Researching Maryland Civil Rights History from This Archive

This site holds fourteen pages produced in 2007 by students at Doris M. Johnson High School in Baltimore, working with staff of the Maryland Historical Society. Ten of them are essay pages, some holding more than one student essay, each essay signed and closed with numbered endnotes. The rest are a timeline, a list of oral history interviews, a credits page and the teacher's introduction. For someone beginning to research civil rights history in Maryland, that is a better starting point than its size suggests. The essays say what happened. The endnotes say where the students found it. The interview list says who was still willing to talk in 2006 and 2007. This note is about how to use the three together, and how to move from them to the primary sources behind them.

What the student pages cover

The subjects run from the 1890s to the 1970s and from west Baltimore to the Eastern Shore. Three essays describe Pennsylvania Avenue, its theaters, and the 1933 boycott under the slogan "Don't Shop Where You Can't Work." One traces the Baltimore Afro-American from John Murphy, Sr., who bought it in 1892, to his son Carl Murphy, who ran it from 1922 until 1957. Two reconstruct the lynchings of Matthew Williams at Salisbury on December 4, 1931 and George Armwood at Princess Anne on October 18, 1933, the second of which the students call the last reported lynching in Maryland. One follows Donald Gaines Murray from his December 1934 application to the University of Maryland law school to the Court of Appeals ruling of January 15, 1936. One explains the March to Annapolis of April 23, 1942. Others cover the 1952 admission of Black students to the engineering course at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, the histories of Dunbar and Douglass high schools, the churches that hosted planning meetings and mass rallies, the Morgan State students who integrated the Northwood Theatre on February 22, 1963, and the Baltimore chapter of the Black Panther Party between 1968 and 1972.

Alongside the essays sits a timeline running from 1892 to 2007, compiled by the same students. Its entries are brief and carry no citations, so it works best as a checklist of things to look up rather than as a source in itself. Many of its Maryland items, such as the Gwynn Oak Park demonstrations of 1963 or the Cambridge disturbances of 1963 and 1967, are touched on only briefly in the essays on this site. Those gaps are the places where a new research project could begin.

Reading the endnotes as a map

Read across all ten essay pages, the endnotes describe a small, repeatable circuit of Baltimore research. The Enoch Pratt Free Library's African American Department keeps vertical files of clippings, sorted by subject, and the students cite them for Dunbar, for Carl Murphy, for the Black Panthers and for Douglass High School. The Maryland Historical Society, since renamed the Maryland Center for History and Culture, holds its own clipping files, which the students cite by the label "NCF" and a subject heading, and the Clarence Logan Papers, which supplied the Sun and Afro-American stories quoted in the Morgan State essay. The same institution holds the older oral histories the students quote, each with a catalogue number: Juanita Jackson Mitchell is OH 8183, Marion Bascom is OH 8128, Clarence Mitchell is OH 8209.

Beyond Baltimore's reading rooms, the notes point to the Maryland State Archives for documents on the Williams lynching and the Murray case, and to three articles in Maryland Historical Magazine: Sandy Shoemaker on the equal rights movement in Baltimore from 1935 to 1942, Robert Palumbos on student involvement from 1953 to 1963, and David Bogen on the first integration of the law school. Two books recur across the endnotes, Barbara Mills's history of Maryland activism and Sherrilyn Ifill's study of the Eastern Shore lynchings.

Newspapers are the other thread. The essays on the Armwood and Williams lynchings cite the Baltimore Afro-American of October 21, 1933 by headline, along with Time magazine and a Baltimore Post editorial of December 5, 1931. The essay on Carl Murphy makes the comparison explicit: the Sun's coverage of both lynchings, according to Ifill, included no interviews with either man's family, while the Afro ran a front-page interview with Armwood's mother. Two newspapers reporting the same week can leave entirely different records, and the one that has been digitized is not always the one that saw most.

The oral histories as primary sources

The interview list holds fourteen entries for conversations recorded between April 24, 2006 and April 9, 2007. The audio was never captured, so the recordings cannot be played here, but the list still gives three things a researcher needs: the name of the person interviewed, the name of the student who asked the questions, and the date. Matched against the essays, those entries become reconstructable citations. When Kenneth Griffin quotes James Griffin on the 26-hour sit-in at the school board's headquarters on 25th Street, the endnote says the interview was conducted by Samantha Porter on March 29, 2007, and the list confirms it. When Jade Thompson quotes Julia Davidson-Randall on spending four days in jail after the Northwood protests, the list dates that conversation to March 31, 2007.

Anyone planning a project of the same shape, built on interviews or a survey as well as on reading, should settle the record-keeping before the first conversation. A practical guide to collecting data for a research project covers the decisions the students evidently faced: who to approach, how to record what is said, and how to keep track of who said what and when. The interview list on this site is, in effect, that log, and it has outlived the recordings it describes.

Gathering and organizing the evidence

The habit the essays model, sometimes unevenly, is to pair every factual claim with a note. A researcher building on them can go one step further and keep a working file in which each source has its own entry. The entry should record at least the following.

• The kind of source: newspaper story, court document, published book or article, archival clipping, or interview.
• The date of the source and the date of the event it describes, which are often different.
• Where it is held and under what label, for instance a vertical file heading or an OH number.
• The specific claim it supports, in your own words, and any claim it contradicts.

That last line matters because the sources disagree. The Armwood essay notes that the Afro at first reported he was hanged from a telephone wire, while other accounts say a tree; it gives the size of the mob as anywhere from 300 to 2,000. The Poly essay says sixteen students applied for the engineering course, while a City Paper headline in its notes refers to thirteen students entering. None of this is a failure on the students' part. It is what evidence looks like before it has been sorted, and an honest write-up says so rather than picking one number silently.

Explaining why, not only when

A timeline tells you the March to Annapolis happened in 1942. The essay on the march explains why, and it does so as a chain. Wartime jobs were going to white workers; in 1943 only 175 of 20,000 workers at the Glenn L. Martin aircraft plant were Black. A 1944 study counted fourteen Black people killed by police since 1930 with no officer brought to trial. Then a soldier, Private Thomas E. Broadus, was shot on Pennsylvania Avenue by Officer Edward Bender. The NAACP responded with a march rather than a riot, in Juanita Jackson Mitchell's phrase, and Governor O'Conor answered with a commission, a report in March 1943 and three Black officers added to the police force. A reader who wants to build a similar argument about a different event will find a guide to writing a causal analysis essay useful for keeping the order of causes straight and for separating the trigger from the conditions behind it.

The same approach explains why the Murray case mattered beyond one student's admission. Maryland ran a single public law school and offered no equivalent for Black applicants; the university president's suggestion that Murray attend the Princess Anne Academy did not change that. Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston argued the case before Judge Eugene O'Dunne in June 1935 and won because the state had no provision for another law school equal to the University of Maryland's, and the Court of Appeals upheld the decision in January 1936. Eighteen years before Brown v. Board of Education, a Maryland court had held that a state with one public law school could not turn away a Black applicant. The significance is in the reasoning, and the reasoning is only visible once the facts are lined up in order.

Where to go from here

Treat this archive as a set of leads. Start with an essay, follow its endnotes to the magazine articles and books, and then to the clipping files and the newspapers themselves. Use the timeline to find events the essays did not reach, Cambridge above all, where Gloria Richardson's arrest at the Dizzyland Restaurant on May 14, 1963 appears only as an entry and an interview date. Keep a file in which each source is named, placed and dated. The students who built this site in 2007 did their research in reading rooms with clippings and cassette tapes; much of the same material is still there, waiting to be read again with a new question in mind.

Questions

Also at the Research Desk: A Publisher and a Plaintiff: Carl Murphy and Donald Gaines Murray · From a School Project to a College Essay