Lucille Gorham (January 18, 1931 - November 3, 2012) was a civil rights activist in Baltimore communities during the Civil Rights Movement. Born Lucille Alexander in Halifax, North Carolina, Gorham moved to Baltimore in 1934 and resided a community in East Baltimore. She attended city public schools and later earned a GED, as well as studying at Sojourner Douglass College. Gorham lived a quiet life as a homemaker until 1967, when she became the president of Citizens for Fair Housing, a neighborhood association founded in response to the city's urban renewal plan. She soon led a successful community-owned and operated housing complex built on Madison Park Square between Caroline and Eden streets. She went on to become the director of the Madison Square Housing Association, director of the Middle East Community, and the leader of a neighborhood 4-H Club. [1]
The Baltimore riot of 1968 resulting from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. propelled Gorham's role in neighborhood activism. In August 1968, Gorham began to operate "Our House," clubhouse that offered services to the community including home-cooked meals, a place for local children to spend their Saturday evenings, and a spot for senior citizens to meet with friends. [2]
Later in life, Gorham fought against the expansion of the Johns Hopkins Hospital medical complex in 2002. As a result of the expansion, Gorham was forced out of her home in the Middle East neighborhood of East Baltimore and moved to a home in the Belair-Edison neighborhood of Northeast Baltimore. Gorham died at 81 years old from a battle with cancer. [3]
Columbia is a census-designated place in Howard County, Maryland, United States. It is a planned community consisting of 10 self-contained villages. The census-designated place had a population of 104,681 at the 2020 census, making it the second most populous community in Maryland after Baltimore. Columbia, located between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., is officially part of the Baltimore metropolitan area.
Ocean Pines is a census-designated place (CDP) in Worcester County, Maryland, United States. The population was 11,710 at the 2010 census. It is part of the Salisbury, Maryland-Delaware Metropolitan Statistical Area. It shares the same ZIP code as Berlin.
Canton is a historic waterfront neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. The neighborhood is along Baltimore's outer harbor in the southeastern section of the city, roughly 2 miles (3 km) east of Baltimore's downtown district and next to or near the neighborhoods of Patterson Park, Fell's Point, Highlandtown, and Brewers Hill.
Mount Washington is an area of northwest Baltimore, Maryland. It is a designated city historic district and divided into two sections: South Road/Sulgrave to the southeast and Dixon's Hill to the north. The Mount Washington Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1990 with a boundary increase in 2001, with five contributing buildings and four contributing structures.
Liberty Square is a 753-unit Miami-Dade public housing apartment complex in the Liberty City neighborhood of Miami, Florida. It is bordered at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard/North 62nd Street to the south, North 67th Street to the north, State Road 933 to the east, and Northwest 15th Avenue to the west. Constructed as a part of the New Deal by the Public Works Administration and opening in 1937, it was the first public housing project for African Americans in the Southern United States.
The Chicago Freedom Movement, also known as the Chicago open housing movement, was led by Martin Luther King Jr., James Bevel and Al Raby. It was supported by the Chicago-based Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The movement included a large rally, marches, and demands to the City of Chicago. These specific demands covered a wide range of areas besides open housing, and included quality education, transportation and job access, income and employment, health, wealth generation, crime and the criminal justice system, community development, tenants rights, and quality of life. Operation Breadbasket, in part led by Jesse Jackson, sought to harness African-American consumer power. The Chicago Freedom Movement was the most ambitious civil rights campaign in the North of the United States, lasted from mid-1965 to August 1966, and is largely credited with inspiring the 1968 Fair Housing Act.
Middle East is a neighborhood in the heart of East Baltimore, Maryland.
Clarence Maurice Mitchell Jr. was an American civil rights activist and was the chief lobbyist for the NAACP for nearly 30 years. He also served as a regional director for the organization.
Velvalea Hortense Rodgers "Vel" Phillips was an American attorney, politician, jurist, and civil rights activist, who served as an alderperson and judge in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and as secretary of state of Wisconsin (1979–1983). She was the first African American woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin Law School; the first African American, as well as the first woman, elected Alderwoman to the Milwaukee Common Council; and the first African American, as well as the first woman, to serve as a jurist in Wisconsin.
Madeline Wheeler Murphy was an African-American community activist, civil rights champion, advocate for the poor, and panelist on the Baltimore television show Square Off.
Ashburton is a middle class, predominantly African-American neighborhood in the Forest Park region of northwestern Baltimore City, Maryland. It is located near Liberty Heights Avenue and Hilton Street, and is characterized by mixture of single family housing and blocks of row houses.
Barclay is a neighborhood in the center of Baltimore City. Its boundaries, as defined by the City Planning Office, are marked by North Avenue, Greenmount Avenue, Saint Paul and 25th Streets. The neighborhood lies north of Greenmount West, south of Charles Village, west of East Baltimore Midway, and east of Charles North and Old Goucher. The boundary between the Northern and Eastern police districts runs through the community, cutting it roughly in half.
King-Lincoln Bronzeville is a historically African American neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio. Originally known as Bronzeville by the residents of the community, it was renamed the King-Lincoln District by Mayor Michael B. Coleman's administration to highlight the historical significance of the district's King Arts Complex and Lincoln Theatre, amid collaborations with investors and developers to revitalize the neighborhood.
The Northern Ireland civil rights movement dates to the early 1960s, when a number of initiatives emerged in Northern Ireland which challenged the inequality and discrimination against ethnic Irish Catholics that was perpetrated by the Ulster Protestant establishment. The Campaign for Social Justice (CSJ) was founded by Conn McCluskey and his wife, Patricia. Conn was a doctor, and Patricia was a social worker who had worked in Glasgow for a period, and who had a background in housing activism. Both were involved in the Homeless Citizens League, an organisation founded after Catholic women occupied disused social housing. The HCL evolved into the CSJ, focusing on lobbying, research and publicising discrimination. The campaign for Derry University was another mid-1960s campaign.
The history of Czechs in Baltimore dates back to the mid-19th century. Thousands of Czechs immigrated to East Baltimore during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, becoming an important component of Baltimore's ethnic and cultural heritage. The Czech community has founded a number of cultural institutions to preserve the city's Czech heritage, including a Roman Catholic church, a heritage association, a gymnastics association, an annual festival, a language school, and a cemetery. During the height of the Czech community in the late 19th century and early 20th century, Baltimore was home to 12,000 to 15,000 people of Czech birth or heritage. The population began to decline during the mid-to-late 20th century, as the community assimilated and aged, while many Czech Americans moved to the suburbs of Baltimore. By the 1980s and early 1990s, the former Czech community in East Baltimore had been almost entirely dispersed, though a few remnants of the city's Czech cultural legacy still remain.
Janet Freeman was an American community organizer and activist for tenant's rights in New York City's lower Manhattan. On June 20, 2013, the corner of Elizabeth Street and Kenmare Street was co-named "Janet Freeman Way" by the New York City Council in her memory and to commemorate her activism on behalf of the community. According to NYC Streets in its listing of street names and their honorees, "Janet Freeman was a community organizer and tenant advocate. She founded the Croman Tenants Association; the Coalition to Protect Public Housing and Section 8; and Co-op Watch, to prevent evictions through phony conversions. She started campaigns to organize tenants against aggressive landlords, phony demolitions, and harassment in and around Chinatown and Little Italy."
Midtown-Edmondson is a mixed-use neighborhood in western Baltimore City developed mostly between the 1880s and the 1910s. The neighborhood is mainly composed of residential rowhouses, with a mixed-used business district along Edmondson Avenue, and industrial warehouses and buildings dotted along the CSX railroads that bound its western edge.
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."
Walter Hall Lively, Jr. was an African American civil rights and socialist activist in Baltimore, MD, USA. A key figure in the Black Power and Black Arts Movements in Baltimore, Lively founded and headed several important organizations devoted to Black liberation and ending poverty. According to the Baltimore Sun, “National civil rights leaders publicly predicted he would be Baltimore’s first Black mayor.” His unexpected death at age 34 abruptly ended his political career.
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