REVIEW OF A BOOK ABOUT BLACK RECONSTRUCTION IN BALTIMORE
A Brotherhood of Liberty: Black Reconstruction and Its Legacies in Baltimore, 1865-1920 (America in the Nineteenth Century)
by Dennis Patrick Halpin
The author argues that Baltimore is key to understanding the trajectory of civil rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In the 1870s and early 1880s, a group of black political leaders moved to Baltimore from rural Virginia and Maryland. Mainly former slaves who had trained in the ministry, they pushed Baltimore toward Reconstruction's promise of racial equality. In this effort, they were among African Americans then trying to strengthen the Black community and build political muscle by starting churches and businesses, establishing community centers, and founding newspapers.
In Baltimore, the Black advocates successfully challenged Jim Crow regulations on public transit, in the courts, in the voting booth, and in some residential neighborhoods. They also formed some of the US' earliest civil rights organizations, such as the United Mutual Brotherhood of Liberty, to work for rights after the Civil War.
In the book, it is shown how the strides of black Baltimoreans stimulated segregationists to revise and update their tactics. Segregationists fought Black activists' achievements by using Progressive Era concerns over the need for urban order and corruption to criminalize and disenfranchise Blacks. The author argues the Progressive Era was extremely important in establishing the segregated, racist twentieth-century nation.
The book also highlights the strategies that can continue to be useful as well as the challenges that are present.
