Mid-Shore Life

By Dwayne Eutsey

With all the snow we’ve had to dig out from lately, it’s easy to forget that February is Black History Month. http://www.history.com/content/blackhistory

This observance originally began as Negro History Week in 1926 when historian Carter G. Woodson, the largely self-educated son of former slaves who went on to receive a PhD from Harvard, wanted to establish a time for remembering and celebrating the significant contributions African Americans have made to our national history.

Woodson initially set this observance during the second week in February because two major figures in African American history were born during that week: Frederick Douglass, the former slave and outspoken abolitionist who escaped from Talbot County, was born on February 14; Abraham Lincoln, the president who signed the Emancipation Proclamation ending chattel slavery in the United States, was born February 12.

The week became a month-long observance in 1976 and is also known as African American Heritage Month. In addition to Frederick Douglass, the Eastern Shore has made a few other noteworthy contributions to that heritage.

There is Harriet Tubman, of course. Growing up in Dorchester County back in the ‘70s, I remember learning a lot about how she bravely helped hundreds of slaves escape from the Shore through the Underground Railroad. http://www.midshorelife.com/content/harriet-tubman%E2%80%99s-legacy-lives

However, one piece of history I didn’t learn much about when I was school kid on the Shore was the important role Cambridge played in the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Maybe that history was too recent and too raw for teachers to make sense of and to teach at the time, but I don’t remember learning anything about it in school. I did overhear, occasionally, vague references adults made about that time, and I even remember when I was almost 4 years old that my grandfather made me scrunch down in the backseat of his car as he drove me and my mom through a riot-torn section of Cambridge.

However, I never knew the larger history until I read a book by historian Peter B. Levy called Civil War on Race Street: The Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland. According to the description given on the inside flap of the book’s cover, Levy recounts a compelling time in the Shore’s recent history when, “catalyzed by the arrival of freedom rides in 1962, the movement in Cambridge expanded in 1963 and 1964 under the leadership of Gloria Richardson, one of the most prominent (and one of the few female) civil rights leaders in the nation.”

http://www.blackpast.org/?q=aah/richardson-gloria-1922

He also examines the controversial 1967 events that reduced a large portion of the African American section in Cambridge smoldering ashes.

http://teachingamericanhistorymd.net/000001/000000/000033/html/t33.html

It’s a fascinating story involving iconic, lightning-rod figures such as H. Rap Brown, George Wallace, and Spiro Agnew, who helped to shape the history of race relations in Cambridge (and the nation) during that volatile era.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding this important part of the Shore’s story. Considering this column’s focus on matters of spirituality on the Shore, I found the book’s background on African American churches in Dorchester Country particularly interesting.

Anyone who knows the history of the modern civil rights movement is aware of the role Black churches played in organizing and providing a moral framework to that movement. Levy also provides an overview of the unfortunate history of racial segregation and repression within churches on the Shore.

Despite the theological egalitarianism espoused by the Methodism in the early 1800s, for example, Levy writes that “black Methodists began to push for their own church—within the white-controlled Baltimore or Philadelphia conference or by establishing their own independent or black-controlled conference. Whites resisted both efforts and effectively checked a split of the Methodist church along racial lines until after the Civil War…On the few occasions when black religious leaders sought to establish an independent black church, they were physically stopped from doing so.”

Levy gives an example from 1830 when two black ministers representing an independent conference came to Dorchester County to organize an African Methodist Episcopal Church. According to Levy, when these two ministers “spoke to a group of free blacks, a mob of whites attacked them. Two black homes were burned to the ground. Some blacks were arrested for disturbing the peace; no whites were.”

Fortunately, we have come a long way in race relations since that time thanks, in large part, to the heroic efforts of people like Gloria Richardson. We still have a long way to go, however…Sunday morning services still remain one of the most racially segregated times on the Shore and elsewhere. But that’s where knowing our shared heritage through efforts like Black History Month can help us to learn from—and to stop committing—the same mistakes so many before us have made in the past.