By: Peter J. Messitte, Judge, U.S. District Court,
District of Maryland*
I remember traveling across the Chesapeake Bay to
Ocean City on the ferry, which had separate waiting rooms, bathrooms and water
fountains for white and colored. I was astonished as a 15 year old grill worker
in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, when I invited a black man standing outside the
restaurant ordering a hamburger through the window to come in and sit down and
he told me he was sorry but that I had no idea what I was talking about. I
especially remember at Glen Echo Amusement Park in Cabin John, Maryland, where
American blacks were not admitted, but blacks from Africa were, so that some
Howard University students dressed up in dashikis in order to get into the Park,
ride the roller coaster and scarf cotton candy.
But there were obviously many developments, well
before my personal experiences and certainly after them, that reveal what has
unquestionably been major progress towards civil rights for African Americans
in this country. A permanent exhibit has been installed at the U.S.
District Court in Greenbelt, Maryland where I sit. It is entitled the “March of
Civil Rights and the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.” It
traces some of the leading cases seeking to enforce equal rights for African
Americans that have been heard in this court since the 19th century. The exhibit
opened in October,2015 and the public of course is invited to visit and observe.
The U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland
was established on September 24, 1789 in Baltimore. It was one of the very
first federal courts established in the new United States. I am able to
speak with at least some personal knowledge about civil rights issues involved in
cases in this court because in 1994, less than a year after I was named to the
federal bench, I inherited the Prince George’s County school desegregation
case, and thereafter, especially from 1998 through 2003, I worked with the
parties as they reached an agreement to end court-ordered busing and provide
other relief.
The whole issue of slavery was deferred at the time
the U.S. Constitution was adopted and the federal Judiciary Act of 1789 was
enacted. There were many highly controversial race-related events leading up to
the U.S. Civil War, which was essentially about slavery. Although the
Emancipation Proclamation issued by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was proclaimed
effective January 1, 1863, it did not apply to Maryland because the
Proclamation was a war-time measure that applied to states in rebellion against
the Union and Maryland was never in rebellion against the Union. Slavery in
border states such as Maryland remained untouched.
It wasn’t until November 1, 1864, over150 years ago,
that amendments to the Maryland Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary
servitude. This in fact took place a few months before the passage on January
31, 1865, of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which
abolished slavery throughout the United States. However African Americans did
not immediately win freedom in Maryland even following the Maryland State
Constitutional Amendment of 1864 and the 13th Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution in 1865.
One unfortunate development that immediately came into
being was the “Apprenticeship System.” Under this system, former slave owners would
induce former slaves, in exchange for a modest sum, to apprentice their
children back to the former slave owners under indenture contracts whereby the
slave owners were to ostensibly teach the children the “habits of industry.”
The Maryland Court of Appeals, the highest state court, had side- stepped the
opportunity to decide whether this amounted to involuntary servitude under the
U.S. Constitution. But in the case of In
Re Turner, decided in 1867, Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
Salmon P. Chase, sitting as a circuit judge in the District of Maryland, found
that the system violated the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.
The decision in that case ended the system.
Segregation, of course, persisted in many forms. Indeed,
in 1896, challenges in federal courts led to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision
in Plessy v. Ferguson, which declared that separate but equal
transportation facilities were constitutional. To be sure, this was an
affirmation of segregation – but at the same time, it also spoke to the
requirement of equality of facilities, even if separate, a critical step forward
in the march of progress of civil rights.
Maryland, through U.S. District Court decisions, had
anticipated this outcome. In 1870, in the case of Thompson v. Baltimore City Passenger Railroad Company, presided
over by U.S. District Judge William Fells Giles, damages were awarded to an
African-American man, Alexander Thompson, who had been expelled from a
Baltimore City public railroad company street car because of his race. In
ruling on the railroad company’s motion to dismiss the claim as not stating a
cause of action, the judge reasoned that all rights and protections against
racial discrimination should apply. No carrier of passengers, no public
conveyance could deny persons of color the privilege that other passengers
received. “(N)o common carrier,” said Judge Giles, “has a right to refuse to
carry a peaceable man who is willing to pay his fare.” Yet here, too, a
critical fact was that there were no equal accommodations available to black
passengers.
In 1885, in the admiralty case in Maryland’s federal
court of The Sue, U.S.
District Judge Thomas John Morris found in favor of plaintiffs, two
African-American sisters, whose accommodations on the steamer Sue fell
far short of the first class tickets they had purchased. The sisters refused
to sleep in a segregated cabin of inferior size and condition. The steamship
owners were ordered to pay the sisters the sum of $100.00 each.
Into the 20th Century, efforts to achieve
equality continued. President Teddy Roosevelt was bold in inviting African-American
scientist and educator Booker T. Washington to dine with him at the White House
in 1901. The invitation caused a huge outcry from southern politicians and the
press, part of the continuous opposition of many individuals to any effort of
African-Americans to obtain equality. However the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and
lynching remained conspicuous misdeeds well into the 20th Century.
Yet there were two law-related events in Maryland in
the 1930's that, while they did not involve U.S. district court decisions,
ultimately had great symbolic significance. In 1930, an aspiring young African-
American from Baltimore named Thurgood Marshall was denied entry into the
University of Maryland Law School because of his race. In 1937, another young
African-American, Donald Murray, represented by the very same, by-then attorney
Thurgood Marshall (who had gone to Howard University Law School in Washington,
D.C. and later became a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court), was admitted to the
University of Maryland Law School by order of a Baltimore city circuit judge. This was not a
decision of our federal district court. I cite it not only as a marker of what
was happening in the courts of Maryland, but also because of how his experience
in Maryland must have helped shape Thurgood Marshall’s views about civil rights
by the time he became a U.S. Supreme Court Justice.
In 1954, the Supreme Court decided the case of Brown v. Board of Education, which reversed Plessy v. Ferguson, finding
that separate but equal schools were “inherently unequal.” And following that
decision came the surge of civil rights activities in the 1960s and 1970s,
involving the vigorous push for voting rights and integration of schools and
public facilities.