to White students. He said that hostility would be lessened and that students would recognize, when Mr. Murray did not sit next to them, that he was not trying to push himself on them,” reported the AFRO in 1935. Aside from the above indignity at the onset of his career at the University of Maryland, Murray reported no real trouble during his time at the university, and graduated essentially without incident. But Murray’s victory, and Black America’s victory, was the result of a plan that was years in the making. BLUEPRINT FOR VICTORY The foundation of the NAACP’s strategy was perhaps the man himself, Donald Gaines Murray. Beyond the fact he graduated with great distinction from prestigious Amherst College, Murray was viewed as coming from the “right” family. Murray was born May 24, 1913, in Philadelphia. His mother Cecelia died when he was 2, and his father, George Murray, moved Donald and his sister, Marjorie, to Baltimore, where they lived with Donald’s paternal grandfather, Abraham Gaines, a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal church. Young Murray was also the second generation in his family to be college educated, a rarity in the Black community in the 1930s. Like Jackie Robinson, who would burst on the scene about a decade later, Murray was considered to have the right temperament to endure what could have been a very volatile situation. So Murray was the champion hand picked by the NAACP, but the organization was actually ready to do battle before 1935. Scheduling conflicts had forced Continued on page 10
The Murray win engineered by the NAACP’s legal team of Charles Houston, senior legal counsel, and young Thurgood Marshall represented the first school desegregation victory in U.S. history. Yet it was a somewhat tenuous victory because Houston and Marshall had to battle through a vigorous appeal by the University of Maryland. At the same time, the duo was crafting a strategy to navigate the complex labyrinth that would lead to the Brown decision almost 20 years later.
By Sean Yoes Special to the AFRO In September 1935, Donald Gaines Murray entered the University of Maryland School of Law by order of Baltimore City Judge Eugene O’Dunne. The judge’s instructions were specific and unwavering. Murray had to be admitted “for the academic year beginning September 25, 1935 ... and permitted to pursue his studies as a regular firstyear student of the school of law of the University of Maryland pending an appeal,” wrote Judge
A
A. Henry Clifton “Curley” Byrd, the University of Maryland’s acting president,
was a staunch segregationist determined to keep ‘their’ law school all White. Note the word Negro scrawled in the upper left hand corner of Byrd’s letter to W.M. Hillegeist and the hand-written message at the bottom of the letter. B. W.M. Hillegeist, the University of Maryland’s registrar affectionately known as “Hille” to his superiors, was perhaps the ultimate “yes man.” But, when it came to admitting Blacks to Maryland, his answer was “no.” Note the panicked tone of his letter to Byrd just one week before the arrival of Donald Gaines Murray. C. Unconquered. Donald Gaines Murray, who was the first Black to enter the University of Maryland in the 20th century, would later fight on behalf of other African Americans to gain admittance to the university in the 1950s. Top: Murray is in the second row on the far right with his University of Maryland law school classmates. D. The order from Baltimore City Court Judge Eugene O’Dunne was handed down just three days after the NAACP’s lawsuit was filed on behalf of Murray. E. Allegedly Byrd was planning to say that Murray flunked out of Maryland’s law school in 1936, but the AFRO beat Curley to the punch. O’Dunne in a court order. And with that mandate, Murray v. Pearson Raymond A. Pearson was president of the university became the first successful school desegregation case in the nation. “Brown [Brown v. Board of Education] begins here. It is the first school victory in the nation. This is ‘ground zero,’ and ya’ll [the AFRO] started it,” says
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B
E D C
Continued from page 9 the group to delay the lawsuit against the University of Maryland. Charles Hamilton Houston, the NAACP’s senior legal counsel, was entrenched in other litigation that did not allow him to give full attention to the desegregation case. The youngest member of the legal team, Thurgood Marshall was busy establishing his burgeoning law career. William I. Gosnell was the third NAACP attorney. However, once all three attorneys did come together in 1935, the case they presented was crystal clear. They argued that legal training was different from any other professional discipline simply because the laws in each state are different, and that sending somebody to an out-of-state law school could therefore not be considered
equal treatment and would not fulfill the doctrine of “separate, but equal,” established by Plessey v. Ferguson in 1896. Their argument was airtight. “They thought they would win, but they did not expect to win so easily at the state level,” said Professor Gibson. It took only three days from the filing of the lawsuit to the decision. Another integral part of the NAACP strategy was finding the judge who heard the case. Eugene O’Dunne, proved to be fair, maybe even
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The Road to Brown
sympathetic to their cause. But the fact that O’Dunne was the presiding judge was not simply the luck of the draw. The NAACP is thought to have timed the lawsuit to coincide with O’Dunne’s turn in the rotation of judges at the Equity Court of Baltimore City because he was known as one of the few judges during that time to treat Blacks fairly. In 1934, the National Bar Association - an organization of Black attorneys - held a meeting in Baltimore, and O’Dunne invited them into his chambers at the Baltimore City courthouse, an extraordinary gesture for that time. Furthermore, while still a lawyer, O’Dunne had stopped the vigilante lynching of a Black man whose last name was Fountain, a client of his. Despite the NAACP’s unequivocal win, however, the University of Maryland’s leadership still conspired to keep the Black presence out of their institution. ‘WHAT ABOUT THE NEGROES?’ Between June and September 1935, Raymond A. Pearson, University of Maryland president, was replaced by Henry Clifton “Curly” Byrd, known as a staunch segregationist. (Byrd ran for governor of Maryland in 1954 on a segregationist platform, but was defeated by Theodore R. McKeldin. That election is generally acknowledged as the emergence of Black voting power statewide.). In spite of O’Dunne’s ruling, Byrd gave W.M. Hillegeist, the school’s registrar, explicit instructions not to admit any Blacks. “Hille,” wrote Byrd on July 15, 1935, “don’t register any Negro students until I talk with you ... I will drop by to see you sometime when I am in Baltimore.” Then Hillegeist delivered his jittery response Sept. 18, 1935, one week before Murray’s admission.
“What about the Negroes? Unless the Court of Appeals intervenes, we will have to accept Donald Gaines Murray. You know what Judge O’Dunne would do to me, one of the defendants, if I ‘thumb my nose’ at the writ of mandamus granted to Murray.” However, the machinations of Byrd and Hillegeist could not stop the inevitable. Murray was admitted Sept. 25th, and the University of Maryland lost its appeal in 1936. The second Black student, Calvin Douglass, entered the university in 1937. Still, Byrd brazenly attempted to steer Black students to other schools outside Maryland, citing the availability of scholarship money provided by the state specifically for Black students. And he even asked Herbert R. O’Connor, Maryland’s attorney general, if he could remove Murray and Douglass retroactively once funds were available for Blacks. O’Connor said no. Even though the University of Maryland’s doors had been officially
pried open for Blacks, the school continued to drag its feet on admitting them. In 1939, the third law student, William H. Murphy Sr. entered. In 1946, more Blacks entered after World War II and, in 1950, a group of Black students sued for admission to Maryland’s schools of nursing, dentistry, pharmacy, undergraduate English, medicine and graduate social work. The lead counsel arguing on their behalf was Donald Gaines Murray.
O’Dunne twits state counsel
When he stated that he thought the scholarship aid provided by the State adequate for the present needs, Judge O’Dunne asked a question that threw the courtroom into laughter. The question was whether Mr. Howell would say that colored people should not be given separate care in states where Jim Crow railway transportation is upheld, because only a few of them travel. “How would you let them ride, in an ox cart?” Judge O’Dunne asked. “Well,” replied Mr. Howell, “if the ox cart were about as good as the cars, I think that I would.” Mr. Howell stated that the scholarship, supposedly provided in 1933, would be a great help to Mr. Murray in another school. As he admitted that they have never been definitely established, Judge O’Dunne said, “Well, you can’t pay the landlady on that.” Dr. Houston closed the arguments in the case. He declared that a constitutional question was at stake, and pointed out that when national and state laws are in conflict, the national laws must prevail. Dr. Houston stated that in the Plessey v. Ferguson case, previously cited, facilities were provided for both races, but in Maryland, no such facilities are available.
Reasons for granting writ
For the following four reasons, he held the writ should be granted: 1. Students seeking higher education are not compelled to take one of the scholarships provided by the act of 1935, if they desire to secure an education at the expense of the state. 2. The act of 1933 was a trap, because it did not actually provide funds for a scholarship, although ostensibly, it did. 3. The act of 1935 does not provide for anything other than tuition. 4. The legislature has never, by statute, signified that it is public policy to deny colored persons the right to attend the University of Maryland. Following this, Judge O’Dunne granted the writ which, under the state of appeals the case, and becomes effective when the University of Maryland opens in September.
Tried hustle on applicant
He charged that when Dr. Pearson told Mr. Murray that he would be given a scholarship if he attended Howard University and on the witness stand admitted that no such scholarship would have been given, the president was admitting that he was giving the applicant a “hustle.” At the time, Mr. Murray was promised a scholarship by the state, Dr. Houston pointed out the act of 1935, providing scholarships, had not been established. He asserted that Mr. Murray would face great expense if made to attend a school outside of the state.
As reported in the AFRO
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Segregate or integrate,
By Sean Yoes AFRO Staff Writer After the monumental, yet shockingly unambiguous Murray victory the NAACP, led by Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall, surveyed America’s vast, racist labyrinth of inferior education for its Black citizens. But, now the battle had become decidedly more complex. “Without education, there is no hope for our people and without hope, our future is lost.” – Charles Hamilton Houston Special Counsel, NAACP “OPEN UP A HIGH SCHOOL FOR ME” “I had just come out of the seventh grade and it was time for us to go to high school,” recalled 81-year old Lucille ScottJones from her home in Edmondson Village in southwest Baltimore. However, as Scott-Jones reflects back to 1935, when she was Lucille Scott, a 13-year-old Colored girl from the small Black enclave of Cowdensville, near Arbutus, she couldn’t just hop on the bus to the nearest high school like her White counterparts. There were 11 high schools in Baltimore County, but all of them were all White. There was no high school for Black children in Baltimore County. “We had to walk about four miles from our little village, from Cowdensville to Arbutus, to catch the streetcar to Baltimore,” said Scott-Jones. There was another hurdle, as well. “We had to take a very rigid test to go to the city school. If we passed, our parents didn’t have to pay,” she remembered. White children simply were promoted to high school
but educate at all costs
upon passing the seventh grade and they attended the school closest to their home. So the NAACP developed a strategy to take the next big step toward equality in education. The plan was for Lucille Scott and another seventh grader, Margaret Williams (who would become the actual plaintiff in the case), who also lived in Cowdensville, to attempt to enter the nearest school, all-White Catonsville High School. Williams is still alive, but age and illness have clouded her mind. However, Scott-Jones’ recall of her first day of high school is clear. “The White children were yelling
With the Murray appeal still pending, Marshall and Houston were engaged in two very important Maryland battles simultaneously, the equal pay for Colored teachers case that was burgeoning in Anne Arundel County in 1936 and the Baltimore County school desegregation case in 1935. There were about 40 enclaves in Baltimore County with Black residents in 1935, yet there was no high school for Black children in the county. Ultimately, the NAACP and Marshall lost the case; however, they salvaged a very significant victory from the defeat.
Fighting for education. Many Whites feared the NAACP’s only desire was to integrate the schools. The reality was they simply wanted Black children to receive the education they were entitled to. From left are attorneys Leon Ransom and Thurgood Marshall and standing from left are Mildred Williams (Margaret Williams’ mother), Lucille Scott and Margaret Williams (with hand on hip).
12 The Road to Brown
at us. But we felt very proud. We had this nice-looking lawyer taking us to school.” The memory causes her to giggle like a 13-year-old schoolgirl again. That lawyer was Thurgood Marshall, the young, rising legal star who represented the NAACP and Margaret Williams in the effort to integrate Catonsville High School. “He felt very protective of us. He had each of us by the hand and we walked into the principal’s office,” she stated. Marshall did not actually enter the school with Williams and Scott, yet for the next year, he fought mightily on behalf of the girls and all Black children.
“By filing the two suits at once, it will be perfectly clear that our main effort is to get adequate high school facilities for Negro children and that we are in substance leaving it up to the county whether it will admit Negro children to the White school or provide separate, but equal high school facilities for the Negro child,” he wrote. This distinction would prove to be pivotal in the case. Furthermore, the notion of separate, but equal, the debate over segregation or integration, was a burgeoning firestorm in Black America and Houston became
one of the most prominent voices in the dialogue. “The association [NAACP] does not intend to endorse the principle of segregation, but to fight segregation by making it so expensive to the state that there will be a disposition on the part of the taxpayer to do away with it,” stated Houston in a 1934 memorandum. Continued on page 14
“MORE POWER TO YOU, SIR!” Unlocking the labyrinth. The 40 or so Black September 12, 1935. communities scattered throughout Baltimore At about 2:30 that Thursday County represented an intricate maze, creafternoon in Baltimore, Marshall ating a real challenge for Black high sent off a telegram to Charles school age children (grades 8 and Hamilton Houston, the above) to somehow get to Baltimore NAACP’s chief legal counsel City to go to school. Some had to in New York. It read: travel as far as 24 miles to a city “PUPILS APPLIED high school and many, unfortuWHITE HIGH SCHOOL nately, never received a high BALTIMORE COUNTY school education at all. THIS MORNING. THURGOOD.” That same day, Marshall drafted a formal letter to Houston briefing him in detail on the above matter: “As to the case itself, two chilCharles Houston dren applied to the White high school this morning. Their names, Margaret Williams and Lucille Scott. The children were refused admission on the grounds that the regulations of Baltimore County prevented Negroes and Whites from attending the same school.” Just days before Williams and Scott were refused admission to Catonsville High School, Marshall had escorted Donald Gaines Murray to register him for classes at the University of Maryland Law School. This was the hand Black Americans were dealt in 1935. This was the minefield that had to be negotiated by the NAACP and its top generals on the front, Houston and Marshall. The organization was emerging from Murray v. Raymond A. Pearson, president of the University of Maryland, et al., the first school desegregation victory in the United States, yet Black children in Baltimore County still had to travel up to 24 miles to attend high school in Baltimore City. So, the NAACP had to strike a precarious balance between power and patience. They could not lose the momentum created by the Murray victory, but they couldn’t push White people too far, too fast. “The University of Maryland case is a wedge, but such a little wedge. And if we do not remain on the alert and push the struggle farther with all our might, even this little hole will close upon us ... and we must convince the White people at all times that we are fighting a defensive fight,” wrote Houston in The Crisis magazine, circa 1935. September 14, 1935. Regarding Marshall’s Sept. 12 letter, Houston responded brilliantly, laying down a loose legal blueprint for the Baltimore County high school case. “Since there were two pupils who applied to the White high school,” wrote Houston, “I suggest two suits: 1-mandamus to have the first child admitted into the White high school; 2-simultaneous suit for mandamus by second child to force the county to afford her high school facilities.” Then Houston explained his reasoning behind the strategy.
Thurgood Marshall
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Continued from page 13 September 16, 1935. In general, Marshall agreed with Houston’s assessment of the high school case; however, there were additional factors to be weighed. “I do not believe these suits can be filed at present because I have made application to the state superintendent, and he has not as yet refused the application. Then, under our law, matters concerning education are referred first to the county board of education,” informed Marshall. “A court of appeals case of Maryland involving the establishment of a White high school was lost because of failure to refer the matter to the county board. This will take time,” he wrote. October 8, 1935 Marshall was putting the pieces of the case together and his work included extensive travel around the state. He reported his efforts and observations to Walter White, secretary of the NAACP. “On this afternoon, I appeared before the board of education with a petition signed by residents and taxpayers of the County requesting the county to establish a Negro high school. They refused to receive the petition, refused to hear me and told me they were doing as much as they intended to do, and that we were going to set the Negro race back many years. I am now on the second step in that case which is to appeal to the State Board of Education. Upon their refusal, suit will be immediately filed,” stated Marshall. However, Marshall’s letter failed to fully convey the level of resistance he was met with at the county board of education. The heated exchanged was reported by the AFRO October 19, 1935. “Mr. Warfield declared that he was a friend to Mr. Marshall’s race and asserted that the Colored people of Baltimore County are getting all they need in the way of education.” When Marshall responded affirmatively to Warfield’s question whether he expected the board to take any action, Warfield exclaimed, “Well, we are not.” Warfield went on to warn Marshall that the NAACP program calling “for a high school in Baltimore County and equality of education facilities is going to do more harm than good. It will set your people back further than they are.” When Marshall reminded Warfield that even in Mississippi there were educational opportunities for Blacks, Warfield replied, tellingly: “Well, there are a lot more of them down there than up here and we believe that we are being fair with your people.” This was the kind of intolerance that forced Marshall and Houston to postpone filing the Baltimore County high school case and kept their intentions to file out of the “White papers” until after
a decision in the Murray appeal was rendered. They feared if Whites believed the NAACP was seeking integration of the schools, the public backlash would adversely affect the decision in the Murray appeal, and it seems their anxiety was warranted. January 22, 1936. “As to the University of Maryland case, the Baltimore News, a Hearst paper, has so couched the article on the University of Maryland case and the Baltimore County case as to give the belief that our main object is to seek admission into the White school. This was for the purpose of stirring up opposition,” Marshall observed in a letter to Houston. But Marshall attempted to remedy the situation by lobbying Louis Azrael, a White columnist with the Baltimore News-Post. On March 3, 1936, Azrael wrote: “There’s likely to be considerable commotion soon about admission of Colored children to White high schools. The Colored people don’t really want to start any movement toward that end. But they do want, according to some of their leaders, to see that the county affords Colored children the advantages which the law demands and which in other counties are given.” THE HARD HOMEWORK It is clear Marshall prepared prodigiously for the Baltimore County high school case. “I am, at present, trying by all methods above board and below board to get a list of the students attending the schools in Baltimore City and shall either visit them myself or have them visited, and also have them make out questionnaires,” Marshall wrote to Houston on Jan. 22, 1936. Indeed, Marshall had traveled hundreds of miles around the state to interview families, gather information and, in some cases, to measure how many miles Black children had to travel to get to school. “We live 20 miles from the city, 12 miles from Towson, the nearest car line, and three and a half miles from the trains,” read one testimony in an investigative report filed March 2, 1936, by Marshall and his team. Furthermore, the report graphically identified the huge disparities in educating Black children and White children in Baltimore County. “Last year, $336,594.88 was spent for current expenses for the support of these high schools. Not one cent of this was shared by Negro pupils. $25,937.43 was spent to transport White children to and from the high schools located in Baltimore County. On the other hand, the chosen few Negroes who are given opportunities for high school education
The genius of Houston and Marshall
Week after week, month after month, for a year or so, Marshall and Houston constantly communicated, primarily by letter, methodically plotting and planning for the high school case and the equal pay for Black teachers suit that was rumbling in Anne Arundel County, as well as the appeal on the part of the University of Maryland in the Murray case. “This is the genius of Houston and Marshall. A long-distance phone call was expensive. It was cheaper to send letters and that’s why they did it. But, we are blessed, because from these letters, we have their thinking,” said Larry S. Gibson, professor of law at the University of Maryland. “His [Marshall’s] preparation and trial work in this case was a thing of beauty. Whatever the ultimate success in it may be, to him belongs the major portion of the credit,” wrote Leon Ransom, NAACP legal counsel in a confidential report dated Sept. 20, 1936. Prof. Gibson is emphatic about the fact that Houston and Marshall were consummate workmen. In fact Gibson suggests that Houston, who died at age 55, “appears to have just worked himself to death.” “What you see are lawyers willing to do the hard homework. Marshall spent many days and hours fine tuning the evidence and the documents in this case and in most of his cases. What you see is careful preparation, the painstaking preparation. They didn’t rush in and they were always thinking ahead,” said Gibson.
are required to go outside the county to Baltimore City to get it and up to 1936 received not a single cent toward payment of their transportation.” At this point, Marshall was ready to proceed. The Murray victory had been secured two months earlier, in midJanuary 1936, and finally, on March 14, 1936, Marshall filed on behalf of Margaret Williams in the Baltimore County Circuit Court in Towson. However, only one suit was filed, a writ of mandamus that required the county to admit Williams to the nearest high school. There was no second suit filed to open up a high school in Baltimore County specifically for Blacks as had been discussed early on by Marshall and Houston. “It was a combination of factors. They had limited financial resources, everything was delayed waiting for the Murray decision and he [Marshall] didn’t think he had a suitable plaintiff for the second lawsuit. So, he decided to gamble with one lawsuit,” said Prof. Larry S. Gibson, of the University of Maryland Law School. Then in mid-September 1936, Marshall appeared before Judge Frank I. Duncan prepared to make his case abundantly clear: 1. There were obvious differences in educational facilities for Blacks and Whites, most glaring being the absence of a high school for Black children. 2. The examination given to Black students for high school entrance was grossly unfair and it was created expressly to keep Blacks from receiving tuition payments from the state for high school education. However, as some would suggest, Judge Duncan shifted the playing field on Marshall.
“Judge Duncan very narrowly defined the issue. `Did she pass the exam to go to high school? I don’t need to consider anything else.’ This was Judge Duncan’s primary focus,” explained Gibson. So, ultimately, Marshall lost the case. However in the appeal ruling on May 26, 1937, rendered by Chief Judge C.J. Bond, an important victory sparkled within a dubious admission by the Court. “The allowance of separate treatment at all involves allowance of some incidental differences and some inequalities in meeting practical problems presented,” cited Bond. The NAACP immediately seized upon the sliver of daylight Judge Bond provided. “Here, for the first time, a court has admitted that certain inequalities are inevitable in a separate school system,” read an NAACP press release on May 28, 1937. In other words, separate could never be equal. Two years later, in 1939, the Baltimore County School Board voted to establish high schools for Black children in Towson, Catonsville and Sparrows Point, but, it was too late for Lucille Scott and Margaret Williams. Williams graduated from St. Frances Academy in 1939 and Scott graduated from Douglass High School in 1941. For the last 40 years, Scott-Jones has lived in her Edmondson Village home, just miles from the Cowdensville community she grew up in as a little girl. Her daughter, Cynthia Williams, is vice principal of James Mosher Elementary School in Baltimore City. “It makes me feel wonderful to learn she didn’t have to go through what I went through. I’m very proud of her,” said Scott-Jones.
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‘Equal work
warranted
equal pay’
citizens earning half the pay their White counterparts received for the same work. “They were not willing to see Colored teachers were worth as much as White teachers. White people just didn’t care. They wanted to give us the minimum they could get away with,” said Mr. Brown. In 1928, the year Mr. Brown earned his elementary teacher’s certificate from Bowie Normal School (now Bowie State University), Colored elementary school teachers earned on average $602 per year. In contrast, White elementary school teachers on average earned $1,155. “Equal work warranted equal pay,” said Mr. Brown, still emphatic after all these decades. But, during the Depression, no one, Black or White, was eager to jeopardize their job, and many Black teachers thought they would be doing just that were they to visibly object to the obvious disparity in their pay structure. Furthermore, most of them understood they could be putting their very lives on the line by challenging the system of White supremacy. But, in February 1936, there was a young teacher who was ready to put it all on the line. “Howard Pindell was the first one to really call to our attention the real difference between the salaries of the races. He organized the Colored Teachers Association of Anne Arundel County,” said Brown, who became the new organization’s treasurer.
After the loss in the Baltimore County case, there was pressure on the NAACP to recapture the momentum and hope created by the landmark Murray win. The opportunity arrived in Anne Arundel County, where Black teachers earned slightly more than half their White counterparts’ salaries for the same work. The victory helped propel the NAACP into becoming a truly national organization, with a presence not just in big cities, but with branches emerging in small towns and sparsely populated counties.
By Sean Yoes AFRO Staff Writer
HUGHES – THE UNSUNG HERO
“Grateful memory of their former teacher and friend and of the unselfish life he lived, and the noble work he wrought; that they, their children, and their children’s children might be blessed.”
The Souls of Black Folk W.E.B. DuBois There was a time in this country, not so long ago, when teachers were perhaps the most respected of the burgeoning Black professional class, a time that Philip and Rachel Brown, now in their 90s, remember well. “Daddy, come on this way and sit down,” Ms. Brown says sweetly to her husband of 71 years as they prepare to tell their story to Larry S. Gibson, professor of law at the University of Maryland. Nestled near the Black enclave of Highland Beach in Annapolis, the Browns’ home is a monument to their marriage and that bygone era when teachers were revered. There are myriad photos, the product of 71 years together, with one perhaps a bit more joyous than the others. It is from June 1947, and the Browns, who had received their teaching certificates years earlier, are striding purposefully, beaming, in cap and gown, a young married couple newly graduated from Morgan State College. They are stunning in their confidence, prepared to take on the world. But, more importantly, they were totally committed to educating Black children and, between the two of them, this is what they did for more than 80 years. Indeed, Philip and Rachel Brown are living testaments to a time when Black teachers were held in high esteem in the Black community. But, of course, in the White America of the 1930s when they started teaching, they were simply second-class
“I DIDN’T HAVE ANYTHING TO LOSE”
Howard Pindell’s luxury apartment in a high-rise looks down on icy Logan’s Circle in Philadelphia as he sits comfortably in his home, protected from the January cold. At 95, he reflects back on a life well lived, a 50-year marriage, a daughter - Howardina Pindell, an internationally known artist - a beautiful home in Philadelphia and an apartment in Paris. But, it was a much different story in Continued on page 16
W.A.C. Hughes was the NAACP’s lead counsel in Maryland after Thurgood Marshall went to New York until the 1950s. He did all of the “heavy lifting,” in the teachers pay cases in Maryland, although Marshall and Charles Houston orchestrated the major moves from New York. Hughes also served as the attorney for the NAACP’s City-Wide Young People’s Forum. “The revitalization of the NAACP with Lillie Jackson as its chair really followed the success of the City-Wide Young People’s Forum,” said Larry S. Gibson.
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Continued from page 15
1936. “I had a couple of suits of clothes, I had a car and I had youth,” said Pindell. Pindell was also the vice president of the Maryland State Colored Teachers Association and served on its strategy committee. The group lobbied the state board of education and the Maryland legislature as well as the governor for pay equity, to no avail. “There were times when we would meet with Gov. Nice in his office, proposing a bill to put before the legislature. Mysteriously, it would be lost before any action was taken. The committee was at its ‘wits’ end’. In desperation, it decided to take the matter to court. Enolia Pettigen [later Enolia MacMillan], head of the Maryland State Colored Teachers Association, asked me to be the plaintiff. Mr. “THE GOAT.” Howard Pindell strongly Frank Butler, princisuspected he would be fired for his pal, the Bates H.S., activism in regards to equal pay for said he was willing to Black teachers and he often referred to do it. I advised him himself as “the goat.” He would later not to because he had move on to a very successful career in a wife, was buying his the legal system in Philadelphia.
home and his age [at the time Butler was in his 50s]. Such a decision would be unwise,” wrote Pindell in his brief autobiography, A Maryland Saga. Pindell welcomed the fight. On several occasions, he wrote Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston, the famed NAACP attorneys, seeking their help, but they were both fully
engaged in attempting to secure high school education for Black students in the Baltimore County high school case. Still, Pindell did not fully escape their radar.
“Enclosed please find a copy of a letter written by a prospective plaintiff for the teachers’ salary case in Maryland. Charlie and I have both talked to him,” wrote Marshall to Walter White, secretary of the NAACP, on Jan. 27, 1936. In February 1936, Pindell was essentially in place as the plaintiff. Then, an implausible twist of fate, or more likely an insidious plot, unfolded. “I had this letter from the superintendent of schools in Frederick offering me a job. After consulting Thurgood, I wrote him [the superintendent] accepting
ONE OF THE MARTYRS. Frank B.
Butler was a principal for 20 years in Anne Arundel County, but he was also the treasurer of the Maryland State Colored Teachers’ Association. Although he remained in the background in the equal salaries confrontation with the county board, in 1942 he was demoted from principal to a science teacher. It was the ultimate slap in the face to a man who had served as an administrator with such dignity. “Him being the elder person-they thought he was the instigator of the whole thing,” said Philip Brown.
SUCCESSFUL PLANTIFF WALTER MILLS, who would
eventually become the plaintiff in the successful NAACP suit to win equity in pay for Black teachers in 1939 the job as principal of Lincoln High School,” said Pindell. Marshall actually encouraged Pindell to take the position, saying it may be a “kick upstairs,” and assured Pindell that another plaintiff would be found. Walter Mills, a principal/teacher at the Rosenwald School in Parole, Md., was the man chosen to replace Pindell.
Uneven pay scales. In 1939, Philip Brown had 12 years’ experience as teacher, taught fifth and sixth grades and earned $941 a year. That same year, Elisabeth Gunderloy, who was White had 11 years experience, also taught fifth and sixth grades and was paid $1,300 a year.
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REGROUPING FOR THE LAWSUIT
“He was a jolly person, very conscientious, very meticulous as far as his teaching was concerned,” said Philip
The Road to Brown
Brown, of Mills. Mills and Brown had graduated from Bowie Normal School in 1929, and Mills actually lived in Frank Butler’s house, along with Pindell, for a time. Butler was the principal of Bates High School, the Colored high school in Anne Arundel County, and treasurer of the Maryland State Colored Teachers Association. After Pindell took the job as principal in Frederick, Mills became president of the Anne Arundel County Colored Teachers Association. “He volunteered to be the person to represent the teachers and he encouraged the teachers that we were entitled to equal pay for equal work,” said Brown. So, in 1939, the NAACP went forward in the fight for pay equity for Black teachers in Anne Arundel County with Mills as their man. W.A.C. Hughes,
Above and below, Philip Brown with his students at the Stanton Elementary School in Anne Arundel County circa 1930s.
TRIUMPHANT. Philip and Rachel Brown met while teaching at the same school in 1930, were married in 1932 and 72 years later they are still going strong...together. This AFRO photo was taken at their graduation from Morgan State College in 1947.
the NAACP’s chief counsel in Maryland, was in charge on the ground, with Marshall and Houston clearly calling the shots from New York. Initially, however, there was a significant glitch in the association’s strategy. Hughes originally filed the case against the State Board of Education. W. Calvin Chesnut, the U.S. district judge who presided over the case of Mills v. State Board of Education, dismissed the case essentially pointing out they had filed against the wrong entity. Hughes quickly re-filed the complaint against the Anne Arundel County Board of Education. In November 1939, Judge Chesnut handed down his unambiguous ruling in favor of Mills and the NAACP. “In signing the injunction, Judge W.
Calvin Chesnut, in federal court, handed down an opinion which stated that the question of whether there has been unlawful discrimination in determining the salaries of White and Colored teachers... must be answered in the affirmative. The plaintiff is therefore entitled to an injunction against the continuance of this unlawful discrimination,” reported the AFRO on Nov. 11, 1939. In the 1920s, Rachel Hall, who would become Rachel Brown, the wife of Philip Brown, had to travel from her parents’ home in Glen Burnie to Baltimore City to attend Douglass High School. The only Black high school in Anne Arundel County was Bates High Continued on page 18
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17
Continued from page 17 School in Annapolis, where her husband one day would become vice-principal. She experienced first-hand the inequality of education as a Black child. Later, as a woman, she watched her husband receive half the pay for the same work that he performed as his White counterparts. But, when she reflects back almost 70 years, she says she knew they would win. “I was confident and I knew it would happen some day,” Ms. Brown said.
“THEY SET HIM UP”
Initially, Frederick looked like the right move for Pindell. “Mr. Pruitt was the superintendent and I must say to you, he was as nice to me as anybody possibly could be. He gave me all the latitude I needed to correct the disciplinary problems in the school ... a very successful two years,” remembered Pindell. However, when Pindell took the job as principal in Frederick, he lost his tenure as a teacher, putting him in a precarious position professionally. “After those two years, he called me to his office and said, ‘you’ve done a wonderful job, but I’ve got to ask for your resignation.’ I cannot tell you why,” said Pindell. In 1938, the school board got rid of Pindell one year before he had reached tenure as a principal. To this day, he believes was a “Mr. Huffington,” supervisor of Colored schools in Maryland, ordered Pindell’s dismissal. But, the truth is, Pindell was aware he would probably lose his job. In fact, he referred to himself in a letter to Charles Hamilton Houston as a “goat,” perhaps a sacrificial one. Yet, Pindell was later successful in several fields. After moving to Philadelphia, he was an executive in the Philadelphia court system, earned two masters’ from Temple University and was a professor at Temple as well as at Spring Garden College.
THE LEADERSHIP OF MARSHALL. Although Thurgood Marshall was in New York, he was clearly the head coach calling the plays and Hughes was the quarterback executing them.
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The Road to Brown
The
Battle for the Links
‘Nine holes could never be equal to eighteen’
While the NAACP was fighting for equality in education for students and teachers in Maryland, Black golfers in Baltimore were in the middle of a 17-year struggle for equal access to the game they loved. But the battle for the links in Baltimore was thrust into the national spotlight when world heavyweight champion Joe Louis was relegated to a round of golf at the shabby, nine-hole, sand greens, Colored course at Carroll Park in 1938.
By Sean Yoes AFRO Staff Writer It’s June 22, 1938, and Black people from the Gilmore Projects in Baltimore to 125th Street in Harlem are huddled in hot houses on this first day of summer, ears glued to radios, all for good reason. Joe Louis, “The Brown Bomber,” is butchering Max Schmeling without mercy, exacting sweet, sweet revenge upon the man who handed Louis the first loss of his legendary career. From the first punches of the first round, two thunderous left hooks, everyone - including Schmeling - knew the German was doomed. Then, suddenly, like a bolt out of the blue in the form of a Louis wrecking-ball right, down went Schmeling! A collective roar of Black euphoria erupts from Atlanta to Altoona as men, women and children rush from their homes into the streets, dancing, screaming and banging on pots and pans. Every time Joe Louis won a fight, it was like the Black Fourth of July, but this time, it was that much sweeter because Schmeling - perhaps unfairly was characterized as a Nazi. He became a prized trophy of Adolph Hitler’s model of Aryan racial supremacy, demolished by a Black man as the world watched, teetering on the brink of war. Continued on page 20
Photo courtesy of University of Md. Law School
PIONEERS. Members of the Monumental Golf Club in 1939 at the Atlantic Pine Golf Club. Attorney Dallas Nicholas is seated at center between the two women wearing hats. Other members included Howard Murphy, fourth from left in back row, and D. Arnett Murphy, standing second from right.
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Elder, and even when the venerable Charlie Sifford was still a teenage caddie in North Carolina, Blacks in And now Joe Louis didn’t belong to Baltimore were serious about golf. just Black people anymore, he belonged Before 1934, Black golfers couldn’t to America. Perhaps for the first time in play on the city’s golf courses, period. this country, Blacks and Whites univerThen in the summer of 1934, the board sally embraced a Black hero, Joe Louis, of park commissioners granted Blacks the heavyweight champion of the world, unrestricted use of the city’s worst the strongest man on the planet, a Black course, Carroll Park. man. However, Whites protested the Right around the time of Louis’ admission of Blacks at Carroll Park so redemption rematch victory over vigorously the board rescinded its resoSchmeling, the champ traveled to “A MILITANT ATTITUDE” lution just two weeks after it passed. Baltimore on several occasions and Baltimore City owned and operated “The board did not anticipate these each time, he held court with the peofour golf courses. Three of them had 18 protests. Suspension of the board’s ple, high and low, like a gracious head holes and grass greens: Forest Park, order is for the purpose of granting a of state. Clifton Park and Mount Pleasant. One, hearing both to those who may favor During one visit, Mayor Thomas Carroll Park, had nine holes and sand and to those who may oppose the carryD’Alesandro even presented him with a greens. ing out of the board’s action. Under key to the City of Baltimore. Guess which one Blacks were relethese circumstances, it is hoped that you Yet, despite (or perhaps because of) gated to. will not continue to have a militant attithe demands of being heavyweight From 1934 to 1951, Black golfers tude on the subject,” wrote G.L. champion of the world, Louis loved to were embroiled in a protracted battle Nichols, general superintendent of hit the links and play a round of golf, parks, on Aug. 29, 1934, to Dallas and when he was in Baltimore, he want- with the Baltimore City Department of Public Parks and Squares (now the Nicholas, attorney for the Monumental ed to do just that. Department of Recreation and Parks) to Golf Club. But, unfortunately, Louis, who had simply play the game they loved and to Yet, the board made an accommodathe keys to the city, couldn’t get the enjoy the same quality facilities as tion. On Labor Day weekend, Sept. 1 keys to the clubhouse. White golfers. and 2, Blacks did play at Carroll Park, “I know that Roger Pippen, who Because, before Tiger Woods or Lee under police guard. Then, play was suswrote for the News American, when he pended for Black golfers until a resolution by the board later that month gave Blacks restricted use of Carroll Park. By 1936, Blacks were given unrestricted and exclusive use of Carroll Park’s shabby golf course, with its nine holes and sand greens. But it was just a matter of time before Black golfers, growing in numbers and in their determination to compete on a decent course, would push for improvements at Carroll Park and access to other courses. “Willie [Adams] and ‘Big Bill’ Dixon and I think Arnett Murphy started working on a law suit. He [Adams] was quite interested in changing, because he knew the Carroll Park course was insufficient. They put up their own money and went as far as they could go in Maryland,” said DIVIDED. April 19, 1943, an agreement was reached for renovations at Carroll Victorine Adams. Park, as well as a playing schedule for Black golfers at other city courses while The man charged with the renovations were being completed. Note the language of the agreement, the lead legally was “cessation of hostilities,” and the fact that it is signed by representatives from the Dallas Nicholas, attorney Colored Golfers of Baltimore City and the White Golfers of Baltimore City. Before for the Monumental Golf Carroll Park was opened to Blacks in 1934, Whites fought hard to keep them out. Club. Rev. Ellis Frye of the Sexton Methodist Episcopal Church in South Baltimore “He clearly was the stated, “I can assure you that the Colored people of South Baltimore are not principal spokesperson as interested in playing golf. To turn that course over to them would mean that a well as the principal number of them would start buying property there…and we don’t want that.” lawyer for Black golfers Continued from page 19
heard that Joe Louis was coming to town, he wanted to play golf with him. Pippen had probably never been to Carroll Park, but when he did, he thought it was terrible that the world champion had to play under those conditions,” stated Victorine Adams, one of Black Baltimore’s “grand ladies” and the wife of the legendary “Little Willie” Adams. “He told Willie he should do something about it,” she said.
DALLAS NICHOLAS was actually born in Richmond, Va., and his father, Luther Nicholas, brought the family to Philadelphia when Nicholas was a boy. He grew up in Philadelphia and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. Nicholas then graduated from Howard University Law School and almost immediately came to Baltimore, where he took and passed the bar exam. “He had a very large and active business law practice in Baltimore,” said Larry S. Gibson, professor of law at the University of Maryland. throughout most of the 17-year controversy,” said Larry S. Gibson, professor of law at the University of Maryland. Nicholas’ strategy could be characterized as a study in patience and dogged persistence. Time after time, Nicholas lobbied the White power structure face-to-face and by letter, from Howard W. Jackson, the mayor of Baltimore, to the members of the board of park commissioners. The Richmond, Va., native wielded his words like choice weapons as evidenced by this letter to the board after the Colored invasion of Carroll Park on Labor Day weekend in 1934: “Scores and scores of Negro golfers used this course on Sept. 1 and 2, conducting themselves in an orderly and credible manner. We are advised that in excess of $20 was collected in fees on these two days, twice as much as had been heretofore collected in a week and, with all of us being eager to again begin playing, you can readily see that, even from the financial angle, it is a more profitable proposition. “We submit that we have been more than fair-minded and patient in suspending our play until your meeting. We submit further that the mayor, your board and Mr. Nichols all agree that we should play golf so, will you fair-minded gentlemen oblige us by advising your superintendents that your order of Aug. 14, 1934, is to be carried out forthwith?” By 1940 the Black golfers had won at least one concession. That year, the city actually built a clubhouse at Carroll Park. But, in 1942, encouraged by the concept of “Double V” or “Double Victory” (victory for America in Europe in World War II and victory for Blacks over racism in America), Black golfers pressed for more. In a series of letters from Nicholas in April and May of 1942 to the board of park commissioners, the attorney outlined a list of demands for improvements at Carroll Park and access to the city’s other golf courses. Accordingly, in May of 1942, the
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The Road to Brown
board relented and gave Blacks use of all four city golf courses, only to once again pull back their promise two months later and send Blacks back to Carroll Park. SHOWDOWN AT MOUNT PLEASANT AND DISTRICT COURT Shortly after the board rescinded its resolution, a contingent of Black golfers - including Marie Murphy, Arnett Murphy, Art Carter, William B. Dixon, Jeff Pickett, William “Little Willie” Adams and Dallas Nicholas - descended upon all-White Mount Pleasant golf course. They were rebuffed by a man described by the AFRO in June 1942 as “solemn-faced William H. Tudor,” and he told the golfers, “I can’t sell Colored players tickets to play here. I have my orders.” Black golfers had their orders, also. Now it was time to take this battle that had already meandered for eight years to court. Arnett Murphy (head of advertising at the AFRO) was the plaintiff in state
As reported in the AFRO 1942
Photo courtesy Askew W. Gatewood, Jr.
GOOD FELLAS. This extraordinary meeting took place at Little Willie’s Inn circa 1938. Among those pictured are Joe Louis (standing third from left ), “Little Willie” Adams (just over Louis’ left shoulder), D. Arnett Murphy (with glasses, partially obscured), Linwood Koger (seated far left) and Askew Gatewood, Sr. (seated far right). the small number of players might, for instance, be found upon inquiry to be adequate for them,” the Court of Appeals ruled in 1943. Undeterred, Nicholas and the Black golfers kept agitating. After the Court of Appeals’ decision, they struck an agreement that would upgrade the golf facilities at Carroll Park, and while the improvements were being made, Black golfers would have temporary unrestricted access to the other city courses. By 1945, after renovations were completed, Black golfers were herded back to Carroll Park. Two years later, in 1947, Charles Law, a prominent Black mortician and avid golfer, sued for a ban of segregation on the links. His legal counsel included two more familiar faces, Charles Houston, the famed former special counsel to the NAACP, and W.A.C. Hughes, the NAACP’s lead counsel in Maryland and the lead attorney for the Colored teachers’ pay victory in Anne Arundel County in 1939. In 1948, once again Carroll Park was ruled not equal to other City courses. This time the ruling was made by Judge Calvin Chesnut (who presided over the Colored teachers’ pay victory). He ordered the board to give Black golfers some access to other courses, but he left the specifics of the remedy in the hands of the board. What they decided was Blacks could play at Mount Pleasant on Tuesdays, Clifton Park on Wednesdays, Forest Park on Thursdays and Carroll Park on Mondays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays. Finally, in 1951 Nicholas, the Black golfers and Black Baltimore got the big win they all sought for so long when the board voted to allow all golfers unrestricted access to all courses. “We couldn’t conceive too well of a change, because the change was so slow. But we didn’t give up because we had some strong people back then,” said Ms. Adams. Little Willie Adams’ memories of that epic fight and his own mythic life have begun to melt away with the onset of age and illness. But Victorine Adams’ memories of Colored Baltimore still sparkle in her voice. Memories of blossoming Black power, the great Joe Louis and her beloved husband when they first met and fell in love. Then, on warm summer days discovered their love of golf. “I still love the game and I still love to watch it. I won one little trophy about three inches high, and I love it to death. I just enjoyed being out in the air and mingling with people,” said Ms. Adams.
“I HAVE MY ORDERS.” In June 1942, William H. Tudor was the man on the hot seat when several Black golfers (L-R, Marie Murphy, D. Arnett Murphy, Art Carver and Willie Dixon) led by attorney Dallas Nicholas sparked a confrontation at all-White Mount Pleasant Golf Course. Days later, the Black golfers would sue to desegregate all City golf courses. The AFRO covered the golf course controversy from the beginning in 1934 to the end in 1951. court, Dallas Nicholas was the lawyer and there was a familiar face presiding over the case. Eugene O’Dunne, the judge who in 1935 ordered the University of Maryland Law School to admit Donald Gaines Murray, ruled on the first round of the golf case. O’Dunne ordered the jury to simply consider if the Carroll Park golf course was equal with the other city courses. It was clear in the eyes of the jury that a nine-hole course could not be equal to an 18-hole course. So, once again, O’Dunne awarded Blacks a victory when he ordered the parks board to permit Black golfers to play at all city courses without restriction. Yet, once again, Nicholas and the other golfers were slapped down, this time at the appellate level, when O’Dunne’s decision was reversed. “Segregation is within the power and discretion of the board. Nine holes for
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The Road to Brown
A community’s dreams come true when we dream together.
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Enoch Pratt
Blacks from the program. The exclusion of Blacks from the training program didn’t go unnoticed. On April 18, 1933, the NAACP’s City Wide Young People’s Forum, a group of young Black political activists, whose membership at one time included Juanita Jackson, Clarence Mitchell Jr. and young Thurgood Marshall, delivered a petition with 5,000 signatures to Baltimore Mayor Howard Jackson and the Board of Estimates. They hoped to stop the city from funding the Pratt because the institution practiced racial discrimination in admission to the
the free library for everyone
Like the golf course case, the Enoch Pratt Free Library case could be characterized as a “detour on the road to Brown.” In 1928, the Pratt created a training class for librarians. But Blacks were banned from this class in direct contradiction to the mandate of the library’s founder, Enoch Pratt, that the library should be available to all, “without distinction of race or color,” as he had written in 1884. The real significance of the case (that resulted in a victory in 1945) was that it attacked the nuances of “separate but equal,” preventing governments from “exiting” the road to Brown by shifting its responsibilities to individuals or private corporations.
By Sean Yoes AFRO Staff Writer In October 1884, Enoch Pratt, a philanthropist from Boston, wrote a letter formally transferring the management of the Enoch Pratt Free Library to his “adopted” city of Baltimore. In that letter Pratt made some specific statements about the library’s use. “These, I think, are all accessible to the people who, I hope, will avail of the advantages it is my wish to offer them, they being for all, rich and poor, without distinction of race or color, who, when properly accredited, can take out the books, if they will handle them carefully and return them,” wrote Pratt. Pratt’s vision of his library, “being for all, rich and poor, without distinction of race or color,” seems to have been fulfilled 120 years later with Dr. Carla Hayden, a Black woman, serving as the Pratt’s executive director. “It’s very important we take part in the information age, not just be the recipients of information, but in the dissemination and creation of that information. It’s important to have people of color involved in that,” said Dr. Hayden. Under Dr. Hayden’s leadership, people of color are integral and abundant in the operation of the Pratt, one of the nation’s most important libraries. There was a time, however, when the leadership of the Enoch Pratt Free Library resisted mightily the participation of Blacks in the library’s operation. Enoch Pratt Free Library, the trustees being advised that there are Colored persons now available with adequate training for the library employment have given the librarian authority to employ such personnel where vacancies occur in a branch or branches with an established record for preponderant Colored use,” wrote Thomas Cullen, president, board of library trustees. Then, on April 23, 1943, almost 10 years to the day that the Young People’s Forum delivered their petition to City Hall, Louise Kerr a 27-year-old Baltimore City schoolteacher and daughter of Dr. T. Henderson Kerr, a prominent Black pharmacist, applied for admission to the training program. In accordance with their policy banning Blacks, the Pratt trustees rejected her application. Again, Cullen, the president of the Pratt trustees, wrote a letter in response to Kerr’s desire to be admitted to the training program and again the board’s intolerance of the situation seemed evident. “At the present time, there are no openings or vacancies among those positions filled by, or available for, members of the Colored race. Under these circumstances, and since no opening as librarian on the staff of the Pratt library is, in the immediate future, available, the admission of Miss Kerr to the library training course, and her work in that course, could result only in an unhappy and unprofitable waste of her time,” wrote Cullen on July 7, 1943. The letter was addressed to W.A.C. Hughes, the NAACP’s lead counsel in Maryland. On Oct. 5, 1943, Hughes, along with the venerable Charles Houston (who with Thurgood Marshall orchestrated the landmark Murray victory in 1935, among others), filed on behalf of the Kerrs against the Library Corporation, its
The winning of the library case proves again the effectiveness of the courts as a weapon in the fight for constitutional rights. It also places a blazing question mark behind the tenets of our so-called democracy, where the Colored man must fight for those opportunities that are justly his as an American citizen.
training program. In May 1933, Mayor Jackson wrote W.A.C. Hughes, attorney for the City Wide Young People’s Forum, “I have taken a position in favor of Negroes taking the library training course. I shall immediately take up the matter again with the Pratt library authorities.” However, the Pratt trustees didn’t budge from their position and funding for the library from the city continued. In September 1942, the NAACP announced it would seek legal action to end the racially biased admission policy of the Pratt’s training program. The library trustees responded to this with a resolution: “Resolved, that is it unnecessary and impracticable to admit Colored persons to the training class of the
“UNNECESSARY AND IMPRACTICABLE...” In 1928, the Enoch Pratt Free Library established a training class for librarians. In direct contrast to the founder’s spirit of inclusion in the establishment of the library, however, the Pratt’s board of trustees banned
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The Road to Brown
nine trustees individually, the head librarian, the mayor and the City Council of Baltimore. Specifically, Houston and Hughes sought an injunction and damages for Louise Kerr against the library performing as a government entity, claiming she was excluded from the training program because of her race and denied equal protection guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. District Court Judge W. Calvin Chesnut, who begrudgingly handed Blacks victories in the equal pay for Colored teachers’ case in Anne Arundel County in 1939 as well as the golf case in Baltimore City in 1948 presided over the Kerr library case. But, this time Blacks were defeated in Chesnut’s courtroom. On March 7, 1944, Judge Chesnut dismissed Kerr’s case, citing that her being denied admission to the training program was not a state action, but that of a private corporation. However, Hughes and Houston filed their appeal of the Chesnut ruling and on April 17, 1945, Judge Morris Soper and two other judges on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Chesnut’s decision. Judge Soper decided that the library
Oct. 1945 As reported in the AFRO
was a public agency and was subject to the parameters of the Constitution, including the 14th Amendment. He specifically cited that the Pratt received a total of $858,346.90 from the city in 1944 and that library employees were paid using a municipal employees’ pay scale and were included in the municipal employees’ retirement system, supporting his argument that the library was a public agency. Judge Soper also alluded to the vision of Enoch Pratt when he founded the library, “for all, rich and poor, without distinction of race or color,” wrote Pratt in 1884. In Judge Soper’s opinion, Louise Kerr was excluded from the training program because of her race, citing the rejection of more than 200 other Black applicants, and this discrimination based on race was not in the spirit of Enoch Pratt’s vision. The Pratt Library appealed Judge Soper’s reversal and sought relief from the U.S. Supreme Court. But in October 1945, the Supreme Court refused to hear the library case, upholding the decision of the Fourth District Court and giving the Kerrs and the NAACP the victory. “The winning of the library case proves again the effectiveness of the courts as a weapon in the fight for constitutional rights. It also places a blazing question mark behind the tenets of our so-called democracy, where the Colored
man must fight for those opportunities that are justly his as an American citizen,” stated Louise Kerr in the AFRO shortly after the win. However, neither Kerr nor any other Black applicant entered the training pro-
gram. The Pratt shut down the librarian training class, alleging a lack of funds. “The disputed Enoch Pratt Library training class, which for the past 15 Continued on page 26
VICTORIOUS. After the win in October 1945 the “jubilant” party, (from left to right) Dr. T. Henderson Kerr and wife, Charles Houston, Louise Kerr and W.A.C. Hughes stand outside of the Enoch Pratt Free Library on Cathedral Street.
A BIG WIN. The AFRO provided wall-to-wall coverage of the Kerr/NAACP victory over the Pratt Library in October 1945. The AFRO even included a photo of the solemn, all-White, allmale Supreme Court.
The Road to Brown
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Continued from page 25 years has been conducted to train librarians, will not open in September due to the lack of funds,” reported the AFRO in 1945. So, the battle was won in the courts, but in the chess game of reality, the pragmatic move of “lack of funds” permitted the racism of the Baltimore establishment culture to once again prevail in denying Kerr and hundreds of others the opportunity they sought. DETOUR ON THE ROAD TO BROWN
Like the 17-year battle to desegregate Baltimore City’s golf courses described earlier in this series, the Kerr library case could be characterized as not being part of the “main road to Brown,” but perhaps more like a “detour.” “What it [the library case] did was block an escape route from Brown,” said Larry S. Gibson, professor of law at the University of Maryland. “It prevented state and local governments from transferring government functions to private corporations [e.g., the Pratt Library] as a means of avoiding constitutional obligations of government. That’s big, and the case is cited all over the country for this.” Charles Houston clearly saw the importance of the library case as well. After the Kerr victory, Houston spoke on the significance of the case in the AFRO on Oct. 13, 1945. “I think it [the Kerr case] is an extension of the University of Maryland [Donald Murray] case on equality of educational opportunities. The Murray case establishes that the state must offer equal educational opportunities to all persons regardless of race, creed or color. The Kerr case shows that the state cannot dodge this responsibility by setting up a private corporation to offer education through public facilities and with public money for benefits restricted to Whites only,” said Houston.
INTOLERANCE. Thomas Cullen and his Board of Pratt Library Trustees never budged on their position of no Blacks in the Training Program. When they finally lost the court battle they shut down the Training Program citing, “lack of funds,” rather than admitting Blacks. Note the language of the resolution dismissing even the possibility of a “Colored person” working at the “White library.”
OLD BOY NETWORK. In 1933 Baltimore Mayor Howard Jackson told W.A.C. Hughes he wanted to see Blacks in the Pratt Training Program and that he would speak to the Trustees concerning the matter. Ten years later, “cunning” Cullen laid down the law to the Mayor and then with mock humility thanked him for all the money the City, “accorded the Enoch Pratt Free Library.” 26
LEADERSHIP. Dr. Carla Hayden, the Pratt’s second AfricanAmerican executive director and the fourth African-American president of the American Library Association, is perhaps the embodiment of Enoch Pratt’s founding vision of an all-inclusive institution.
The Road to Brown
Fighting for
Freedom on the Courts
Voluntary integration — not allowed
A few years after the Pratt Library case and during the protracted golf course conflict, an unprecedented demonstration on the clay tennis courts of historic Druid Hill Park took place. Blacks and Whites protested together the policy of segregation of the city’s recreational facilities. (Tennis players, golfers and basketball players would all come together later in a lawsuit to desegregate Baltimore’s courts and courses.) The 1948 demonstration was the first time in Maryland that Blacks and Whites argued that Jim Crow laws hurt both groups.
By Sean Yoes AFRO Staff Writer Many of Baltimore’s Black and White amateur athletes battled to play together back in the 1940’s in a city and a country that was determined to legally keep them separate. It was early in the morning on July 11, 1948, and 18year-old Mitzi Freishtat, a young, White tennis enthusiast was wired. “I was very nervous. I got the permit in the morning around 8 or 9 a.m. and I was like a jumping jack, running all over the place,” she said almost 56 years later, excitement still in her voice. “But once we got to the park, I lost my nervousness. It was a mission I knew what I was doing and we knew we were right,” she recalled with conviction. The events that continue to stir emotion in the heart of the woman who is now Mitzi Swan surround the fabled clay courts that existed for decades near Auchentoroly Terrace at venerable Druid Hill Park. Legend has it that the late, great Arthur Ashe once played there as a teen amateur, but on that July 11, the courts were not the site of an athletic competition, but a political protest. “The Young Progressives of Maryland are planning a tennis outing at Druid Hill Park on Sunday, July 11. As you probably know, membership in the Young Progressives is open to all regardless of race, color or creed. We have been advised by legal opinion that there is no law providing for segregation on the tennis courts. Our members are desirous of playing tennis on the basis of ability and not on the basis of color. It is in the best tradition of Maryland fair play that athletics be based solely upon the consideration of sportsmanship and ability,” wrote Stan Askin, director of the Young Progressives of Maryland on July 3, 1948, to Harold Callowhill, superintendent of the Bureau of Recreation and Parks. Five days later, Askin received the response he was looking for. “I regret that I cannot comply with your request because the Board of Recreation and Parks rules that there shall be segregation. Until such time as that rule is rescinded, I shall have to abide by it,” wrote Charles Hook, superintendent of parks. So, the stage was set for the confrontation that the Young Progressives - the younger component of the Progressive Party, a far-left political organization with alleged communist ties - were looking for. “We told everyone what we were doing, the police, the newspapers... It was a planned demonstration,” said Swan. In fact, the Young Progressives sent out a flyer containing what some would call inflammatory language. “KILL JIM CROW!” “DEMAND YOUR Continued on page 28
James Crockett
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Continued from page 27 RIGHTS!” “Organize to smash discrimination in recreational facilities,” read the flyer’s top three lines. The organization’s efforts worked. Hundreds came out to the clay courts at Druid Hill Park on that sparkling summer Sunday. Anticipation was heavy in the air, like the humidity. Around two o’clock in the afternoon, Mitzi Freishat, Mary Coffee, Jeanette Fino and Gloria Stewart lined up on one court. Others lined up on another court. But before a ball could hit the clay, Baltimore park police who were staggered along a hillside, waiting - swooped in and broke up the demonstration. “We all got arrested and the whole crowd erupted. They were singing ‘America, My Country ‘Tis of
Thee’ and the Negro National Anthem. It was very stirring,” said Swan. In all, 22 people, Black and White, were arrested and charged with rioting, conspiracy to riot or disturbing the public peace. Seven demonstrators were convicted of those charges. However, their actions were more far reaching than a simple act of civil disobedience. “This case demonstrated that Jim Crow laws restricted the freedom of all citizens, Black and White,” said Larry S. Gibson, professor of law at the University of Maryland. “It was the first case in Maryland when Blacks and Whites together initiated a lawsuit alleging that both groups’ rights were being violated by Jim Crow laws,” said Gibson.
Indeed, other groups joined the Young Progressives to challenge the rule of law, which was segregation on Baltimore’s recreational courts and courses. “WE HAD A VERY GOOD TEAM.” In 1948, James Crockett was a 23-year-old co-manager and co-owner — along with Phillip Boyer — of “The Easterwood Professionals,” an interracial basketball team in Baltimore. Having a team with Blacks and Whites in the 1940s presented significant challenges. “We could only play on courts that would allow interracial sports, like Catholic schools and synagogues,” recalled Crockett, who for decades has been a successful Baltimore businessman. However, the department of recreation operated the vast majority of basketball courts in Baltimore City, thus restricting the team’s venues at home, although the team competed in Annapolis, Washington and Pennsylvania. Nevertheless, in 1948, Boyer and Crockett helped spark Boyer v. Garrett, which sought to desegregate recreational facilities in Baltimore, along with two golfers, one Black and one White (described earlier in the “Battle for the Links,” segment of the Signature Series), as well as the Young Progressives. The first stage of the case began September of that year, with the attorneys for the plaintiffs perhaps foreshadowing today’s modern legal “dream teams.” They were I. Duke Avnet a leading civil rights attorney who defended Baltimore labor unions, Edgar Paul Boyko, William H. Murphy Sr. one of the first Black students to enter the University of Maryland Law School, Robert P. Watts one of the first Black Circuit Court Judges, Milton B. Allen the first Black elected state’s attorney for Baltimore City and Dallas F. Nicholas, who represented the Monumental Golf Club
MENCKEN’S LAST STAND
In what was said to be his last column, which appeared in the Baltimore Evening Sun November 9, 1948 H.L. Mencken, one of the most controversial newspapermen of the 20th century, took on the tennis court controversy. Yet, Mencken’s position (many characterized him as racist, anti-Semitic, etc.) shocked some. “That’s why I was so surprised when Mencken’s article came out. He was such a cynical person,” said Mitzi Swan. Mencken began his column by describing the events of July 11, 1948 when Blacks and Whites were arrested for attempting to play an interracial tennis match. Later in his column Mencken attacked the Baltimore City Park Board for upholding the ban on interracial play, “Certainly it is astounding to find so much of the Georgia Cracker surviving in the Maryland Free State, and under official auspices,” he wrote. Furthermore, he argued both Black and White taxpayers support the public parks. He concluded the matter emphatically when he wrote, “The Park Board rule is irrational and nefarious. It should be got rid of forthwith.”
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The Road to Brown
in its 17-year battle with Baltimore City (also described in the Battle for the Links). For Boyer v. Garrett, once again there was a familiar presence presiding. Judge W. Calvin Chesnut was the district court judge who ruled on the teachers’ pay case in 1938, as well as delivering a decision in the lengthy golf course case. In Boyer v. Garrett, Judge Chesnut seemed to concentrate on Plessy v. Ferguson, the constitutional law of the land that had established “separate, but equal” in 1898. Accordingly, he cited that Maryland law at the time recognized segregation as permissible. Ironically, perhaps, Judge Chesnut cited Murray v. University of Maryland in 1935: “Equality of treatment does not require that privileges be provided members of the two races in the same place. The state may choose the method by which equality is maintained.” In January 1950, Judge Chesnut ruled in favor of the Department of Recreation and Parks and in August of that year, the plaintiffs lost on appeal. “If the players had sued then, the court would have rendered a different decision,” said James Crockett, reflecting back over 50 years. The Easterwood Professionals disbanded the same year they lost the appeal. In 1948, the Young Progressives “sort of fell apart after the 1948 election,” said Mitzi Swan. Yet Swan, who served for many years as executive director of the Maryland Conference of Social Concern, seems to have maintained her sense of agitation over social injustice after all these decades. “We knew we did a significant thing. I still have the same spirit as before, I just don’t have the body, but I don’t let that kind of stuff get me down.”
As reported in the 1948 AFRO
As reported in the 1948 AFRO
FIGHT THE POWER. Young Progressives flyer announcing the tennis court demonstration.
The Road to Brown
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E
By Sean Yoes AFRO Staff Writer
nding
xile
ducation in Maryland
knew I was going to be all right. We became friends.” McCready said, with a laugh. However, there wasn’t much to laugh about in 1949 when McCready was refused admission to Maryland’s School of Nursing. “The General Assembly of Maryland (Laws of 1949, Chapter 282), in its session last winter, authorized the State of Maryland to enter into a compact with certain other states relating to the development and maintenance of regional educational services and schools in the professional, technological, scientific, literary and other fields. This compact applies to both white and Negro students. The State of Maryland has already sent to the University of Georgia, under this compact arrangement, ten white students to study veterinary medicine. Arrangements have been made whereby the Meharry Medical College at Nashville, Tennessee, has become a compact institution to which the signatory states will send students for Medical, Dental and Nursing education. Therefore, in accordance with the State policy established by the Legislature, you will be authorized to study Nursing at the Meharry Medical College,” wrote Edgar F. Long, director of admissions for the University of Maryland on August 13, 1949. The “compact” that Long alluded to in his letter to McCready was “The Regional Compact,” an agreement that the State of Maryland entered into with 13 other southern states in 1949. The Regional Compact was created allegedly to provide education in the technological, scientific and literary fields for all people of the member states
Although the road to Brown had detoured slightly with the golf, tennis and library cases, education was still the NAACP’s primary focus in its fight for desegregation. After the initial Murray victory in 1935 that integrated the University of Maryland, only a handful of Blacks trickled through the school’s doors, until 1950. That was the year the NAACP successfully sued Maryland’s flagship university, forcing it to admit several Black students into the schools of nursing, pharmacy, engineering and medicine.
Sparkling sunshine filters through the office window of Larry Gibson, professor of law at the University of Maryland, on the second day of spring. Yet on this day, the sun is deceptive because it feels more like the second day of winter. Nevertheless, Ester McCready has made the trip from New York to Baltimore on this blustery day to be inducted into the Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame. But first she reminisces in Prof. Gibson’s office and he is mesmerized by her total recall of people and events from over 50 years ago, when McCready became the first African-American woman to enroll in the University of Maryland’s school of nursing. Her crystal clear recollection of first and last names, conversations and dates is stunning, but there is something else, her hands. Ester McCready is 73 years old, but her hands tell a different story, no blotches, no wrinkles, just smooth, supple skin, perhaps similar to the hands of the young woman who entered the University of Maryland in 1950. “On my first day, I was standing by the elevator and this R.N. said, ‘If you don’t pray to God, you won’t get out of here, because nobody here is supporting you.’ I looked her right in the eye and I said, ‘If God intends for me to get out of here, nobody can stop me,’” recalled McCready. “She said to me later that when I said that, she
Houston’s last stand.
Charles Hamilton Houston was “one of the greatest constitutional lawyers in America,” according to the AFRO in April 1950. Indeed, Houston was one of the most important - if not well-known - figures of the 20th century civil rights movement in the U.S. But, not just because of what he accomplished in the courtroom helping to lay down the foundation for the landmark Brown decision in 1954, but outside the courtroom, where he was an advocate and an intellectual articulating the argument for equality. As he lay on his sickbed in the Bethesda Naval Hospital in 1950, Ester McCready and Donald Murray were the first to bring Houston the news of the appeals victory. Houston allegedly said to McCready, “You’re the last of the Mohicans,” perhaps a reference to his last case, his last victory. He died of a heart attack about two weeks later.
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The Road to Brown
As reported in the 1950 AFRO
“regardless of race.” Yet, many found the motives of the compact dubious at best. “The McCready case exposed and began to unravel the conspiracy that the governors of the 14 states had engaged in to limit the professional school options of its Black citizens. The only people required to go out of state when their state had a program were Blacks,” said Gibson. “Blacks were forced to go to the Regional Compact school that would accept them, i.e. the Black school. This was the grand scheme of all of those states to meet their obligations of separate, but equal.” The reality for Ester McCready was that she lived on Dallas Street in Baltimore City and had no desire to travel to Tennessee to go to nursing school when there was a quality institution in her home state. So the stage was set. Even before the University of Maryland had made the Meharry offer to McCready the decision was made to file law suits to desegregate the school of nursing as well as six other professional schools at the university, the schools of pharmacy, dentistry, engineering,
home economics, medicine and sociology. Once again the NAACP came forward to represent the plaintiffs, led by Charles Houston, the association’s venerable special counsel, and an ironic figure in the University of Maryland equation, Donald Murray. Murray, who at the time of the McCready trial was an attorney practicing in Baltimore and legal counsel with the NAACP, had been the first Black to enter the University of Maryland’s law school in 1935. It was the first school desegregation victory for Black America. The McCready lawsuit, a petition for a writ of mandamus, was filed on July 27, 1949, in the District Court of Baltimore City. Chief Judge W. Conwell Smith presided over the case. Essentially, Houston argued that McCready’s qualifications were equivalent, if not superior, to the White students admitted to the school. Houston argued the only reason she was not admitted was because of her color. However, Judge Smith sided with the University of Maryland. He decided that there was nothing dubious
about the Regional Compact and indeed it was made in good faith. Smith wrote, “that the State in offering the training at Meharry has discharged its obligation in this single case and that the training offered is substantially equal, if not superior, to the training at the University of Maryland School of Nursing, and for that reason, the petition for the writ of mandamus should be denied.” Houston and Murray filed notice of appeal for the McCready case on Oct. 21, 1949, and the formal appeal was filed on Jan. 16, 1950. However, the team representing McCready was forced to make a change because Charles Houston had taken ill shortly after Judge Conwell’s decision. So, now Donald Murray was teamed once again with the man who had escorted him through the doors of the University of Maryland law school in 1935, Thurgood Marshall. In the McCready appeal they cited the Murray case, arguing that the decision that allowed him to enter the University of Maryland law school should be applicaContinued on page 32
The Road to Brown
31
Continued from page 31 ble to all public education. Marshall argued that White students were being given the full protection of the State of Maryland in their educational endeavors, while Ester McCready was being exiled from the state to seek her education. The Court of Appeals agreed with Marshall and Murray on April 15, 1950. Judge Charles Markell, a University of Maryland law school graduate, wrote: “Manifestly, the obligation of the State to give the protection of equal laws can be performed only where its laws operate, that is within its own jurisdiction. It is there that the equality of legal right must be maintained.” In other words, Maryland couldn’t ship Ester McCready off to another state and dump its responsibility for educating her on that state.
As reported in the 1950 AFRO
“The McCready decision was the first case that extended the Murray decision beyond a law school. For Maryland, it ushered in the next phase in opening up the university’s professional and graduate schools,” said Professor Gibson. The McCready victory was clearly another important step for the NAACP and Black America towards the seminal Brown decision. Yet, at the core of the victory was an 18-year-old girl, Ester McCready, whose personal power and moral conviction were the glue holding the case together. Her character seems that much more profound over 50 years later as she reflects on those solitary years at the University of Maryland’s School of Nursing. But, there was at least one time when she didn’t feel quite so alone. “When I came, the only Donald Gaines Murray, the man in the middle in this photo, positions Negroes had were as was the man on the hot seat in 1935 when he became the first dietary aides in the cafeteria, Black to be admitted to the University of Maryland law school in housekeeping, orderlies or the 20th century. As an attorney, he utilized his legal education to nurses aides, that’s all. When I help usher Ester McCready through the door that he opened 15 walked into the cafeteria, years earlier. Standing with Murray are the desegregation plaintiffs those people were beaming. from left to right are Ester McCready, nursing; Richard Tyson, They were all huddled togethpharmacy; Hiram Whittle, engineering; Donald Stewart, medicine. er like `hi,’ they were so happy, they were so tickled,” said McCready. As reported in the 1950 AFRO After she graduated from the University of Maryland in 1953, McCready actually dabbled in music and teaching, but she never stopped being a nurse. In fact, as she brought forward the chapters of her life in front of Larry Gibson’s camcorder, it was unclear if she had actually retired from nursing, and perhaps that explains her youthful hands. She never stopped using them to help healing others.
The return.
As reported in the 1950 AFRO
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The Road to Brown
Breaking
University of Maryland
a legacy of
The University of Maryland’s longtime president Henry “Curly” Byrd suffered one defeat after another at the hands of the NAACP in his battle to keep Blacks out of the University of Maryland. For 15 years after the Murray case, Byrd fought mightily to keep the College Park campus all White. But when Parren Mitchell entered the university’s graduate school of sociology in 1950, Byrd’s last bastion of Whiteness at the University of Maryland was wiped out.
By Sean Yoes Baltimore AFRO Staff University’s president: “I’m watching you.” “A few days ago, I sent you a copy of a letter to Senator Melvin on his proposed bill to create scholarships for Negroes. We have received several reports that you are the sponsor of this bill as well as the general idea, and I might say it is a very logical conclusion. The entire bill is centered around the attempt of the Board of Regents of the University of Maryland to deprive Negroes of their constitutional right to attend this school. Not so long ago, it was necessary for the Negro citizens of the State of Maryland to expend large sums of money in carrying a case through to the Court of Appeals in order to have the said Board of Regents follow the constitution and the laws of the State of Maryland which they, as State officers, were bound to follow. Now it seems that the same Board of Regents through you as its representative is attempting to circumvent this decision,” wrote Marshall in a letter to Byrd on March 19, 1937. It seemed Marshall had Byrd’s “number” early on. “To say that Curly Byrd was a dyed-in-thewool segregationist would be an understatement,” said Larry S. Gibson, professor of law at the University of Maryland. “No other university in the nation had to be sued so many times in order to force it to integrate. Even after winning in court, Curly Byrd made it necessary to fight hard to secure that the Court’s order was enforced,” explained Gibson. COLLEGE PARK-THE FINAL FRONTIER Byrd’s detractors maintain that his legacy is linked to the segregationist imagery of Alabama Governor George Wallace standing in front of the door of an Alabama schoolhouse in an attempt to Continued on page 34
Intolerance
“Hille: Don’t register any Negro students until I talk with you. CB”
(Henry C.“Curly” Byrd)
This was the post-script of a letter dated July 15, 1935, to W.M. Hillegeist, registrar of the University of Maryland, from Henry Clifton “Curly” Byrd, then acting president of the university (reported in the Signature Series May 29, 2003-Dec. 5, 2003). Byrd had recently taken the helm of the university and this was perhaps his first covert mandate: “Don’t register any Negro students until I talk with you.” Byrd’s order to Hillegeist was in direct defiance of the court order of Judge Eugene O’Dunne to admit Donald Murray, the first Black to enter the school, the first school desegregation victory for Black America in the fall of 1935. It may have been Byrd’s first edict, but history indicates that keeping Blacks out of the University of Maryland was a crusade he conducted for more than 20 years. Byrd’s primary opponent in the battle to keep Blacks out of College Park was arguably Thurgood Marshall who, at the start of his legendary legal career, represented Murray in his victory to enter the University of Maryland in 1935. Yet even after Murray’s victory at the trial level and his subsequent appellate victory, Marshall sent a letter to Byrd with an enduring message for the
KEEPING BYRD CAGED. Some would say Thurgood Marshall waged a somewhat personal battle to subdue the segregationist machinations of Curly Byrd, the president of the University of Maryland. On the same day he wrote Byrd, he fired off another letter to Harry Nice, the governor of Maryland, warning him that the NAACP was prepared to fight. Note the last line of Marshall’s letter to Nice on page 35.
The Road to Brown
33
Continued from page 33 stop Black children from entering Alabama public schools on June 11, 1963. Just as Wallace was defeated in 1963, Byrd had suffered several defeats in court at the hands of the NAACP’s lead counsel of Marshall and Charles Houston. Still, he fought tenaciously to maintain the University of Maryland’s last bastion of total Whiteness, the College Park campus. From 1935 to 1950, Black students trickled into the school seemingly every other year or so, yet none had entered the doors of College Park until Parren Mitchell sued to enter Maryland’s School of Sociology on Aug. 15, 1950. Mitchell, who in 1970 became the first Black congressman from Maryland, has been slowed in recent years by a series of strokes, but his mind is still sharp and he clearly remembers Curly Byrd. “I had no direct contact with him, but all that I heard was that he was a terrible person, a bigot of the first order, no sympathy no kindness in his heart,” said Mitchell. Although Mitchell did not deal directly with Byrd, he did have a meeting with Dr. Ronald Bramford, acting dean of Maryland’s graduate school, before the
BREAKING DOWN THE DOORS. Thurgood Marshall, at left, and Donald Murray, second from right, fought in the courts to help open the doors of the University of Maryland to Blacks. Marshall and Murray stand with several of the University of Maryland plaintiffs, including Ester McCready, nursing; Linwood Koger; Donald Stewart, medicine; Hiram Whittle, engineering; Richard Tyson, pharmacy; Earl Koger; and on the far right is Mitchell, sociology. legal hearings began. Dr. Bramford advised Mitchell that the master’s course in sociology would be offered to him, but not on the College Park campus. He would have had to pursue his Master’s in Baltimore on a part-time basis. In fact, Dr. Bramford admitted this fact to NAACP attorneys during a deposition about a week prior to the Mitchell hearing for writ of mandamus that would open the doors of College Park to him. “The policy now at the University of Maryland is to keep colored students off the campus at College Park by admitting them to courses in the university’s Baltimore schools... Dr. Ronald Bramford, acting dean of the graduate school, stated that Dr. H.C. Byrd, university president, gave the instructions to approve Mr. Mitchell’s application for the Baltimore school rather than College Park. Dr. Byrd, according to the dean, commented at the time that it was ‘inadvisable’ for Mr. Mitchell to come to College Park,” wrote the AFRO on Sept. 23, 1950. Mitchell was represented by Marshall, somewhat in an advisory position, Donald Murray, the first Black Maryland graduate who would later become legal counsel for the NAACP, and by Robert Carter another superstar attorney of his day who actually made the final argument in the landmark 1954 Brown case. Carter did most of the “heavy lifting” in the Mitchell case. Baltimore City Court Judge John Tucker presided over the hearing and
Stewart: ‘I expected to be accepted.’
“Since high school, my goal was to be a dentist. The people who seemed to be the movers and shakers were the dentists,” said Dr. Donald Stewart, M.D., in a conversation with Larry S. Gibson, professor of law at the University of Maryland. As he moved from high school to Morgan College in October 1950, Stewart made a discovery. “I was fascinated by the human body,” he said, which sparked his interest in medicine. Yet, he went forward with his original plans and applied to the University of Maryland School of Dentistry and, like every other Black who had applied to that school, he received his letter of rejection. “I went to the NAACP,” said Dr. Stewart, going directly to Thurgood Marshall to take legal action. “I went to him with the rejection and Marshall said ‘apply to the medical school,’” explained Dr. Stewart. The University of Maryland sent Stewart a letter that essentially said, “If you drop your legal actions against the dental school, we’ll accept you in medical school.” Because the medical school was in Baltimore City, perhaps this suggestion was another attempt by Curly Byrd to preserve the Whiteness of the College Park campus. “After an inordinate wait, I got accepted,” said Dr. Stewart. But when he entered medical school, he discovered his was not the only face of color in his class. “I had all these problems getting in, then, on the first day, much to my surprise, I notice there’s another African American. [The other African American was Roderick Charles who went on to become a psychiatrist.] They gave me this hard way to get in and on the first day, there were two of us,” said Dr Stewart. Much like Ester McCready, who integrated the University of Maryland’s School of Nursing in 1951, Dr. Stewart - after decades of practicing medicine in Baltimore maintains a dignity and grace that may have rebuked any overt racism during his time at the state’s flagship institution of higher education. “I know some people don’t want to hear this. They want to hear that I went through the brimstone and hell experience. But I really did not have a lot of problems to my satisfaction,” said Dr. Stewart.
Dr. Donald Stewart, first Black medical student at the University of Maryland.
34
The Road to Brown
As reported in the 1950 AFRO
initially, that was not good news to the Mitchell camp. “He didn’t have a good reputation,” said Mitchell. In fact, Mitchell had conceded defeat before the decision was rendered. He said to Carter, “Judge Tucker is not our friend, so don’t expect any victory from him.” However, Judge Tucker’s opinion was clear, swift and stunning to many. “The unequal opportunities available to the petitioner in this case are more pronounced than those of McLaurin, the student who was involved in the aforesaid Supreme Court case. There, although he was required to sit in a specified row of seats in the classroom, he could hear all that was said by the instructor and other students. Although he was assigned to a particular table in the library, he had access to all books and other contents of the library that were available to other student... These differences in treatment were nonetheless sufficient to create a denial to McLaurin of his constitutional right of equal protection under the laws... Under the facts in the present case, there is much greater reason for the impairment of the petitioner’s ability to study, to engage in discussions and exchange of views with other students, and, in general, to learn his profession than there was for the impairment of McLaurin’s ability to do those things,” wrote Judge Tucker. What the judge was saying in essence was although McLaurin was segregated from his classmates he at least was permitted to attend classes on the University of Oklahoma campus. In contrast, Mitchell was not being allowed to even come to College Park. Thus, he wouldn’t have had access to the same education as his White counterparts. “It was just like a thunderbolt, his [Tucker’s] decision,” remembered Mitchell. Mitchell also remembered those days of profound isolation on the College Park campus of 1950 after his victory allowed him to enter the school. “From the entrance of the campus to the back of the cafeteria it was a long walk. The cafeteria was a huge place and every table I passed just went quiet. It was just very lonely,” said the former congressman. Despite his solitary experience, however, Mitchell graduated from the University of Maryland with his master’s in sociology, a straight-A average and induction into the Phi Kappa Phi Society, the school’s highest honor society. The rest of his career in public service is the substance legends are made of. As for Curly Byrd, he left the University of Maryland shortly after Mitchell graduated and in 1954 ran for governor of Maryland. The University of Maryland’s own biographical information about Byrd suggests he ran on a segregationist platform. He lost.
The Road to Brown
35
On the
By Sean Yoes AFRO Staff Writer The battle to integrate three Baltimore high schools took place in the shadow of the landmark Brown decision in 1954.
brink of
As the road to Brown was coming to an end in 1954, Maryland continued to play a significant role in the battle for school desegregation. In 1952, the integration of Baltimore’s Polytechnic High School’s prestigious “A Course” was the first desegregation victory on the high school level in the United States. Desegregation decisions in the Western High School and Mergenthaler Vocational Technical High School cases were on hold as the nation waited for the Supreme Court’s decision in the landmark Brown case.
over the University of Maryland in 1935, the first school desegregation victory in the country, the NAACP chipped away at separate, but equal. Many of those precedent-setting cases took place in Maryland, and established the foundation for the Brown decision. From 1952 to 1954, while the nation’s focus shifted to Brown, Maryland still played an important supporting role in the final stage of smashing separate, but equal. OPENING UP THE “A” COURSE In 1952, the prestigious A Course at Polytechnic Institute High School was the college preparatory gem of the Baltimore City Public School System. It included courses that would enable male high school graduates to enter college with sophomore status. However, it was only available to Whites. Thus, Poly was the perfect target for the NAACP’s onslaught against segregated schools. There was clearly nothing equal to the A Course for Black students, and this was the dilemma facing the Baltimore City school board. The Baltimore branch of the NAACP assembled 16 elite Black students to apply for the ninth grade A Course. Once the Black students applied, city school superintendent Dr. William H. Lemmel decided that 10 of them were definitely qualified and three were probably qualified to enter the A Course. The other three had already completed the ninth and 10th grades in junior high school, so Dr. Lemmel said they probably wouldn’t benefit from repeating course work just to qualify for the A Course. Nevertheless, the school board faced this question: Would it be possible to create an A Course for Black students at Douglass High School equal to the Poly A Course? On Sept. 2, 1952 the city school board held a special meeting to resolve the matter. The meeting lasted about four hours and individuals for and against creating an A Course at Douglass spoke. Speaking first, Dr. Lemmel asserted that the school board could provide the same curriculum and instruction comparable to the Poly A Course at Douglass. He conceded, however, that Douglass was overcrowded. Earlier in the summer Dr. Lemmel, in a letter, had admitted it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to reproduce the specialized equipment that was such an integral part of Poly’s A Course at Douglass. The last speaker in the meeting was Thurgood Marshall, NAACP counsel, who was one of the main litigants in the landmark Brown case. With Charles Houston as his mentor, Marshall was one of the architects of the legal strategy that provided the foundation for the pending Brown decision. As a native Baltimorean and as a graduate of Douglass High School, Marshall may have felt he had a personal stake in the case for him to appear at a school board meeting at the time of the most important case (Brown) of his career. He argued that the board simply had to provide the Black applicants equal educational opportunities. He also said the Douglass option was a “gamble” ... and “a gamble is not what I consider equality.” At the end of the meeting, a majority of the school board - five members -
Brown
voted that Douglass could not provide an equal educational opportunity for the A Course applicants, so they would be admitted specifically to Poly’s A Course curriculum (full integration of Poly came after the Brown decision). Although the integration of the Poly A Course did not come as the result of litigation, it was significant because it was the first school desegregation victory in the United States below the Mason-Dixon line at the high school level. It was a different situation for Baltimore’s Western High School. Twenty-four Black girls who were “qualified” to enter Western - as determined by Dr. John Fischer, superintendent of Baltimore City schools - were denied admission to the elite school in 1953. The board’s action - rather, inaction - in the case of the Western applicants sparked legal action by the NAACP, but the legal outcome of the Western case stayed in limbo until after the Brown decision in 1954. Western, an all-girl school known as Poly’s “sister school,” like Poly was a prestigious all-White high school. Also like Poly, the main reason Western was so coveted was its college preparatory curriculum, which afforded college credits for Western’s graduates, and, again like in the Poly case, there was no Black school with a comparable curriculum. This was important to many Black families, who had aspirations for their daughters to attend college. One of those families was the family of W.A.C. Hughes, the NAACP’s lead counsel in Maryland. His daughter, Alfreda Hughes, was among the first Black students admitted to the school in
“The Association does not intend to endorse the principle of segregation; but to fight segregation by making it so expensive to the State that there will be a disposition on the part of the taxpayer to do away with it.”
— Charles Houston, the NAACP’s special counsel in a 1934 memorandum. This strategy was still at the core of the NAACP’s struggle for equality in education for Blacks in 1954, 20 years after Houston wrote about it and four years after his death in 1950. Led by Houston and Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP kept pointing out the inequality of the nation’s educational system from the college to the elementary school level, reducing the law of the land of separate, but equal to a fallacy. “Houston believed that the way to destroy separate was to make it impracticable, make it too expensive and too troublesome,” says Larry S. Gibson, professor of law at the University of Maryland. This is where Black America stood at the threshold of the seminal 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kan., decision. For 20 years after the Murray win
36
The Road to Brown
the fall of 1954, after the Brown decision. “My father was elated, and my mother. That’s when he made the move to take me up to Western. They were all elated. It was a victory won,” remembers Alfreda Hughes, who says her father took her to the school himself to enroll her. But her memories of that first day of school are not good ones. “What I remember was the English teacher and French teacher. They didn’t like us very much. They didn’t like the fact that we were there,” says Hughes. “I gave her [English teacher] a smile and she gave me a glare. We were seated near the back and I remember her saying, `I don’t see why people don’t stay where they belong.’ They didn’t want us to go to college, evidently.” Although her memories of Western are at best mixed, Hughes fully understands the importance of the presence of her Black classmates in 1954 and the work her father did in the Western case and many of the cases leading up to the Brown decision. “Juanita Mitchell said, `your daddy was the brains behind our cases. We never made a move without calling him,’” recalls Hughes. Mitchell, a political activist going back to the early days of the City-Wide Young People’s Forum, did the bulk of the work in the Western case, along with Hughes. Besides the outstanding high school education she received at Western, one of the positive experiences Hughes recalls didn’t manifest until after she graduated. “I think I came out of it not fearing White people. I think it cured me of my fear of White people. I found out that people were just people,” said Hughes. But, 50 years later, she’s still somewhat undecided whether the experience was worth it. “As far as history is concerned or doing something for the future, as far as the change for America was concerned, it was important. We did that, but it was a sacrifice. As far as our social concerns, sometimes I wish I had stayed at Douglass,” said Hughes. OPENING UP ‘MERVO’ In the case of Mergenthaler Vocational Technical High School (“Mervo”), this was a school that provided a highly specialized curriculum only available at that school, a school only open to Whites prior to the Brown decision. But, unlike Poly and Western, Mervo wasn’t a school with a college preparatory curriculum and was not known for nurturing the city’s academic elite. Mervo was a “trade school” that featured a state-of-the-art printing press. There was a school for Blacks - Carver Vocational Technical School - that offered vocational training similar to Mervo, but had no print training. Mervo was touted as having the most advanced printing program in the country.
For obvious reasons, Carl Murphy, publisher of the Afro-American newspapers, had high stakes in Mervo becoming integrated. There was a significant lack of Black printers and the AFRO papers had a great demand for newly trained Black printers. Four 10th graders from Dunbar High School were selected to apply for admission to Mervo. They applied on Feb. 3, 1953, and were rejected outright by the school’s principal. That same day, Lillie Mae Jackson, president of the Baltimore branch of the NAACP, wrote a letter to John Fischer, then the city’s deputy school superintendent, asking that the 10th graders be admitted to Mervo. Two days later, the school board held a meet-
ing to “consider” the boys’ applications; they were rejected yet again. Now the same question was asked that had been asked for Poly and Western: Can the city provide an educational facility equal to Mervo, specifically its print training program, for Black students? Despite the machinations of the school board (they even nominated Carl Murphy to sit on a committee charged with the development of Carver to make it equal to Mervo), the answer was an unequivocal “no” in the eyes of the NAACP. However, the school board tossed yet another curve ball; the four young applicants were given an aptitude test to see if they were eligible to attend Mervo and, based on the results of the test, three of
the four original applicants were eliminated. This forced the NAACP to scramble for two new applicants, who turned out to be ninth grader Carl Smith, son of the AFRO’s personnel manager, Edward Smith, and James Grove, a 10th grader at Dunbar. The attorneys for the applicants Thurgood Marshall, Jack Greenberg, Juanita Mitchell and Donald Murray filed a petition for a writ of mandamus on June 5, 1953. However, like the Western case, the proceedings were in legal limbo pending the outcome of the Brown case in 1954. Two weeks after the Brown decision, all the public schools in Baltimore City were desegregated.
As reported in the 1953 AFRO
See continuation on page 38
The Road to Brown
37
School rejects 4 pupils
This page continues AFRO Archive story from page 37 turned from a 780 mile trip in an effort to recruit printers, said that the AFRO “has been short-handed in printers for the last 10 years,” while not one colored printer has been trained locally. “I don’t see how we can postpone one day the admission of colored students to the Mergenthaler printing course,” he said. Mr. Thomsen originally advised the board that on the basis of consultation by school officials and printing authorities, an equal course could be provided in a colored school in six months, including the hiring of colored or white teachers and the buying of equipment or moving some from Mergenthaler. Because of this, Mr. Thomsen said, the board was obligated under the City Charter to maintain separate schools. Mr. Mitchell however, did not agree. “This decision today is neither legally correct or morally justifiable, “ he said. Mr. Thomsen recommended that a committee make a study of the printing course at Mergenthaler and of the possibility of instituting a similar course at a colored school. The three men he suggested for the committee were: Carl Murphy, president of the AFROAmerican Newspapers; Hugo Delscheimer of the Waverly Press, and William Schneidereith of the Fidelity Trust Company. Applying for admittance to the white school were James Mosby, 15, 1728 E. Lanvale St.; David Kaintuck, 15, 1027 Rutland Ave.; Robert Scales, 15, 3029 Walbrook Ave.; and Howard Boone, 18, 1202 Short Ct. Dunbar High Pupils The 15-year-old boys are all graduates of the Dunbar Junior High School, while Boone is a graduate of the Dunbar Senior High School seeking a special linotype course. They were accompanied to the school, Greenmount Ave. And Eager Street by Bowen Jackson, NAACP coordinator, and Jessie Scales, father of one of the youths. Upon arrival at the office of the principal, John G. Edelmann, Mr. Jackson informed the school head that the four youths were applying for entrance to Mergenthaler.
As reported in the 1953 AFRO
Interested Spectators: Nancy Grinage, 14, a 9A student at Dunbar High School, and her 11-year-old sister Kay, 7-B student at Dunbar, were two of the interested spectators at the School Board hearing Tuesday. They are the daughters of Mr. and Mrs. O. G. Grinage. Mr. Edelmann was also told that the applicants were all qualified as to the age and educational requirements. ‘A WHITE SCHOOL!’ The school principal was then quoted as saying: “Well, Mr. Jackson, as you know this is a white school and we d not accept colored entrants.” He refused to state whether such a policy was a result of a School Board directive, however. Mr. Edelmann concluded the interview with the reminder that his instructions were not to accept colored applicants. When news of the rejection became known there were rumblings that Mrs. Ethel J. Hucles, counselor at Dunbar, faced disciplinary action because she released names of the qualified pupils to the NAACP. SCOFFS AT RUMOR Houston Jackson, assistant superintendent of schools scoffed at such a possibility. “As far as I’m concerned there will be no action against Mrs. Hucles and, if necessary, I will defend her.” When asked about the rejection of the youths seeking entrance to Mergenthaler, Mr. Jackson said: “I’ve previously stated that if Mergenthaler opens up before Carver and there are courses offered not available in the public schools, the matter should be taken before the School Board. “I did learn that the NAACP had contacted various principals and requested them to send children to Mergenthaler for registration. “That wasn’t proper because no principal has a right to send pupils to the special schools such as Mergenthaler. BLAMES CITY CODE “The real trouble lies with the City Code which clearly states that separate schools must be maintained. The School Board cannot allow integrated schools unless the Code is changed. “The City Solicitor, Mr. Biddison, however, has determined that the schools must be equal. Therefore the colored pupils were admitted to Poly,” Mr. Jackson concluded. The NAACP has deferred further action on the Mergenthaler school situation until a response is received from the letter dispatched to Mr. Fischer. Qualified applicants for training at the Towson State Teachers’ College and pupils desiring training in printing at the Mergenthaler School should contact the local NAACP office, 402 Dolphin St.
Although the integration of the Poly “A” course did not come as the result of litigation, it was significant because it was the first school desegregation victory in the United States below the Mason-Dixon line at the high school level.
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The Road to Brown
Brown 1954:
How the AFRO saw it
The vast majority of Blacks received the Brown decision with elation. Whites in general received it with trepidation. This is how the AFRO covered the historic event.
Court Rules Segregation Illegal
More of this AFRO Archives on page 40
The Road to Brown
39
AFRO Archive:
Brown decision as originally reported
Mix Schools continued from page 39
The Decision
40
The Road to Brown
Baltimore and Washington AFRO May 18, 1954
The Road to Brown
41
Some would argue that in many ways, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision created more questions than answers in Black America’s quest for equality in education, as well as equal access to all of America. It may have taken 20 years of hard, methodical legal work to get to the 1954 decision, but 50 years later, all the implications of Brown are still being sorted out. However, in order to fully understand Brown, it is imperative to know the whole story. That has been the objective of the Signature Series, to reveal the important but mostly untold story of the 20 years of cases in the State of Maryland that helped to lay the foundation for Brown. Larry S. Gibson, professor of law at the University of Maryland, whose decades of research made the Signature Series possible, explained the sum of the matter.
Prof. Larry Gibson:
that they were almost opposites. Houston was formal, refined and sophisticated and Marshall was boisterous and happy-go-lucky. The thesis of the AFRO’s What they had in common was that Signature Series is that the Brown they both were willing to work very decision didn’t happen in a vacuum; hard,” said Gibson. Brown was really a process that The 1954 Brown decision that took 20 years to unfold. Houston and Marshall worked so Larry S. Gibson, professor of law hard for – as well as its ongoing at the University of Maryland, aftermath – will be debated far after whose 20-plus years of research this 50th anniversary passes. helped make the “To understand Signature Series possible, Brown, one must underspoke candidly about the So, no longer following Plessy, is there a notion that there is stand Plessy v. “Road to Brown.” Ferguson. The evil of “The road to Brown one mankind, there are groups of mankind specified by race Plessy v. Ferguson is did several things. One, it that it denied the essentrained a cadre of and government can require them to be treated differently. tial oneness of humanilawyers. The civil rights ty. The Plessy decision If you by law separate and segregate, the minority will be lawyers were developed said that government and became very good inevitably be discriminated against in what it receives, and could classify its citilawyers. The road to zens by race and then Brown also produced, on will receive less. What Brown did was invalidate that notion. treat them differently an incremental basis, and separately just on building blocks, cases munity. They built momentum,” has admitted that certain inequalithe grounds of race. that were building blocks to the said Gibson. ties are inevitable in a separate “So, no longer following Plessy, final decision, and you see them He pointed to the two cases that school system. It is significant and is there a notion that there is one cited in the Brown opinion,” said came right after the seminal Murray valuable to have a court recognize mankind, there are groups of Gibson. victory that he argues should not be and state that the mere existence of mankind specified by race and govSeveral of those important overlooked as far as their impora separate system in itself imports ernment can require them to be “building-block cases,” including tance, the Baltimore County school inequality,” said a NAACP press treated differently. If you by law the Murray win over the University desegregation case in 1936 and the release in 1937. Marshall and separate and segregate, the minority of Maryland in 1935, the first teachers’ pay equalization cases Charles Houston were the men priwill inevitably be discriminated school desegregation victory in the from 1936 to 1939. marily responsible for dismantling against in what it receives, and will country, happened in Maryland. “The teachers pay cases in the notion of separate, but equal. receive less. What Brown did was But Maryland’s impact on the Maryland and these other states pro“Charles Houston and Thurgood invalidate that notion. What Brown road to Brown was felt beyond vided the framework in which the Marshall some would call the odd did was begin to unravel the Plessy courtroom decisions. NAACP became a truly national couple. Their demeanor was such v. Ferguson doctrine,” said Gibson. “Maryland provided the first suc42 The Road to Brown
By Sean Yoes AFRO Staff Writer
Notes on Brown
cessful case [Murray]. Maryland provided the lead attorney [Thurgood Marshall]. Maryland provided a laboratory in which the lead attorney and other attorneys learned and trained. And Maryland provided an environment in which some ideas were tried out and succeeded at the trial level or at the state level. They were precedents to a certain extent and they had to be encouraging to the civil rights comorganization, not just in major cities, but in counties and smaller subdivisions all over the country,” said Gibson. Although the Baltimore County school desegregation case was technically a loss, there was a phrase gleaned from the appellate decision in 1937 and seized upon by the NAACP, “separate can never be equal.” “Here for the first time a court
Our contributors
Larry
Gibson
Christopher Jack Hill Special to the Afro Larry Gibson is an eloquent storyteller, no doubt about that. As a veteran professor, stories are what he tells almost every day to teach election law, civil procedure and race law at the University of Maryland Law School. The third Black law professor at the university, he has been educating lawyers for more than 30 years, and has a strong belief in the empowerment of education. The stories behind attorneys are the apparent motivation behind his compilation, “Maryland First Black Lawyers: 1877- 1977,” a multi-panel exhibit that celebrates the first 100-years of Black lawyers in Maryland. “For most of my life, I have been educating attorneys, and I want people to know about the major contributions Black lawyers have made on the nation, and I want to educate the younger generations about that historical role.” But the stories he’s been weaving, along with Sean Yoes, the stories of mammoth proportions in the Signature Series, recount landmark accomplishments streaming from the heart of the civil rights movement. Gibson and Yoes published the Signature Series in 10 parts over the course of six months. “I just thought enough time had passed that the younger generation didn’t know the history. It’s important to recognize people who made valuable contributions,” Gibson said. “I particularly wanted to emphasize some of the unknown heroes, lawyers and plaintiffs who made great sacrifices.” He also wanted to show “the central role the AFRO played in the struggle for justice through the years.” And that’s where the professor began his research in 1981, looking through the Afro-American newspapers’ archives. Forever the student, Gibson holds degrees from Howard University in Washington and Columbia University in New York. A political strategist largely responsible for the election of Kurt Schmoke, Baltimore’s first African-American mayor, Professor Gibson also served as state chairman for the 1992 Clinton/Gore presidential campaign. Gibson, who has spent much of his career engaged in civil rights cases, leading campaigns and taking on highprofile clients, such as members of the Black Panther Party, recalls days of leading school protests and taking cases to challenge housing discrimination.
He has a deep love for education and teaching the younger generation about the struggle for equality. “I try to speak directly to the hearts of my students and to me, education has been most effective,” said Gibson.
Sean
Yoes
Christopher Jack Hill Special to the AFRO For years, AFRO staff writer Sean Yoes worked in different areas of media in Los Angeles, Detroit and Baltimore. He was a television news producer and writer, a radio producer and radio talk-show host, as well as a documentary filmmaker. But perhaps his most enduring passion in media has been his work with the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper. His love for journalism was sparked at Walbrook High School in the early ‘80s, working on the school’s newspaper, The Communicator. “They gave me the opportunity to say what I wanted to say, pretty much without being censored. We had one of the best journalism programs in the city, we had the first advanced-placement English class in the city. Walbrook really gave me my foundation as a writer,” said Yoes.
That foundation helped him get his first glimpse into the writing profession when he traveled to Los Angeles in 1988 and wrote a script for the NBC sitcom, “A Diff’rent World,” which garnered serious attention from the show’s executive producer, Thad Mumford. However, almost a year later, and on the strength of that script, Yoes, at 23, was given his first professional shot as a writer by the late Bob Matthews, the AFRO’s editor at the time. Between his first stint with the AFRO in 1989 and his current time with the paper, Yoes won a National Newspaper Publisher’s Association award for his reporting on the plight of the Black farmer in America in 2000, as well as a MarylandDelaware-D.C. Press Association award in 2004 for his reporting on Essie Mae Washington, the Black daughter of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond. But, he says, the AFRO’s Signature Series has been his most
challenging and rewarding work yet. “It was just really important for me to get the stories right. First of all, many of the plaintiffs in the different cases are still alive. They lived the experience and I needed to respect that fully. Then, you know, a lot of people outside of Maryland don’t know what an important role this state, this newspaper played in making Brown possible. I didn’t know, so I got an education.” That education came as a result of Larry Gibson’s 20-plus years of research on Black lawyers. “This is a guy who has dedicated a lot of his life, a lot of his time to these stories and it is clear he has a lot of reverence for these men and women who put their lives on the line. Initially, we were kind of thrown together, but the working relationship clicked straight away and it’s evolved into a friendship,” said Yoes. Gibson and Yoes will work on the next phase of the Signature Series in the fall of 2004.
The Road to Brown
43
Thurgood Marshall
Thurgood Marshall may become U.S. judge, Oct. 1, 1949
44 The Road to Brown
Prince Hall Shriners made their annual donation of over $3,000 to the NAACP Legal Defense and Aid Fund. From left are: the Rev. David Licorish, assistant pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church; Leon Berry, Imperial Deputy of New York State; Charles Dargan, Imperial Oriental Guide; Thurgood Marshall who received the donation; Clifford J. Storey, Illustrious Potentate of Medina Temple No. 19; L. Joseph Overton, Imperial Deputy-at-Large, and Baxter F. Jackson, public relations director of the Grand Lodge. While chief attorney for the NAACP, Thurgood Marshall received a $936 check from Dela Given of the New York chapter of the National Association of Business and Professional Women’s Club Inc. as their contribution and support of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Chapter Chairman Eva Flanders and other members look on.
AFRO photo by Layne
At dedication of Howard University’s new School of Law building, Thurgood Marshall, (left) director-counsel of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, chats with Dean George M. Johnson of the law school. Mr. Marshall, a graduate of Howard’s law school, was the dedication speaker.
October 25, 1953, Thurgood and lawyers
Between sessions, Dr. J. F. Drake, president, Alabama A&M College (left); Dr. W. S. Davis, president, Tennessee State University; Thurgood Marshall, NAACP legal counselor and Dr. Benjamin B. Mays, president, Morehouse College, chat.
Thurgood Marshall, NAACP attorney, standing, who argued the Sipuel case before the Supreme Court last week, checks last-minute details with Frank Reeves, left and Spottswood Robinson 3rd, prior to making argument. Marshall, who also sponsored Reeves’ admission to the Supreme Court on Thursday, asked for the end of separate education and the admission of Ada L. Sipuel to the Oklahoma University Law School now.
The Road to Brown 45
Thurgood Marshall was sworn in today as judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals, 2nd Circuit. Photo shows Mr. Marshall seated in the judge’s chair with his sons, John 3, (left), and Thurgood Jr., 5. His wife, Cecilia completes the picture.
1962 Judge Thurgood Marshall 46 The Road to Brown
Mr. and Mrs. Thurgood Marshall
Thurgood Marshall, Marsh 3, 1951
Chief NAACP counsel, Baltimore-born Thurgood Marshall, accepts the 2-foot high achievement trophy presented when he spoke at the Baltimore NAACP membership meeting at Douglas Memorial Church. The award was presented by Lillie M. Jackson, local branch president since 1935, when Marshall was the agency’s legal advisor.
Col. Darwin D. Martin and Thurgood Marshall in Tokyo en route to Korea.
WASHINGTON - Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall temporarily blocked the scheduled execution of Fla. John Spenkelink.
Thurgood Marshall 1946
The Road to Brown 47
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