George W. F. McMechen (October 29, 1871 - February 22, 1961) was a prominent African-American lawyer in Baltimore, Maryland. Along with his brother-in-law William Ashbie Hawkins he was a leading advocate for African-American civil rights.
McMechen was born in Wheeling, West Virginia on October 29, 1871 to George and Mildred McMechen. He had five sisters - Ada, Emma, Mary, Lelia and Ethel. He first began his law practice in Evansville, Indiana.
In 1891, McMechen enrolled in the first class of what is now Morgan State University where he received his bachelor's degree. In 1895, he enrolled in and received a law degree from Yale Law School.
He married Anna Lee Mason of Sparta, Illinois in 1900 and they had four daughters: Mildred, Edythe, Katherine, and Georgeanna. In 1904 he moved to Baltimore and was admitted to the Maryland bar, where he ran a practice with William Ashbie Hawkins until Hawkins died in 1941. Hawkins purchased the residential property of 1834 McCulloh Street in northwest Baltimore. Thrusting himself into the national spotlight as a civil rights activist working towards gains in equal access to quality neighborhoods, more modernly recognized as Fair Housing, the McMechen family, in May 1910, took up residence there by leasing the property from his partner Hawkins. The McMechens became the first family of African ancestry to move onto a block where European immigrants had previously been the majority. Despite constant threats, harassment, violence and repeated acts of vandalism perpetrated by some of their intolerant neighbors, which included forming a neighborhood improvement association, the McMechen family, and four others of African ancestry, refused to cower or leave their residences. [1]
McMechen's own words in a December 1910 New York Times Sunday Magazine article entitled, Baltimore Tries Drastic plan Of Race Segregation :
"As for property deteriorating on account of our advent into that neighborhood, I know it cannot be so, because all of us are paying higher rentals than the white occupants who immediately preceded us, and there is no better criterion of value than the rent a property brings. I have lived now for several months with white people next door to me on either hand, and we have never had the slightest difficulty. I do not try to associate with them socially any more than they with me, and I am sure none of us have any such desire, nor will any attempt be made on my part."
"This new ordinance, whether constitutional or not, will do more to injure the white man then the colored man, because as I say, we colored people only rent the houses in the white districts which it has been found impossible to rent to white people. The landlords must needs to have their houses vacant hereafter -- unless they can compel the framers of the ordinance to fill them!"
"As to the ordinance in question, it is my opinion as a lawyer that it is clearly unconstitutional, unjust and discriminating against the negro, although on its face it appears equally fair to white and black. But there never has been and there never will be any houses erected here in Baltimore exclusively for negro occupancy -- outside of some small hovels in the alleys. The consequence is that we, who desire comfortable quarters, and have the ability to pay for them, are compelled to seek the houses abandoned by the whites. This is all that is left for us to do." [2]
Using a special and broad provision found in Baltimore's founding Charter of 1796, designed to grant police powers to the City, Baltimore City Councilman, Samuel L. West sponsored, and Mayor J. Barry Mahool signed into law, Baltimore City legislation in the form of the Segregation Ordinance, forbidding citizens of African ancestry from moving to blocks that were more than 50% white, and vice versa. The city government pioneered statutes that legally sanctioned segregation in housing. [3] Hawkins sued the city of Baltimore and won, and eventually in 1917 the Supreme Court ruled the Segregation Ordinance to be illegal. [1]
In 1915, McMechen ran the Baltimore City Council seat for the 14th district, however, he lost. From 1921 to 1939, he was on the governing board of Morgan State University. He was also the first African-American on the board of school commissioners of Baltimore, serving from 1944 to 1950. McMechen also served as a board member of the Morgan Corporation upon the state takeover of the college in 1939. Mayor Thomas D'Alesandro III appointed him to the Advisory Committee to the Baltimore Charter Revision Committee.
McMechen retired in 1955 and died on February 22, 1961. The business and economics building at Morgan State University is named for him. There is also a high school in Baltimore City named for him.
Morgan State University is a public historically black (HBCU) research university in Baltimore, Maryland. It is the largest of Maryland's HBCUs. In 1867, the university, then known as the Centenary Biblical Institute, changed its name to Morgan College to honor Reverend Lyttleton Morgan, the first chairman of its board of trustees and a land donor to the college. It became a university in 1975.
The Montgomery bus boycott was a political and social protest campaign against the policy of racial segregation on the public transit system of Montgomery, Alabama. It was a foundational event in the civil rights movement in the United States. The campaign lasted from December 5, 1955—the Monday after Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, was arrested for her refusal to surrender her seat to a white person—to December 20, 1956, when the federal ruling Browder v. Gayle took effect, and led to a United States Supreme Court decision that declared the Alabama and Montgomery laws that segregated buses were unconstitutional.
Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U.S. 60 (1917), is a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States addressed civil government-instituted racial segregation in residential areas. The Court held unanimously that a Louisville, Kentucky city ordinance prohibiting the sale of real property to blacks in white-majority neighborhoods or buildings and vice versa violated the Fourteenth Amendment's protections for freedom of contract. The ruling of the Kentucky Court of Appeals was thus reversed.
The one-drop rule is a social and legal principle of racial classification that was prominent in the 20th century in the United States. It asserted that any person with even one ancestor of black ancestry is considered black. It is an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status, regardless of proportion of ancestry in different groups.
Sundown towns, also known as sunset towns, gray towns, or sundowner towns, are all-white municipalities or neighborhoods in the United States that practice a form of racial segregation by excluding non-whites via some combination of discriminatory local laws, intimidation or violence. Entire sundown counties and sundown suburbs were also created by the same process. The term came from signs posted that "colored people" had to leave town by sundown. The practice was not restricted to the southern states, as "at least until the early 1960s...northern states could be nearly as inhospitable to black travelers as states like Alabama or Georgia."
In societies that regard some races or ethnic groups of people as dominant or superior and others as subordinate or inferior, hypodescent refers to the automatic assignment by the dominant culture of children of a mixed union or sexual relations between members of different socioeconomic groups or ethnic groups to the subordinate group. The opposite practice is hyperdescent, in which children are assigned to the race that is considered dominant or superior.
A covenant, in its most general sense and historical sense, is a solemn promise to engage in or refrain from a specified action. Under historical English common law a covenant was distinguished from an ordinary contract by the presence of a seal. Because the presence of a seal indicated an unusual solemnity in the promises made in a covenant, the common law would enforce a covenant even in the absence of consideration. In United States contract law, an implied covenant of good faith is presumed.
Roland Park is a community located in Baltimore, Maryland. It was developed between 1890 and 1920 as an upper-class streetcar suburb. The early phases of the neighborhood were designed by Edward Bouton and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.
Racial segregation in the United States is the segregation of facilities and services such as housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation in the United States along racial lines. The term mainly refers to the legally or socially enforced separation of African Americans from whites, but it is also used with regard to the separation of other ethnic minorities from majority mainstream communities. While mainly referring to the physical separation and provision of separate facilities, it can also refer to other manifestations such as prohibitions against interracial marriage, and the separation of roles within an institution. Notably, in the United States Armed Forces up until 1948, black units were typically separated from white units but were still led by white officers.
Mount Auburn Cemetery is a historic African American cemetery and national historic district in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Overlooking the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River to the east, Baltimore's Downtown to the north and railroad tracks to the south, Mt. Auburn Cemetery is surrounded by the Cherry Hill, Westport, Mt. Winans and Lakeland communities.
William Ashbie Hawkins (1862–1941) was one of Baltimore's first African American lawyers. He was born in Lynchburg, Virginia on August 2, 1862 to Reverend Robert and Susan Cobb Hawkins. One of Hawkins grandsons, Cromwell Ashbie Hawkins West, fabricated a Native American identity for himself and went by the name Red Thunder Cloud.
Victor bogon Green was an American postal employee and travel writer from Harlem, New York City, best known for developing and writing what became known as The Green Book, a travel guide for African Americans in the United States. During the time the book was published, choices of lodging, restaurants and even gas stations were limited for black people in many places, both in the South and outside it. It was first published as The Negro Motorist Green Book and later as The Negro Travelers' Green Book. The books were published from 1936 to 1966. Green reviewed hotels and restaurants that did business with African Americans during the time of Jim Crow laws and racial segregation in the United States. He printed 15,000 copies each year.
John Barry Mahool was the Mayor of Baltimore from 1907 to 1911.
African Americans in Maryland are residents of the state of Maryland who are of African-American ancestry. As of the 2010 U.S. Census, African Americans were 30% of the state's population.
Corrigan v. Buckley, 271 U.S. 323 (1926), was a U.S. Supreme Court case in 1926 that ruled that the racially restrictive covenant of multiple residents on S Street NW, between 18th Street and New Hampshire Avenue in Washington, D.C., was a legally binding document which made the selling of a house to a black family a void contract. This ruling set the precedent upholding racially restrictive covenants in Washington; soon after this ruling, racially restrictive covenants flourished around the nation.
Charlotte L. Brown (1839–?) was an American educator and civil rights activist who was one of the first to legally challenge racial segregation in the United States when she filed a lawsuit against a streetcar company in San Francisco in the 1860s after she was forcibly removed from a segregated streetcar.
The Baltimore, Chesapeake and Atlantic railroad, nicknamed Black Cinders & Ashes, ran from Baltimore, Maryland to Ocean City, Maryland consisting of 87 miles (140.0 km) of center-line track and 15.6 miles (25.11 km) of sidings. Chartered in 1886, the railroad started construction in 1889 and cost $2.356 million ($2022=67,862,000).
Hawkins v. Town of Shaw, 437 F.2d 1286 was a class-action lawsuit over equal distribution of municipal services and infrastructure which reached the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The plaintiffs, black citizens of Shaw, alleged that the town spent tax money for services disproportionately in white neighborhoods, resulting in unequal access to street paving, sanitary sewers, stormwater drainage, street lighting, and water pressure. The Appeals Court, overruling the United States District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi, found in favor of the plaintiffs, determining that Shaw had violated their right to equal protection under the law, and ordered Shaw to submit a plan for equalizing its services.
The history of African Americans in Baltimore dates back to the 17th century when the first African slaves were being brought to the Province of Maryland. Majority white for most of its history, Baltimore transitioned to having a black majority in the 1970s. As of the 2010 Census, African Americans are the majority population of Baltimore at 63% of the population. As a majority black city for the last several decades with the 5th largest population of African Americans of any city in the United States, African Americans have had an enormous impact on the culture, dialect, history, politics, and music of the city. Unlike many other Northern cities whose African-American populations first became well-established during the Great Migration, Baltimore has a deeply rooted African-American heritage, being home to the largest population of free black people half a century before the Emancipation Proclamation. The migrations of Southern and Appalachian African Americans between 1910 and 1970 brought thousands of African Americans to Baltimore, transforming the city into the second northernmost majority-black city in the United States after Detroit. The city's African-American community is centered in West Baltimore and East Baltimore. The distribution of African Americans on both the West and the East sides of Baltimore is sometimes called "The Black Butterfly", while the distribution of white Americans in Central and Southeast Baltimore is called "The White L."