Terry, David Taft

OUR SYNOPSIS: David Taft Terry illuminates the Black Baltimorean response to the rise of racial segregation, showing this to be “an enduring black struggle for equality” that “evolved from the 1890s through the 1950s.” (1) He emphasizes community building as a vital force in the struggle for equality and self-determination, which built an empowering counter-narrative to Jim Crow. Black community institutions such as churches and schools were vital pillars of this narrative. The NAACP and the Afro-American provided strong organizational bases for driving Black Baltimorean struggle. Students and other young people played a crucial role in social action. Terry argues that Baltimore’s civil rights struggle reflected circumstances specific to Baltimore and the urban South, thus requiring localized analysis to understand national developments. Indeed, “In cities like Baltimore, where Jim Crow existed as a fact of law and where pervasive segregation culture regenerated itself, the size of the black population and its proportion to the overall population made for a milieu relatively unique to the urban South, certainly in the earlier decades of the twentieth century. Together these factors created specific resistance environments, and the conditions and forces of both segregation and the struggle against it reflected the specific political, social, and cultural economies of the urban South.” (217)