A Target City

By the late nineteen-sixties, Baltimore’s Black neighborhoods were tense with frustration and expectancy, a feeling as ambient as the summer heat that clung to rowhouse stoops and corner carryouts. It was in this unsettled space—between the promise of change and the familiarity of neglect Black Power came into focus. The movement gave language and posture to a sense of urgency that had been accumulating quietly for years.

National civil-rights organizations understood Baltimore as both promising and combustible. In 1966, the Congress of Racial Equality formally designated the city a “target,” establishing an office on Gay Street and pledging, with characteristic bluntness, to “move to the ghetto.” Local groups were already ahead of them. U-Join—the Union for Jobs and Income Now—organized poor and working-class residents around employment and housing, and was led by a twenty-three-year-old named Walter Lively, whose youth was less an anomaly than a sign of the moment. In January of 1967, U-Join sponsored a talk at Morgan State University by Stokely Carmichael, then at the height of his influence.

The spring of 1968 sharpened everything. In March, Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke at St. Augustine Lutheran Church in Baltimore, as part of his effort to build support for the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington. A month later, he was assassinated. King’s assassination tore through Black communities nationwide, but in Baltimore—already identified by federal officials as one of several industrial cities vulnerable to unrest—it landed with particular force. The shock confirmed what many residents had come to suspect: that moral suasion, on its own, would not secure decent housing, steady work, or safety from the police. The older civil-rights leadership, hemmed in by white political elites and a commitment to gradualism, seemed increasingly disconnected from a younger, working-class population navigating overcrowded schools, unstable employment, and constant surveillance.

By 1970, nearly half of Baltimore’s population was Black. Yet political power lagged conspicuously behind demographic reality. Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Oakland, and Philadelphia—all with smaller Black populations—had elected Black mayors before Baltimore would. The imbalance was not subtle; it was a daily reminder of how thoroughly representation could be deferred.

Between 1968 and 1971, federal and local law enforcement treated Black political organizing less as civic participation than as a security threat. Scrutiny intensified during moments of electoral consequence. In the 1971 mayoral race, Baltimore police monitored the campaigns of Black candidates challenging William Donald Schaefer, passing intelligence directly to his team. Among those watched were Parren Mitchell, later the city’s first Black congressman; Milton Allen, who would become Maryland’s first Black state’s attorney; and Joseph Howard, eventually Baltimore’s first Black criminal-court judge. The implication was unmistakable: Black political ambition would be permitted, but only within carefully policed limits. It would take another fifteen years for the city to elect its first Black mayor—long after the numbers suggested it should have happened.

Federal attention was no less intrusive. Most F.B.I. COINTELPRO operations targeted the Black Panther Party, and Baltimore was no exception. Rumors that police intended to assassinate local Panther leaders led to the formation of the Baltimore Committee for Political Freedom, a civilian watchdog group born as much from fear as from principle. Even institutions only adjacent to overt politics drew scrutiny. The Soul School, founded in West Baltimore by Olugbala—formerly Benjamin McMillan—to teach Swahili, African history, and self-determination to neighborhood children, was infiltrated and monitored. In Baltimore, the line between education and subversion, like so many others, proved perilously thin.