Prince George's County is a county located in the U.S. state of Maryland bordering the eastern portion of Washington, D.C. As of the 2020 U.S. census, the population was 967,201, making it the second-most populous county in Maryland, behind Montgomery County. The 2020 census counted an increase of nearly 104,000 in the previous ten years. Its county seat is Upper Marlboro. It is the largest and the second most affluent African American-majority county in the United States, with five of its communities identified in a 2015 top ten list.
Bowie is a city in Prince George's County, Maryland, United States. Per the 2020 census, the population was 58,329. Bowie has grown from a small railroad stop to the largest municipality in Prince George's County, and the fifth most populous city and third largest city by area in the U.S. state of Maryland. In 2014, CNN Money ranked Bowie 28th in its Best Places to Live list.
William Lloyd Garrison was a prominent American Christian, abolitionist, journalist, suffragist, and social reformer. He is best known for his widely read antislavery newspaper The Liberator, which he founded in 1831 and published in Boston until slavery in the United States was abolished by constitutional amendment in 1865. Garrison promoted "no-governmentism" and rejected the inherent validity of the American government on the basis that its engagement in war, imperialism, and slavery made it corrupt and tyrannical. He initially opposed violence as a principle and advocated for Christian nonresistance against evil; at the outbreak of the Civil War, he abandoned his previous principles and embraced the armed struggle and the Lincoln administration. He was one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society and promoted immediate and uncompensated, as opposed to gradual and compensated, emancipation of slaves in the United States.
The source of Garrison's power was the Bible. From his earliest days, he read the Bible constantly and prayed constantly. It was with this fire that he started his conflagration. ... So also, a prejudice against all fixed forms of worship, against the authority of human government, against every binding of the spirit into conformity with human law, – all these things grew up in Garrison's mind out of his Bible reading.
Johns Hopkins was an American merchant, investor, and philanthropist. Born on a plantation, he left his home to start a career at the age of 17, and settled in Baltimore, Maryland where he remained for most of his life.
Henry Highland Garnet was an African-American abolitionist, minister, educator and orator. Having escaped as a child from slavery in Maryland with his family, he grew up in New York City. He was educated at the African Free School and other institutions, and became an advocate of militant abolitionism. He became a minister and based his drive for abolitionism in religion.
William Still was an African-American abolitionist based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, businessman, writer, historian and civil rights activist. Before the American Civil War, Still was chairman of the Vigilance Committee of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. He directly aided fugitive slaves and also kept records of the people served in order to help families reunite.
The University of Maryland Medical System is a private, not-for-profit corporation founded in 1984 and based in Baltimore, Maryland. It owns and operates 13 hospitals in Maryland, and has more than 2,500 licensed beds, 122,300 annual admissions and gross patient revenues of $4.4 billion annually. UMMS physicians and care teams work with University of Maryland School of Medicine specialists to provide primary and specialty care at more than 150 locations across the state, including a network of academic, community and specialty hospitals.
Nat Turner's Rebellion, also known as the Southampton Insurrection, was a rebellion of enslaved Virginians that took place in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831. Led by Nat Turner, the rebels killed between 55 and 65 people, at least 51 of whom were White. The rebellion was effectively suppressed within a few days, at Belmont Plantation on the morning of August 23, but Turner survived in hiding for more than two months afterward.
The National Great Blacks in Wax Museum is a wax museum in Baltimore, Maryland featuring prominent African-American and other black historical figures. It was established in 1983, in a downtown storefront on Saratoga Street.
Daniel Coker (1780–1846), born Isaac Wright, was an African American of mixed race from Baltimore, Maryland; after he gained freedom from slavery, he became a Methodist minister. He wrote one of the few pamphlets published in the South that protested against slavery and supported abolition. In 1816 he helped found the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first independent black denomination in the United States, at its first national convention in Philadelphia.
First Baptist Church was the first Baptist church in Petersburg, Virginia; one of the first African-American Baptist congregations in the United States, and one of the oldest black churches in the nation. It established one of the first local schools for black children in the nation.
Richard Sprigg Steuart (1797–1876) was a Maryland physician and an early pioneer of the treatment of mental illness. In 1838 he inherited four contiguous farms, totalling approximately 1900 acres as well as 150 slaves.
Charles Turner Torrey was a leading American abolitionist. Although largely lost to historians until recently, Torrey pushed the abolitionist movement to more political and aggressive strategies, including setting up one of the first highly organized lines for the Underground Railroad and personally freeing approximately 400 slaves. Torrey also worked closely with free blacks, thus becoming one of the first to consider them partners. John Brown cited Torrey as one of the three abolitionists he looked to as models for his own efforts.
Leonard Andrew Grimes was an African-American abolitionist and pastor. He served as a conductor of the Underground Railroad, including his efforts to free fugitive slave Anthony Burns captured in accordance with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. After the Civil War began, Grimes petitioned for African-American enlistment. He then recruited soldiers for the 54th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry.
Elisha Tyson was an American colonial millionaire and philanthropist who was active in the abolition movement, Underground Railroad, and African colonization movement. He helped black people escape slavery by establishing safe houses, or Underground Railroad stations, on the route from Maryland to Pennsylvania. He purchased the freedom of blacks at slave auctions. He also initiated lawsuits for kidnapped blacks and created a group of vigilantes to prevent blacks from being kidnapped and enslaved. He also returned some kidnapped people from Liberia returned to their home country.
Edmund Kelly was the first African-American Baptist minister ordained in Tennessee. He escaped slavery in the 1840s to New England and returned after the US Civil War. He worked as a preacher and teacher in Columbia, Tennessee and was a frequent participant in national Baptist Conventions.
Henry Vinton Plummer was an American Baptist preacher and chaplain with the United States Army Buffalo Soldiers. Born a slave on a plantation near Bowie, Maryland, he escaped slavery in his early 20s and enlisted in the Union Navy during the American Civil War. He served as a pastor at several churches before being appointed chaplain of the 9th Cavalry Regiment by President Chester A. Arthur in 1884. At that time, he was the only black officer in the US Army. In 1894 he was dishonorably discharged from the Army for drunkenness and poor conduct, but his discharge was upgraded to honorable after a review in 2005.
Agnes Kane Callum was a genealogist known for her research into Maryland's African-American history. She was a founding member of the Baltimore Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, a frequent columnist for The Catholic Review, and the founding editor of a black genealogical journal, Flower of the Forest. Callum was inducted into the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame in 2014.
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."
William J. Watkins Sr. (1803–1858) was an African-American abolitionist, educator, and minister from Baltimore, Maryland.
