There’s more to Thurgood Marshall’s old neighborhood than just his school

As contractors completed the painstaking restoration of the public school attended by former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in West Baltimore, it’s time to consider the historic neighborhood context of that building.

Marshall’s family owned and operated a large grocery store just south of the school on Division Street in the early years of the 20th century. In fact, both his grandfathers were merchants and owned grocery businesses. His father had been a Maryland Club head waiter and Gibson Island Club steward.

Historian and University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law professor Larry S. Gibson documented this neighborhood in his 2012 book, “Young Thurgood: The Making of a Supreme Court Justice.”

Gibson says that when Marshall was born in 1908, West Baltimore “was fairly integrated, with white and Black families living in close proximity.” Baltimore was the fourth most Black city in the U.S., behind Washington, New York and New Orleans. There were 84,779 African-Americans living in Baltimore according to the 1910 federal Census.

The numbers tell us that while the Black population represented 18% of the city’s population, it resided in 10% of the residential units and even less of the land mass.

The elites of Baltimore’s Black professionals lived near each other in this segregated but fairly affluent community.

Their children attended the Henry Highland Garnet School, also known as PS No. 103, on Division Street, a source of community pride with many of its teachers demanding the best from their students.

Gibson writes, “The school had a reputation for solid instruction and many of the pupils came from homes where the parents valued education.”

Gibson notes that the West Baltimore Black community lived in 60 square blocks and that members of the city council tried unsuccessfully to pass ordinances to enforce residential segregation. The Supreme Court struck down these laws but the real estate industry then changed tactics and used deed covenants.

The neighborhood’s commercial street was Pennsylvania Avenue with its restaurants, shops, movie theaters, barber shops and nightclubs. It is perhaps the best known street, but thoroughfares such as Druid Hill and Division have, over the years, suffered less demolition.

The restoration of PS No. 103 is not an isolated exercise in historic preservation. The Rev. Al Hathaway, president and chief executive officer of the Beloved Community Services Corp., the organization leading the school’s restoration, has also purchased the home of civil rights activists Clarence and Juanita Jackson Mitchell on Druid Hill Avenue.

Hathaway also acquired the imposing Chernock Fire-Proof Storage, an early public storage building that still operates as it has since about 1900.

“The Mitchell home is about 50% renovated now,” Hathaway said.

Hathaway is also in the process of restoring the Druid Hill residence of John H. Murphy, a former enslaved man who founded the Afro-American newspapers.

Hathaway, one time pastor at Union Baptist Church, notes that churches have played an important role in the neighborhood.

Marshall was confirmed at Saint Katherine of Alexandria Episcopal Church at Mosher and Division streets, a congregation that followed the formal Anglo-Catholic liturgies. He later switched to St. James Church on Lafayette Square because it had a Black priest.

The common thread of the community was PS No. 103, which functioned until the early 1970s and then became the Upton Cultural and Arts Center.

The Division Street school opened in 1877 as the Male and Female Grammar School No. 6 and served many children of German descent. As the German families moved away, Black families took their place.

Marshall went on to graduate (ceremonies were held at the Lyric Theater) from what had been the German-American School that became Baltimore’s Colored High School. It was soon replaced by a new structure, Frederick Douglass High School.

But it was Marshall’s elementary school, named for Henry Highland Garnet, a minister, educator and abolitionist born into slavery in Kent County, that won the neighborhood’s heart.