Savannah Wood

SAVANNAH WOOD WAS A PARTICIPANT IN OUR 2021 DIALOGUES: LEGACY AND STORYTELLING SERIES

Recommendation: A BROTHERHOOD OF LIBERTY BY DENNIS PATRICK HALPIN

“I read these one after the other and got a great education on the legacy of Black activism in Baltimore in the 19th century. Both books illustrate how free Baltimoreans used both public demonstrations and the court system to gain more civil rights, and official recognition as full citizens. These tactics formed the basis for the Civil Rights Movement that would take place a century later”

Book Description: In A Brotherhood of Liberty, Dennis Patrick Halpin shifts the focus of the black freedom struggle from the Deep South to argue 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 dynamic group of black political leaders migrated to Baltimore from rural Virginia and Maryland. These activists, mostly former slaves who subsequently trained in the ministry, pushed Baltimore to fulfill Reconstruction's promise of racial equality. In doing so, they were part of a larger effort among African Americans to create new forms of black politics by founding churches, starting businesses, establishing community centers, and creating newspapers. Black Baltimoreans successfully challenged Jim Crow regulations on public transit, in the courts, in the voting booth, and on the streets of residential neighborhoods. They formed some of the nation's earliest civil rights organizations, including the United Mutual Brotherhood of Liberty, to define their own freedom in the period after the Civil War.