Black Antebellum Baltimore: The Largest Free Black Community in America

In eighteen fifty, Baltimore had approximately twenty-five thousand free Black residents. No other American city had more. They lived and worked in a city that was simultaneously one of the largest slave-trading centers in the United States, a city where human beings were bought, sold, and held in pens a few blocks from where the free Black community had built its churches and schools and mutual aid societies. The coexistence of those two facts, the thriving free Black community and the active slave market, within the same city limits, in the same decade, is one of the defining contradictions of American urban life before the Civil War.

The community had been building its institutions for decades before eighteen fifty. The Sharp Street Memorial Methodist Church had been founded in seventeen eighty-seven. The Bethel AME Church, affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal denomination that Richard Allen had organized in Philadelphia, was established in Baltimore in eighteen sixteen by Daniel Coker, a man who had been born enslaved and had bought his own freedom. Coker went on to lead the church school he established before sailing to West Africa in eighteen twenty as a missionary with the American Colonization Society, where he remained until his death.

The laws governing this community were designed to contain and restrict it. Black Marylanders, free or enslaved, were prohibited from learning to read. Free Black residents could be returned to enslavement under certain legal circumstances. The rights that these institutions asserted, the right to worship, to educate, to maintain community records, to pass property between generations, were each contested by the legal architecture of the slave state surrounding them.

They asserted those rights anyway, year after year, generation after generation, in buildings that are still standing in west and east Baltimore today.