In the 1870s, The Start of a New School Year Marked the Start of a New Era.
Still, Baltimore's First Public Schools for "Colored" Students Only Went So Far
Colored parents have starved themselves to give their children education. They have taken a pride in seeing their children acquiring learning which the parents of white children do not feel. — Dr. Henry J. Brown, Colored People’s Educational Meeting, April 10, 1879.
The 1870s radically altered Baltimore’s educational landscape. You’d be right if this brings to mind the beginnings of Johns Hopkins University. Inaugural President Daniel Coit Gilman assumed his post with an address delivered in February 1876. Two years later, in 1878, the university conferred its first degrees, four PhDs, while a foundation for the medical school was laid.
The research of Hard Histories Lab member Kevin LaMonica reminds us that the 1870s also were a watershed for young people in Baltimore City as Black children gained entry to public school classrooms for the first time. Kevin’s research into public records and period newspapers chronicles this story, the importance of which rivals that of the university’s beginnings.
The story of pre-Civil War public education in Baltimore is one of out-right exclusion. Historian Bettye J. Gardner chronicled how the city’s earliest Black educators set up in churches and private academies when officials refused to admit Black students. Parents repeatedly petitioned the Baltimore City Council, insisting upon a change. They argued that, because taxes paid by Black families supported public schools, their children must be admitted. And they appealed to principles of equity: public policy should not distinguish between Black and white children in Baltimore City.1
As Kevin LaMonica chronicles on his Sutori timeline, in the 1870s the struggles waged by Black parents and educators continued even after Black pupils were regularly admitted to Baltimore’s public schools. Equality claims went beyond the establishment of classrooms and school buildings for Black students. Equality also demanded that Black educators be employed in all public schools, including those for Black students. Equality demanded that school buildings in marked disrepair be restored. Equality meant that it was beyond time for the establishment of a high school open to Black students. These concerns consumed the efforts of Baltimore’s Black community into the 1880s, and beyond.
Throughout these first decades, Baltimore’s public schools remained segregated — with Black and white students separated from one another throughout the system. This arrangement, an early manifestation of what would become the city’s Jim Crow hierarchy, promoted pernicious falsehoods about not only the difference but also the inferiority of Black versus white students. Separate was not equal.
Kevin LaMonica’s findings about early segregation in Baltimore’s public schools fit with what we know about other of the city’s institutions in the wake of slavery’s abolition. As Lab member Ariella Shua shows, public transportation in Baltimore separated Black from white riders. Plans for the Johns Hopkins Hospital anticipated the same: Black and white patients cared for in separate facilities. For those who want to read more about how Black Baltimoreans pushed back, we recommend one of the Lab’s frequent reads, Dennis Patrick Halpin’s A Brotherhood of Liberty: Black Reconstruction and Its Legacies in Baltimore 1865-1920 (UPenn Press 2019).
To students and educators alike, welcome back to a new school year, and to the struggle.
— MSJ.
Bettye J. Gardner, “William Watkins: Antebellum Black Teacher and Writer,” Negro History Bulletin 39, no. 6 (September 1976): 623; Bettye J. Gardner, “Antebellum Black Education in Baltimore,” Maryland Historical Magazine 71 (1976): 360-66.