Baltimore's Board of Estimates has decommissioned and removed a raised plaque honoring a segregationist from public property in Bolton Hill and decommissioned by the city. The William L. Marbury Plaque was placed in the late 1930s at the south end of a wide median strip in the 1700 block of Park Avenue near the intersection of Park Avenue and Wilson Street by the Mt. Royal Garden Club, a predecessor of today’s Bolton Hill Garden Club where it remained for almost 90 years. It was installed to honor an attorney who lived in Bolton Hill in the early 1900s. After the November 2024 removal, there remains a hole in the ground Its removal from public property is consistent with the community’s wishes and the plaque has been given to the Marbury family, which was “willing and anxious” to receive it.The plaque was been removed in November 2024 from city-owned land in Bolton Hill and decommissioned by the city on Wednesday, January 8, 2025. The inscription on the plaque read: "William L. Marbury, Dec. 26, 1859 Oct. 26, 1935, Planted by Mt. Royal Garden Club."
He served as the U.S. Attorney for Maryland during the Grover Cleveland administration or as president of Maryland State Bar Association in 1910. He ran unsuccessfully for the U. S. Senate in 1913. The firm where he and his son worked for many years, then known as Marbury Miller and Evans, merged in 1952 with Piper, Watkins, Avirett & Egerton to create Piper & Marbury, now part of DLA Piper.
William Luke Marbury Sr. was also a segregationist - the founder in 1910 of the Mount Royal Protective Association, whose mission was “to halt African Americans from renting or purchasing property in the Mount Royal District, which included present-day Bolton Hill and Reservoir Hill.” Marbury had a record of promoting residential segregation.
“Marbury is credited with being the architect of redlining laws in Baltimore,” neighborhood resident and a past president of the Bolton Hill Community Association David Nyweide wrote in the December issue of The Bolton Hill Bulletin. “He actively tried to disenfranchise voters in Maryland with dark skin, even arguing, unsuccessfully, before the U. S. Supreme Court that the State of Maryland could legally strip their voting rights because Maryland never ratified the Fifteenth Amendment. He himself was a descendant of the plaintiff in Marbury v. Madison about a century earlier, the case which famously established the power of the Supreme Court to invalidate state laws and acts of Congress that contravene the Constitution.”
Historians also note that Marbury came from a family of plantation-owners in Southern Maryland who held slaves before moving to Baltimore in the 1870s. “Marbury helped draft several state bills designed to disenfranchise Black Marylanders’ voting rights from the late 1890s to 1911,” a 2020 report by the Bolton Hill committee. about Marbury. said. “As he told the Baltimore Sun in January 1910, ‘it is an anomalous condition that an inferior race should share the government with the superior one.’ “
By 1910, “Marbury had also become an advisor to members of the Baltimore City Council who were promoting residential segregation, and he help them draft a series of residential segregation laws between 1910 and 1917, among the earliest such urban statues in the country,” the report stated. “When they proved so conservative as to fail to pass constitutional muster in the Supreme Court, Marbury favored enforcement tools in the form of restrictive covenants and the Mount Royal Protective Association, which was founded with the explicit purpose to stop Black people from renting or purchasing homes in Bolton Hill.” In 1910, Baltimore was the first U.S. city to pass a residential segregation ordinance.
Marbury “did not…simply hold beliefs about racial segregation that were not uncommon for other white people of his time,” the committee stated in its report. “[H]e was instead a locally prominent white man who actively shaped the world of Jim Crow during the early twentieth century” and the plaque “memorializes a former resident of Bolton Hill who would not be honored today for his public, proactive efforts to disenfranchise Black people and inhibit them from living in the neighborhood.” Because of “the unverified reasons for the plaque’s placement but unequivocal knowledge of the revolting public reputation of the man honored by the plaque, the committee recommends removal,” the committee concluded, adding a suggestion that the plaque be given to “a Marbury descendant.” The garden club’s executive committee agreed with the recommendation to remove the plaque. The committee “considers the plaque to no longer represent the values of the garden club and the Bolton Hill neighborhood as it is a painful reminder to many of exclusionary and discriminatory times.”
Nyweide said in his article that there was some debate within the community about removing the plaque. “Reasonable, dissenting voices to removing the plaque were concerned that it would erase the odious history it signified, where dispensing with it would be a convenient means of ignoring the history of segregation in Bolton Hill,” he wrote. “Yet, that history remains despite the absence of the plaque on the Park Avenue median, and the public historic markers committee’s work was a means of drawing attention to it. As the committee concluded, the plaque was placed to honor a man whose legacy would not be honored with such a plaque today by the Bolton Hill Garden Club nor by the Bolton Hill Community Association. His former residence does not bear a Blue Plaque [marking the homes of noteworthy Bolton Hill residents who have died.] The Marbury plaque’s placement amid a grassy median on Park Avenue had become as incongruous as the man himself would be today.”
“To his descendants, the Marbury plaque is a familial artifact,” he wrote. “They had no say in inheriting the racist legacy of their forebearer, just as today’s residents of Bolton Hill did not live in the neighborhood of Marbury’s day. The Marbury plaque remains, just not where it was originally planted.”
