THE“ BUY WHERE YOU CAN WORK” CAMPAIGN ENCOURAGED BOYCOTTS OF BUSINESSES THAT REFUSED TO HIRE BLACK PEOPLE.
COURTESY OF THE AFRO AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS ARCHIVES
HOME OF THE BRAVE
Baltimore’ s Black Leaders Pursue Justice for Their People
N ot everyone was included in the white working class’ s fights for sovereignty and economic equality that defined Mobtown in the 1800s. Free and enslaved Black individuals continued to face intense racial discrimination through the 1900s, but a few brave Baltimoreans fought back and advanced freedoms for themselves and African Americans around the country.
Revolutionary author and abolitionist Frederick Douglass worked in a Fell’ s Point shipyard as a young man in the 1830s before escaping to the north— an era you can learn about at the Frederick Douglass-Isaac Myers Maritime Park Museum. Three years before he died, Douglass returned to Baltimore as a prosperous free man and built five houses on Strawberry Alley( now known as Dallas Street). Douglass Place, as he named it, still stands today. Meanwhile, Harriet Tubman led 13 dangerous forays into Maryland to facilitate the escape of about 70 enslaved individuals, including a woman named Tilly whose story is memorialized at Pier 4 outside the National Aquarium.
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