How Faith, Labor, Mutual Aid, Civil Rights, and Black Institutions Helped Shape a Nation
(BALTIMORE – July 11, 2026) – When Baltimore historian Marco Merrick first began telling me about the “City of Firsts,” he was not initially telling a Black history story.
He was telling a Baltimore story.
That distinction will forever stand out in my mind.
Marco spoke with an enthusiasm and pride that were impossible to miss. He talked about the B&O Railroad, the telegraph, Johns Hopkins University, the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery, the Enoch Pratt Free Library, the Washington Monument, the Basilica, Fort McHenry, and the many inventions and institutions that helped establish Baltimore as one of the most consequential cities in American history.
He was not speaking merely as a Black historian.
He was speaking as a Baltimorean who loves his city.
There was something refreshing about that.
His pride did not require a qualifier. It did not begin with race. It began with home.
But because Marco and I are both Black Americans, examining the particular contributions of Black Baltimore became the logical next step. It was not a detour from the story. It was the natural continuation of it.
Once we began peeling back the layers, the picture became even clearer.
Baltimore was not only important to American history.
Baltimore was essential to Black American history.
When we think of Mother Mary Lange, Isaac Myers, Lillie Mae Carroll Jackson, Juanita Jackson Mitchell, Thurgood Marshall, Clarence M. Mitchell Jr., Parren J. Mitchell, the Murphy family, Baltimore’s Black churches, its funeral directors, labor organizations, newspapers, schools, mutual-aid societies, and neighborhood institutions, we see something much greater than a collection of famous names.
We see an ecosystem.
We see generations of Black Baltimoreans creating institutions, challenging exclusion, organizing for justice, producing leadership, and building opportunities that did not previously exist.
That legacy continues today.
When a Black Baltimore businessman such as P. David Bramble, co-founder and managing partner of MCB Real Estate, assumes responsibility for leading the nearly $1 billion reimagining of Harborplace after years of decline and unrealized expectations, he is participating in a much older tradition. Black Baltimoreans have never merely occupied this city. They have repeatedly been called upon to help build it, defend it, sustain it, and imagine its future.
Black Americans have contributed as much as anyone to the building of this city, this state, this nation, and the world.
Their stories are not an appendix to Baltimore history.
They are Baltimore history.
Faith Before Freedom
One of Baltimore’s greatest contributions to Black America began with faith.
Standing above the city on Cathedral Hill, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary became the first Roman Catholic cathedral built in the United States.
Only blocks away, however, another foundational chapter of American Catholicism was taking shape.
In 1829, Mother Mary Lange, a woman of African descent with roots in Saint-Domingue—present-day Haiti—co-founded the Oblate Sisters of Providence with Father James Joubert.
The Oblate Sisters became the first Roman Catholic religious order in the United States established for women of African descent.
That fact alone places Baltimore at the center of Black Catholic history.
But the story is even deeper.
Mother Lange was part of a larger Afro-Caribbean and Haitian presence that helped shape Baltimore during and after the Haitian Revolution. Refugees from Saint-Domingue brought their French language, Catholic faith, educational traditions, commercial skills, and cultural practices to the city.
Their presence helped make Baltimore one of the most important centers of Black Catholic life in the United States.
Mother Lange understood that education was more than academic preparation.
Education was liberation.
Before the formal establishment of the Oblate Sisters, she was already educating Black children in her home. Her work developed into the institution now known as Saint Frances Academy, whose origins date to 1828 and which is recognized as the oldest continuously operating predominantly African American Catholic high school in the United States.
The Oblate Sisters taught children whom other institutions refused to educate. They cared for orphans. They served communities affected by disease and poverty. They demonstrated that Black women could lead enduring religious and educational institutions in a nation that doubted both their intellect and their humanity.
Generations later, leaders such as Father Charles A. Hall continued Baltimore’s tradition of Black Catholic ministry, education, and community service.
Baltimore was therefore not simply the birthplace of organized Catholicism in America.
It became one of the birthplaces of organized Black Catholicism in America.
That distinction matters.
Isaac Myers and the Organization of Black Labor
Faith gave Black Baltimore spiritual grounding.
Labor offered a pathway toward economic independence.
Few people better represent that history than Isaac Myers.
Myers was a highly skilled ship caulker working in Baltimore’s enormous maritime economy. Black caulkers were among the most accomplished tradesmen on the waterfront, performing the demanding work required to make wooden ships watertight.
Their skills were essential.
Yet after the Civil War, white workers attempted to drive Black caulkers from the trade.
Myers and his fellow workers did not quietly accept their exclusion.
They organized.
In 1866, Myers and other Black craftsmen established the Chesapeake Marine Railway and Dry Dock Company, a cooperative shipyard that demonstrated the capacity of Black workers to own, manage, and operate a major industrial enterprise.
This was not charity.
It was ownership.
It was economic resistance.
It was Black labor answering discrimination with institution-building.
In 1868, Black caulkers formally organized the Colored Caulkers Trade Union Society, one of the nation’s earliest Black trade unions.
The following year, Myers helped organize the Colored National Labor Union, also known in some records as the National Labor Union of Colored Men. Myers became its first president.
In 1872, Frederick Douglass succeeded him as president.
That progression is extraordinary:
In 1866, Black cooperative enterprise.
In 1868, organized Black skilled labor.
In 1869, a national Black labor organization.
In 1872, Frederick Douglass carrying its leadership forward.
Baltimore did not simply participate in the history of organized labor.
Black Baltimore helped establish one of its earliest national models.
Mutual Aid Before Government Aid
Long before Social Security, public assistance, corporate foundations, and government safety nets, Black communities survived through mutual aid.
They pooled money.
They cared for the sick.
They supported widows and orphans.
They paid burial expenses.
They helped families endure emergencies.
They understood that no individual could survive racial exclusion alone.
Among the most consequential of these organizations was the Independent Order of St. Luke, whose institutional roots trace to Baltimore in 1867.
The organization began as a Black mutual-aid and burial society. It later established its headquarters in Richmond, where Maggie Lena Walker transformed it into one of Black America’s most important engines of cooperative economics.
Under Walker’s leadership, the Order supported the St. Luke Herald, the St. Luke Emporium, and the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank.
Walker became the first Black woman in the United States to charter and lead a bank.
Although her best-known achievements took place in Richmond, the mutual-aid tradition from which that economic network grew had roots in Baltimore.
That connection illustrates something important:
Baltimore did not only export talented people.
Baltimore exported institutional ideas.
Before there were Black banks, there were Black burial societies.
Before modern venture capital, there was mutual aid.
Before corporate philanthropy, Black people practiced cooperative economics.
Joseph G. Locks and the Business of Dignity
Few professions occupied a more trusted position in Black America than funeral service.
Funeral directors did far more than bury the dead.
They were entrepreneurs.
Property owners.
Counselors.
Employers.
Civic leaders.
Political organizers.
Philanthropists.
In communities denied fair access to white-controlled banks and institutions, Black funeral directors frequently extended credit, sponsored neighborhood activities, supported churches, and helped finance civic life.
Baltimore’s Black funeral-service tradition has exceptionally deep roots.
The Joseph G. Locks enterprise dates to approximately 1835, when the family operated a livery and carriage service that provided transportation connected to funerals and community life.
The enterprise later developed into one of the oldest Black family-owned funeral businesses in the United States.
That history predates Emancipation.
It emerged during a period when Baltimore’s large free Black population was creating businesses and institutions despite the continued existence of slavery.
The Locks tradition reminds us that Black enterprise in Baltimore did not begin in the twentieth century.
It extends back nearly two centuries.
That spirit of innovation continues today. Joey Brown of Joseph H. Brown Jr. Funeral Home has continued Baltimore’s long tradition of leadership in funeral service by developing Baltimore City’s first crematory and introducing the city’s first water cremation (alkaline hydrolysis) system, demonstrating that one of the community’s oldest professions continues to embrace innovation.
Maryland Organized Before the Nation
Baltimore and Maryland’s Black funeral professionals did not merely establish individual businesses.
They organized an enduring professional institution.
The Funeral Directors and Morticians Association of Maryland was established in 1904—the same year as Baltimore’s Great Fire.
While flames destroyed more than 1,500 buildings across downtown Baltimore, Black professionals were creating an institution that would endure for generations.
The association became a source of advocacy, education, networking, ethical standards, and professional development for Black-owned funeral homes throughout Maryland.
Its history is nationally significant.
The Maryland organization predates the national association representing Black funeral professionals by two decades.
The organization now known as the National Funeral Directors and Morticians Association was established on September 6, 1924, as the Independent National Funeral Directors Association. It later went through mergers and name changes before adopting its present name in 1957.
Maryland’s Black funeral directors had already been organized since 1904.
Once again, Baltimore and Maryland were ahead of the nation.
My appreciation for this history is also personal.
My father served as president of the Funeral Directors and Morticians Association of Maryland. Through him, I learned that funeral directors were not simply businessmen who appeared when someone died. They were trusted counselors, community leaders, historians, and entrepreneurs. They comforted grieving families, supported churches and civic organizations, mentored young people, and quietly helped sustain Black Baltimore through some of its most difficult moments.
Watching my father lead the association gave me an appreciation for funeral service that extended far beyond the business itself. I came to understand that funeral homes were among the most important institutions in Black America—places where dignity was preserved, history was honored, and communities found strength in times of loss.
They were stewards of dignity.
They were community historians.
They were counselors in moments of grief.
They were supporters of churches, neighborhood organizations, political movements, young people, and families.
They helped carry Black Baltimore.
Sacred Ground and the Memory of a People
A city’s cemeteries reveal whom it remembers—and whom it has allowed itself to forget.
Laurel Cemetery was established as a non-denominational burial ground for African Americans and became the resting place of many prominent Black Baltimoreans.
Among those associated with Laurel’s history was Rev. Dr. Harvey Johnson, the legendary pastor and early civil-rights leader whose work predated the modern Civil Rights Movement by generations.
Over time, Laurel Cemetery was neglected, desecrated, and largely erased by commercial development.
But the people buried there did not cease to matter simply because the city failed to protect their resting place.
Efforts to recover Laurel’s history are therefore about more than archaeology.
They are about justice.
They are about restoring Black Baltimoreans to the historical record.
Much credit is due to historian and preservation advocate Chezia Cager, whose unwavering commitment has helped keep Laurel Cemetery’s history alive and in the public consciousness. Her work reminds us that preserving burial grounds is ultimately about preserving people, families, and the stories that define a community.
Mount Auburn Cemetery, located in the Westport area near Cherry Hill, is another vital repository of Black Baltimore history.
Its graves tell the stories of ministers, educators, entrepreneurs, veterans, elected officials, community leaders, and generations of ordinary families.
It is also the resting place of Joe Gans, the Baltimore boxing legend who became the first African American world boxing champion.
These burial grounds are sacred archives.
Their stones, records, and landscapes preserve a history that cannot always be found in textbooks.
Druid Hill Avenue: A Freedom Corridor
Every movement has a geography.
Harlem had 125th Street.
Washington had U Street.
Atlanta had Auburn Avenue.
Baltimore had several corridors of Black power, including Pennsylvania Avenue and Druid Hill Avenue.
Druid Hill Avenue was more than a road connecting neighborhoods.
It was a freedom corridor.
Union Baptist Church stood there.
The Baltimore Branch of the NAACP established offices there.
The Mitchell family lived and worked there.
Law offices, churches, homes, meeting places, and organizing spaces placed some of Baltimore’s most important civil-rights leaders within walking distance of one another.
At 1239 Druid Hill Avenue, the Mitchell family maintained law offices. Nearby, the Baltimore NAACP operated from 1234 Druid Hill Avenue. Juanita Jackson Mitchell and Clarence Mitchell Jr. lived at 1324 Druid Hill Avenue. Their homes and offices became centers of local, state, and national civil-rights strategy.
When we walk down Druid Hill Avenue, we are walking through civil-rights history.
Rev. Harvey Johnson: Before the Modern Movement
Baltimore’s organized freedom struggle did not begin in the 1950s.
Decades earlier, Rev. Dr. Harvey Johnson was using the pulpit of Union Baptist Church to confront discrimination in transportation, education, the courts, business, and religious life.
In 1885, Johnson gathered ministers and organizers who helped create the Mutual United Brotherhood of Liberty, an early civil-rights organization committed to using legal action to protect Black citizenship.
The organization challenged discriminatory laws, the exclusion of Black people from juries, unequal treatment in public transportation, and barriers facing Black attorneys.
Johnson’s work helped establish a tradition of legal resistance that would later be associated with the NAACP and Thurgood Marshall.
Baltimore was developing organized civil-rights strategies in the nineteenth century—generations before the movement reached its most visible national phase.
Lillie Mae Carroll Jackson and the Baltimore NAACP
No discussion of Baltimore’s civil-rights history is complete without Lillie Mae Carroll Jackson.
Jackson became president of the Baltimore Branch of the NAACP in 1935 and transformed it into one of the most powerful branches in the country.
When she took over, the branch had fewer than 200 members. By the mid-1940s, its membership had grown into the tens of thousands. Historical accounts differ on the exact peak, but the transformation itself is beyond dispute.
Under Jackson’s leadership, the Baltimore NAACP fought segregation in schools, theaters, housing, employment, law enforcement, and public accommodations. It registered voters, developed young leaders, supported legal challenges, and employed sustained boycotts and protests.
The Baltimore branch was not important merely because of its size.
It was important because of its influence.
Jackson helped build an infrastructure that connected neighborhood organizing, legal strategy, youth activism, electoral power, and national civil-rights advocacy.
Juanita Jackson Mitchell and the Power of Law
Jackson’s daughter, Juanita Jackson Mitchell, carried the movement into the legal profession.
She became the first Black woman to practice law in Maryland.
Her career brought together law, voter registration, education, youth organizing, and civil rights. She challenged segregation while helping to expand the political participation of Black Baltimoreans.
Her marriage to Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. united two extraordinary civil-rights legacies under one roof.
Their home and offices on Druid Hill Avenue became part of a larger network of Black legal and political leadership that influenced Maryland and the nation.
Clarence Mitchell Jr.: The 101st Senator
Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. became one of the most effective advocates in the history of the United States Congress.
Known as the “101st Senator,” Mitchell led the NAACP’s Washington Bureau and spent nearly three decades lobbying Congress for civil-rights legislation.
He helped secure passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964; the Voting Rights Act of 1965; and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
He held no seat in the Senate.
Yet his influence was so substantial that lawmakers and civil-rights leaders recognized him as a force equivalent to an additional senator.
Baltimore sent him to Washington.
But his work changed America.
Thurgood Marshall and Parren Mitchell
Baltimore also gave America Thurgood Marshall.
Raised in West Baltimore, educated at Frederick Douglass High School, and shaped by the city’s Black legal tradition, Marshall became the architect of the legal strategy that dismantled state-sponsored school segregation.
He successfully argued Brown v. Board of Education and later became the first African American justice of the United States Supreme Court.
His achievement was individual, but the ecosystem that helped produce him was collective.
Baltimore’s schools, churches, attorneys, civil-rights organizations, and Black neighborhoods all formed part of the world from which he emerged.
Parren J. Mitchell, the brother of Clarence Mitchell Jr., carried Baltimore’s freedom tradition into elected office.
In 1970, he became the first African American elected to Congress from Maryland.
There, he became a fierce advocate for minority business participation, economic justice, and federal contracting opportunities.
The Mitchells understood that civil rights without economic opportunity would remain incomplete.
The Murphy Family and the Courtroom
The Murphy family represents another multigenerational Baltimore legal tradition.
Judge William H. Murphy Sr. helped establish a family legacy rooted in law, justice, public service, and Black political empowerment.
His son, William H. “Billy” Murphy Jr., became a judge and later one of the nation’s most prominent civil-rights and trial attorneys.
Billy Murphy’s career has repeatedly placed him at the center of major struggles involving police accountability, constitutional rights, racial justice, and equal treatment under the law.
His late brother, Arthur Murphy, was also an attorney and an important part of that family legacy.
Arthur was my friend.
In 2002, he took me to Jordan, an experience that expanded my understanding of journalism, diplomacy, international affairs, and the global connections that can emerge from relationships built in Baltimore.
That personal memory belongs here because history is not merely a list of offices held and cases won.
It is also the way leaders open doors for others.
Rev. Vernon Dobson and the Goon Squad
Union Baptist Church’s civil-rights legacy continued through Rev. Vernon N. Dobson.
Dobson helped lead protests to integrate Gwynn Oak Amusement Park. He fought for the equal treatment of Black rape victims. He supported early-childhood education through Union Baptist’s Head Start program and later helped establish Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development, better known as BUILD.
He also worked with the group known as the Goon Squad.
The name may sound informal, but its mission was serious.
The Goon Squad brought together ministers, attorneys, political organizers, and community leaders who confronted racial injustice, promoted Black political representation, and applied organized pressure when traditional appeals failed.
They did not wait to be invited into power.
They organized power.
Dobson’s ministry connected the church to public policy, electoral politics, neighborhood development, education, and civil rights.
Morgan State and the Student Movement
Baltimore’s institutions also trained young people to challenge segregation.
In 1955, Morgan State students protested segregation at Read’s Drug Store in downtown Baltimore.
Their successful demonstration helped persuade the company to desegregate its Baltimore-area lunch counters five years before the Greensboro sit-ins captured national attention.
That distinction matters.
It does not diminish Greensboro.
It expands our understanding of the movement.
Baltimore students were already testing direct-action strategies, confronting segregated businesses, and winning concrete victories before the sit-in movement became a defining national story.
The Neighborhood Institutions That History Misses
Not every institution that built Black Baltimore had a nationally known leader or a formal archive.
Some existed at the neighborhood level.
Social clubs.
Athletic clubs.
Church auxiliaries.
Masonic lodges.
Eastern Star chapters.
Block associations.
Bowling leagues.
Funeral-home networks.
Men’s clubs.
Women’s clubs.
In Sandtown-Winchester, the Freeloaders Social Club was part of that neighborhood fabric.
Its history may not be easily found online.
That does not mean it did not matter.
Black history has often survived in family photographs, funeral programs, church books, anniversary journals, club minutes, newspaper clippings, and oral memory rather than in official archives.
Organizations such as the Freeloaders helped create relationships, maintain traditions, organize social life, and strengthen the sense of belonging that communities require.
A city is not held together only by its largest institutions.
It is also held together by the places where people know one another.
Black Baltimore Built Freedom
When we place these stories together, a pattern becomes visible.
Mother Mary Lange built education and faith.
Isaac Myers built labor and ownership.
The Independent Order of St. Luke built mutual aid.
Joseph G. Locks and Maryland’s funeral directors built dignity and professional institutions.
Rev. Harvey Johnson built early civil-rights organization.
Lillie Mae Carroll Jackson built mass membership and political pressure.
Juanita Jackson Mitchell used the law.
Clarence Mitchell Jr. moved legislation through Congress.
Thurgood Marshall transformed constitutional law.
Parren Mitchell carried economic justice into Congress.
The Murphy family defended civil rights in the courtroom.
Rev. Vernon Dobson and the Goon Squad organized ministers, attorneys, and community leaders.
Morgan students challenged segregation directly.
Neighborhood organizations built the relationships that sustained communities between major campaigns.
And today, Black Baltimoreans such as P. David Bramble continue accepting responsibility for the city’s next chapter.
Freedom was never the work of one person.
It was built by institutions.
Sustained by families.
Strengthened by churches.
Defended by lawyers.
Organized by workers.
Financed by entrepreneurs.
Amplified by newspapers.
Protected by funeral directors.
Advanced by students.
Preserved in community memory.
When Marco Merrick began talking about Baltimore’s “firsts,” he spoke with the pride of a Baltimorean.
The deeper we looked, the more reason there was for that pride.
Baltimore helped build America.
And Black Baltimore helped build the freedom America continues struggling to fulfill.
