The history of African Americans in Baltimore dates back to the 17th century when the first enslaved African people 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.Alabaster cities: urban U.S. since 1950. John R. Short (2006). Syracuse University Press. p.142. 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."
Demographics African-American population in Baltimore Year Percentage 1790 11.7% 1800 21.2% 1810 22.2% 1820 23.4% 1830 23.5% 1840 20.7% 1850 16.8% 1860 13.1% 1870 14.8% 1880 16.2% 1890 15.4% 1900 15.6% 1910 15.2% 1920 14.8% 1930 17.7% 1940 19.3% 1950 23.8% 1960 34.7% 1970 46.4% 1980 54.8% 1990 59.2% 2000 64.3%201063.7%202062.4%
In the 1790 census, the first census in the history of the United States, African American constituted 11.7% of Baltimore's population. 1,578 lived in Baltimore in that year. From 1800 until 1840, African Americans were between a fifth and a quarter of Baltimore's population. The African-American population decreased in the 1850s to around 17%. The lowest percentage for African Americans in Baltimore was in 1860, constituting 13% of the population. Between the 1860s and the 1920s, Baltimore's African-American population remained between 13 and 16% of the population. The proportion only began to increase again in the 1930s and 1940s, during the Great Migration. During the Great Migration, thousands of African Americans from the Southern United States moved to Baltimore in search of better socioeconomic conditions and freedom from segregationist Jim Crow laws, lynching, and other forms of anti-black racism. Baltimore was a major destination for Southern and Appalachian African Americans, with many coming from the states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina.
In the 1960 United States census, Baltimore was home to 325,589 African-American residents, 34.7% of Baltimore's population. By 1970 Africans Americans were 46.4% of Baltimore's population, on the verge of becoming the majority for the first time.
In the 1980 United States census, there were 431,151 African Americans living in Baltimore, constituting 54.8% of the population. The 1980 census was the first census for which African Americans were a majority in Baltimore. By the 1990 United States census, there were 435,768 African Americans, constituting 59.2% of the population.
The Black or African-American community in the Baltimore metropolitan area numbered 699,962 as of 2000, making up 27.4% of the area's population.
In the 2010 United States census, there were 395,781 African Americans living in Baltimore, constituting 63.7% of the population.
In 2017, an estimated 389,222 African Americans resided in Baltimore city, 62.8% of the population.
Baltimore's African-American population has been declining in numbers each year since 1993, while the white population has been increasing during the 2010s. The black population has decreased due to a combination of black flight, an influx of younger whites, gentrification, and immigration of Latinos and Asians.
Many black Baltimore residents have moved to the suburbs or returning to Southern cities such as Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Birmingham, Memphis, San Antonio and Jackson.
History 17th century
The first Black people to reside in what is now Baltimore city came in 1634 under Lord Baltimore's charter alongside the Englishmen, only fifteen years after the first Africans arrived in the Colony of Virginia in 1619. A Jesuit missionary named Andrew White brought two mixed-race indentured servants named Mathias de Sousa and Francisco. The brothers Frederick and Edward Wintour brought an enslaved African named John Prince.
18th century
19th century
The first annual conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church was held in Baltimore in 1817.
From the late 18th century into the 1820s Baltimore was a "city of transients," a fast-growing boom town attracting thousands of ex-slaves from the surrounding countryside. Slavery in Maryland declined steadily after the 1810s as the state's economy shifted away from plantation agriculture, as evangelicalism and a liberal manumission law encouraged slaveholders to free enslaved people held in bondage, and as other slaveholders practiced "term slavery," registering deeds of manumission but postponing the actual date of freedom for a decade or more. Baltimore's shrinking population of enslaved people often lived and worked alongside the city's growing free black population as "quasi-freedmen." With unskilled and semiskilled employment readily available in the shipyards and related industries, little friction with white workers occurred. Despite the overall poverty of the city's free black people, compared with the condition of those living in Philadelphia, Charleston, and New Orleans, Baltimore was a "city of refuge," where enslaved and free black people alike found an unusual amount of freedom. Churches, schools, and fraternal and benevolent associations provided a cushion against hardening white attitudes toward free people of color in the wake of Nat Turner's revolt in Virginia in 1831. But a flood of German and Irish immigrants swamped Baltimore's labor market after 1840, driving free black people deeper into poverty.Christopher Phillips Freedom's Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1791-1860 (1997)
The Maryland Chemical Works of Baltimore used a mix of free labor, hired slave labor, and enslaved people held by the corporation to work in its factory. Since chemicals needed constant attention, the rapid turnover of free white labor encouraged the owner to use enslaved workers. While slave labor was about 20 percent cheaper, the company began to reduce its dependence on enslaved labor in 1829 when two slaves ran away and one died.T. Stephen Whitman, "Industrial Slavery at the Margin: the Maryland Chemical Works," Journal of Southern History 1993 59(1): 31-62,
The location of Baltimore in a border state created opportunities for enslaved people in the city to run away and find freedom in the north—as Frederick Douglass did. Therefore, slaveholders in Baltimore frequently turned to gradual manumission as a means to secure dependable and productive labor from slaves. In promising freedom after a fixed period of years, slaveholders intended to reduce the costs associated with lifetime servitude while providing slaves incentive for cooperation. Enslaved people tried to negotiate terms of manumission that were more advantageous, and the implicit threat of flight weighed significantly in slaveholders' calculations. The dramatic decrease in the enslaved population during 1850-60 indicates that slavery was no longer profitable in the city. Slaves were still used as expensive house servants: it was cheaper to hire a free worker by the day, with the option of dropping him or replacing him with a better worker, rather than run the expense of maintaining a slave month in and month out with little flexibility.Stephen Whitman, "Manumission and the Transformation of Urban Slavery," Social Science History 1995 19(3): 333-370
On the eve of the Civil War, Baltimore had the largest free black community in the nation. About 15 schools for black people were operating, including Sabbath schools operated by Methodists, Presbyterians, and Quakers, along with several private academies. All black schools were self-sustaining, receiving no state or local government funds, and whites in Baltimore generally opposed educating the black population, continuing to tax black property holders to maintain schools from which black children were excluded by law. Baltimore's black community, nevertheless, was one of the largest and most divided in America due to this experience.
Civil War period Maryland was not subject to Reconstruction, but the end of slavery meant heightened racial tensions as free black people flocked to the city and many armed confrontations erupted between black people and whites. Rural black people who flocked to Baltimore created increased competition for skilled jobs and upset the prewar relationship between free black people and whites. As black migrants were relegated to unskilled work or no work at all, violent strikes erupted. Denied entry into the regular state militia, armed black people formed militias of their own. In the midst of this change, white Baltimoreans interpreted black discontent as disrespect for law and order, which justified police repression.Richard Paul Fuke, "Blacks, Whites, and Guns: Interracial Violence in Post-emancipation Maryland," Maryland Historical Magazine 1997 92(3): 326-347
Baltimore had a larger population of African Americans than any northern city. The new Maryland state constitution of 1864 ended slavery and provided for the education of all children, including black people. The Baltimore Association for the Moral and Educational Improvement of the Colored People established schools for black people that were taken over by the public school system, which then restricted education for black people beginning in 1867 when Democrats regained control of the city. Establishing an unequal system that prepared white students for citizenship while using education to reinforce black subjugation, Baltimore's postwar school system exposed the contradictions of race, education, and republicanism in an age when African Americans struggled to realize the ostensible freedoms gained by emancipation.Robert S. Wolff, "The Problem of Race in the Age of Freedom: Emancipation and the Transformation of Republican Schooling in Baltimore, 1860-1867," Civil War History 2006 52(3): 229-254 Thus black people found themselves forced to support Jim Crow legislation and urged that the "colored schools" be staffed only with black teachers. From 1867 to 1900 black schools grew from 10 to 27 and enrollment from 901 to 9,383. The Mechanical and Industrial Association achieved success only in 1892 with the opening of the Colored Manual Training School. Black leaders were convinced by the Rev. William Alexander and his newspaper, the Afro American, that economic advancement and first-class citizenship depended on equal access to schools.
20th century