Moaney, Jaelon 2019 Africana Studies Thesis

Title: ‘Something on the Inside, Is Working on the Outside’: A Continuum of Buried Testaments to Black Tidewater Voice on the Eastern Shore, MD’s 1st Congressional District: Advisor: Neil Roberts Advisor is Co-author: None of the above Second Advisor: Released: release now Authenticated User Access: No Contains Copyrighted Material: No

‘Something on the Inside, Is Working on the Outside’: A Continuum of Buried Testaments to Black Tidewater Voice on the Eastern Shore, MD’s 1st Congressional District

by Jaelon Terrele Moaney

Neil Roberts, Advisor

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment Of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Africana Studies

WILLIAMS COLLEGE

Williamstown, Massachusetts

May 20, 2019

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... 3 AUTHOR’S NOTE ...... 4 ILLUSTRATIONS ...... 5 INTRODUCTION ...... 6 CHAPTER ONE THE MIDDLING SORT OF THE MIDDLE PASSAGE: THE CURTIS BROTHERS ...... 13 CHAPTER TWO A POLITICAL SANDBAR BENEATH THE RISING TIDES OF POLARIZATION IN THE NEW AMERICAN SOUTH: PUBLIC EDUCATION IN MARYLAND’S FIRST CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT ...... 32 CHAPTER THREE A SALTWATER BASIN RUNNETH OVER: THE POLITICAL LEGACY OF THE MARYLAND EASTERN SHORE’S AFRICAN METHODIST EPSICOPAL CHURCH ...... 73 • Redemption, Come Hell & Shallow Water: The Impact of the Chesapeake’s African Methodist Episcopal Church on U.S. Christianity………………………………………………………...76 • The Ebb and Flow of The Holy Ghost: Negro Sorrow and Joy in Musical Harmony…………………………………………………94 • A More Perfect Union in His Brackish Galilee: Civic Fortunes, Misgivings and Divinations of the Chesapeake’s African Methodist Congregations……………………………………………………107 CONCLUSION ...... 143 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 150

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I am so blessed to have shared and done justice to the narrative of Black tidewater communities with this thesis. In many ways, this work is an enlightened tribute to the

Chesapeake’s ethos, politics and unique sense of place. Coming from the Maryland

Eastern Shore, life always seemed so simple and time always seemed to inch along. Daily interpersonal communication rarely began with any other question than “Who are your people?” Country roads that led to sprawling farms and beautiful waterfront from each small town or village were the same as when my ancestors walked them. Void of any buildings comparable in height to churches or the bitterness that comes over New

Englanders during each never-ending winter season, the MD Eastern Shore was and remains worlds away from the exposure I’ve gained since arriving at Williams.

In particular, the late History Professor Leslie Brown planted the seed of intellectually pursuing the micro-political. My grandmother and matriarch of my storied family, Mary B. Moaney, navigated and knew the micro-political world that I inherited like the back of her hand. It is through her unceasing love and teachings that I am beginning to understand the intangible depths of my own identity. Both of their passing during my undergraduate career catalyzed my passion for this work as well as the impetus for its continuation in my career as a public servant. Lastly, Professor Neil

Roberts, no stranger to the Old Line State, has been a tremendous advisor and mentor for which I will forever be grateful. Without the help of this intellectual and familial community, the grace of God or the sustenance of the Chesapeake Bay this work would be truncated at best. As a living testament of the Black tidewater tradition and a future proponent of its political force, this work is only the beginning of my devotion to the region’s Black tidewater narrative redemption in the academy and in the political arena. Moaney 4

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is a work of nonfiction. Most of the interviews and interactions described in this book took place in sacred spaces of fellowship between the span of November 2018 and April 2019. Except where indicated in the notes, all events that occurred within that window of time were witnessed firsthand. All quotations were captured by hand in a notepad or were copied from official documents and published literature. The first names of the active and retired ministry, as well as scholars, have been rescinded to protect their individual privacy while still giving the reverence owed to the historic free Black tidewater families of the Maryland Eastern Shore.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

MD State Flag…………………………………………………………………………………….……….7 Downes and Albert Curtis…………………………………………………………………….…...31 Daniel Coker Plaque…………………………………………………………………………….…....41 Dorchester County Canning Industry…………………………………………………….…...42 Rock Hall Monument………………………………………………………………………….….…..45 Newspaper Clipping of Mathew Williams 1931 Lynching…………………….……...52 Moaney Family Outside the Historic Bethel AME Church of Chestertown….....77 Reverend Richard Allen Portrait………………………………………………………………..79 Bethel AME Church of Easton, MD……………………………………………………………...80 Bethel AME Church of Baltimore, MD………………………………………………………....82 “The Presentation” of December 1845………………………………………………………..84 Historic Free Black Community of Bellevue, MD………………………………………….87 Jerena Lee Portrait………………………………………………………………………………...... 88 St. Stephens AME Church of Unionville, MD…………………………………………………89 Talbot County United States Colored Troops……………………………………………….90 1933 black-and-white lithograph Hell’s Crossing by Ruth Starr Rose…………….91 Crisfield, MD African-American women picking crabmeat…………………………...92 203rd AME Church Baltimore Annual Conference Opening Service……………….93 Map of MD Eastern Shore…………………………………………………………………………...97 Crisfield, MD African Americans Atop Oyster Midden…………………………………..99 Shot from the banks of the Chester River…………………………………………………..104 1951 color serigraph This Train is Bound for Glory by Ruth Starr Rose………..109 Talbot County, MD Courthouse…………………………………………………………………112 Mother Bethel AME Church of Philadelphia, PA…………………………………………115 Frederick Douglass 1847 Speech on the Dred Scott Decision……………………...117 Kent County, MD NAACP Marching in Chestertown, MD……………………………..118 Aerial view of the Nanticoke River…………………………………………………………….120 H. Rap Brown during the Cambridge Riot of 1967……………………………………...121 Pine Street following the Cambridge Riot of 1967……………………………………...122 Worton Point Schoolhouse………………………………………………………………………..124 Chief Justice Earl Warren Majority Opinion………………………………………………..128 President Trump Tweet following Stephen Decatur High School Rally………...131

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Since its inception, Maryland has been just one of many American border-states riddled with a contradictory past that frequently influences its trajectory. Therefore, embedded deep within its cultural fabric, symbolism has been the prominent arena of political warfare between competing historical narratives. In 1928, William Isaac Thomas contributed a world-renown theory to sociology when he expressed “if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”1 In other words, what is imagined to be real, is real in its consequences. This notion of conceptual place-making is the essence of the state’s most prized and potent symbol: its flag. Branded on beer koozies, swimwear, storefront exteriors, blankets, vehicle doors, athletic uniforms and even tattoos, the Maryland state flag which contemporary U.S. citizens admire was not officially created until 19042. Its popularity is buttressed by a widespread misremembrance of its inherent moral dichotomy spread statewide following the

American Civil War, nearly four decades after its conclusion.

As a slave-state that never seceded from the Union, Maryland’s strong undertone of

Confederate sympathy for approximately 25,000 rebel soldiers has “weaved into our art and politics” espousals for civic myths that Maryland-native Ta-Nehisi Coates argues

“dress villainy in martyrdom and transform banditry into chivalry”3. History is a hotly contested field of knowledge that accredits the narratives of winners over losers, heroes over villains and, in America’s case, conquerors over the conquered. Maryland was and continues comfortably to be no exception to this subjugation.

1John Scott, and Gordon Marshall. "Thomas Theorem." A Dictionary of Sociology. : Oxford University Press, January 01, 2009. Oxford Reference. Date Accessed 22 Apr. 2019 http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199533008.001.0001/acref-9780199533008-e-2359. 2Ron, Cassie. “Understanding the Maryland Flag's Ties to the Confederate Cause.” Baltimore Magazine, Mar. 2018, www.baltimoremagazine.com/2018/3/20/does-the-maryland-state-flag-have-ties-to-the-confederate-cause. 3Ta-Nehisi, Coates. We Were Eight Years in Power. An American Tragedy. One World, 2017, pp. 64. Moaney 7

The flag combines the black and gold crosshatched paternal Calvert crest with the red and white Christian, triple-lobed cross bottony crest of the maternal side of the Calvert family. Although this early 17th century coat of arms originates from Hertingfordbury,

England, controversy is prompted by the conflicting forces each half embodied across the

Atlantic Ocean. The Calverts were the founding family of the Maryland colony. The first three Barons of Baltimore—George, son Cecil and grandson Charles—made Maryland the first colony to specify that baptism as a Christian did not grant a slave freedom in

1639, the first to mandate lifelong servitude for all black slaves, the first to make the children of slaves their master’s property for life and the first to ban interracial marriage4. Two centuries later, Maryland’s U.S. Union troops would stitch the black and gold Calvert emblem into their battle uniforms. Whereas the Confederates, lustily aligned

4 Cassie, 2018. Moaney 8

with the Southern religious crusade, sported red and white cross bottony lapels on their gray uniforms. On the Maryland Eastern Shore, both sides of America’s deadliest war are represented in front of courthouses, on the tombstones of graveyards and brown tourist information road signs. In Maryland’s First Congressional District, William Faulkner’s trope that “the past is never dead, it’s not even past” is the defining sentiment.

I did not choose the Black tidewater tradition of the Chesapeake, it was instilled within me at birth. My father’s lineage hails from the shipbuilding heavyweight, Talbot

County, MD, which is home to the first free Black community in the United States of

America and the birthplace of Frederick Douglass. The renowned artwork of Ruth Starr

Rose is comprised of many portraits and lithographs of my ancestors that founded the

Copperville community where she developed her progressive propensities. Enclosed by the Wye, Miles, Tred Avon and Choptank Rivers, my paternal grandmother born of indigenous ancestry and my paternal grandfather, a local farmer, inherited near spiritual reverence for the natural world and its bounty. These teachings that shunned wastefulness in the consumption God’s creations and emphasized a duty to live a life guided by eutierria were deeply rooted in each of their four sons, one of which being my father. My father would go on to serve eight years in the United States Navy, the branch of military forged by the sea. My birth did not sunder my father’s affinity to the Chesapeake, if anything it made it stronger. My mother’s lineage is wedded to the sprawling rural, maritime center of Kent County, MD. This half of my family has immersed themselves in the distinguished African Methodist Episcopal Church fellowship on the Delmarva peninsula and the livelihoods afforded atop the Sassafras and Chester Rivers. An African

American museum, run by and featuring my maternal lineage, rests on Worton Point Moaney 9

detailing the intricacies of Black tidewater life on the Upper Shore. In totality, my family as a whole has found sustenance from Chesapeake Bay tributaries for nearly ten generations. I will never disparage or fumble the responsibility of preserving and furthering the legacy of free Black citizenship on the Maryland Eastern Shore; my latest contribution is this truncated ethnographic analysis.

As a lifelong resident of the MD Eastern Shore, I have always accepted the micro- political landscape as commonplace. Now at twenty-two years of age, my aforementioned responsibility has evolved into comprehending the distinct nature of the region, by county, by tributary and by locale. Family by family, the free Black tidewater communities have a select few that can recount family trees and histories by way of oral tradition. However, as they age these mediums of genealogy become increasingly inaccessible. In their absence, empirical scholarship and historical accounts of varying mediums only produce porous conclusions, at best. For the past four years I have become more analytical of my daily interactions, conversations and activities in these tidewater communities. Across all nine counties of the MD Eastern Shore I collected interviews of at least two active or retired African American clergy, as well as the superintendent of the public school district in each. This ethnographic exploration of individual people and

Chesapeake culture pinpointed three narratives that undergird a subversive politics of belonging on the MD Eastern Shore: economic mobility, egalitarianism and spiritual equality. Previous evaluations of the nine counties east of the Chesapeake Bay in MD’s

First Congressional District have failed to adequately dissect and reassemble its economic, political and religious components to decipher its sustained divergence from Moaney 10

the remainder of the state. I have humbly attempted to rectify this void in the canon of

MD politics.

To dedicate the time and space necessary for each component, while simultaneously placing them in conversation with one another for holistic comprehension, this thesis is split into three chapters. The first of which illustrates the navigability of maritime culture for Black men and uses Downes and Albert Curtis, of Oxford, MD, as a case study to contextualize its relation to the Black tidewater communities of the MD Eastern Shore.

Spanning from the nineteenth century to the present, this focus on African Americans in closer proximity to water, as opposed to Black population further inland, grants further insight into the socioeconomic conveniences of life along the Chesapeake Bay. The second chapter stresses the expression of political voice as the crux of the American democratic republic and highlights the most volatile arena of power broking: public education. Given that life in main street America is so sparsely-populated, primary and secondary education present the sole public site of political exchange, principle establishment and moral discernment for youth. Thus, civic interest groups, policymakers and educators alike find themselves on the front lines of a debate to decide which narrative or perspectives should be fed to the malleable minds of MD’s youth. The final chapter, a commentary on the African Methodist Episcopal Church, traverses centuries worth of social justice impetus born from the founder Richard Allen’s revolutionary theology. At the core of this final chapter, is an interplay of the final link between the

Negro spirituals and contemporary congregations of the first autonomous Black civic organization in America: hymns. By interlocking themes of spiritual redemption with the Moaney 11

natural elements prevalent on the MD Eastern Shore, the political force of the AME

Church throughout the region’s Black tidewater communities can be seen with clarity.

For over three centuries the way of life on the Maryland Eastern Shore continued uninterrupted until the William Preston Lane, Jr. Memorial Bridge broke ground in the mid-twentieth century, connecting the state’s western and eastern shores. More commonly known as ‘the Bay Bridge’, the original 4.3-mile long infrastructure spanning the Chesapeake Bay was the world’s longest continuous over-water steel structure5. No matter its length, this vector had the capacity to transport MD’s citizens and enhance economic harmony across the state. However, what it has yet to overcome are the disparate worlds people crossover into, on either side, that have been solidified by centuries of ideological and cultural sovereignty. The Chesapeake Bay has functioned as a buffer against national or statewide demographic, economic, political and spiritual phenomena for the islands and tidewater communities of the MD Eastern Shore. These geological attributes lay at the heart of why the region’s nine counties congealed into a congressional anomaly. Citing MD’s First Congressional District as a proxy for a larger examination of other equally-isolated districts throughout the U.S., particularly in the

New South, warrants a Democratic rhetorical redemption in the 2020 Presidential

Election. Ethnographically mining the micro-political landscapes of similar districts for misremembered histories, voices and nuanced narratives tied to place has the potential to spark a Democratic resurgence in the same region it was once an unrivaled stronghold up until six decades ago. The search for human dignity via labor, politics and religion carries extraordinary significance today for the African Diaspora, as well as the plethora of racial

5 “Fun Facts about the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.” Holabird Sports, 7 Nov. 2014, www.holabirdsports.com/blogs/news/fun-facts-about-the-chesapeake-bay-bridge.

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and ethnic minorities that constitute the new Democratic coalition. In 2020, the political stakes for historically-marginalized and disadvantaged populations could not be higher.

This work provides a long-anticipated oyster pearl for MD Democrats to bring the blue wave to fruition. Not at the expense of a presumed base but rather a lever of empowerment for citizens of color.

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Chapter 1

The Middling Sort of the Middle Passage: The Curtis Brothers

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The skillful craftsmen and tradesmen of the colonial Atlantic world, that tangibly sustained mercantilism and maritime life, were not the only demographic to find upward mobility in the accumulation of seafaring knowledge. Between 1525 and 1866 12.5 million Africans were coercively captured. While nearly half did not survive the voyage, the other half were enslaved in the New World as mere cattle. Despite being entrapped in free terrestrial labor, seafaring remained focal to the heritage of the displaced West

Africans. The many-headed Hydra of the 18th century, comprised of misfits and minorities, provided the foundation for communities of color to transcend the social constructs that restricted their prospects in life. Once legally liberated, rather than comfortably submitting their labor to sharecropping as a commodity, some African

American men found maritime culture to be the true arbiter of freedom in the United

States. Downes Curtis, an African American sailmaker of Talbot County on the Maryland

Eastern Shore, epitomizes the access to citizenship, economic security, and liberty afforded to men of color after centuries of captivity by way of the same waters evolved into sources of sustenance. The Atlantic Ocean served as both a bridge and a barrier to the New World but by the 20th century its harboring of immoral enterprise had come to foster societal evolution at a pace unparalleled by any other social sphere.

The dawn of the twentieth century brought forth serious contemplation of the foundation of the American democracy: citizenship. In an unprecedented fashion, what constituted citizenship and who deserved it permeated the societal periphery and gained traction within the consciousness of the highest public office of the United States of Moaney 15

America. President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 freed approximately 3 million slaves in Confederate states and ultimately fed the Union Army’s numbers. By contributing to the Union victory in the Civil War, colored troops defied the racial inferiority on which the South’s “whole theory of slavery”6 stood. Following the abolition of slavery, the social experimentation of the Freedmen’s Bureau,

Reconstruction, the 14th and the 15th amendments legally reinforced the Enlightenment principles that the United States was founded upon. After the turn of the twentieth century the American people witnessed the emergence of the Socialist Party, National

Association for the Advancement of Colored People, World War I, the 19th Amendment, the Great Depression, World War II, President Harry S. Truman’s Executive Order 9981, and Brown v. Board of Education. All of which brought formidable pressure to the image of the United States by putting a spotlight onto what the nation stood for in the midst of a rapidly changing world.

Although these major events were catalysts for legislation the underlying question of to accommodate race remained focal. The implications of this being left unresolved undermined the efficacy of the policies that emerged out of these revolutionary episodes.

Given the outcome of the Civil War, in no other region did this prevail in a larger magnitude than the American South. The ideology that a white slave master’s liberty and natural right to enslave was God-given resurfaced in the actions taken by former

Confederate states7. As DuBois wrote “not a single Southern legislature believed free

6 Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, (New York: One World Publishing Company, 2017), xiv. 7 William Green, “Narrative of Events in the life of William Green, (Formerly a Slave.) Written by Himself”, Documenting the American South, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 10. Moaney 16

Negro labor was possible without a system of restriction”8 because in the words of

Mississippi’s governor Adelbert Ames “a return to a condition of serfdom- an era of second slavery”9 was the only viable way to manage the social unrest that had begun to present itself during the era of Reconstruction. This resulted in the persistence of a regional division, long after the Civil War. By exploiting federalism, the establishment of separate but equal stripped the Civil Rights Act of 187510, the 13th Amendment and the

14th Amendment of their essence and replaced them with black codes, Jim Crow, violence and intimidation. The utilization of both legal and illegal tactics “bonded white people into a broader aristocracy united by the salient fact of unblackness”11. Despite the momentum revolutionary movements supplied to marginalized demographics, African

Americans became the primary targets of capitalism, law enforcement and white supremacy: the “unrelenting pyramid of intimidation”12. As early as the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, “all realistic hope of authentic independence had been shattered”13 within the African American community.

While as a nation race had yet to be adequately addressed, states located along the borders of the Union and the Confederacy exhibited a myriad of approaches. Taken under

Union control after a single year of war, Maryland freed all slaves within the state in

1864 with an all but certain referendum. With antislavery measures sweeping the country,

Maryland waited 23 months to acquiesce to President Lincoln’s freeing of slaves, only

8 Douglas A., Blackmon. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, (Anchor Books, 2009), 245. 9 Coates, 63. 10 Melvin I., Urofsky. “Civil Rights Act of 1875.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 22 Feb. 2019, www.britannica.com/topic/Civil-Rights-Act-United-States-1875. 11 Coates, 131. 12 Blackmon, 331. 13 Blackmon, Ibid. Moaney 17

three months before Congress approved the 13th Amendment14. This delay in action towards the “infamous fugitive slave bill” can be attributed to Maryland’s legacy of

“wrongs and sufferings [that African Americans] have endured and are still enduring because of [the] iniquitous system”15 nominally instituted in 1644. While Baltimore, similar to Philadelphia and New York, was a political haven of abolition, slavery was a religion to the rural acreage of Southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore16. Therefore, the maintenance of a system undergirded by human property served as a vital economic and cultural element the same way it did throughout the rest of the deep South. Technically, this action made Maryland the first of the Border States to grant legally-recognized freedom to its formerly enslaved population17. Such a divided community on the basis of human rights and citizenship prompted the escape of Wye Mills’ Frederick Augustus

Washington Bailey, better known as Frederick Douglass and Oxford Neck’s William

Green. Although their self-written narratives provide the deepest insight into slavery in

Talbot County, Maryland, a more poignant history rests in their names. Both managed to elude the institution of slavery and contribute to abolition efforts in Massachusetts and

Canada, but being fathered by their masters presented an internal bondage they would never escape.

An 1830 census conducted in Maryland recorded 52,938 African Americans as free and 102,994 as slaves18. Maryland did not secede, however it had the largest number of free Blacks in the Union at that point in time19. Three decades later, the Dred Scott

14 The Washington Post, 13 September 2013. 15 Green, 9. 16 The Washington Post, 13 September 2013. 17 The Legacy of Slavery Program, “Researching African American Families.” Maryland State Archives. http://slavery.msa.maryland.gov/pdf/researching_african_american_families.pdf 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. Moaney 18

decision, decided by Maryland native Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney of Calvert

County, led to a national dismissal of slaves as humans, let alone citizens20. This occurred simultaneously as Maryland Third Constitution granted the enslaved freedom. Such an array of decisions produced confusion amongst this newly liminal population. After rationally taking matters into their own hands for four decades the 1904 Maryland legislature introduced the Poe Amendment. This was the onset of Jim Crow laws in the state implemented for the sole purpose of depriving minorities of suffrage21. If this did not make clear the state’s affinity to the American South, reported lynching did not cease until well into the 1930s, the 14th amendment wasn’t ratified until 1959 and the 15th amendment wasn’t ratified until 197322. The previous uncertainty that surrounded the parameters under which African Americans were to live in Maryland had been settled.

This trend of southern adherence reassured African Americans, now legally free, that their citizenship was limited and entailed new forms of the same prejudice. The enlightened principles on which the United States was founded had yet to extend to all of its inhabitants. However, even before the abolishment of slavery, William Green’s determination “to be free or die in [his] attempt”23 envisioned “far off in the distance a small gleaming of light”24. For the African American men of the Maryland Eastern Shore along the Chesapeake Bay that light was the Atlantic maritime world.

Unlike other inhabitants of the New World, native or immigrant, the maritime element of the horrific Middle Passage was not unusual to those of African descent. The manner in which it was done and the destination which they were being shipped to were

20 Ibid. 21 The Legacy of Slavery Program, “Researching African American Families.” Maryland State Archives. http://slavery.msa.maryland.gov/pdf/researching_african_american_families.pdf 22 Ibid. 23 Green, 6. 24 Green, 11. Moaney 19

the only factors that differed from centuries of cultural seafaring. In addition to the manual labor enslaved Africans provided on the plantations ashore, their “legacies, including tangible skills, historical memories, and spiritual knowledge”25 influenced the

Atlantic seafaring tradition of the Americas that we know today. At the crux of the New

World plantation system lay a reliance on these African boating skills to man the canoes and pettiaugers to ship supplies and products, literally keeping the institution itself afloat26. This West African seafaring subversively fused the sacred and the secular with a reverence for bodies of water unparalleled by the whites of the New World. The water itself “served in myth and ritual as the boundary through which spiritual communications occurred”27. This intimate relationship culturally embedded within the new occupants of the Maryland Eastern Shore afforded the privilege of running errands for a slave master.

Unlike those restricted by the plantation in landlocked regions, “colonial slaves [of the

Chesapeake] worked off the water, as shipbuilders, caulkers, sailmakers, cordswains, and other nautical tradesman”28. The physical separation from the plantation granted the enslaved an opportunity to temporarily instill permanent autonomy and agency into their identity. By stretching the conventional parameters of slavery, if only briefly, the experiences of African American men throughout maritime culture forever changed their perspective of what it meant to be Black in the New World.

Once situated in the New World, and in areas with direct access to water like the

Chesapeake Bay, Douglass and the slaves he worked alongside saw the opportunity to

25 W. Jeffrey, Bolster. Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail, (Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 45. 26 Ibid. 27 Bolster, 62. 28David S., Cecelski. The Waterman's Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina, (University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 18. Moaney 20

experience the mobility of seafaring as a privilege and “no small affair”29. Even though

Douglass’ perspective of the sea is tainted, due to his lack of freedom on land following him aboard, maritime culture was often associated with providence. Douglass proclaims his voyage from Colonel Lloyd’s plantation toward Baltimore as the “first plain manifestation of that kind providence” which “laid the foundation, and opened the gateway, to all my subsequent prosperity”30. For the majority of Douglass’ life seafaring was simply the way in which the site of his bondage was relocated. However, the vessels he sailed on across the Chesapeake Bay allowed him to witness his departure from the plantation. Seafaring not only granted Douglass sanctity and empowerment, but also the ability to discover himself.

The marine environment, and communities within close proximity of it, pioneered sociopolitical revolutions relative to race that society further inland was reluctant to embrace or counteracted. During the War of 1812, sea service as sailors, stewards, and cooks defined what it meant to live in occupational harmony with whites without sacrificing cultural identity. Approximately 18,000 free African Americans owed this ability to evade the confines of social hierarchy to the maritime tendency of considering sailors as “hands not faces”31. Throughout the rest of the century, the slave watermen, couriers, and draymen of the many-headed hydra were the vectors of information, ideas and cultures. When used for purposes beyond their intended function these vessels served as “micro-systems of linguistic and political hybridity”32. This enabled Black jacks to become “citizens of the world” that “stitched together the ports and peoples of the

29 Frederick Douglass. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, (Dover, 1995), pp. 5. 30 Douglass, 18. 31 Bolster, 216. 32Glenn S. Gordinier and Jason R. Mancini. Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Power in Maritime America: Papers from the Conference Held at Mystic Seaport, September 2006, (Mystic Seaport, 2008), pp. 48. Moaney 21

Atlantic world”33. The American racial politics of the nineteenth century did not distinguish free Black seamen from the property of slaveholders inland. The Antebellum

South feared the “liminal, worldly, masterless” seamen’s mobility and deemed them “a dangerous class of persons [that] would infect slaves with freedom’s taint”34. Given the danger this presented to the institutional integrity of slavery Southern legislatures produced a myriad of laws targeting free Black sailors labeled as the Negro Seamen

Acts35. With legal ramifications now aimed at the cultural disparities flourishing beyond the scope of inland bondage, African Americans began to establish themselves in seaport cities. Matching their social isolation with convenient geography, these marginalized people found respite on the coastal edge of the United States. The knowledge Black seamen acquired in their seafaring experience paradoxically gave them the ability to

“claim recognized membership in a large polity which often excluded them: the citizenry of the United States”36.

Due to the repressive policies’ intent to reinforce white supremacy both on land and at sea, African Americans engaged in survival tactics of the disenfranchised: communication and collaboration. Maritime culture presented African American men with qualities nonexistent ashore such as dignity, networks, sense of community, adventure, occupational identity, and pay relatively tangential to race. After years of experience, Black seamen utilized their opportunity of “having one foot in the local shoreline culture and the other on board the vessels that sailed the Atlantic”37 to aid communities of color from coastal escape to delivering news and goods. However,

33 Bolster, 232. 34William Jeffrey, Bolster. “African-American Seamen: Race, Seafaring Work, and Atlantic Maritime Culture, 1750- 1860”, UMI Dissertation Services, Johns Hopkins University, 1991, pp. 488. 35 Bolster, 489. 36 Bolster, 454. 37 Cecelski, 13. Moaney 22

W.E.B. Du Bois coined the “question of economic survival [as] the most pressing of all questions for the nineteenth-century American blacks”38 due to inherent racism and increased competition for work. This dynamic resulted in the whitening of crews in New

England prior to the Civil War39. By mid-century prewar tensions served as a catalyst for the policy of hiring white first in the maritime industry of both the United States and the

British consul in Baltimore40. This resulted in the cascading effects of seafaring no longer being a “bulwark of the tiny black middle class” and a subsequent decrease of Black men with seafaring skills in Norfolk and Baltimore from 13.1% in 1870 to 5.9% in 189041.

Also, Black seamen experienced wage discrimination in Baltimore earning $2.50 per month less than whites aboard schooners and $4.20 less aboard brigs. The revolving door labor pool of the maritime trades provided casual employment that was still more appealing than sharecropping inland and supported African American families financially despite limited options ashore. Seafaring consistently ranked as one of the three most common occupations for African American men and despite plummeting numbers this pool of labor reinvested their experience into land-based maritime trades42. Of the limited options available to African American men, aquaculture and the artisan system of the early nineteenth century were both viable and economically promising. These maritime industries ashore enabled individual craftsmen and skilled laborers to gain dignity form

“their work, ethos of producerism, and their artisanal skill”43. Neither the legacy of slave waterman nor African American artisans eroded in the Chesapeake Bay to the same extent as other regions within the Atlantic maritime world.

38 Bolster, 223. 39 Bolster, 223. 40 Bolster, 228. 41 Bolster, 222. 42 Bolster, 1190. 43 Bolster, 447. Moaney 23

African American men continued to thrive in the seaports, not only because of their historic ties to aquaculture and the interdependence inherent in maritime culture but also the symmetry between their lives and seagoing whites. In rural areas like the

Maryland Eastern Shore where “nature held the upper hand, and harvests did not know racial boundaries”44 blacks and whites “temporarily shar[ed] a life beyond the pale of the stricter racial barriers ashore”45. The resiliency deeply embedded in African Americans after centuries of slavery paralleled the response to adversity white watermen had come to develop in a sporadic industry. By sharing the ethos of self-reliance both races redefined worth by the merits of work rather than solely on complexion. Even though the land-based maritime trades “could not remove [African Americans] from the white supremacy pervasive in the American South, they had at least two advantages that most

Black Southerners could only dream of: land and a fair chance to join their white neighbors as rough equals in a common struggle to make a living from the sea”46. As the

Chesapeake Bay and the Maryland Eastern Shore gained notoriety the occupations for

African American watermen and artisans gained a legitimacy that still exists today.

The Chesapeake Bay was, by 1860, the main supplier of oysters in the United

States. Nearly two decades later the waters of the Chesapeake Bay were producing 120 million pounds47 in the packing houses of the Maryland Eastern Shore. In conjunction with fisheries, shipbuilding also gave the region economic stability. Two significant changes swept the shipyards of the Chesapeake at the turn of the twentieth century:

44Harold, Anderson. “Black Men, Blue Waters African Americans on the Chesapeake”, Maryland Marine Notes: Research, Education, Outreach, 1998, 5. 45Glenn S., Gordinier. Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity, and Power in Maritime America: Papers from the Conference Held at Mystic Seaport, September 2000, (Mystic Seaport, 2005) 112. 46 Gordinier, 114. 47 “On the Brink: Chesapeake's Native Oysters, What It Will Take to Bring Them Back.” Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Chesapeake Bay Foundation, 26 June 2010, mdstatedocs.slrc.info/cdm/ref/collection/mdgov/id/0. Moaney 24

skipjack construction supplanted the earlier bugeyes and solos in the oyster dredging fishery48. The industrial staple of shipbuilding in Talbot County reinforced the adage that form follows function, the vessels hailing from the Oxford, Tilghman Island, and Saint

Michaels were built specifically for the Chesapeake Bay tributaries. In fact, as the “center of industry during this period”49, Talbot County produced vessels at a rate of five to every three in the rest of the state. Talbot County was also home to Maryland maritime pioneers such as William P. Benson, an Oxford shipyard owner, who installed the first marine railway in 186950. With the introduction of railroads the seaports of the Maryland Eastern

Shore, previously sustained by exporting goods to the British, gained access to national

American markets following the Civil War. This instrumental role of seafaring fostered the marriage of a minimal capital outlay requirement and high demand for seafood making Black enterprise on the Maryland Eastern Shore attainable in late nineteenth century51. Talbot County’s importance in the Atlantic Maritime World stem from groups distinctive to two Chesapeake tributaries: shipbuilders on the Miles River and the artisans on the Tred Avon River.

Naturally nestled on opposing banks of the Tred Avon River are the town of

Bellevue and the port of Oxford. In the 17th century, Oxford was the only port of entry for the entire Maryland province besides Anne Arundel, now known as Annapolis, MD52.

This designation as the sole entrance to the colony on the eastern rim of the Chesapeake

Bay was the birth of an inextricable tie between Oxford and the waters that facilitated

48Pete, Lesher. “Thomas Kirby and the Decline of Shipbuilding in Talbot County”, Maryland Historical Magazine, Vol. 97, Fall 2002, pp. 358-68. 49 Ben, Ford. “Wooden Shipbuilding In Maryland Prior To The Mid-Nineteenth Century”, The American Neptune, Vol. 62, No. 1, 2002, pp. 78. 50 Lesher, Ibid. 51 Anderson, Ibid. 52“A Brief History of Oxford.” Town Of Oxford - Maryland, 2011, www.oxfordmd.net/history.html. Moaney 25

Maryland life. Bellevue, on the other hand was an historically free Black enclave that eventually evolved into a larger community just across the Tred Avon. Both communities rest less than twelve miles from The Hill, the earliest free Black community in the nation53. The notion of agency was embedded in the pioneering communities of color in

Talbot County. These African Americans’ sense of self and ability to remain self- sufficient served as a precursor to the renowned accomplishments of Oxford’s Curtis

Brothers. This unique proximity to the slavery of the American South, the autonomy of maritime trade, and the freedom of seafaring gave the African American communities of

Talbot County the ability to secure a principle yet to be fulfilled by the new republic: realized equality.

In the wake of Nat Turner’s 1831crebellion, barely south of the Maryland Eastern

Shore, Black tidewater communities were impacted by “arbitrary and petty” policies that resulted in them being “excluded from public schools, from combat roles in the military and from giving legal testimony against whites”54, rendering their citizenship negligible.

Segregated one-room schoolhouses and independent churches were vital to African

Americans in the tidewater communities of Talbot County. African American families like the Curtis’s transformed these societal institutions into epicenters of culture and survival throughout the region.

The Bethel African Methodist Episcopal congregation was founded in 1816 in response to the racial discrimination from the Methodist episcopal congregation regarding an educationally-based denial of right to ordination as elders55. This

53 The Washington Post, 25 July 2013. 54 Anderson, 4. 55 The Legacy of Slavery Program, “Researching African American Families.” Maryland State Archives. http://slavery.msa.maryland.gov/pdf/researching_african_american_families.pdf Moaney 26

denomination blossomed in cities harboring large African American populations like

Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Annapolis then made its way across the Chesapeake to take root throughout the Maryland Eastern Shore, where it’s still prevalent today. Though functionally built for religious worship, the church in rural areas was the crux of the

African American community. It provided a space for people to “through all grades of color, sit promiscuously together at church, unite in social visits and public balls, and stand side by side”56. The nucleus formed in this institution and Odd Fellows Hall was mirrored by the Black children attending the Oxford schoolhouse built in 1899 for grades one through eight57. In 1910 nearly a third of all Blacks were illiterate and only 37% of

Black children attended school in comparison to 69% of white children58. Therefore, their shared experience in gaining social capital through education connected the children and families of these tidewater communities at volumes mere residential proximity could not.

The Curtis family of six girls and three boys was nurtured by Ralphael Curtis, a free

African American waterman, and Mary Elizabeth Downes Curtis of Westover, MD, the

Oxford school teacher on Tilghman Street. On December 15, 1911 “the only black sailmaker east of the Mississippi River”59, Downes Frances Curtis, was introduced to this afflicted environment on Norton Street in Oxford, MD.

Born into the family of a Chesapeake Bay waterman, Downes F. Curtis and his siblings quickly grew accustomed to a way of life intimately intertwined with the

Chesapeake Bay, particularly the Tred Avon and Miles rivers. Downes and his brother

Albert learned their father’s career, working as extra hands for the oyster bar during

56 Bolster, 543. 57 The Star Democrat, 13 June 2001. 58 Blackmon, 356. 59 The Star Democrat, 13 June 2001. Moaney 27

winter months and crew aboard the oyster sloop Edith Leonard (U.S. Registry: 136081)60.

Built in 1889 in Cambridge, MD, this 42.5 foot vessel that Ralphael sustained his profession with throughout his adult life symbolized the respect he had earned from the white watermen of Talbot County, MD. With the welfare of their family solely contingent upon the productivity of their skill, Downes and his brother Albert witnessed self-sufficiency on the Maryland Eastern Shore first through their father. Ralphael did just the same as his sons would, as his father was from the rural county of Worcester at the very tip of the Delmarva peninsula. Sharecropping inland throughout the vast agricultural acreage of the Maryland Eastern Shore was a route that other African

American men took following emancipation seeking social mobility, but to little avail. Its operational structure mirrored the institution of slavery’s exploitation of African

American labor. However, instead of their literal identity being enveloped in being someone’s property, these households were victims of economic bondage. With maritime industry bearing some of the most restrict legislation to prevent Blacks from participating in industry, particularly oystering, their father’s career was an anomaly. For example, in

1836 a bill that “forbade black from captaining any vessel large enough to require being registered” contributed to the “culture of legal and institutionalized suppression”61 in the

South. However, despite these challenges free African American men in these tidewater enclaves continued to defy the white paternalism that commandeered them since the days of slavery.

Curtis simultaneously matured and witnessed Oxford, the distinguished seaport, when it “bustled with life and seven packing houses handled the abundance of oysters

60 The Daily Times, 2 March 1999. 61 Anderson, 4. Moaney 28

and crabs”62. He would complete the first grade through seventh grade on the upper floor of a former oyster packing house on the water adjacent to the Oxford boatyard and later graduate from Easton High School. As a young adult seeking to enjoy leisure in the waters of Talbot County, Downes’s practical need for sails would introduce him to a man that would help him form the foundation of his chosen craft for the rest of his life. At the age of seventeen, Downes sought the expertise of English sailmaker Dave Pritchett and, in the absence of a transaction, Downes returned the favor by working in Pritchett’s sail loft. The feel of sitting on a wooden bench and monotonously pushing the needle through canvas with the aid of a palm did not initially present itself to Downes as a virtuous deed.

Although this was seamless, just sixty-one years earlier federal courts struck down the practice of apprenticeships involving Black children ruling them as “essentially involuntary servitude”63. By the early twentieth century, trade began to leave Oxford due to both overharvesting in the shellfish industry and railroads supplanting the roles previously held by steamboats and schooners64. Filling the economic void left by this downturn was a recreational lust for the Chesapeake Bay which brought in business to the sail loft. The new designs needed for this influx of vessels differed greatly from the working vessels. What paved the way for Curtis and his brother Albert was that they developed their skills when “learned sailmaking when it was still an art”65. Such expertise requires an ability to rhythmically pass a stitch through canvas of varying grades in straight lines. Absent of an initial passion for a daunting skill mastered only after years of experience, the pace at which the Curtis brothers learned from Mr. Pritchett is admirable.

62 The Star Democrat, June 1991. 63 Howard, Gillman. “Chapter 6: The Civil War and Reconstruction—Equality/Race/Implementing the Thirteenth Amendment: In Re Turner, 24 F. Cas. 337 (C.C. Md. 1867)”, American Constitutionalism, Oxford University Press, 2017. 64 Lesher, Ibid. 65 The Star Democrat, 13 June 2001. Moaney 29

Up until the age of eighty-five Downes employed this “old-timey way”66 of attaching bolt rope, making cringles and rose to legendary rank for his sails.

At the height of the Great Depression, Mr. Pritchett died and Downes purchased the business. The sail loft was initially in an old packing plant but the Curtis Brothers moved it to a former staple of the African American community in Oxford: the second floor of the same schoolhouse he attended as a child, and where his mother taught. Sail lofts were elevated from ground-level to primarily gain light and avoid dirt. Also, being in the top floor of building afforded space, void of posts that supported the upper story making open room, to lay out the entire sails. However, in the winter months remaining physically stationary at this elevation, without no shoes or insulation, could make for grueling labor conditions. In these circumstances the Curtis Brothers’ combined their knowledge of both sail-making and the function of the vessels they were intended for to give their business an undeniable legitimacy. They cut sails whose form followed the function of traditional Chesapeake Bay vessels like log canoes, oyster-dredging boats, skipjacks, and bugeyes67. However, as the business ventured further into producing scientific sails designed and cut for racing, Downes’s work became the embodiment of precision. There were no rounded numbers on the sail designs and if orders don’t come with a blueprint, Downes was on the vessel taking his own precise measurements68.

“Everyone who wanted the best sails came to him”, this included custom sails for Errol

Flynn, James Cagney, Walter Cronkite, the Kennedy family and Lowndes Johnson69. Just as generations of Black artisans before him, Downes was able to weave his surroundings

66 The Daily Times, 12 November 1995. 67 Ibid. 68 The Star Democrat, June 1991. 69 The Star Democrat, 13 June 2001. Moaney 30

into his identity and passion in a way that was profitable. Thee Curtis brothers did not just perfect the craft of marketable items but also the vehicles that afforded Frederick

Douglass and William Green their freedom nearly a century before on the same waters.

Albert and Downes Curtis were the manifestation of generations of African

American men’s sacrifice and increased prospects in the Atlantic Maritime World. The complexity of these environments made it possible for slave watermen, free Black sailors and African American captains to economically support their families amidst the legal impediments created by the contemporary racial politics. Just as Black jacks had “pay[ed] off the jib-topsail downhaul”70 to freedom, the Curtis brothers, one stitch at a time, sustained a Black enterprise in a society that had yet to genuinely grant them citizenship.

As African American maritime artisans from the Maryland Eastern Shore, the Curtis

Brothers gained the respect of those throughout the Chesapeake Bay watershed in ways only briefly held by their predecessors during Reconstruction in the South. Their proximity to water and the culture of the port of Oxford laid the foundation for the legacy they would continue in their sail-making. The sea and life upon it did not eradicate racial hierarchy but it did blur the conventional boundaries of discrimination by fostering a harmonious culture unprecedented on land.

70 Bolster, 571. Moaney 31

A Young Downes Curtis in Oxford, MD Sail Loft, 1950.

Both Albert and Downes Curtis in Mr. Pritchett’s sail loft in Oxford, MD.

Moaney 32

Chapter 2

A Political Sandbar Beneath the Rising Tides of Polarization in the

American South: Maryland’s First Congressional District

Moaney 33

Political Scientist Robert Dahl’s pluralism theory stresses the inherent tendency of political life to foster conflicts and cleavages between individuals and groups striving for autonomy in relation to the control of each other. Dahl concludes further that pluralism produces “problems for which no altogether satisfactory solution seems yet to have been found”71. A site of pluralism where William Faulkner’s famous line “the past is never dead, it’s not even past” could not resonate deeper is the Maryland Eastern Shore. The rich history of this region has a myriad of contemporary conflicts that have manifested themselves via what Dahl terms “organizational pluralism”72. The quantity and autonomy of civic and interest groups that each share a portion of the region’s history must be taken into account in order to characterize the conflicts that exist in Maryland’s First

Congressional District. Conflict is solely responsible for the distinctiveness of

Maryland’s Eastern Shore’s development, which in its essence remains a cultural, religious and economic battleground that predate legal demarcations. Its inhabitants and their pride in shared histories determined the political terrain and govern its trajectory. In an attempt to provide a forecast for the region’s federal representation, this analysis of organizations that claim to uphold and define “the land of pleasant living” can exhibit the voids yet to be filled by either major political party and the stakes of those well underway. Despite being absent of any national media spotlight, the politics of belonging throughout the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries are some of the most complex, enduring and critical micro-indicators of the recent faults occurring in the bedrock of the

71Robert A., Dahl. "Pluralism Revisited." Comparative Politics 10, no. 2 (1978), pp. 191. 72 Ibid. Moaney 34

America democracy. Therefore, this research lends itself to two questions: How can a collective subscription to the values, principles and ideology of the Maryland Eastern

Shore transcend the ascriptive hierarchies of race, gender and religion that have governed America since its birth? Despite the solidarity fostered by an ecological isolation, is there a larger battleground or series of battles where demographics historically in competition with one another are struggling to legitimize their belonging within the state and give equal standing to their narratives?

As a case study for party sectionalism, the state of Maryland is ideal because, in many ways, it lives up to its characterization as “America in miniature”73. There are equal and opposite forces at play in nearly every dimension of its history and contemporary political landscape. Its demographic composition, institutional battlegrounds for religion and slavery, and ecologically-induced occupations have been the variables responsible for the legal manifestation and conceptual magnitude of Maryland’s First Congressional

District. As a lifelong resident and descendant of one of the three original free Black families on the Maryland Eastern Shore, the politics of belonging run through my veins.

Prior to party realignment, the conservative essence of the region was paramount and still remains focal today.

An individual’s sense of place is largely contingent upon that of the community they are immersed in. Several variables are essential to the creation of consensus around what a place means, is and how it functions: culture, ecology, demographic composition, religion and industry. By virtue of proximity to or residency within a legally, conceptually and historically-defined boundary a collective embracement of place can

73 “Maryland Facts.” Visit Maryland, 2018, www.visitmaryland.org/info/maryland-facts. Moaney 35

serve as a catalyst for regional pride. The politics of belonging to a place, claiming that place and actively preserving the qualitative significance of that place envelope those who engage in the process. As a result, an authentic embodiment of place becomes focal to identity and a primary criterion for recognition. Over time this pride evolves from mere rhetoric and manifests itself in decision-making, policy and public opinion.

The Old Line State is the gateway of the American South due to the Mason Dixon

Line, however Maryland’s political landscape is more saliently influenced by a natural demarcation that predates cartography: the Chesapeake Bay. The Bay and its tributaries split the state into two separate cultural, political and economic entities. Just as the urban, liberal Western Shore has intensified the rural, conservative Eastern Shore has also enjoyed stability. Though the ecology has clearly defined both shores, the citizens of

Maryland have internalized this perceptual and substantive isolation with pride and a sense of place dictates their way of life and ideology74.Throughout the Chesapeake Bay watershed and its tributaries barrier islands serve as a shield to the impending environmental threats life further inland may face. In particular, these barrier islands are largely sandy environments that help to buffer the Eastern Shore communities from storms. The island ecosystem also features lagoons, tidal marshes, and mainland watersheds75. On the side of the islands facing land, there are broad shallow bays and extensive salt marshes adjacent to forested uplands. Interestingly enough, the bay's watershed land-to-water ratio of 14:1 is the largest ratio of any coastal water body in the

74 Sally A., Rood. “Addressing Eastern Shore and Chesapeake Bay Environmental Issues and Economic Development: University Research and Education.” Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, vol. 98, no. 3, 2012, pp. 45–76. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24536484. 75 Ibid. Moaney 36

world76. As a result of these ecological features the Eastern Shore has been a bastion of freedom, self-sufficiency and small, private community for centuries. None of these components have faded in 2018, but rather they have grown stronger in response to the state’s expanding Democratic stronghold.

Maryland’s First Congressional District, the only Republican seat of eight, is home to all nine counties that constitute the Eastern Shore: Caroline, Cecil, Dorchester,

Kent, Somerset, Talbot, Queen Anne’s, Wicomico and Worchester. Therefore, in many ways the Eastern Shore is the Republican Party’s last line of defense amidst an overwhelming partisan opposition which dominates the remainder of the state.

Although Maryland is often mistaken for the northernmost southern state and even the southernmost northern state77, perception is reality and the Maryland Eastern

Shore has historically defied this liminal location by aligning itself with the American

South. Prior to identifying the discrepancies between contemporary organizational adversaries, it is essential to outlay the historical beginnings of each social variable at odds in the battleground that defines the region.

At the heart of southern politics is a social construct whose origin precedes

America’s founding yet continues to feed the nation’s political volatility: race78. The implications of this burgeoning social variable are entrenched in the Eastern Shore’s political bedrock and, despite their sporadic state, regulate the region’s sense of place today. 200 years prior to the premier of large cotton plantations throughout the American

76 Ibid. 77Herbert C. Smith and John T. Willis. “The Maryland Identity.” Maryland Politics and Government: Democratic Dominance, University of Nebraska Press, LINCOLN; LONDON, 2012, pp. 2. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1df4h1r.7. 78Richard L., Engstrom. “Race and Southern Politics: The Special Case of Congressional Districting.” Writing Southern Politics: Contemporary Interpretations and Future Directions, edited by Robert P. Steed and Laurence W. Moreland, University Press of Kentucky, 2006. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt130hw9b.9. Moaney 37

South, an abundance of mono-cropping acreage was the primary site of African labor and captivity in the Chesapeake region79. Given their advantageous Mid-Atlantic coastal location, by the end of the seventeenth century the Eastern Shore of Maryland established itself as an American pioneer in transatlantic slave trade by ranking only second to

Virginia in the importation of African slaves80.

Maryland’s volume of slavery did not approach the massive plantation system of the slave states farther south; however, its efficiency was present in the tobacco estates in the Tidewater counties of Southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore. Slaves throughout the region understood the “most productive slave territory… where farming was done on a large scale” predominantly by “many poor people” to be the MD Eastern Shore81. As the focus of Maryland’s agrarian economy shifted to grains and corn, agricultural commodities sustainable in the absence of slave labor, the number of freed slaves in the state soared from 8,000 in 1790 to 84,000 in 186082. This presented a dynamic with potential to threaten both the hegemonic power and social order that white authorities had long treasured. Prior to the Jacksonian era, the vast majority of Maryland’s state leaders reflected a privileged culture83: southern exceptionalism. They and the governmental system they ruled were one in the same, both representing elitist and exclusive spheres of society. About two-thirds emerged from the planter class of rural Southern Maryland and

79Carole C., Marks. A History of African Americans of Delaware and Maryland's Eastern Shore. Delaware Heritage Commission, 1996. 80 Herbert C. Smith and John T. Willis. “A Maryland Political History.” Maryland Politics and Government: Democratic Dominance, University of Nebraska Press, LINCOLN; LONDON, 2012, pp. 19. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1df4h1r.8. 81Peggy, Bulger. Maryland Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in Maryland from Interviews with Former Slaves. Applewood Books, 2006. 82 William W., Freehling. "The Founding Fathers and Slavery." The American Historical Review, 77, 1, Spring 1972, 90. 83Smith and Willis, 27. Moaney 38

the Eastern Shore84. These men relished the comfortable lifestyle of large and extensive estates complete with slaves. Socially well-connected and often well-educated, they were

first and foremost gentry politicians of the old school85. Having the opportunity to set the precedent within the confines of the Democratic Party’s stronghold on the region, the contemporary regional consciousness of Maryland’s First Congressional is the byproduct of their legacy.

In addition to race, the institution of religion bears an enduring mark on the political landscape of the American South. Maryland was the first colony to establish religious freedom as a pragmatic reaction to the Calverts’ Catholicism in predominantly

Protestant England. The free exercise of the Christian religion was broadened in 1649, when the Maryland Assembly passed the Toleration Act. In the context of the seventeenth century, “when conformity under compulsion was the universal practice”86 and religious prejudice was widespread, this was a considerable achievement.

“The tides of [monarchial] English politics engulfed Maryland as the English

Civil War brought Puritan ascendancy to the colony”87 and eventually an end to the

Toleration Act. Catholics were barred from voting and Lord Baltimore’s proprietary rights effectively suspended. By the eighteenth century the shifting demographic composition of the state impaled the English-bred immigrant aristocratic hierarchy88.

This new majority of native-born Marylanders developed a distinctive identity that deeply resented authority from afar and control. However, another split occurred separating those that bestowed human rights to African American and those loyal to

84 Ibid. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid, 18. 87 Ibid, 19. 88 Ibid, 20. Moaney 39

slavery. The strata of plantation investors on the Maryland Eastern Shore quickly grew intolerant of Catholic affinity to Africans they deemed human chattel and ousted them to the Western Shore where flourished and exist today.

Both free and enslaved African Americans on the Eastern Shore of Maryland were exposed to a multiplicity of theological influences, primarily those of Catholics and

Quakers. Both of which contributed to their religious education, extended the sacraments of marriage and baptism, and the opportunity to engage in white spaces of worship as spiritual equals. In the eighteenth century Quakers took a step further than Jesuits and began advocating for human rights and abolition on behalf of their newfound spiritual equals89. After declaring “Friends should not in any [way] encourage the importation of

Negroes, by buying or selling them, or other slaves”90, Quakers gained a credibility amongst African Americans inaccessible to the Jesuits that had built plantations. This antislavery activism sparked a series of foundings of both antislavery societies and schools for free African Americans on the Eastern Shore. The strongest of the sect were in Talbot County, all of which remarkably manumitted their slaves by 179091. Maryland’s

Eastern Shore clearly did heed their moral compass and Americans have brave souls like

Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman to thank for bringing consequence to the horrors of that discretion.

Another source of theological influence was the rhetoric of the Methodist

Episcopal Church. However, despite the Methodist Episcopal Church’s strong stance against slavery, its discrimination against Black Methodists’ lack of education and denial

89David W., Jordan. “‘Gods Candle’ within Government: Quakers and Politics in Early Maryland.” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 4, 1982. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1919006. 90Jennifer Hull, Dorsey. “Community.” Hirelings: African American Workers and Free Labor in Early Maryland, 1st ed., Cornell University Press, Ithaca; London, 2011, pp. 104. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt7v83g.10. 91 Ibid. Moaney 40

of the right to elderly ordination prompted Blacks to leave the church and found the

African Methodist Episcopal Church in the promising seaports of Philadelphia and

Baltimore92. This splintering of the Methodist sect exposed one of the many societal institutions susceptible to and constrained by ideology. For a demographic seeking legitimate channels of societal inclusion the unthinkable limitation of the Christian faith’s purity was a strong symbol of exclusion African Americans on the Eastern Shore.

As elsewhere throughout the country, free African Americans on the Eastern

Shore of Maryland grappled with the challenge of self-definition in the face of prejudice.

Social relations, work, and material possessions (or the lack thereof) all contributed to individual and group identity, but, as Reverend Richard Allen suggested, free African

Americans also needed to develop their spiritual identities93. Allen advocated for freedmen to rededicate themselves to Christianity. He believed that only through an independent institutional church would former slaves find a community that celebrated their resilience, affirmed their dignity, and validated their identity as a distinct people with a Christian mission94. It was this conviction that inspired Allen to collaborate with other African American Christians from across the Mid-Atlantic states to organize the

African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1816.

92 Ibid, 102. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid. Moaney 41

A historical plaque that memorializes Daniel Coker on the façade of Bethel AME on Druid Hill in Baltimore, MD. On the Eastern Shore, as elsewhere, the AME was a spiritual home, but it also served to raise African Americans’ consciousness around their connections to the trials of other oppressed populations across the Middle Atlantic, the U.S. and the globe. This channel of mobilization still functions as an autonomous space for people of color to express their ideals regarding civic duty, exchange political discourse and realize with dignity their seminal, yet trivialized role in the American democratic process. In terms of informing one another in the name of both religious and racial solidarity, this basis for self- definition and social capital transformed the historically disenfranchised of the Eastern

Shore into active first-class citizens. Moaney 42

Maritime culture, especially in geographically-induced landscapes, has been a laboratory

African American men from Dorchester County, MD in the process of canning fruit and vegetables in 1938. for networks of both resistance and social capital built on “hands not faces”95. The response to ‘what can you do?’ is not oblivious to social constructs however it provides the basis for who one is and the value of their identity to the community. In other words, the tidewater politics of belonging on the Maryland Eastern Shore is primarily governed by individual hands-on skills as opposed to the predominant ascriptive hierarchies that govern society further inland.

Once legally liberated, rather than comfortably submitting their labor to sharecropping and converting themselves into commodities again, some African

American men found maritime culture to be the true arbiter of freedom in the United

States. The black watermen of Maryland Eastern Shore epitomize the basis of citizenship, economic security, and liberty afforded to men of color after centuries of captivity by

95 W. Jeffrey, Bolster. Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail, (Harvard University Press, 1997), 216. Moaney 43

way of the same waters that now supported their lives. Although the Atlantic Ocean served as both a bridge and a barrier to the New World, by the 20th century its harboring of an immoral enterprise had come to foster societal evolution at a pace unparalleled by any other social sphere. As an integral part of the “many headed hydra”, African

American men alongside minorities “of the lowest order, with a few of the better class”96 continued to thrive in the seaports, not only because of their historic ties to aquaculture and the interdependence inherent to maritime culture but also the symmetry between their lives and tidewater whites.

In rural areas like the Maryland Eastern Shore where “nature held the upper hand, and harvests did not know racial boundaries”97 blacks and whites “temporarily shar[ed] a life beyond the pale of the stricter racial barriers ashore”98. The resiliency deeply embedded in African Americans after centuries of slavery paralleled the response to adversity white watermen had come to develop in a sporadic industry. The waterfront agricultural economy similarly narrowed the distance between free black and white farmhands. A life on the Shore in either of these industries was defined by uncertainty and the mundane pattern of seasonal unemployment offered no quarter and cared little about race. By sharing the ethos of self-reliance, both races redefined worth by the merits of work rather than solely on complexion. Even though the land-based maritime trades “could not remove [African Americans] from the white supremacy pervasive in the American South, they had at least two advantages that most black Southerners could only dream of: land

96 Max, Rivno. “‘Chased Out on the Slippery Ice’: Rural Wage Laborers in Antebellum Maryland.” Gleanings of Freedom: Free and Slave Labor along the Mason-Dixon Line, 1790-1860, University of Illinois Press, 2011, pp. 153. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt2ttbmt.10. 97 Harold Anderson, “Black Men, Blue Waters African Americans on the Chesapeake”, Maryland Marine Notes: Research, Education, Outreach, 1998, pp. 5. 98 Glenn S. Gordinier, Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity, and Power in Maritime America: Papers from the Conference Held at Mystic Seaport, September 2000, (Mystic Seaport, 2005), pp. 112. Moaney 44

and a fair chance to join their white neighbors as rough equals in a common struggle to make a living from the sea”99. As the Chesapeake Bay and the Maryland Eastern Shore gained notoriety the occupations for African American watermen and artisans gained a legitimacy that still exists today.

The most celebrated natural resource that has gained the region global mid-nineteenth century recognition as the seafood capitol of the world is the eastern oyster (crassostrea virginica). Well in advance of the blue crab (callinectes sapidus Rathbun)100, Greek and

Latin for beautiful savory swimmer, becoming synonymous to the state of Maryland, the oyster reigned king. A Baltimore Sun article published on September 18, 1880 boasts of

10,569,012 bushels of oysters harvested over the course of the 1879-1880 season101. For centuries, MD Eastern Shore watermen have preserved oystering as a way of life and a cultural staple between the months of November and April. During the second half of the

19th century, industrialization brought new technologies, capital, and labor organization to the Chesapeake Bay oyster fishery102. The innovation, represented by the oyster dredging industry, contrasted with hand tonging, a small-scale, owner-operated venture that represented traditional oyster harvesting practices. Thus, in contrast to dredging, which took place in open water, tonging was conducted near shore in relatively sheltered location. This type of environment permitted communication and camaraderie essential to producing an occupational identity. Many fishing communities are physically isolated,

99 Ibid, 114. 100Mary J., Rathbun. 1896. "The genus Callinectes." Proceedings of the United States National Museum. 18 (1070): 349–375, 17 pls.. https://doi.org/10.5479/si.00963801.18-1070.349 101Lucie L., Snodgrass. Dishing up Maryland: 150 Recipes Fom Tne Alleghenies to the Chesapeake Bay. Storey Publishing, 2010. 102Bradford Botwick and Debra A. McClane. “Landscapes of Resistance: A View of the Nineteenth-Century Chesapeake Bay Oyster Fishery.” Historical Archaeology, vol. 39, no. 3, 2005, pp. 95. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25617272. Moaney 45

which helps to create boundaries and a sense of separation from the rest of society103. In the Chesapeake region, tongers often lived on islands and in marginal areas divided from the mainland by extensive marshes104, so these communities were figuratively if not actually islands. In theory, ideologies associated with the occupational subculture would have

Statue of an oysterman tonging on the “Pearl of the Chesapeake”105, Rock Hall, MD looking across the Bay towards the Patapsco River that feeds Baltimore. permeated into the domestic sphere of oyster tongers to family members who weren’t oystermen themselves. The occupational identity of watermen, and by extension

Chesapeake Bay oyster tongers, is based on the “shared type of work, the common experiences, specialized skills and knowledge, location of work, and the physical and economic risks involved”106.

103Robert Lee, Maril. “Texas Shrimpers: Community, Capitalism, and the Sea.” Texas A&M University Press, College Station, 75, 1983, 84-85. 104Carolyn, Ellis. “Fisher Folk: Two Communities on Chesapeake Bay.” University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, 1986. 105 “Chillin' on the Chesapeake.” Rock Hall Maryland , Town of Rock Hall, 2015, www.rockhallmd.com/.

106 Botwick, 99. Moaney 46

Occupational communities are groups of people working in the same trade, craft, or occupation whose shared experiences and way of life form a basis of a distinct culture.

Embedded in the Maryland Eastern Shore, folklore emits the desire of watermen to hustle a living through whatever means were available while sacrificing fishing as their primary occupation. In exchange for lower financial returns these demographics can enjoy a conservative lifestyle of freedom and liberty: to control their work schedules, have oversight of production and marketing, and retain all profits as private economic agents107. Though only a shadow of what it once was, the oystering industry has contemporary significance and continues to substantiate the essence of life in the ‘land of pleasant living’.

All together race, religion and industry form the dimensions of a narrative battlefield throughout Maryland's smaller counties on the Eastern Shore and highlights the region’s trajectory. In particular, party realignment during critical time periods comprises the political ramifications of the aforementioned cleavages. Bain finds Queen Anne's County, a rural, Republican, mostly white area on the Eastern shore, as an exemplary site of previously Democratic factional politics based on patronage for nearly a century between the 1870s and mid-1950s108. This political stability mirrors that of the American South prior to its adoption of the Republican Party. From Reconstruction to WWII to the “S&S

Years”109, or the sixties and seventies, each represent distinct periods where the Maryland

107 Botwick, 100. 108David R., Mayhew. “States with ‘Persistent Factionalism.’” Placing Parties in American Politics: Organization, Electoral Settings, and Government Activity in the Twentieth Century, Princeton University Press, 1986, pp. 88. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7zv5xk.10. 109 Samuel P., Huntington. American Politics: the Promise of Disharmony. Harvard University Press, 1983.

Moaney 47

Eastern Shore further hardened out of a shared sentiment of pride in its heritage and way of life.

V.O. Key, Jr. and Frank Munger established the foundational theory for political stability and periods of partisan realignment. The concept states that “stability amounts to a standing decision by the community”110, ultimately shaped by major social or political events. Therefore traditional party divisions are supposed to fluctuate in correspondence with the aggregation of individual political battles in a given locale. The Eastern Shore is an anomaly in the sense that its chronological battles amount to the fortification of partisan ideology over time rather than an oscillation.

Within the period of Reconstruction to WWII, two specific battles are critical: the election of 1872 and the elections from 1928-1948. The former, the shorter battle of the two, was won by those who prioritized the democratic legitimacy of the nation and understood the merit of extending access to the franchise. The presidential election of

1872 marked the formative year for the initial manifestation of Key’s standing decision on the Maryland Eastern Shore. It was then that the electorate, particularly in rural

Maryland, took its future shape. Black Marylanders voted for the first time in a presidential election and their impact was immediate and enormous. Slaveholding counties in Tidewater Maryland which had previously been overwhelmingly Democratic became areas of Republican strength overnight111. These counties of the Eastern Shore and Southern Maryland were unified in their new allegiance with the Republican Party due to their defining traits: slave holding, agricultural, homogeneously of old English

110Marc V., Levine. “Standing Political Decisions and Critical Realignment: The Pattern of Maryland Politics, 1872- 1948.” The Journal of Politics, vol. 38, no. 2, 1976, pp. 292. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2129537. 111 Ibid, 295. Moaney 48

stock and sympathetic toward the South112. The former battle critical to cementing the initial standing decision was the string of presidential elections stemming from 1928 to

1948. From 1928 to 1936, new factors began to mitigate the salience of the Civil War-

Reconstruction cleavages. In these presidential elections, the Democratic Party was based on a new urban constituency and less on its old Southern oriented foundations. In 1928 old habits of party loyalty were broken as Catholicism, ethnicity, prohibition, and urban- rural cleavages became more potent than standing political attitudes113. In 1932,

Maryland resembled Michigan and Illinois in having the force of the Great Depression move the entire state toward the Democratic Party114. The Great Depression closed integral canneries on the Eastern Shore however, the New Deal Civil Conservation Corps improved drainage on farmland115. By 1936, however, a new partisan pattern emerged, based fundamentally on the urban-rural reaction to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s transformation of the federal government role in American life. Previously, rural

Maryland had been nearly evenly divided in partisanship. After 1936, in presidential elections, Baltimore city was heavily Democratic while the rest of the state-with a few exceptions-moved toward the Republicans. Of those exceptions, the Eastern Shore was the site of the most dramatic and cohesive shift. The foundation of Maryland’s First

Congressional District was nearly complete at the close of this realignment. After WWII, many small towns on the Eastern Shore actually lost population during the war years because of military service and the allure of high-paying jobs in the central core of the state. Even former Gov. William Preston Lane Jr.’s efforts that produced the Chesapeake

112 Ibid, 299. 113 Levine, 319. 114 James G. Gimpel and Jason E. Schuknecht. “MARYLAND.” Patchwork Nation: Sectionalism and Political Change in American Politics, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2003, pp. 260. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.17820.14. 115 Smith and Willis, 46. Moaney 49

Bay Bridge in 1952116 could not repair the irreparable socioeconomic severance the region suffered during this period.

Maryland’s third critical period of realignment can be attributed to the political atmosphere of what Samuel Huntington calls the S&S years, or the 1960s and 1970s.

During which there was a limitation of the exploitative Southern Strategy and instead a more impactful realization of Richard Nixon’s “new majority”117 throughout the

American South. Ronald Reagan is often rewarded for the contemporary Republican political apparatus in the American South, however the foundation laid for this partisan realignment preceded him by nearly a decade.

The turmoil of the 1960s sharply divided the Democratic Party over race, the Vietnam

War and generational conflict leaving them politically vulnerable to the GOP reclamation of its position as the dominant national party118. Nixon and the GOP aimed to win over the northern white working class, which had overwhelmingly backed the Democrats since the New Deal. His envisioned “new majority”119 included the traditional Republican constituencies of rural and small-town whites and corporate leaders120, which comprised the Maryland Eastern Shore in great quantities. Nixon comprehended that whites needed peace, objected to substantial new spending on low-income minorities, and detested federal authorities mandating school and neighborhood integration. Though Nixon’s running mate, a Maryland native, Spiro Agnew embraced attitudes of racial resentment disguised in federalism, Nixon instead connected with white voters by telling them a

116 Ibid, 49. 117 Timothy N., Thurber. “A New Republican Majority?” Republicans and Race: The GOP's Frayed Relationship with African Americans, 19451974, University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, 2013, pp. 342. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1ch799s.18. 118 Ibid, 340. 119 Ibid, 342. 120 Ibid, 341. Moaney 50

narrative about themselves, African Americans, and the nation that they already believed121. After five consecutive summers of widespread racial violence, Vietnam War protests and increasing crime this rhetoric fit what white conservative Americans blamed for the nation’s slippage: a loss of discipline and conservative values. In turn, Nixon defined the GOP’s approach to the key political cleavage of the American South of racial politics for decades to come.

Caucasian anger, frustration, and resentment toward a government that supposedly cared more about blacks throughout the S&S years was “a boon to the GOP and an albatross around the Democrats’ neck for years to come”122. Another crucial layer of complexity is that there was a class dimension to white attitudes. Well-educated, upper- income whites who had little direct contact with African Americans had less intense negative stereotypes of them and indicated stronger support for closer interracial contact and liberal policy reforms, which was more common on the Western Shore. Working- class whites, who were not insulated by wealth, felt a deep sense of unfairness and viewed Nixon’s focus on law and order as the timely antidote to Johnson’s antipoverty efforts. As the President of the “forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the non- demonstrators, that are not racists or sick, that are not guilty of the crime that plagues the land,”123 Nixon dismantled southern exceptionalism to create the new majority. Instead of setting this region apart from the rest of nation, Nixon praised the South for its prioritization of “strong national defense, patriotism, lifestyles, [and] morality”124. In

121 Timothy N., Thurber. “The Nixon Synthesis.” Republicans and Race: The GOP's Frayed Relationship with African Americans, 19451974, University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, 2013, pp. 281. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1ch799s.14. 122 Thurber, The Nixon Synthesis, 260. 123 Ibid, 274. 124 Thurber, A New Republican Majority?, 355. Moaney 51

stark contrast to the media, antiwar protesters, and “liberal intellectuals,”125 who, Agnew alleged, made excuses for violent criminals, mocked the South, wasted taxpayer money on welfare programs, and provided comfort for America’s enemies abroad, rural southern whites would be the restorers of the “first civil right”126: the right to be safe. Nixon became the first Republican to carry every state in the South. He received an estimated 80 percent of the southern white vote, 92 percent of the rural white Deep South vote and lost in only two congressional districts in 1972127. Therefore, Reagan winning 93 percent of the 1968 districts where Nixon had triumphed in 1980128 is a direct result of Nixon’s deliberate construction of an enduring presidential base among the white American

South.

An additional period of quasi-realignment is the congressional elections of the 1990s, especially those in 1992 and 1994, that took a serious toll on the Democratic Party in the

South. The Republicans' national gain of nine seats in 1992, and another sixteen in 1994 resulted in their having a majority of the southern members of the House for the first time since Reconstruction129. Symbolically, this was a devastating blow to the Democratic

Party throughout the American South that has yet to be overcome.

Similar to how Americans have routinely grappled with the underlying question of who qualifies for national recognition by contemplating expansions of the franchise, citizens of the Eastern Shore distinguish themselves from the state at-large as the “real”

Marylanders. The Chesapeake Bay’s ecological rift has produced a pair of polities bound

125 Ibid, 343. 126 Thurber, The Nixon Synthesis, 277. 127 Thurber, A New Republican Majority?, 358. 128 Ibid. 129Richard L., Engstrom. “Race and Southern Politics: The Special Case of Congressional Districting.” Writing Southern Politics: Contemporary Interpretations and Future Directions, edited by Robert P. Steed and Laurence W. Moreland, University Press of Kentucky, 2006, pp. 100. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt130hw9b.9. Moaney 52

only by law: one, for better or worse, committed to conserving the state’s earliest characteristics and the other evolving in response to national or regional currents. This physical and ideological isolation has afforded the Eastern Shore the ability to sustain a

Civil War sympathy for the antebellum South, resist technological advances in tidewater industry and symbolically attempt to secede from the state on three separate occasions130.

In a similar fashion to other regions uniquely isolated by ecology throughout rural

America, the Eastern Shore has weathered political realignment without compromising its essence. An exhaustive analysis of the catalysts that yielded this phenomenon expose fissures the Democratic Party must fill in order to restore its connection with rural

America. Several civic and interest groups have taken it upon themselves to plug these voids in the absence of partisan influence. In describing each individual pillar of

Maryland’s Eastern Shore and their correlating social organizations, the dimensions of the regional identity battleground begin to take shape as a far from complete puzzle.

It is through the affiliation with organizations that citizens of the rural Eastern Shore

The 1931 lynching of Matthew Williams in Salisbury, MD; the last recorded lynching in MD.

130Barry, Rascovar. “The 50th State: Delmarva?” Politicalmaryland.com, 25 Sept. 2013, www.politicalmaryland.com/2013/09/25/50th-state-delmarva/. Moaney 53

make the majority of their public appearances, share fellowship as well as develop the confines of their communities. It is also through the infrastructure of these social entities that the values and beliefs of a place become institutionalized and culturally engrained for generations. Unfortunately, this has led to the racial tension, and at times racial explosion, that has burdened an area in which the dehumanizing practice of slavery reigned. As a result two of the largest memberships that prioritize their racial identity can be attributed to a hate group and civil rights group: the Klu Klux Klan and the National

Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples. The riots of Cambridge131, the

132 lynchings of Salisbury, occasional klansman robe sold with properties , the Rising Sun,

Cecil County Klu Klux Klan headquarters and the conversion of plantations into spaces of leisure133 that embrace their legacy rather than erase it all epitomize the longevity of

134 the unresolved social variable of race on Maryland’s Eastern Shore .

Another resounding pillar of life in “the land of pleasant living” is religious discipline. In an environment as beautiful as the Chesapeake Bay watershed its inhabitants have no other description more apt than God’s country. For centuries religion has grounded the region’s citizens and granted them extreme social capital. To not accept

Christianity was to exist on the margins of society and claim an existence foreign to the notion of citizenship embedded in America’s founding documents. Today, several denominations dominate the religious makeup of the Maryland Eastern Shore: the

131Anna Murray, Douglass. “Is Baltimore Burning?” Maryland State Archives, 1993, www.msa.maryland.gov/msa/stagser/s1259/121/2395/html/0000.html. 132Christina, Tkacik. “A KKK Robe Showed up at a Maryland Auction House. They Donated the Proceeds to a Nigerian Student.” Baltimoresun.com, 19 Feb. 2018, www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-klan-robe-auction- 20180212-story.html. 133 “Hyatt River Marsh Golf Club - Cambridge, MD.” Hyatt River Marsh Golf Club - Cambridge, MD, 2019, www.rivermarshgolfclub.com/. 134Phebe R., Jacobsen. “Researching African American Families at the Maryland State Archives.” Maryland State Archives, http://slavery.msa.maryland.gov/pdf/researching_african_american_families.pdf. Moaney 54

African Methodist Episcopal Church, Quakers, Baptists, Methodists and the Catholic

Church. Each contributes a great deal to the integrity, spiritual well-being and welfare of the communities they serve. Ministry and leadership of each church are infectious servants to their brothers and sisters in the kingdom of Christ and more importantly public figures who promote communal harmony as their utmost priority. Religion is focal and dually foundational to the backbone of private life and interdependency.

Closely interwoven with both the maritime and agricultural industries is the principle of self-sufficiency. These occupations are completely at the mercy of the sporadic and unpredictable tendencies of the natural world. Therefore, with so little control over the environment the men and women of these industries have to be able to adapt and maintain a forward-thinking mentality. It takes time to develop such great comfortability with seeking sustenance from uncertain yields, therefore organizations such as the Future

Farmers of America incorporate opportunities for youth to engage in their respective trade. Each stresses the social benefit produced from the industry’s labor as well as the ongoing cultural significance of cherishing nature’s bounty within the region. By gaining prospective interest in tools such as self-sufficiency, defending the present exhibitors of the skill and advancing the ideals born by the retired exemplars these organizations can further solidify this way of life as a staple and key component of “the land of pleasant living”135.

The greatest social pillar of all would be the emphasis of communal responsibility and duty to country. This is primarily grounded in the preservation of American symbols, agrarian sentiment that harkens back to America’s founding and service to the fellow

135Leon, Reinstein. “The Story behind That Natty Boh Beer...” Baltimoresun.com, Baltimore Sun Media Group, 1 Nov. 1996, www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1996-11-01-1996306125-story.html. Moaney 55

citizens who live and share community with one another. The Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion and the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the United

States of America each serve distinct demographics but all fight sincerely to prevent the dissolution of values that men and women have shed blood for or have given their lives to in honor of America. These organizations have large memberships but lack diversity.

Therefore, their rhetoric implicitly reinforces hegemonic white, male, Anglo-Saxon

Protestant hierarchies and assimilation for all that exist beyond them. Although this may seem like an impediment to far-reaching scope, their conservative agendas have traction in nearly every small town or village throughout the Eastern Shore and are often the site of political mobilization. These organizations constitute the investment citizens are willing to make in American communal living. Sharing a collective understanding of the sanctity owed to America’s founding as well as a vision for a future that doesn’t detract in any way from preservation is their top goal. The residents of the Eastern Shore embrace this objective as honorable and desperately needed in the midst of a rapidly changing concept of country and manifestations of pluralism.

To concentrate this research and see these Eastern Shore values and beliefs’ political interplay at the local and state level, each has been aligned with its corresponding advocacy organization and sorted into the foremost policy areas of narrative dispute: property, education, land use and infrastructure. In selecting these four categories of local and state governance where conflict amongst civic and interest groups were greatest the narrative battleground is crystallized. Considering the finite physical space of the Eastern

Shore, its geological character and the demographic dynamics of the region, this compressed battleground expedites a hotly contested fight for claim to regional and Moaney 56

national identity. By no means are the following organizations the only or even adequate proxies for identity, however they are representative of the competing values and beliefs of the region: the Maryland Farm Bureau, National Association for the Advancement of

Colored People, Frederick Douglass Honor Society, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Maryland

Catholic Church, United Methodist Church, the American Legion, African Methodist

Episcopal Social Action Commission, Maryland Audubon Society, Mid-Shore Regional

Council, Quakers and the National Baptist Convention Housing Commission. This list is thorough but not exhaustive due the fact that other strong organizations have lacked in longevity or new organizations may emerged prior to the completion of this research.

Therefore, being unable to analyze the influence of such groups on policy presents an opportunity to hone in on the legislative agenda of those that persist. For the year of 2018 each civic or interest group produced a legislative agenda or has a standing political action committee designated to each state and federal legislative session. Within these documents are policy suggestions, policy support or disapproval and a concise description of what matters most to their membership. Using this information as data, the research effectively explores each policy area, in turn producing microcosms of analysis for the larger regional puzzle. There are certainly more than four pieces to the puzzle of the Maryland Eastern Shore, however for the purposes of the research a control was essential for narrow study.

While legislative agendas regarding property rights, land use and zoning each espouse the status quo throughout “the land of pleasant living”, the research suggests that these policy areas are relatively dormant. The concluding results pinpoint education as the most active battleground with the highest stakes. Every interest or civic group chosen for this Moaney 57

study, except for one, has an explicit legislative agenda for this policy area. In an extensively rural environment there are very few moments when one’s private life is interrupted beyond their control by a governmental body. Education is inherently intrusive on individual liberties because children must go and learn alongside their peers who live in or near a legally-defined boundary. This crucial period of development in any citizen’s life has soaring implications that range from curriculum and discipline to food provision and the operation of schools themselves. As school choice has progressively gained national attention, parents on Maryland’s Eastern Shore are investing more money, time and thought into where their children being civically introduced to society as well as what perspectives they are being exposed to.

Entirely unique to the educational battleground are its stratified dimensions. It is as if each organization with a vested interest in education has self-sorted into tiers in which they feel they have the most political leverage. Primary, Secondary and Post-Secondary education are the three camps civic and interest groups find themselves in. However, for those that wish to address the conceptual or theoretical purpose of education the policy implications come second to their organizational philosophy of what education should entail and how education should serve society. There are a couple organizations with enough social infrastructure, political clout and resources to lobby multiple tiers however the majority specialize in one. This cross-sectioning of education and educational policy exposes the varying perspectives and agendas feuding with one another on Maryland’s

Eastern Shore.

Rather than designating resources to legislative and political intricacies of the

Maryland General Assembly and U.S. Congress, a few organizations approached Moaney 58

education with the goal of advocating principles in which institutions of learning should be grounded. The Frederick Douglass Honor Society is no stranger to Juneteenth celebrations or traditional festivals. During which the organization has well-anticipated slots in the itinerary for displays of the American hero from Talbot County or even exhibitions that captivate his spirit of human dignity and genuine fellowship. For example, during the 2018 Waterfowl Festival, the Frederick Douglass Honor Society showcased “Shore Explorations: Chesapeake Bay: Land, Water and Life a month-long immersive exhibition focusing on what it means to be ‘of the Eastern Shore’”136. The inspiration for the exhibition comes from the legitimacy of the renowned social reformer, abolitionist, orator and statesman’s connection to the Eastern Shore. Though his narrative diverged from its predecessors, causing great controversy, to embrace diverse narratives of a single place is an expression of equitable inclusivity.

The Frederick Douglass Honor Society’s diversity, equity and inclusion advocacy in educational spaces beyond the classroom echo those of the NAACP. The NAACP

Education Department leads the Association's work to eliminate the severe racial inequities that continue to plague our education system and ensure that every student of color receives “a quality public education that prepares him or her to be a contributing member of a democracy”137. The focus on citizenship, contingent upon education, is one that advances the agency people of color need to exert in order to transform their quality of life through knowledge. Quakers share the same contempt for ignorance. The friends feel that education is a “lifetime effort to develop an open and informed mind and a

136 Events. Frederick Douglass Honor Society, 2018, www.frederickdouglasshonorsociety.org/events.html. 137 Issues. NAACP Maryland, 2018, www.naacpmd.com/issues. Moaney 59

seeking and sensitive spirit”138. Both of which are foundational for leadership and ministry because Truth prospers best among a populace that is "led out"139 from illiteracy and ignorance. Quakers however are opposed to an “overemphasis on competition, military exercises in schools” and “overly lax or overly severe discipline”140. Just as the

United Methodist Church aims to rid inequity, on the basis of gender, race, class, or other factors, in educational opportunities141, Quakers too view education as the foremost site of development for each child's spiritual strength as well as intellectual and practical skills.

Primary and secondary education has a rift in itself between K-12 public schools and religiously-affiliated private schools. On Maryland’s Eastern Shore the public side of this tier is occupied by the Maryland Farm Bureau and the American Legion, while the private side is led by the three Roman Catholic archdioceses serving Maryland: the

Archdiocese of Baltimore, the Archdiocese of Washington, and the Diocese of

Wilmington. As the face of not only an industry but a culturally-embedded way of life, the Maryland Farm Bureau’s influence revolves around the encouragement of agriculture as a viable culmination of education alongside higher education’s prospect of knowledge- based industries. In its 2018 legislative agenda, the Maryland Farm Bureau recommended that local boards of education, with state support, introduce an approved production agriculture program in Maryland junior and senior high schools to expose students to the teaching of agriculture, Ag economics and general agri-business in an academic

138 “Publications : Faith and Practice : 1988 Edition : 1988 Section II.” Baltimore Yearly Meeting, 2018, www.bym- rsf.org/publications/fandp/1988approved/88section2.html.

139 Ibid. 140 Ibid. 141 “Racial Justice.” Baltimore-Washington Conference UMC, 2018, www.bwcumc.org/ministries/advocacy- action/racial-justice/. Moaney 60

setting142. To ensure the efficacy of such a program, the Maryland Farm Bureau proposed the training of teachers for Maryland public K-12 schools and colleges include a mini- course in agriculture, and that state educational subdivisions include an in-service day or days to instruct teachers and guidance counselors about agriculture and careers in agriculture143. This organization hopes this from-the-ground-up approach will bolster support and an appreciation for policies such as Maryland’s Farm-to-School program. By getting all school systems to participate in and actively promote this program and purchase more locally grown products for school nutrition programs, the Maryland Farm

Bureau anticipates the restoration of statewide recognition of the region as an agrarian entity integral to its success.

Beyond primary and secondary education policy, organizations also have invested resources in trying to influence the parameters of education. In particular, the Maryland

Farm Bureau, representing a predominantly rural conservative membership, has pinpointed discipline and illegal drug activity as areas of concern in education. The former addresses a perceived generational disregard for authority which is the backbone for family-owned farms and the latter highlights the opioid epidemic rupturing rural communities across the nation. Also to combat state encroachment into the private lives of Eastern Shore citizens, the Maryland Farm Bureau opposes a year-round and/or a staggered school year and supports a school year that starts after Labor Day and ends no later than June 15th144. This is to isolate harvests from being interrupted by a state sanctioned activity. To shield their children, essential producers on family farms, from

142 Maryland Farm Bureau Policy for 2018. Maryland Farm Bureau, 5 Dec. 2017, www.mdfarmbureau.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/01/MFBPolicy-2018-Final.pdf.

143 Ibid. 144 Maryland Farm Bureau, 2017. Moaney 61

educational consequences the Maryland Farm Bureau advocates that participation in agricultural activities (e.g. 4-H, FFA and the Miss County or Miss Maryland Farm

Bureau Programs)145 should be allowed as an excused absence and should not count against the number of allowable absences set by the county school system in question.

The Maryland Farm Bureau has exhausted its analysis of the Maryland Association of

Boards of Education so that its industry may continue as smoothly as possible however organizations like the American Legion are resisting educational encroachment upon national pride. The American Legion embodies an extensive passion and respect for

American symbols that unify the nation146. The specific areas of educational policy that the organization has targeted are the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance by students and teachers in our nation’s school and the continued inclusion of “under God” in the

Pledge147. The American Legion affirms that pledging allegiance to the U.S. flag is the voluntary offering of a patriotic oath to the nation and should be a regular part of school activities and events so that no one will be denied this opportunity. The American Legion believes that removal of these words will have a cascading effect and in turn open

Pandora’s Box. By setting a precedent that questions the propriety of numerous references to a supreme being in historical documents, on currency and on many government buildings, including the U.S. Supreme Court the youth of the Maryland

Eastern Shore will be depraved and deprived of a universal love for their country148.

145 Ibid. 146 The American Legion Annual Report. The American Legion, 2018, www.legion.org/sites/legion.org/files/legion/publications/2018-American-Legion-Annual-Report.pdf. 147Brett, Reistad. Our Pillars, Your Platform: 2016 Election Issues That Matter Most to the Nation's Largest Organization of Wartime Veterans. The American Legion, 2016, www.legion.org/sites/legion.org/files/legion/publications/Our-Pillars-Your-Platform-2016.pdf.

148 Ibid. Moaney 62

These stakes are enormous because each organization is investing not only in the current public educational system but also the future of the nation.

The future on earth has implications for education just the after-life and religiously- affiliated private schools define their institutions by this notion. At the helm of this body of organizations is the Maryland Catholic Church. Its interest in advocating for access to quality education and alleviating poverty originates with its perspective of education as

“the first line of defense against the cycle of poverty that can entrap children in less than desirable circumstances as they grow and begin to participate in society”149. Having the financial resources and theological reach throughout Maryland to do so, the Maryland

Catholic Church directly targets the expansion and fortification of existing policy that bridges its religious principles with the vitality of its admissions.

Two Maryland programs that have significantly aided the enrollment of private religious institutions for primary and secondary education are Head Start and the BOOST

Scholarship programs150. Head Start is a program designed to help alleviate poverty and provide benefits to both young children and their parents simultaneously. Its overarching goal is to prepare low-income children for school readiness prior to entering elementary school. Head Start works to level the playing field so low-income children are not entering kindergarten and elementary school behind their financially-secure peers. The

Maryland Catholic Church finds the funding for this program to be essential to serving

Maryland’s next generation. In addition to Head Start, the BOOST Scholarship Program has acted as a supplemental source of assistance to low-income Catholic school families,

149 “2018 Legislative Testimony.” Maryland Catholic Conference - Press Releases, 2018, www.mdcathcon.org/2018testimony. 150 Ibid. Moaney 63

“fostering a partnership between Catholic schools and the State of Maryland”151. A

Maryland State Department of Education report highlighted Catholic schools’ continuing commitment to low-income students, paralleling BOOST aid with an increase of more than $200 for the 2017-18 school year, for an average of $4,535 per student-recipient in non-BOOST assistance152. Crucial to the Maryland Catholic Church’s legitimacy is this proof that its wholesome services to over 1, 350 students is supplementing assistance to low-income students, as opposed to supplanting it153. The Maryland Catholic Church extended its reach beyond state and local government when it joined a collective religious institutions around the nation in opposing the current administration’s bigotry towards immigrants. An explicit support for the removal of restrictions and expansion of protections to Marylanders who have been provided deferred action relief under the

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy is a prime example. The

Maryland Catholic Church considered post-secondary education in this stance by prioritizing more accessible and affordable college education to Maryland youth. This defense of equitable education be summed up by a key objective in their educational legislative agenda: being able to “provide them with greater opportunities –opportunities for higher education, to acquire job skills, and to have a better chance of supporting themselves and their families in the future”154. Whether private or public, the entities battling over the provision of education understand that the youth are the future and their development is not coincidental but rather the product of intentional, carefully-crafted decision-making.

151 Ibid. 152 Ibid. 153 Ibid. 154 Ibid. Moaney 64

Finally, the third and top tier of the educational battleground is post-secondary education. The key contributors are the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign

Wars who advocate on behalf of citizens who have served the Department of Defense. As the primary authors of the original GI Bill155, these two organizations have such a large interest in post-secondary education because of how focal it is during the recruitment process. The prospect of federally-funded access to social capital in exchange for service is very appealing to the young men and women of the Maryland Eastern Shore where opportunity beyond rural or maritime industry, entrepreneurship or service sectors is negligible. Therefore, protecting the longevity of this commitment to the youth of

America, in a society that increasingly demands higher education as a pre-requisite for entrance into the workforce, is not just an organizational interest but a national mission to make sure tradition endures partisan turbulence.

Since the Post-9/11 GI Bill went into effect in August 2009, there has been dramatic growth in the number of beneficiaries and benefits payments at post-secondary institutions. In its 2018 legislative agenda, the American Legion acknowledges the VA’s support of more than 800,000 students through its education benefits programs, and the

Department of Defense’s assistance of nearly 400,000 through its Tuition Assistance

Program156. The American Legion emphasized the need to educate prospective student- veterans and their families about what to anticipate when pursuing higher education.

Given the longevity of this security granted to those upon their return to society as civilians following their service, the American Legion has pinpointed specific policies to

155Matthew J., Shuman, et al. Legislative Agenda for the 115th Congress 2nd Session. The American Legion, 2018, www.legion.org/sites/legion.org/files/legion/publications/13LEG0318-Legislative-Agenda.pdf.

156 Reistad, 2016. Moaney 65

leverage the synergy between the military and political spheres to their benefit. To address student-veteran preparation, this organization recommends that policymakers

“review and re-address the creation of relevant and useful data collection points in the federal Higher Education Opportunity Act when the law is reviewed for reauthorization”157. To ensure the maintenance of the GI Bill’s integrity, the American

Legion recommends U.S. Congress take a three pronged approach: “pass S. 1209, the

Military and Veterans Education Protection Act to count Title 38 veterans education benefits as federal funds to eliminate the 90-10 loophole, call on the Department of

Education to honor and enforce Gainful Employment and Borrower Defense rules that protect veterans from fraud, waste and abuse, and call on the Department of Education to coordinate data sharing with the Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Defense,

CFPB, Office of Federal Student Aid, and the Commissioner for Education Statistics to better understand and improve student veteran outcomes”158. The Veterans of Foreign

Wars similarly prioritize high quality and sustainable education benefits, education and training in new and expanding career fields as well as civilian credentials or academic credit for the professional training they receive during military service159. In an effort to expedite the transition from service into civilian life, both organizations are exhausting their resources to make social capital as accessible as possible to citizens who sacrificed their lives for the sake of country.

The working class, a vital missing piece of the contemporary Democratic Party coalition of Americans, has begun to lose faith in the American Dream. According to an

157 Ibid. 158Denise H, Rohan. The American Legion Legislative Agenda: Submitted to Accompany Testimoney before Congress. The American Legion, 28 Feb. 2018, www.legion.org/sites/legion.org/files/legion/publications/2018-Commander- Testimony.pdf.

159 “Legislative Priorities.” VFW, 2018, www.vfw.org/advocacy/national-legislative-service. Moaney 66

economic security and mobility study conducted by The Pew Charitable Trust160, only a fifth of citizens in rural communities expressed confidence in the feasibility of climbing the ladder of capitalism in the U.S. In The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of

Capitalism, Max Weber chronicles how Calvinist clergy prescribed “unstinting, purposeful labor”161 to calm their congregations’ psychological isolation and distance from God. The capacity of capitalism to consecrate humans and transform them into cogs of a machines is what Weber attributes to masses’ impetus to live to work rather than work to live. It is of no coincidence then that the essence of the Dignity of Work Tour162 championed by Senator Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio is derived from the holy savant

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.163 In the focal capitalistic society of the free world, the labor of survival does emerge as a religion in of itself. Therefore, when the aim of political agendas is directed toward its strongest adherents an accord is struck that resonates deeper than partisanship ever could. Although much more volatile, year after year Ohio has been a battleground state in the same sense that MD’s 1st Congressional

District harbors longstanding tension. Since the age of twenty-two, as a public servant in the Ohio Statehouse, United States House of Representatives and now the United States

Senate, Sen. Brown proven himself to be an unapologetic embodiment of “a message and messenger for working people”164. Citizens of the MD Eastern Shore who rise before dawn to work bi-centennial, tri-centennial farms or harvest the Chesapeake Bay have a hereditary understanding of honest labor and hard-earned prosperity. The Democratic

160 https://www.pewtrusts.org/-/media/assets/2017/09/security_regions.pdf 161Max, Weber. The Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism. Routledge, 2001, pp. 60. 162 “Home.” The Dignity of Work Tour | Sherrod Brown, 2019, www.dignityofwork.com/. 163 “No work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance.” 164Jackie, Borchardt. “Who Is Sherrod Brown? 5 Things to Know about the Ohio Democrat Who Could Face President Trump.” Cincinnati.com, Cincinnati Enquirer, 1 Feb. 2019, www.cincinnati.com/story/news/politics/2019/01/28/5- things-know-sherrod-brown/2659009002/. Moaney 67

rhetorical narratives employed in state and county chapters need to be nuanced, so as to reflect a genuine comprehension of this niche. In order for the diversity of the national

Democratic coalition’s inherent leverage to eclipse the shoddy Republican sacred cow of

‘the taxpayer’, narratives must be contextualized in a manner than does not erase preexisting mores but works in tandem with the people that entrenched them.

The white working class have held the American Dream near and dear amidst an evolving paradigm shift of hegemonic power as the demographic composition signals the prospect of a multicultural America. While minorities account for approximately 47% of

Maryland’s population, minorities constitute over a quarter of the Maryland Eastern

Shore population; increasing and surpassing that of the state average on the Lower Shore counties of Dorchester, Wicomico and Somerset165. In considering themselves as the sole and righteous forbearers of the civic myth, their hardship, perceived or real, couldn’t be further from trivial. However, the narrative of white rural neglect is one echoed across the

Rust Belt, as well as the contemporary Democratic base of historically disenfranchised demographics. In similar fashion to the New Deal and the Great Society, Democrats need twenty-first century enduring policy package that evokes founding principles so as not to seem opportunistic but genuinely committed to using government to restore the dignity of the individual. This is the most politically expedient strategy to reconnect to rural

America in time for 2020, however without transformational leadership the final product will be inadequate. An investment in Democratic presidential candidates that can both descriptively represent this constituency and innovate policy that situates their realities within the context of a diverse, concerted, egalitarian effort to improve quality of life

165 http://dls.maryland.gov/pubs/prod/InterGovMatters/Demog/Maryland-Demographics-January-2015.pdf Moaney 68

presents the Democratic Party with a chance to substantively reconnect to the southern rural America it once reigned. The revitalization of Democratic presence in the American south, especially in districts with overwhelming conservativism, must uproot its bigoted history and supplant it with an educated, empathetic and invigorating platform.

Throughout the Maryland Eastern Shore, the Democratic party is associated with weakness early and often. The most common adage uttered to articulate this partisan perspective hails from a prized outdoor sport across the region: fishing. The story goes as follows, you can continually give a man fish or you can teach him how to fish so he can catch them on his own. This resonates with the region not only because of its national prominence as a seafood hub but also its political implications. Underlying its imagery is a powerful message of ideological skepticism of paternalistic external authority and disdain for the government’s provision of a federal safety net and the longevity of self- sufficiency. Where the Democratic Party might be able to flip the cultural impulse of this rhetorical tool on its head is by ushering in a policy package wrapped in a theme that rising tides lift all boats166 throughout the First Congressional District. Underlying the efficacy of this metaphor is the pretense that everyone has a boat, or more tangibly equal means of competition. Whether it be watery liberation for the region’s American revolutionaries or the exorbitant registration of vessels and equipment for each season’s harvest, the ethos of labor across the Delmarva peninsula are inextricably tied to coastal modes transportation. From this lens, every citizen can envision themselves as tidewater hands in pursuit of happiness atop an estuarine manifestation of life and liberty. A sound

166 Theodore C. Sorensen Personal Papers. JFK Speech Files, 1961-1963. European trip, 1963: 23 June-3 July: Germany and Naples (NATO): Drafts. TCSPP-074-006. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

Moaney 69

and everlasting bridge over the troubled waters of partisanship is the commitment to place citizens of the MD Eastern Shore have cosseted for centuries.

To outsiders, the impression of Maryland’s Eastern Shore is reduced to “wealthy classes cruising on lavish yachts, living in stately mansions that recall traditions of the past, and its quaint, small towns suggest tranquility”167. If approached by water, the

“privacy of secluded coves of the bay also promises that the Eastern Shore provides retreat from the noise, pollution, traffic, and fast-lived pace of nearby metropolitan areas”168. However, what doesn’t appear on road maps or front the bay waters is a dual reality, “one hidden in small, all black hamlets and the privileged acres of the rich”169. To this day, the racial and economic inequality that marked the region's past persists in the income inequality, residential segregation, and lopsided life opportunities for whites and blacks.

Maryland ranks the wealthiest state, not only for its $78, 916 median household income170, but for the millionaire households that make up 7.87% of its residences171.

According for the Phoenix Wealth & Affluent Monitor, Maryland has been home to the highest number of households with $5M or more in assets per capita since 2011172.

However, in the First Congressional District the largest socioeconomic bracket is

$100,000 to $149,999 with 50,411 households followed by $50,000 to $74,999 with 45,

103 households173. Therefore, the middle and working class constitute the majority of the

167 Marks, 1996. 168 Ibid. 169 Ibid. 170 “U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts: Maryland.” Census Bureau QuickFacts, United States Census Bureau, 2018, www.census.gov/quickfacts/md. 171Deb, Belt. “Maryland Ranks No. 1 In Millionaires In 2018.” Stone Mountain-Lithonia, GA Patch, Patch, 8 Feb. 2018, www.patch.com/maryland/annapolis/maryland-ranks-no-1-millionaires-2018. 172 Ibid. 173 Center for New Media & Promotion, and US Census Bureau. “My Congressional District.” Census Bureau QuickFacts, United States Census Bureau, 25 Jan. 2017, www.census.gov/mycd/?st=24&cd=01. Moaney 70

region’s citizenship. The richest Americans have concentrated in states won by

Democrats in at least three out of the four past presidential elections. Although correlation doesn’t necessarily equate causation, economically Maryland is prospering due to the combination of Democratic leadership and conservative-spirited entrepreneurial economic development. Maryland’s faith in a free market can be fused with Democratic representation and warrant similar results in the depressed towns and villages of the MD Eastern Shore. Overcoming voters’ cognitive dissonance in the political sphere proves the Democratic Party’s largest obstacle but still a manageable feat with the assurance of an uplifting rather than demeaning policy package that dignifies citizens.

Another point of entry for the Democratic Party to reclaim the GOP-controlled spaces throughout the American south is the national consensus surrounding the European immigrant narrative as an assimilated facet of the American Dream. With the largest two ancestries in the First Congressional District being German and Irish, not American, the

Democratic Party has a unique opportunity to embrace the historical value of multiculturalism in both America and the region. Illuminating the temporal aspect of this prevailing demographic reality can in fact shift the way the people who reside in ‘the land of pleasant living’ embrace their heritage. Dawning upon the interconnected nature of origins throughout the American public can prove the legacy of difference that has propelled the U.S. since its birth and been the core of the renewed Democratic platform.

In general, relying upon innovative presentations of pre-existing American social infrastructure will be the crux of the Democratic Party’s resurgence in the American south. Moaney 71

Recently on Capitol Hill, I was in a room of bipartisan political strategists where I heard and witnessed a brief sentence encompass the 2016 presidential election outcome in rural districts. A professional delivered the prospect that ‘Democrats need to listen to more country music’. Everyone, including myself, chuckled at the unanticipated statement but then paused in silence thereafter to revel in its genius. Whether accurate or not, the “feel-as-if-its-true”174 concept that had long applied to the rural, white working class has now engulfed the new Democratic coalition. The stereotypes of condescending, educated liberals more adept to theory than a bottom line and caretakers incapable of fathoming individualism or national strength have come to sever the party from its previous regional stronghold. The pride of the Eastern Shore, in large part, stems from its ability to remain immune to ideological reconfiguration from either of the major parties.

The utmost priority of the MD Democratic Party must be to acknowledge all dimensions of difference in America so that the new Democratic coalition doesn’t ostracize demographics it took for granted as its base but instead inserts them in a larger framework of moral principles as old as the nation itself: progress rooted in interdependence.

174Arlie Russell, Hochschild. “Special Report: I Spent 5 Years with Some of Trump's Biggest Fans. Here's What They Won't Tell You.” Mother Jones, 23 June 2017, www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/trump-white-blue-collar- supporters/. Moaney 72

Chapter 3

Moaney 73

There is something ostensibly unique about people who think of themselves bound less by legal, man-made boundaries and more by those Mother Nature erects.

During the last Ice Age, long before human life dwelled Maryland’s Eastern Shore, the weight of the Laurentide Ice Sheet caused a bulge to form under the Chesapeake Bay region which elevated its crust. The simultaneous flooding of the Susquehanna River and slow release of glacial pressure, which spurred land subsidence, created the low-lying, intricate rim of Maryland that caresses the Chesapeake Bay today175. As the salt-water of the Atlantic Ocean has expanded and continues to alter Maryland’s geological footprint, it has also governed tidewater inhabitants’ lives for centuries. Proximity to this basin has been an integral catalyst for free and enslaved Blacks of the Chesapeake to establish themselves as formally sophisticated, irreducibly nuanced, and autonomous human beings.

175Tim, Horton. “On the Chesapeake, A Precarious Future of Rising Seas and High Tides.” Yale E360, 22 Jan. 2018, e360.yale.edu/features/on-the-chesapeake-a-precarious-future-of-rising-seas-and-high-tides. Moaney 74

Etched with dozens of tributaries and islands, the Delmarva Peninsula’s poetic landscape mirrors the arresting nature of its people. Church steeples—not skyscrapers— dot otherworldly skylines, and a tangible connection to the past permeates the community in seemingly every direction and surname. While this region harbored two Founding

Father’s complicit practice of slavery in the New World, America’s great paradox and darkest sin, several of the nation’s monumental advancements can be attributed to the

Chesapeake: the birthplace of the American democracy’s earliest free Black community, world-renown revolutionary abolitionists and exemplary self-sufficient industries born from Nature’s bounty that remain vibrant today. All of which are interwoven with a civic institution invested in a universal seeking of truth, irrespective of race, that has captivated the Maryland Eastern Shore just as the water that surrounds it: the African Methodist

Episcopal Church.

Since America’s dawn spaces of communion, for both sacred organizations and secular institutions, have been sites of political, social and spiritual development. From

Maryland’s colonial infancy onward, religion has remained a defining aspect of tidewater life, enveloping both enslaved and free Black populations of the region in a strong liturgical culture. The sanctified depiction of the MD Eastern Shore’s lifeline by Vincent

O. Leggett in The Chesapeake Bay Through Ebony Eyes encapsulates these ethos:

Twice daily, the ever reliable tides bring in saltwater from the Atlantic Ocean.

God mixes it with the freshwater flowing from the Susquehanna and other rivers— creating one of the world’s most unique estuaries176.

176Vincent O, Leggett. The Chesapeake Bay through Ebony Eyes. Blacks of the Chesapeake Foundation, 1999. Moaney 75

An explanation for the sublime nature of the Chesapeake Bay that resonates most with the region is rendered upon divine providence. By way of the watery vectors that connect Philadelphia to Baltimore, the AME Church fortified autonomous Black avenues toward multigenerational human dignity, social mobility and egalitarian citizenship.

Whether in the bowels of the “free school for colored children conducted at Allen’s

Mission”177 or at biannual revivals along the MD Eastern Shore in which the enslaved baptized in the Bay and sang commemorative hymns178, the Black Chesapeake tradition vindicates the injustices of the New World by reconciling the beauty of nature as God’s doing179. Such a longstanding preservation of a religiously-grounded civic ethic serves not as an artifact but as a contemporary political tool of ultimate justice to be applied just as the spiritual artisans who made them intended.

177Peggy, Bulger. Maryland Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in Maryland from Interviews with Former Slaves. Applewood Books, 2006, pp. 64. 178 Bulger, 32. 179 Genesis 1:1. Moaney 76

In the United States of America, bodies of African descent have involuntarily served as raw marble for an effigy of the everlasting battle between their own innermost convictions of humanity and those upheld by a world governed by Eurocentric ascriptive hierarchies. Centuries in advance of W.E.B. Du Bois’ coined “double-consciousness”, an inherent conflict of hyphenated citizenship, the African Diaspora was inherently veiled by a liminal way of life within the New World: fixed between their homelands that have yet to be recovered and a global democratic ideal that has yet to become home180. In

August of 1631 this new world order set up shop in the land named in honor of Queen

180 Michael, Gomez. “Of Du Bois and Diaspora: The Challenge of African American Studies” in the Journal of Black Studies 35(2): 175-194 (November 2004). Moaney 77

Henrietta Maria181 with its first English settlement, Kent Island. While Black populations arrived in colonial Maryland as a result of Africa laying victim to imperial capitalism, the so-called ‘bastion of freedom’ simultaneously rejected their humanity and citizenship in western society at every turn.

At first glimpse of this moral vacuum, the earliest free Black communities in U.S. history began to conceptualize the creation and maintenance of their own institutions to validate the secular and sacred humanity of blackness. The advent of this Black counterpublic in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries fostered the germination of radical egalitarianism, which was disseminated throughout the nation by the many Chesapeake revolutionaries. Social scientist Michael Dawson states that “the most important organization during each historical epoch, always intimately tied to the black counterpublic, has been the black church”182. In dissecting the micro-political fabric of everyday life within the pioneering African American communities throughout the

An informal gathering following Sunday service at the historic Bethel AME of Chestertown, MD in the late 1990s.

181Carl, Schoettler. “A Royal State of Affairs Founders: Why You Sing 'Maryland, My Maryland' -- and Not Janesylvania or Some Such Thing -- Has to Do with Henrietta Maria. But You Knew That.” Baltimoresun.com, 25 Mar. 1998, www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1998-03-25-1998084003-story.html. 182Michael C., Dawson. Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies. Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001, pp. 35. Moaney 78

Chesapeake’s tributaries, it is essential to begin with what “gave rise to the great African

Methodist Church, the greatest Negro organization in the world”183.

Tributary-by-tributary and county-by-county, the AME Church of the MD Eastern

Shore, since its inception, has managed to champion universal social justice and plant a capacious denomination of Protestant Christianity intolerant of the America’s soil-deep bigotry.

The Black tidewater populations of the MD Eastern Shore are a people “swept on by the current of the nineteenth while yet struggling in the eddies of the fifteenth century”184. To understand the semblance of this deceivingly antiquated allusion to the metaphysical power of nature, intergenerational politics of struggle and regional fulfillment of faith, the potency of seemingly mundane interactions must be focal.

Survival on the MD Eastern Shore requires straightforward and steady steadfastness.

Therefore, over centuries Black tidewater communities of the region have developed a keen sense of nature’s simplicity and signals. Such dexterity not only bid them worldly sustenance but also spiritual sanctity. Given the inroads of Black political thought in communalism and orality, the indigenous, race-based institutions of political, social, economic and spiritual advancement “do the surprising and critical work of constructing meaningful world views”185. The AME Church’s “networks, skills, mobilization, and contact opportunities necessary to nurture political action”186 are bound by its

183 W. E. B., Du Bois, et al. The Souls of Black Folk: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. W.W. Norton, 1999, pp. 124.

184 Du Bois, 127. 185Melissa Victoria, Harris-Lacewell. Barbershops, Bibles, and BET Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought. Princeton University Press, 2014, pp. 2. 186 Harris-Lacewell, 8. Moaney 79

institutional organization. Whether in praise worship, sermons or fellowship beyond the sanctuary, denominational discipline provides congregations with and ideology that facilitates constructive criticisms of their daily challenges and “suggests a vision for the future”187. It is with this spiritual capacity to transform human intellect that the AME

Church has cultivated a training grounds for Black political stimulation regarding the gap between America’s ideals and institutions. Western Judeo-Christian societies and

Christians worldwide have felt and witnessed the unmistakable influence of Rev. Richard

A portrait of The Reverend Richard Allen in Bethel AME Church of Baltimore, MD.

187 Harris-Lacewell. 18. Moaney 80

Allen.

From the close of the Revolution to the War of 1812 thousands of African

Americans in the Chesapeake were emancipated and thus leading to the “creation of

Black Christian communities springing from conversions to evangelical sects, especially the Methodists and Baptists”188. Within these decades, Baptist and Methodist itinerants had preached to handfuls of blacks, mostly in isolated rural meetings on the Delmarva peninsula189. In 1774 approximately

Founded in 1818, the Bethel AME Church of Easton, MD, pastored by Rev. Gary, rests within the heart of the earliest free Black community in the U.S. The Hill neighborhood is bounded by Dover, South, Harrison and Higgins streets in Easton, MD.

five hundred blacks belonged to Methodist societies, equating twenty-five percent of the colony’s total190. However, the turn of the century brought the Chesapeake a white evangelical retreat from a religious criticism of slavery and a hardened Biblical defense of black bondage. This elasticity of black subordination and proslavery sentiment

188 Stephen T., Whitman. Challenging Slavery in the Chesapeake: Black and White Resistance to Human Bondage, 1775-1865. Maryland Historical Society, 2007, pp. 93.

189 Whitman, 97. 190 Whitman, 95. Moaney 81

throughout the South demanded organized Black agency. Thus, the first African

American-led church and congregations, bulwarks were resources of temporal and spiritual survival amidst “a heathen land, with slaveholders as sinful idolators and persecutors of the righteous”191. Within this context, the AME Church’s provision of spiritual sanctuaries and social rallying points gave it license as a “powerful element in defining African American identity”192 and an anchor for wider efforts to create and sustain free black communities, like The Hill193 in Easton, MD. These strides for equality are not merely an African American deed but rather a testament to the unflinching spirit of American liberty.

Scholar Eddie S. Glaude Jr., in his critiques of American democracy, has underscored the United States’ tendency to engage in “rituals of disremembrance”194.

Which, in practice, is a “public performance of recalling and not recalling aimed at setting the future free from the sins of the past”195. The founding of the AME Church directly redressed said rituals’ repression of God’s will on Sundays. In 1787, Reverends

Richard Allen and Absalom Jones withdrew indefinitely from the St. George Methodist

Church of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania because of “unkind treatment”196 and restrictions placed upon worshipers of African descent. In this moment, Rev. Allen and Jones prioritized equality over liberty as the guiding principle for political action from the

191 Whitman, 154. 192 Whitman, 97. 193 Michael E., Ruane. “Experts Probe an Eastern Shore Site, Built by Freed Slaves, for the Nation's Oldest Black Neighborhood.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 25 July 2013, www.washingtonpost.com/local/experts-probe-an- eastern-shore-site-built-by-freed-slaves-for-the-nations-oldest-black-neighborhood/2013/07/25/1303cd58-f530-11e2- a2f1-a7acf9bd5d3a_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.93abd3bb2bbb. 194 Eddie S., Glaude. Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul. Crown Publishers, 2017, pp. 103.

195 Ibid. 196 Gregory G. M., Ingram. The S.A.T. Manual for African Methodism. AMEC Sunday School Union, 1992, pp. 65. Moaney 82

benchmarks of the American creed. This social justice protest is considered “the founding act of African American Christendom”197 since it ultimately led to the founding of The

Free African Society which evolved into the Bethel AME Church of Philadelphia in

1798. After being forced to organize a separate group for their own spiritual, social, educational, general growth and development, Richard Allen and his associates “derived what amounted to a ‘new concept’ of Christian Brotherhood”198 that was incapable of limitation and truly universal. Because of Mother Bethel’s birth in Philadelphia’s maritime culture, the AME Church was primed for the MD Eastern Shore.

Similar to what occurred in Philadelphia, the displacement of Black Methodists in

Baltimore, MD lead to the establishment of the AME Church’s mother conference. In

1787, the Colored Methodist Society, founded by Jacob Fortie and Caleb Hyland, separated from Lovely Lane Methodist Church199. By 1802, blacksmiths Jacob Gilliard and Richard Russell ensured

Bethel AME Church on 1300 Druid Hill Avenue Baltimore, MD in 1912.

197Eddie S, Glaude. African American Religion: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 42.

198 Ingram, 68. 199 MDHS Library Dept. “The Rise of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore and the Bethel A.M.E. Church.” Underbelly, 30 Nov. 2017, www.mdhs.org/underbelly/2017/11/30/the-rise-of-the-african-methodist- episcopal-church-in-baltimore-and-the-bethel-a-m-e-church/. Moaney 83

200 Black ownership of the Sharp Street Methodist Church and the lot on which it stood .

Although the church was established as an independent congregation, it retained its formal affiliation with the white dominated Methodist Episcopal Church authority.

Out of concern for the Sharp Street Methodist Church’s ability to minister to Black

Methodists in Baltimore under white surveillance, MD native Daniel Coker founded the

African Methodist Bethel Society and transplanted the congregation to East Saratoga

Street in 1815201. One year later, the first national conference of the AME Church would be held in Baltimore. A century later, the Bethel AME Church found its current home within the hub of Baltimore’s African American community on Druid Hill Avenue, the former home of St. Peter’s Protestant Episcopal Church, in 1912202.

On March 20, 2019, the national conference season commenced with sixty-six churches of the Second Episcopal District of the AME Church at the 203rd Baltimore

Annual Conference. The opening worship service filled the two-story sanctuary of the

Mother conference with spirituals from the enslaved, the sanctitude of communion and

Reverend R. Kevin Brown Sr.’s sermon, It is time to move from a spectator to a risk taker. This risk taking harkens back to Rev. Richard Allen and is the embodiment of the conference’s theme, Advancing the Kingdom: Kingdom-worthy living. Reverend

Ashton’s lead of the opening hymn of praise enveloped an ancestral principle of AME

Faith, especially on the MD Eastern Shore. AME Hymn #394, “And Are We Yet Alive”, exemplifies a phrase that generations of Black tidewater population know from experience to be true: ‘if it had not been for The Lord on my side’. Just as Nat Turner

200 Whitman, 97. 201 Ibid. 202 Ibid. Moaney 84

Bethel AME Reverend Darius Stokes giving Robert Jefferson Breckenridge, a Presbyterian minister, a gold snuff box for his work to prevent legislation that would place restrictions on slaveholders’ ability to manumit slaves and the rights of the state’s free black population in December 1845. —MD Historical Society

“baptized ‘by the spirit’ in a [Chesapeake] stream”203 and his rebellion was one born from evangelical religion, so too is “ineffable in the ordinary, the mystical in the mundane, the transcendent in the midst of pragmatic justice-seeking acts”204 the AME Church has used to kickstart social and racial progress throughout the region.

In The Souls of Black Folk Du Bois outlined three components of the Negro

Church that characterized the religion of the slave: the preacher, the music, and the frenzy205. Despite capacity for spiritual equality in the practice of Christian faith, the

Negro Church of the MD Eastern Shore was the only viable shelter for Black tidewater populations whose Methodist masters preached Ephesians 6:5. Talbot County native

203 Whitman, 161. 204Barbara A., Holmes. “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Contemplation, Activism, and Praxis.” Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church (2nd Edition), 2nd ed., Augsburg Fortress, Publishers, MINNEAPOLIS, 2017, pp. 124. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1tm7hhz.11. 205 Glaude, 4. Moaney 85

Frederick Douglass attested that “being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me”206 because of southern religious practitioners’ personification of the false prophets Jesus spoke of in the book of Matthew207. Given that the AME church stood and remains at the epicenter of Black tidewater life, African

Americans’ “reliance on and respect for oral communication”208, which shapes cultural and political life, is vested in the preacher. Due to such a tall order of service for an entire community, preachers of the AME Church are the epitome of dynamic leadership. Du

Bois states that “the Preacher is the most unique personality developed by the Negro on

American soil. A leader, a politician, an orator, a ‘boss’, an intriguer, an idealist”209. The versatility required of AME ministry produces channels of development that surpass the pulpit and take root in the Black tidewater communities beyond the walls of the church.

An integral rationale upon which this archetype has been created is the notion that the

Lord’s house is a place of healing.

Holy Trinity AME Trustee Mr. Cotton vividly remembers the ‘observe and absorb’ mentality of his elders who were Black watermen being made manifest in their telling him to “get in somebody’s church” because the “church was a hospital”210.

Reverend Steward also corroborated that working-class Blacks of the Chesapeake’s tributaries “knew where their health came from” since scripture and their AME family was every bit “a part of their soul”211. Being reminded daily of God’s power working the fields and waters of the MD Eastern Shore, Black tidewater communities’ fear of god

206Frederick, Douglass. "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave." The Harper Single Volume American Literature. Ed. Donald McQuade, et.al. 3rd edition. New York: Longman, 1999. 207 Matthew 7:15-20. 208 Harris-Lacewell. 3. 209 Du Bois, 120. 210 12/28/18 Interview With Mr. Cotton. 211 12/28/18 Interview With Rev. Steward. Moaney 86

implicated an exhaustive protection of their souls. This assurance that fellowship would grant any child of God access to whatever they needed to go again connotes that not only is God the source of their love and lives but also their revival. In this context, Du Bois’ articulation of the duality embedded in the secular and spiritual welfare tending of

“medicine-man” can be better understood:

He appeared early on the plantation and found his function as the healer of the sick, the interpreter of the Unknown, the comforter of the sorrowing, the supernatural avenger of wrong, and the one who rudely but picturesquely expressed the longing, disappointment, and resentment of a stolen and oppressed people”

Rev. Richard Allen did not solely employ his visionary capacity in external acts of defiance, he also made sure the AME Church could achieve the same revolutionary spirit internally. Baptized by Richard Allen himself, Jerena Lee, “exemplified the hopes, desires, and conflicts that the call to preach could engender”212. Although Rev. Allen initially held to 1 Corinthians 14:34 as policy predominantly abided by Protestant church, he relented to the power of her preaching throughout Caroline County, MD. Lee understood the original apostles to have been ‘unlearned fishermen’ of men, and that surely God could inspire “a female to preach the simple story of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of our Lord”213. In the bowels of what would become the nation’s seafood capital, both secular and religious fishing was well accustomed to on the MD Eastern

Shore. As part of the Second Great Awakening, stretching from the 1790s to the 1840s,

Lee was able to link religion, moral reform and the inequality rampant in the lives of

212 Whitman, 151. 213 Whitman, 152. Moaney 87

American women in her ministry214. This convergence of temperance, abolition and

women’s rights manifested the AME Church’s legacy of social justice by assuring poor

Outlook from historically Black tidewater community, Bellevue, MD, onto Oxford across the Tred Avon

River. persons, the uneducated, Blacks and women that they could find salvation. While on the edge of a bank like Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey215216, Lee similarly professed the “unseen arm of God which saved”217 her from death. Not long after recovering from the illness of her suicide, her “anxiety still continued respecting [her] poor soul, she departed for Philadelphia where Rev. Allen’s sermon catalyzed her being made anew in

Christ. Lee recounters her experience as “if a garment, which had entirely enveloped

[her] whole person, even to [her] fingers’ ends, split at the crown of [her] head, and was

214 “Jerena Lee 1783-1849.” Women and the American Story, New York Historical Society Museum & Library, www.nyhistory.org/sites/default/files/newfiles/cwh- curriculum/Module%202/Life%20Stories/Jarena%20Lee%20Life%20Story.pdf. 215 For purposes of security and safety in the myriad of maritime communities in which he found sustenance, Frederick Douglass took on many aliases other than the name given to him at birth by his mother, Harriet Bailey. It wasn’t until he arrived in New Bedford, MA that he was anointed with the name Douglass by Mr. Johnson, a man inspired by Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake. 216 Douglass, 38.

217Jerena, Lee. “Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee, Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel : Lee, Jarena, b. 1783.” The Library of Harvard University, Philadelphia, Pub. for the Author, 1849, pp. 4., archive.org/details/religiousexperi00leegoog/page/n6. Moaney 88

stripped away from [her] passing like a shadow from [her] sight—when the glory of God seemed to cover [her] in its stead”218. In this moment Lee likened the volatility of human nature to that of the natural world, a revelation that would anoint her for the healing of many Black tidewater souls on the MD Eastern Shore.

Jerena Lee, born on February 11, 1783, was the first woman preacher in the AME Church and one of the first African American women known to have preached the gospel in the original thirteen colonies219.

218 Lee, 5. 219 Martha Simmons and Frank A. Thomas. Preaching with Sacred Fire: An Anthology of African American Sermons, 1750 to the Present (New York: Norton, 2010), 160; Susan J. Hubert, “Testimony and Prophecy in The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee,” Journal of Religious Thought 54/55:2/1 (1998): 45. Moaney 89

Through the social justice agenda of the AME Church, in stances like the integration of church membership and the boycott of slavemade goods220, souls previously made to drink the bitterest dregs of slavery221 on MD’s Eastern Shore were injected with a wave of radical impetus. Dawson argues that the contemporary Black ideologies and public opinion stem from broad historical patterns born of a separate Black counterpublic. That which he associates with Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, the pre-1930 Du Bois and the pre-1967 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is radical egalitarianism. This ideology is comprised of “a severe critique of racism in American society, an impassioned appeal for America

The St. Stephens A.M.E. Church, founded in 1867, behind which Talbot County, MD USCT soldiers rest in peace (left) in Unionville which is the only village in the U.S. founded by formerly enslaved soldiers222.

220 Frederick Abbott, Norwood. The Story of American Methodism: a History of the United Methodists and Their Relations. Abingdon, 1989, pp. 171. 221 Douglass, 37. 222 Gabriella Demczuk and Natalie Hopkinson. “After the Civil War, African-American Veterans Created a Home of Their Own: Unionville.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 1 Sept. 2017, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/civil-war-african-american-veterans-town-own-unionville-180964398/. Moaney 90

to live up to the best of its values, and support for a radical egalitarian view of a multiracial democratic society”223. For radical egalitarians, full equality meant that one was both equal before the law and also participated fully in the conventions of civil society. For example, eighteen men of Unionville, MD gave their lives to defend the

Union in the Civil War and are embraced as American patriots in conjunction with the other United States Colored Troops across the region224. In other words, “equality of opportunity should be reflected in equality in outcomes”225. Considering the pendulum- like swinging of racial relations in America, this ideology was well ahead of its time when initially employed by Maryland revolutionaries Harriet Tubman, Henry Highland

Garnet, Frederick Douglass, William Green, John Brown,

Eighteen free Black soldiers from Talbot County, MD who fought for the union form 1863-1866.

223 Dawson, 15. 224 “United States Colored Troops (USCT) Case Studies.” Legacy of Slavery in Maryland - United States Colored Troops (USCT), slavery.msa.maryland.gov/html/casestudies/usct.html. 225 Dawson, 268. Moaney 91

Overleaf: Hell’s Crossing, 1933, black-and-white lithograph of Copperville, MD226 by Ruth Starr Rose227. Elisha Tyson, William Lloyd Garrison, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Josiah Henson and many others. The methods these American icons used mobilize the Black tidewater communities of the Chesapeake were simply alternative “languages to imagine themselves apart from the dehumanizing practices of white supremacy”228. Radical egalitarianism on the MD Eastern Shore emerged organically in the AME Church pews

226 Named for the prominent African American Copper family, the village was originally settled by John Copper, Philip Moaney and Solomon DeShields. It was previously part of the powerful Lloyd family of Wye’s extensive landholding, which was also Frederick Douglass’ childhood home. 227Barbara, Paca, et al. Ruth Star Rose (1887-1965): Revelations of African American Life in Maryland and the World. Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture, 2015, 77-78.

228 Glaude, 4. Moaney 92

Women who picked crabmeat and shucked oysters for roughly 30 cents per gallon level at the Milbourne Oyster Co., Crisfield, MD in 1940.—Maryland State Archives229. following the benediction, during labor atop the sprawling tobacco and vegetable-ridden acreage, afloat the Chesapeake Bay at dawn and even over the rare comfort of Maryland seafood feasts on the porches of Black tidewater homes.

Deep within the crevices of otherwise mundane interactions, Black tidewater populations have capitalized on scarce privacy to amass centuries worth of networks and sustain autonomous communities. At the heart of this community-building was the kingdom-building of the AME Church. After the theology of Rev. Richard Allen crossed the Chesapeake Bay, it fostered a decentralized wellspring of radical egalitarianism that

229 Craig, Simpson. “600 Black Women Stand Strong: The 1938 Crab Pickers Strike.” Washington Area Spark, 16 Jan. 2013, washingtonareaspark.com/2012/12/05/600-black-women-stand-strong-the-1938-crab-pickers-strike/. Moaney 93

The 203rd Baltimore Annual Conference of the AME Church opening worship service on March, 20, 2019. would captivate souls throughout the nation. Not only did the AME Church alter the landscape of Methodism in the advent of several independent denominations, but its promotion of spiritual equality and common recognition of humanity helped cleanse U.S.

Christianity from being corroded entirely by southern prejudice.

Moaney 94

The soundtrack of every harvest on the Maryland Eastern Shore begins with a symphony of cicadas at each sunrise and sunset along the horizon of the Chesapeake Bay.

Accompanying these natural reverberations during the antebellum period was a non- western musical expression that will forever linger in the air over nine counties worth of morally-conflicted acreage: the painful groans and joyous shouts of the Negro. It is within these soul-wrenching pleas for strength, salvation and healing that the hypocrisy of ‘the great experiment’ remains irrefutable. The contemporary hymns of the African

Methodist Episcopal Church have preserved not only the melodies and harmonies of

Chesapeake Negro spirituals but, more importantly, their ancestral heritage. At their core, these hymns born from assemblies, unbeknownst to masters, in “rudely constructed log Moaney 95

houses, one story in heighth, with huge stone chimneys, and …beds of straw”230 are the cultural residue of the original free Black American experiences bound together by a revolutionary religious understanding of an ultimate justice negligibly reflected in the

New World that engulfed them.

W.E.B. Du Bois argued that “there are no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is no true

American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave”. The “vacillation between an embrace of the abolition of slavery on Christian grounds and a justification for slavery on those same grounds” has left people of African descent in the liminal, yet distinctly American, conflict of an “ironic…. commit[ment] to democratic principles”231.

Juxtaposing American global valor and domestic embrace of mores antithetical to its founding embedded in the name ‘American Negro’ echoes a paradox as trademark to the nation as its birth.

Despite the United States’ Judeo-Christian encasement, white supremacy has polished the ‘shining city on a hill’ with a blinding allure whose rays germinated the

“most original and beautiful expression of human life”232. Below the Mason-Dixon Line, gentrymen crafting and maintaining the religious hierarchies of slave society understood that “the life and teachings of Jesus meant freedom for the captive and release for those held in economic, social, and political bondage”233. However, once the dynamic of master

230 Bulger, 61. 231 Glaude, 34.

232 Du Bois,120.

233Howard, Thurman. Deep River; and, the Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death. Friends United Press, 1975, pp. 16. Moaney 96

and slave gave way to the prospect of spiritual equality derived from religious conversion, people of African descent understood the “communication event of speaking, singing, or a combination of speech and song”234 as malleable enough to make their own.

This dual employment of formal trance-inducing musical worship as “agency and agent; a transitive and an intransitive usage”235 equipped congregations alongside Sunday’s corollary in confronting America’s moral integrity daily with unprecedented explicitness.

On the MD Eastern Shore, AME hymns ritualized forthcoming liberation and reminded the denigrated of God’s resounding promises. With this new language, these Black tidewater communities were able “to see beyond their present condition and to imagine a future defined by freedom, not by slavery or white supremacy”236, an essential first step in acquiring dignity.

234Irving I. Zaretsky and Mark P. Leone. Religious Movements in Contemporary America. Princeton University Press,

1977, pp. 88.

235 Ibid. 236 Glaude, 40. Moaney 97

In his exploration of the raw materials of Negro spirituals, Howard Thurman identified three major sources of origin: the Old and New Testaments, the world of nature, and the personal experiences of the enslaved237. Given the synergy between what

Black tidewater populations worshiped, saw and felt, these three major sources converged into a singular force that legitimized the lyrics’ capacity to invoke the Holy

Spirit. Given the surveillance of worship throughout the Chesapeake, “many slaves were forced to worship in secret- to steal away to worship God apart from the gaze of white slave owners”238. From the mouth of Cape Henry and Cape Charles, Virginia, to Havre de Grace, Maryland, the forty-seven tributary rivers and streams were nothing short of an optimal setting for Black Christians to forge a precious style of worship and a distinctive theological outlook.

237 Thurman, 12. 238 Glaude, 40. Moaney 98

Prior to the institutional church, communion took the form of camp meetings which were required by municipalities to be held in remote locations239. This racialized political tactic to prevent disturbing mild-mannered towns with noise pollution and discourage black attendance backfired in the sense that Black tidewater communities’ spiritual affinity to the surrounding natural world strengthened their faith. “As spiritual sanctuaries, social rallying points, and powerful elements in defining African American identity”240, these sacred places of worship, concealed by the intricate geography of the

Delmarva Peninsula, anchored the perseverance to create and sustain free black communities.

Black tidewater populations have historically identified the hymns that resonate most to be those which draw upon natural metaphors and analogies mirroring the

Chesapeake’s geography, water in particular. The physical proximity of the enslaved to the Chesapeake Bay lent itself to a tantalizing conception of liberty unknown to those held captive throughout the landlocked Deep South. The Chesapeake Bay’s tributaries were, in some cases, the last and most formidable barrier to freedom. Therefore, the enslaved perspective of being in literal arms reach of a tangible, marshy liberation during the antebellum period provoked an African diasporic anguish unique to the Chesapeake.

Of all natural environments, the estuary ranks as one of the most dynamic due to its ever- changing biological composition and complex ecosystem. The immersion of these intergenerational struggles in the Bay’s constancy and boundlessness feeding the Atlantic

Ocean led the oppressed to conceptualize the force of nature as indicative of God’s unceasing presence in their trials.

239 Whitman, 151. 240 Whitman, 97. Moaney 99

Through musical worship, MD Eastern Shore congregations were filled with the Holy

Spirit and ultimately “breathed a hope- a faith in the ultimate justice of things”241. As a result, participants prepared for the trials of the upcoming week by verbally sealing their memory of God’s unmerited grace and power. As their faith deepened, both free and enslaved Black populations of the MD Eastern Shore used the medium of song to comprehend “the pessimism of life as raw material out of which it creates its own strength”242.

20th Century crowd of African Americans atop an oyster pile in Crisfield, MD.

Whether in musical harmony, religious fellowship, shared industry or residential community, music fortified the human dignity of Black tidewater communities and the strongest, ongoing practice lay within the AME Church of the Chesapeake.

241 Du Bois, 162. 242 Thurman, 56. Moaney 100

Contemporary Black tidewater communities join in fellowship today to give God praise for how the tribulations of the Old Testament’s enslaved parallels their ancestors’ in the New World. The Chesapeake’s Christian slaves understood scripture to be a part of their soul and consumed its knowledge for full, abundant survival in this life and the next.

Therefore, the geographic realization that MD’s Eastern Shore, fixed between the

Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, resembles Israel being fixed state between the

Sea of Galilee and the Mediterranean Sea gave those who saw themselves as America’s

Israelites an irreducible legitimacy in God’s Kingdom243. The corresponding Africanized musical and linguistic expressions made audible “the unshakable resolve that all was not settled” in the New World and functioned as a “musical language that gave voice to the conflicted experience of being a Christian slave”244. People of African descent have

The AME Church Second Regional District leadership singing at the 203rd Baltimore Annual Conference on March 20, 2019.

243 1/10/19 Interview With Rev. Steward. 244 Glaude, 41. Moaney 101

occupied a liminal existence since the inception of Western societies undergirded by slavery. However, through redemptive scripture that empowered the oppressed, their marginalization gained purpose and their faith became their lifeblood.

The practicality of connecting the tidal vicissitudes of life with the ebb and flow of the

Chesapeake Bay enabled hymns to also function as tools for disseminating experiential wisdom. This tradition spans generations of those who worked the fields and tributaries of the MD Eastern Shore. While elementary at face value, these acoustic channels of the

Holy Spirit heighten temporal consciousness at indescribable volumes by requiring all who engage with them to offer their testimony in exchange for a redemptive vision.

Imaginings “beyond the relationship of slave and master” enabled a “slave to reach backward into the world of the early slaves and blur the lines between the experience recounted in scripture”245 and contemporary challenges. The Old Testament parable of the children of Israel’s “exodus signifies the crossing of a community from a world of linear historical progress and objective time into a metaphysical reality that requires reliance on a Spirit God”246. In the same token, the AME Church’s musical emphasis on a resolute, Almighty guidance is inextricably linked with the ethos and political efforts of

Maryland’s Black tidewater communities to attain dignity, prosperity and universal justice in America.

In several ways, the Chesapeake Bay’s tributaries from which Black tidewater communities gained secular sustenance also served as incubators for their spiritual growth. Water, still or flowing, has been a seminal element of nature to the worldview of

245 Glaude, 42. 246 Barbara A. Holmes. “Joy Comes in the Morning: Contemplative Themes in African American Biblical Interpretation.” Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church (2nd Edition), 2nd ed., Augsburg Fortress, Publishers, MINNEAPOLIS, 2017, pp. 99. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1tm7hhz.10. Moaney 102

West Africans and their descendants. In the New World, maritime communities with

Black populations witnessed the instinctual connection between water and their co- inhabitants of deep hue. Unsurprisingly, this sacred sentiment is deeply interwoven throughout the oral history and music of the earliest Black religious worship on the MD

Eastern Shore. Such respect for nature’s sublime qualities inherently rejects Manifest

Destiny’s notion of reducing nature into mere units of control and utility. This combination of unconventional perspectives of nature and Christianity grounded AME hymns’ artistic expressions of humanity in exclusive bedrock sheltered from the insidiousness of white supremacy throughout the region’s religion.

The natural phenomena of climate change has been occurring in Maryland for centuries, lost islands and sunken communities present ample evidence. Therefore, the presence of sunny day flooding, subsidence throughout the low-lying marshlands and coastal erosion have been accepted as anticipated interactions with the Chesapeake Bay.

Human inhabitance all along the Bay’s tributaries have persisted upon sinking and weathered ground, literally. J. Hector St. John de Crévecouer’s 1781 work, Letters from an American Farmer, implies that the land on which slave-trading occurred in the U.S. created a moral geography. Spanning “from the virtuous North to the corrupt South”247, the vitality of the natural environment served as a metric for sinful acreage. The “showers of sweat and tears which from the bodies of Africans daily drop[ped] and moisten[ed] the ground they till[ed]”248 were unseen by all but the Black tidewater communities that endured them. In both metaphor and in reality, the spiritual striving of African Americans

247Kimberly K., Smith. “Environmental Criticism and the Slave Narratives.” The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative, by John Ernest, Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 320. 248 St. John de Crèvecoeur, J. Hector , and Dennis D. Moore. Letters from an American Farmer and Other Essays. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013, pp. 168. Moaney 103

on MD’s Eastern Shore for higher ground is one destined for survival on Earth and in

Heaven.

For generations, African Americans “pressing on the upward way” have been overcome by a wave of trust and patience in The Lord. In acknowledging “new heights” of faith being gained every day from prayer, an insistence for eternal Truth and Rest in

His kingdom develops. Asking The Lord to “plant [one’s] feet on higher ground” is a plea for sanctity and refuge from the flawed, vile manifestations of flesh down below

Heaven. To seek for an invitation to Heaven, after having borne witness to and prevailed trials, is an attempt for disciples to express their understanding of God’s work. This confession of testimony reinforces a follower of Christ to confirm that they are in the world but not of it. Black tidewater communities perceived the onslaught of attacks upon their human dignity to be the backbone of their faith in life everlasting with Christ. The

AME hymn I’m Pressing on the Upward Way exemplifies the uphill battle Black tidewater communities have experienced on MD’s Eastern Shore and justifies their cheerful shouting and clapping for the blessings to come.

The natural analogies embedded in AME hymns comparing life to rivers are

“perhaps the most universal in insight, and certainly the most intellectual” derivatives of the Negro spirituals born on the region’s tobacco plantations. The natural tendency of the river to flow and remain flowing, despite impediments, symbolizes the ongoing process of life. This sporadic aliveness confirms a estuarine reality Black tidewater communities have known all too well for centuries. Just as the river has times of both drought and flood, so too does life present its peaks of success and valleys of stillness. Just as a basin is ridden with troubled and healing waters, life offers vices and virtues. Finally, just as Moaney 104

the goal and source of the river are the same, the goal and source of life is God.

According to Thurman, God is “the goal of man’s life, the end of all his seeking, the meaning of all his striving … the guarantor of all his values, the ultimate meaning – the timeless frame of reference”249. This ancestral link to water and continued affinity with the routine flux of the Chesapeake provide the cultural rationale that lends itself to blurring the sacred and secular.

Black tidewater communities remain to be inextricably linked to the Chesapeake tributary on which they were built. This close affinity to a dynamic natural force lent itself to a cultural rationalization of life’s toils based upon the adjoining marine environment. The AME hymn When the Storms of Life are Raging is an expression of tempered faith and assurance in God’s promise to “never leave thee, nor forsake thee”250.

The use of personification grants the ocean and its subsidiaries a capacity for rage that overpowers the humans who encounter it. Yet, the MD Eastern Shore’s Black tidewater communities who have traveled atop the Chesapeake Bay possess both a practical and spiritual belief in the Lord, “thou who rulest wind and water”, to remain their rock, my

From the shores of Chestertown, MD, a view of the mouth of the Chester River.

249 Thurman, 74. 250 Hebrews 13:5. Moaney 105

sword and shield both on land and at sea. This hymn is typically sung solo, as it demands the innermost emotions of collectedness. To share this spiritual maturity in fellowship through song reflects a degree of defiance worthy of praise, similar to a vessel that remains afloat despite turbulent squalls. In this sense, a strong hull equates to a foundational, unwavering trust in The Lord. In towns and villages brimming with maritime artisans and industry, the anvil of the AME church solidified faith in Christ and secular perseverance amidst nature’s unrest for Black tidewater communities throughout the region.

In joined fashion, arms interlocked, the performance of In Jordan’s Stormy Banks

I Stand transfers the sentiment of the Israelites’ embracing their last barrier to the

Promised Land and places it in the context of the Delmarva Peninsula’s enslaved.

Maryland’s lower shore juts out into the Atlantic Ocean and theoretically affords a well- oriented person of African descent a seascape that eventually leads to their home continent. Ready to enter Canaan at last, Joshua’s people were “cast a wishful eye” onto the land promised by their savior in the same way America’s self-proclaimed Israelites comprehended their liminality: living in a land that has yet to become home far apart from their beloved origins across the Atlantic. Any tributary within Somerset, Wicomico and Worcester counties interchangeably symbolizes the Chesapeake’s Jordan River for

Black tidewater communities. Also, throughout the rest of the Eastern Shore, free and enslaved African Americans came to envision their view of the Western Shore as more progressive bastions of social mobility that lacked in the tobacco counties.

Therefore, maritime communities that presented unprecedented access and opportunities like Baltimore were seen as havens. Void of plantations, but certainly not Moaney 106

the racial caste system of slavery, the Western Shore and north of the Mason Dixon Line became locations where “no chilling winds nor poisonous breath [could] reach [their] healthful shore[s]”. To sing this AME hymn about standing on the bank of a river and waiting for spiritual guidance before proceeding produces powerful, symbolic imagery as well as a testament to the religious conviction unique to Black tidewater communities.

Music, for the Black tidewater communities of the Chesapeake, became a “break from [Eurocentric] order” for the pursuit of a reality separate from the morally-bankrupt society that surrounded them. Although the AME hymns syncretized pre-contact African religious beliefs and practices251, institutionalized and patterned African-American innovations did preserve the essence of their ancestors’ spirituals whose tribulations occurred along the same banks of the Chesapeake. Through musical harmony, singing the same notes and inviting the Holy Spirit similarly, an intergenerational continuum of faith was formed. Access to this for African Americans, born by the longstanding capacity of white supremacy to subvert the discipline of reconciliation, was intentionally unlimited.

This made possible for any generation of listeners or participants of this worship to comprehend this invocation of the Holy Spirit as “of me and of mine”252, irrespective of their worldly distinctions. Whether recited via oral tradition or in unison with instruments, the lyrics of AME hymnals were flexible and practical enough to fulfill the needs or concerns of all who received them. In doing so, these words continue to bridge centuries’ worth of Black pain, despair, rejoice and contemplation for the sake of enlightening children of God not to compare suffering but connect struggle for social justice.

251 Zaretsky, 89. 252 Du Bois, 155. Moaney 107

Whether literal, metaphorical or spiritual, African Americans of the Chesapeake have never been strangers to turbulence. In the transition from being affixed between the

‘peculiar institution’ inland and the brackish straits of freedom to securing sustenance atop indiscriminate estuarine currents, Black tidewater communities absorbed a distinct saltiness in their character. It is as though when Jesus told his disciples to cast their net on the right side of the boat, the faithful, persecuted African Americans on the eastern rim of Moaney 108

Chesapeake were His miraculous yield253. However, no matter the strength of gales or the size of squalls, their well-tested faith always served to remind them that Jesus had not left and would never their boat254. Life on the Maryland Eastern Shore demands a consistent level of perseverance which natives of ‘God’s Country’255 only consider to be sustainable with His unmerited grace. As mortals, inhabitants of African descent equate the rhythm of life with the mechanics of the surrounding natural world and leave the incalculable to

The Lord. In knowing the King of Kings to be the final arbiter, not the flawed white

Anglo-Saxon Protestant politicians and judges who appraised their race as three-fifths of a person256, worldly enfranchisement was approached with a jaded hesitancy. The original forms of free Black life in America, launched throughout Maryland’s Eastern

Shore, shared a cynicism towards what a more perfect union could be with their inclusion because they viscerally bore the brunt of what it was not. James Baldwin embodied this sentiment in articulating the deep layers of wisdom that prevent African Americans from blindly accepting the codified integrity of accept American Democracy:

“The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest county the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, … that American men are the world’s most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that.”

253 John 21:6. 254Mark 4: 35-41. 255Gary, Garcia. “Welcome to ST MARYS COUNTY!!! Gods Country!!!” YouTube, YouTube, 26 Sept. 2008, www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0BqCizBKek. 256 “['Clause III'].” Legal Information Institute, Legal Information Institute, www.law.cornell.edu/constitution- conan/article-1/section-2/clause-3.

Moaney 109

This Train is Bound for Glory, Ruth Starr Rose 1951 color serigraph situated in the Copperville church community of wheat field/tomato patch laborers, crab house pickers and oyster shuckers. It is inspired by the heavenly deliverance of Negro spirituals that the Copperville Moaney Quartet performed as a “simple Christian duty of helping souls to find heaven”257.

257 Barbara, Paca, et al. “Rose's Documentation of Negro Spirituals.” Ruth Star Rose (1887-1965): Revelations of African American Life in Maryland and the World, Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture, 2015, pp. 97–133. Moaney 110

From revolutionary American patriots like Frederick Augustus Washington

Bailey to the founding Copper, DeShields and Moaney families, the anvil of the African

Methodist Episcopal Church has symbolized Black tidewater populations’ strivings for social justice in civic engagement since Maryland’s colonial beginnings. The AME

Church on the MD Eastern Shore has historically smelted258 the line between church and state to help society distinguish between the validity of His plans for the oppressed and the U.S. government’s negligence of their deep-hued brothers and sisters in Christ. After generations of quenching259 this distinction, greater clarity could be applied to the democratic prospect of working within the confines of America’s man-made political process to exalt The Lord’s divine will. AME ministry, from within and outside of the pulpit, have only felt warranted to politically intervene in order to counter governmental forces that threaten their congregation’s quality of life; such as that within The Parable of the Gold Coins260. A blacksmith is focal to any maritime community and the congregations guided by Richard Allen’s theology have embodied Proverbs 21:17261 in their faithful pursuit of an egalitarianism that mirrors the universality of God’s kingdom.

Such redemptive sentiment can be extracted from an analysis of three U.S.

Supreme Court cases that ruptured Black life throughout the Chesapeake and continue to impact Black life in America: Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857)262, Brown v.

Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954)263 and Shelby County v. Holder, 570

258 Smelting is the process of heating and melting ore in order to extract metal. 259 Quenching is the process of rapidly cooling hot metal to alter its properties—usually to harden it. 260 Luke 19:11-27. 261 Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend. 262 “Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1856).” Justia Law, supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/60/393/. 263 “Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).” Justia Law, supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/347/483/. Moaney 111

U.S. ___ (2013)264. Undergirding all three is a burning urge for both codified and realized human dignity; as children of God, as first-class patrons of the state and as legitimate voices of American democracy. Spanning three centuries of service, the civic and political spirit of the AME Church has advanced the Lord’s judgement as supreme as opposed to any man whose appointment as a justice inevitably expires with death. A prerequisite of irreducible justice is that it’s judge must use discernment that is impartial.

Given the inherent imperfection of flesh, no human conscience is immune to the whims of society. In U.S. cases involving African Americans, history shows that Lady Justice is not blind. Therefore, the successors of Richard Allen recognize Jesus’ assurance to be the same today, tomorrow and forevermore as foundational to the fulfillment of America’s ideals265. As a mainline Protestant denomination, the AME Church has contributed to many ecumenical social justice coalitions. However, on the Maryland Eastern Shore, these three U.S. Supreme Court cases encapsulate the ancestral goals, intergenerational triumphs and enduring faith spurred by the AME Church and characteristic of tidewater

African American life.

To be dehumanized as a person of color in the New World prior to the Civil War was as commonplace as the strange fruit266 hanging from loblolly pines throughout the coastal plains of the Chesapeake Bay267. Just under a century after the fruition of the U.S.

Constitution, it remained true that while every man was created equal, every man was not valued so in America.

264 “Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. ___ (2013).” Justia Law, supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/570/12-96/.

265 Malachi 3:6. 266 “Nina Simone – Strange Fruit.” Genius, 1 Oct. 1965, genius.com/Nina-simone-strange-fruit-lyrics. 267 “Plants Profile for Pinus Taeda (Loblolly Pine).” Plants Database, United States Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service, plants.usda.gov/core/profile?symbol=PITA. Moaney 112

The confederate Talbot Boys (left) and Frederick Douglass (right) statues in front of the Talbot County

Courthouse, Maryland; the same building, behind which, Frederick Douglass was jailed in268.

During the summer of 1831, Nat Turner’s rebellion in Southampton County, VA awakened not only southern gentry but the foremost Black revolutionary of the nineteenth century: Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. Despite his childhood exposure to Methodists on the MD Eastern Shore, who in practice were children of

Barabbus more so than Jesus Christ269, “many of them the hypocritical masters he used as a foil for resistance”270. It was not until he crossed the Chesapeake that notions of

“spiritual equality … would begin to condition Douglass for the moral persuasions of the abolitionists”271. From the Black sermons preached near the shipyards of Baltimore

Douglass was able to reconcile that “all men, great and small, bond and free, were sinners

268David W., Blight. Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. Simon & Schuster, 2018, pp. 73, 269 1/10/19 Interview with Rev. Steward. 270 Blight, 92. 271 Blight, 52. Moaney 113

in the sight of God; that they were by nature rebels against His government”272. As an inheritor of Enlightenment ideas, the poignancy with which Douglass articulated the

American slave narrative also shared a moral genesis: the Old testament Hebrew prophets of the sixth to eighth centuries BC273. Douglass’ oratory career began in front of an AME congregation274 and his exhortations of social justice following the Dred Scott decision would captivate the nation.

Roger Brooke Taney, the fifth chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United

States, also hailed from the Old-Line state. Both Douglass and Taney grew out of very similar environments. Just as the gentry men of tobacco plantations up and down the MD

Eastern Shore, Taney was also a prosperous tobacco grower in Calvert County, MD275.

In his majority opinion, Chief Justice Taney held portions of the Missouri Compromise of

1820 were unconstitutional and, by way of depriving a slave owner of their human property, in violation of the Fifth Amendment. Thus, Scott “a negro, whose ancestors were imported into [the U.S.], and sold as slaves,”276 could not be an American, much less a person.

272 Ibid. 273 Blight, 228. 274John, Rivera. “Sharp Street Church Celebrates a Centenary It Was First Built in Baltimore for a Black Congregation.” Baltimoresun.com, 12 Dec. 1998, www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1998-12-12-1998346038- story.html. 275Alvin J., Schumacher. “Roger B. Taney.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 13 Mar. 2019, http://www.britannica.com/biography/Roger-B-Taney. 276 “Scott v. Sandford.” Legal Information Institute, Legal Information Institute, www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/60/393#writing-USSC_CR_0060_0393_ZO.

Moaney 114

As a result of Bishop Richard Allen’s departure from the Wesleyan tradition’s control of church property in Discipline, Mother Bethel AME Church rests atop the oldest parcel of land continuously owned by African Americans in the United States of America.

The Atlantic maritime world of the nineteenth century forged a strong link between Philadelphia and Baltimore that not only impacted commerce but also religion.

At the famous Mother Bethel AME Church of Philadelphia during an event held in his honor on August 6, 1847, Douglass “called his role as black representative a ‘religious duty’ of the ‘sweetest enjoyment’” and felt “entitled from this oneness to be heard … and to secure the rights which have been robbed”277. Just as Richard Allen and Daniel Coker,

Douglass regarded Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel as sources of intellectual and emotional control, an essential asset to oppressed people seeking strategic redemption. Preaching of the Exodus story provided Douglass a life-changing opportunity to place his experience of Black bondage on the MD Eastern Shore in America’s unrealized moral context. To

Black tidewater AME congregations “their Jerusalem, their temple, their Israelites

277 Blight, 185. Moaney 115

transported in the Babylonian Captivity, their oracles to the nation of the woe to be inflicted upon them by a vengeful God for their crimes”278 were synonymous with those experienced by African Americans. Therefore, Douglass’ radical employment of these

“rhetorical, spiritual, and historical traditions … envisioned the prophet as a messenger of

God’s warnings and wisdom”279 to engage American society over its most central and fundamental values. In his own words, the Lord’s will would be done whenever he could

“pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke”280. Douglass’ early years preaching from biblical texts in the AME Church welded an international natural rights activist with an unprecedented Black civic organization; a creation that forced a convicting reevaluation of American contentment in dehumanizing mores.

Whether at the hand of his editorial penning of The North Star or the reverberations of his fiery speeches throughout the United States, Frederick Douglass never grew weary in well doing as a vessel for the Lord281. In May of 1857, he characteristically asked the American Abolition Society, and the nation as whole, to take

“an observation to ascertain where we are, and what our prospects are”282 in the ongoing struggle between slavery and freedom in the ‘land of the free’. In doing so, Douglass reminded America of how insignificant David looked until he had slain Goliath. Making an analogy to the organized oppression against those of African descent, Douglass imparts a progressive faith that the ‘peculiar institution’ “will appear invincible up to the

278 Blight, 228. 279 Blight, 237. 280 Blight, 234. 281 Galatians 6:9. 282 Frederick, Douglass. “Speech on the Dred Scott Decision, May 1857.” Teaching American History, teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/speech-on-the-dred-scott-decision-2/. Moaney 116

very hour of its fall”283. To Douglass, the highest American authority’s “judicial incarnation of wolfishness” was, in essence, a manifestation of “tones of loft exultation” cast out “over the troubled waves of the National Conscience, saying peace, be still”284.

AME Hymn 462, “Master, the Tempest is Raging”, echoes this exact message. However,

Black tidewater populations knew God’s only begotten Son to be a deliverer from the

“demons, or men, or whatever it be” that Taney’s “settlement”285 embodied. Void of naiveté on the part of slaveholders, Douglass gave deference to His rod by emphasizing the “Redeemer must come from above, not from beneath”286. With the Civil War looming, Douglass made clear that America, a nation of “excellent law, and detestable practices”, need only to “live up to the Constitution, adopt its principles, imbibe its spirit, and enforce its provisions”287. It is within this plea for recognition of common humanity between all races in the New World that the AME Church’s vision of an equitable, inclusive and diverse kingdom is amplified; and that a “more perfect union”288 will be achieved.

283 Ibid. 284 Ibid. 285 Ibid. 286 Isaiah 11:4. 287 Douglass, 1857. 288 LII Staff. “Preamble.” Legal Information Institute, Legal Information Institute, 17 May 2018, www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/preamble. Moaney 117

The Atlantic maritime world in which the Maryland Eastern Shore emerged as a renowned member was defined by a fluidity that paralleled the natural environment around it. Political revolution might have been foreign to the Chesapeake region prior to agents of liberation throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however the concept of tidal transience are standard to the four corners of the north Atlantic: The

West African coast, the Caribbean islands, the North American colonies, and northwestern Europe. Therefore, within “a world in which long-standing social, economic, and political hierarchies could be destabilized”289 revolution can be anticipated. Black life throughout the Chesapeake has historically been a microcosm of a seminal American principle: unjust law demands disobedience290. Any world in which

“American laws, symbols, and freedoms are contingent rather than absolute” lends itself

289Bryan, Sinche. “Citizens, Sailors, and Slaves.” Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Power in Maritime America: Papers from the Conference Held at Mystic Seaport, September 2006, by Glenn S. Gordinier and Jason R. Mancini, Mystic Seaport, 2008, pp. 102. 290 “Thomas Jefferson's Monticello.” If a Law Is Unjust...(Spurious Quotation) | Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/if-law-unjustspurious-quotation. Moaney 118

to a trajectory of activism like that of the MD Eastern Shore; which stretched from the mid-nineteenth century well into Civil Rights era of the twentieth century291. Despite its geographic isolation, the racial turmoil sweeping across America throughout the 1950s and 1960s catalyzed the reopening of Antebellum social wounds on the MD Eastern

Shore.

The predominant political arena that contested the separate but equal doctrine of

Jim Crow was public education. In order to preserve white supremacy school districts resisted integration at all costs. In the process, this institution of formidable development and social capital became the latest incubator of innovation for America’s racial

African Americans marching down Cannon Street in Chestertown, MD following the 1962 visit of the Freedom Riders.

caste system. African American civil rights activists took refuge within the pews of AME

Churches throughout the region. Following Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the

1960s witnessed the convergence of Freedom Summers and the Lord’s everlasting

291 Sinche, 102. Moaney 119

sacrifice for the kingdom of Christ292. At the root of this struggle for inclusive, first-class citizenship lay an ancestral yearning for human dignity.

Black churches “transformed itself and identified itself with the dream of

Abolition”, in turn cultivating a “new religion to the black world” that made emancipation seem to the freedman “a literal Coming of the Lord”293. Convinced of the

Lord’s legitimacy through a nuanced, yet consistent continuum of Black struggle, Black tidewater populations embraced Christianity for “its moral plumb line, its mandate to ‘do justice’”294. The Rev. Dr. Barbara A. Holmes argues that “activism and contemplation are not functional opposites”295 but instead are spiritually balanced nuclei of twentieth century communal justice movements. James Noel furthers this notion by expressing that

“any spirituality which does not engage in justice is unbiblical and only reinforces the political and psychic structures of oppression”296. It is through this buckling297 of the sacred and secular that “individuals and congregations enter the liminal space where the impossible becomes possible”298. The practical guidance of the AME Church injected

“ineffable in the ordinary, the mystical in the mundane, the transcendent in the midst of pragmatic justice-seeking acts”299 on MD’s Eastern Shore. Civil rights activists understood the Black churches’ capacity to shape political perspectives and found its collection of “networks, skills, mobilization, and contact opportunities necessary to

292 Galatians 5:1. 293 Du Bois, 126. 294 Holmes, “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Us Around:” Joy Unspeakable, 114. 295 Holmes, 113. 296 Holmes, 114. 297 Buckling is a bend, bulge, kink, wave, etc. in a workpiece. 298 Holmes, 114. 299 Harris-Lacewell, 124.

Moaney 120

nurture political action”300 vital to the movement, particularly amidst the sparsely- populated rural south.

The Nanticoke River which forms the natural boundary between Dorchester and Wicomico Counties.

Up until the 1950s and 1960s, America had grown comfortable in justifying

“unjust practices as aberrations”301 that simply fell short of the promises of western democracy rather than sources of an inherent gap between United States’ ideals and institutions. The Civil Rights era subverted an American tendency to slight the debts incurred on the backs of Black and Brown people, phenomena Dr. Glaude Jr. refers to as ritualistic acts of “disremembrance”302. The MD Eastern Shore revolutionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were succeeded by a befitting generation of social justice warriors. Dr. Mary Fair Burks was the founder and president of the Women’s

Political Council which laid the foundation for the renowned Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955. Shortly after landing at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore in 1960, her

300 Harris-Lacewell, 8. 301 Glaude, Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul, 34. 302 Glaude, 103. Moaney 121

niche for grass-roots organizing and civic activism catalyzed the mobilization of

Salisbury, MD in a myriad of organizations303. Further north in the watershed, Student

Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader, H. Rap Brown, would politically arm the citizens of Cambridge, MD304. Natives of the region knew, and Rev. Fitchett of Bethel

AME in Cambridge can attest305, that “growing up black in the Eastern Shore of

Maryland was a lot like growing up in Mississippi”306. However, it was the Black Power dignitary who infamously shouted atop the trunk of a car on Race Street to make it plain that violence was “as American as cherry pie” and if it didn’t rectify its injustices it should be set aflame307.

H. Rap Brown speaking to a crowd of approximately 500 on Race Street, Cambridge, MD—July 24, 1967.

303Linda, Duyer. “Salisbury's Famous Activist: Mary Fair Burks.” Delmarva African American History, 17 Mar. 2019, aahistorydelmarva.wordpress.com/2019/03/17/salisburys-famous-activist-mary-fair-burks/. 304Peter B., Levy. Civil War on Race Street: the Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland. University Press of Florida, 2003. 305 1/15/19 Interview with Mr. Fitchett. 306 Carson Clayborne and Tom Hamburger. “The Cambridge Convergence: How a Night in Maryland 30 Years Ago Changed the Nation's Course of Racial Politics.” The Cambridge: How a Night in Maryland 30 Years Ago Changed the Nation's Course of Racial Politics, Minneapolis Star Tribune, 28 July 1997, web.stanford.edu/~ccarson/articles/cambridge_convergence.htm. 307 Ibid. Moaney 122

The National Guard on Pine Street, Cambridge, MD the day after the 1967 riot. –D.C. Public Library

This redemptive spirit was not solely driven by outsiders, members of the historic

Bethel AME Church in Chestertown, MD vividly remember serving as a haven to freedom riders from near and far. Due to all the tight reign of white supremacy over

American institutions, Black have been forced to build their own that “cultivated their civic capacities and served as a space to transmit values that opposed the value gap”308.

Although Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was neither the genesis nor Damascus of Civil Rights movement, its gravity on the MD Eastern Shore can be attributed to the culmination of the case.

At its core, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 was an amalgamation of cases from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware and

Washington, D.C. The common thread of each cases was the denied admittance of

African American students into segregated public institutions of learning. Rising throughout the U.S. judicial system was the question of whether or not the segregation of

308 Glaude, 125. Moaney 123

public education rooted exclusively in race violated the Equal Protection Clause of the

Fourteenth Amendment309. Despite the U.S. Supreme Court recognizing the separate but equal doctrine as inherently unjust and unconstitutional, codified law and law enforcement were not on the same accord. The Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 was not ratified in MD until 1959 and the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 was not ratified until

1973310. The counties of the MD Eastern Shore, in particular, were bastions of resistance to federal human and civil rights policy that overrode state and municipal police powers.

Up to eleven years after the Chief Justice Earl Warren’s Majority Opinion on May 17,

1954, Kent County’s “free choice plan”311 had only integrated six African American students. Within this context of statewide apathy, Reverend Tolliver, a fourth-generation

Boardly Chapel AME pastor, joined 138 progenies of the 976 total Negro students312 emerged from the twenty-five one-room black schools313 across the county during the

1965-66 school year to integrate one of the last school districts in America to end segregation314: Kent County Public School System.

MD Eastern Shore revolutionary and African American abolitionist, Henry

Highland Garnet, was born in Kent County on December 23, 1815. A century later the

Henry Highland Garnett School would open in his memorial to teach African American students in grades one through twelve on College Avenue in Chestertown, MD. These

309 “Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1).” Oyez, www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/347us483. 310 http://slavery.msa.maryland.gov/pdf/researching_african_american_families.pdf 311 “Lay Committee Endorses Plan of School Board for Desegregation,” Kent County News, July 22, 1955. 312 Maryland State Advisory Committee, Report on School Segregation in 14 Eastern Shore and Southern Maryland Counties. Presented to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, February 1966.

313 Peter, Heck. “The Growth of 19th-Century African American Schools Was a Prelude to Integration.” MyEasternShoreMD, 2 Dec. 2010, www.myeasternshoremd.com/news/kent_county/the-growth-of-th-century-african- american-schools-was-a/article_5ee12730-ff13-58e4-ad69-5543e7bc2012.html.

314 George R., Shivers. “A Long Road: The Desegregation of the Public Schools in Kent County, Maryland, 1955- 1967.” Key to Old Kent, 7 (2013): 33-75. Moaney 124

students from Sharptown, Broad Neck, Fairlee, Georgetown, Edesville, Quaker Neck,

Worton Point (Butlertown), Coleman and Still Pond315, who eventually found themselves socially and intellectually developing where College Ave. and Calvert Street meet, would experience their very own “call to rebellion”316. Mr. Cotton, whose family settled in

Edesville in 1885, attended the original school317. It lacked running water and electricity but neighbored Bethel A.M.E. Church, an oasis in the desert. Growing up in Rock Hall as one of seventeen children, it became apparent to him and his siblings that America’s gap between its ideals and institutions needed to be filled by the dauntless. These children perforated the separate but equal doctrine just over a century later atop the same morally- conflicted soil.

315Richard Paul, Fuke. “The Baltimore Association for the Moral and Educational Improvement of the Colored People 1864-1870. Maryland Historical Magazine. Vol. 66, No. 4, Winter, 1971, p. 378.

316 “Henry Highland Garnet's 'Call to Rebellion'.” The Patriot Post, patriotpost.us/documents/124.

317 12/28/18 Interview With Mr. Cotton. Moaney 125

Worton Point Schoolhouse, now museum, for African American communities within a six-mile radius from 1890 to 1958.

The constitution MD adopted in 1864 established a “uniform system of free public education, by which a school shall be kept open and supported… in each school district”318. However, Union delegates fearing the implications of universal provision to be a poison pill passed the document at the expense of African Americans319. Therefore the Baltimore Association and Educational Improvement of the Colored People was established in 1864 to promote Negro education320. By November of 1867, the United

States Freedmen’s Bureau assumed responsibility for the molecular advancement of

Negro schools on the Eastern Shore321. Records show that in 1881 Kent County had 18

Negro schools, in which 19 teachers served an enrollment of 878 African Americans322.

The Maryland State Board of Education, prompted by Attorney General Edward B.

Rollins “wait and see”323 counsel, fed the fraudulent proceduralism of the Kent County

Board of Education’s response to the Supreme Court order of Brown v. Board of

Education of Topeka. In June of 1954, the Kent County Board of Education issues a statement articulating that “the laws of Maryland specifically provide for segregation in the public schools … In view of this law requiring segregation, no program of integration can be put into effect until the decision of the Supreme Court becomes final and an effective date is set by the court”324. Furthering the expression of hesitancy to ignite mass resistance throughout the county, the Board concluded “the implementation of the

318 Fuke, 369. 319 Fuke, 370. 320 Fuke, 373. 321 Fuke, 395. 322 Fifteenth Annual Report of the State Board of Education of Maryland for the Year Ending September 30, 1881. Annapolis: L.F. Cotton, 1882, pp. 44, http://archive.org/stream/fifteenthannualr1882mary#page/43/mode/1up. 323George C., Grant. “Desegregation in Maryland Since the Supreme Court Decision.” The Journal of Negro Education, vol. 24, no. 3, 1955, pp. 275–286. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2293457. 324 Ibid. Moaney 126

Supreme Court’s decision would need to be made gradually in a calm, patient manner.”325 The manifestation of this incremental process would take place a year later in the appointment of the twenty-member Biracial Lay Committee on Integration.

The purpose of the Biracial Lay Committee on Integration’s “careful study of local conditions and… fair interpretation of the [Supreme Court’s] decision” was to assist the Kent County Board of Education in its “deliberations and formation of policies”326.

After Reade Corr, the Superintendent of Kent County Schools, went at great lengths to emphasize the dichotomy between desegregation and integration, the Board’s acceptance of a recommendation from the Committee on April 17, 1955 would forever alter the landscape of Kent County education. The Board instituted a passive policy of voluntary desegregation on the “administratively sound” principle of ‘Freedom of Choice’327 that would enable African American students to submit admission applications for formerly all-white schools.

Since the Civil War, southern states used every legal tool available to prevent federally-coerced disruption of Antebellum social hierarchies. The Kent County Public

School System, laden with delaying tactics, was no exception to this cultural holdout.

Davis Barus, of the U.S. Office of Education, prescribed requirements for federal school aid under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in a presentation to the Kent Board of Education which revealed “seventeen other counties in Maryland besides Kent have not achieved satisfactory school desegregation…”328 per a State Commission on Interracial Problems and Relations disclosure. The nominal existence of the ‘Freedom of Choice’ policy

325 “Segregation to be Continued in Kent County Next School Year,” Kent County News, June 18, 1954. 326 “Name Lay Group to Aid Plans for Kent Integration,” Kent County News, June 17, 1955. 327 Board of Education of Kent County, “Desegregation Policies,” August, 1963, (Volume that covers from October 1961 to December 1964). 328 “Kent School Officials Hear ‘Musts’ on Desegregation,” Kent County News, May 5, 1965. Moaney 127

satisfied compliance, however in practice forms soliciting African American students were not distributed until a decade after its implementation. On March 26, 1966 David S.

Seeley, Assistant Commissioner for the Equal Educational Opportunities Program of the

U.S. Office of Education, made clear that the free choice policy was “no longer appropriate for moving toward complete elimination of the dual school structure for white and Negro students…”329. Despite, Mr. Seeley demanding “suitable plans for the total desegregation”330 of Kent County schools, the Board had only issued a limited quantity of transfer forms with the assumption that only a small number of students would apply predicated on skewed statistics. To counter local NAACP campaign activity that encouraged applicants and duplicated forms for an increased scope of distribution, the Board issued a new form bearing their seal and required those who had already filled out the form to complete a new one331. Given this introduction of red tape, parents refused or neglected to do this and in turn fewer students were able to exercise a free choice in their education332.

Only under the pressure of the federal government threatening to withdraw financial assistance did Kent County Public Schools System’s school board move with

“all deliberate speed” to produce a formal plan of absolute desegregation in 1966333.

329 Letter contained in a file relevant to desegregation, pertaining to the Board of Education of Kent County in the library collection of the Historical Society of Kent County. 330 Ibid. 331 Maryland State Advisory Committee, Report on School Segregation in 14 Eastern Shore and Southern Maryland Counties. 332 Ibid. 333Spy, Desk. “50th Anniversary of the Desegregation of Chestertown Schools by Kathleen James-Chakraborty.” The Chestertown Spy, 6 Sept. 2016, chestertownspy.org/2016/09/06/50th-anniversary-of-the-desegregation-eastern-shore- schools-by-kathleen-james-chakraborty/.

Moaney 128

Majority Opinion delivered by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Moaney 129

Although urgency was introduced in 1966, compliance with the non-discrimination requirement of Title VI was not realized until Regional Civil Rights Director Dr. Eloise

Severinson expressed approval to Superintendent Richard L. Holler on March, 28,

1969334. These transformations did not occur in an institutional bubble, but rather spread through the entire social fabric of the MD Eastern Shore.

The source of solace for this Black tidewater activism during the 1960’s lay in the

AME sanctuaries riddled with loose tooth folk335 whose humble service and comprehension of “the life and teachings of Jesus meant freedom for the captive and release for those held in economic, social, and political bondage.”336 This testament of deliverance was made manifest in its ebb and flow in the Civil Rights movement. The larger racial tensions that began to explode across the MD Eastern Shore reached Kent

County when 145 Freedom Riders arrived in Chestertown, MD via two Greyhound buses and an estimated dozen private cars337. The Reverend Frederick Jones of Bethel AME

Church offered the church as a staging area for the campaign. Immediately following the demonstrations of January and early February, Rev. Jones formed the Kent County regional chapter of the NAACP on February 17, 1962. The Bi-Racial Commission that was to come after the presence of Freedom Riders championed the desegregation of all

Chestertown’s places of public accommodation and the created of a county-wide bi-racial committee only five months later338. Acting directly in opposition to and routing MD

334George R., Shivers. “A Long Road: The Desegregation of the Public Schools in Kent County, Maryland, 1955- 1967.” Key to Old Kent, 7 (2013): 33-75. 335 Vernacular for wise elders. 336 Thurman, 16. 337 “Chestertown, MD, ‘Freedom Riders’ campaign against racial segregation, 1962.” Global Nonviolent Action Database, http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/chestertown-md-freedom-riders-campaign-against-racial- segregation-1962. 338 “Voluntary Integration July 15 For All But One Public Place,” Kent County News, July 10, 1963. Moaney 130

Eastern Shore states rights, segregationist populism339 born from Brown v. Board of

Education is the AME Church’s unprecedented social justice vision and universal fulfillment of Christian ethics.

Despite the waning size of congregations in the twenty-first century, just as the preceding historical epochs340, the most important organization intimately linked with the

Black tidewater counterpublic of the MD Eastern Shore is the AME Church. Social scientist Michael Dawson suggests “the advancement of the self, the liberation of the self, is a meaningless concept outside the context of one’s community”341. Elsa Barkley

Brown centers the Black world view around the moral autonomy of free Black communities342 and in a western democracy their primary channel of agency is the vote.

The linchpin of the Founding Fathers’ conception of the American Republic and its materialization is the ability of citizens to exercise their political will. However, the integrity of a representative democracy rest upon the unabridged opportunity for all citizens to vote. James Madison determined it “essential to such a government, that it be derived from the great body of the society, not from an inconsiderable proportion, or a favoured class of it”343. At the very core of the American democracy lay the concept that the nation is run by a government “of the people, by the people and for the people”. The trajectory of voting in the United States of America has displayed progress, but as Mr.

Cotton has suggested since his return from Vietnam in 1967344, absent of this assurance in its entirety the legitimacy of the republic remains ambivalent.

339 “Civil Rights Signatures Total 41,671,” Kent County News, July 15, 1964. 340 Dawson, 35. 341 Dawson, 255. 342 Elsa Barkley, Brown. 1989. To Catch the Vision of Freedom: Reconstructing Southern Black Women’s Political History, 1865-1885. The University of Michigan. Manuscript. 343 Alexander, Hamilton, et al. The Federalist: A Collection. Liberty Fund, 2001. 344 12/28/18 Interview with Mr. Cotton. Moaney 131

The right to vote and to whom it applies has historically rested upon the underlying basis of who is deserving of citizenship. The free exercise of political will is a focal entitlement and a

Tweet from President Donald Trump on Aug. 3, 2018 at 9:06PM harkening back to his campaign rally held at Stephen Decatur High School in Berlin, MD in April 2016345. democratic principle on which the viability of all the others rest. However, marginalized demographics seeking equality have encountered resistance from subsequent majorities in their attempts to secure this theoretical promise. Routine contemplation over the legality of alleviating U.S. citizens of legal barriers that prevent the fulfillment of their constitutional rights is a divergence from the accountability inherent to a representative democracy. To Madison “justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been, and ever will be, pursued, until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the

345 Reports, Staff. “Trump Tweets about Ocean City Boats with His Flags.” Delmarva Daily Times, Salisbury Daily Times, 4 Aug. 2018, www.delmarvanow.com/story/news/local/maryland/2018/08/04/trump-tweets-ocean-city-boats- his-flags/904483002/. Moaney 132

pursuit”346. Under this same pretense, the teeth of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were conceived and destroyed by the 2013 Supreme Court decision of Shelby County v.

Holder.

The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution reflected the culmination of a four-year debate over the application of the enlightened principles, on which the country was founded. The latter two have implications that have influenced the electoral process since their inception. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified on July 28, 1868347, codified the diversity of citizenship by granting both civil and legal rights to African Americans. Both U.S. Supreme Court Cases Baker v. Carr348 and Reynolds v. Sims349, nearly a century later, drew upon the Fourteenth Amendment to substantiate political equality as applicable to the right to vote. From these cases the

“one-vote, one-person”350 doctrine was developed which now ensures that all congressional districts in a state have an equal number of people.

The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified on February 2, 1870, granted Congress the authority to enforce a guarantee of the right to vote to citizens free from discrimination based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Primarily this constitutional amendment enfranchised African American men, however it also led to the establishment of two violation metrics for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The first of which, justified in

Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections351 and Dunn v. Blumstein352, determines that all

346 Ibid, Hamilton. 347Richard H. Pildes and Bradley A. Smith. “The 15th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.” National Constitution Center – Constitutioncenter.org, National Constitution Center, constitutioncenter.org/interactive- constitution/amendments/amendment-xv. 348 "Baker v. Carr." Oyez, 1 Jun. 2018, www.oyez.org/cases/1960/6. 349 "Reynolds v. Sims." Oyez, 1 Jun. 2018, www.oyez.org/cases/1963/23. 350 Ibid, Pildes, Richard H., and Bradley A. Smith. 351 "Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections." Oyez, 1 Jun. 2018, www.oyez.org/cases/1965/48. 352 "Dunn v. Blumstein." Oyez, 1 Jun. 2018, www.oyez.org/cases/1971/70-13. Moaney 133

restrictions beyond citizenship, jurisdictional residency, and being at least 18 years of age are unconstitutional. The second violation metric, produced in Burdick v. Takushi353, is a two-part test. This test requires an evaluation of whether the burden imposed by an electoral regulation is severe or not. Granted that the regulation is found to not be severe, the regulation previously in question will be upheld.

Although the additions to the federal vetting process of electoral changes contributed by these amendments surfaced a century later, at their onset these enactments survived in writing but varied in fruition. In particular, the Fifteenth Amendment failed to fulfill its promise due to its “ends [being] invited without marshaling sufficient means”354. At the time of its passing the Grant administration unveiled declarations of federal protection for the Fifteenth Amendment and Congress followed suit with five separate enforcement acts355. The first enforcement act was passed on May 31, 1870 and banned the use of force, bribery, or intimidation for voter suppression based on race, affecting both local and state elections. The second was passed on July 14, 1870 and providing 20,000 special deputy marshals to police elections and make arrests without warrants. The third enforcement act, passed on February 28, 1871, further defined the duties of these enforcement officers and introduced a requirement of written ballots in congressional elections. The fourth enforcement act, also known as the Klu Klux Klan

Act, passed on April 20, 1871 resulting in the outlawing of the KKK. Finally, on June 10,

1872, the fifth enforcement act expanded election supervision into rural areas and was ultimately inserted into the Sundry Civil Appropriations Act. The efficacy of the officers

353 “Burdick v. Takushi." Oyez, 1 Jun. 2018, https://www.oyez.org/cases/1991/91-535. 354 Richard Orr, Curry. “Anatomy of a Failure: Federal Enforcement of the Right to Vote in the Border States during Reconstruction.” Radicalism, Racism, and Party Realignment: The Border States during Reconstruction, Johns Hopkins Press, 1969, pp. 302. 355 Ibid, 267. Moaney 134

was undermined by the fifth enforcement act’s stripping of their ability to make arrests or interfere with the electoral process.

Despite this array of federal lawmaking, by the 1890s states exercised sole electoral authority by reversing the liberal trends of the Reconstruction era and eluded federal compliance. In summation, the Fifteenth Amendment “amount[ed] to little or nothing south of the Mason Dixon line without the right to vote being “secure and its exercise guaranteed”356. Removed from executive enforcement, several Southern states felt no binding obligation towards the Fifteenth Amendment and employed literacy tests to curtail voter registration: AL, GA, LA, MS, NC, SC, and VA. At the close of the

Reconstruction era, other pre-requisites emerged and in conjunction with threats and violence voter suppression intensified. These forms of intimidation “paralyze[d] not only the foundation of federal authority and the integrity of the democratic process but the order of society itself”357.

The impetus of the civil rights movement during the 1960s was to prove that the

American promise wasn’t fully realized for all its citizens, particularly those of color. An integral piece of this obscured American experience was the persistence of being denied the right to vote. Article I, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution authorizes Congress to “at any time make or alter [electoral] regulations”358 beyond those set by state legislatures. In signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that’s exactly what former President Lyndon

Baines Johnson exercised. His remarks detailed voting as the “basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own

356 Ibid, 266. 357 Ibid, 268. 358Myrna, Perez. “U.S. Supreme Court Examines Voting Rights in Two Cases | Brennan Center for Justice.” America's Faulty Perception of Crime Rates | Brennan Center for Justice, 15 May 2013, www.brennancenter.org/analysis/us- supreme-court-examines-voting-rights-two-cases. Moaney 135

destinies”359. This legislation invalidated literacy tests, poll taxes, and other tools of discriminatory voter suppression.

At the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is the objective of preclearance in

Section 5. For states or political subdivisions to qualify for this, outlined in Section 4(b) are two thresholds: the presence of a test or device used to deter registration and voter registration falling below 50% of the voting age population360. If these two apply, states or political subdivisions are required to proactively submit any voting change to the Civil

Rights Division of the department of Justice, headed by the Attorney General, or obtain a declaratory judgement action from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia before making any legally enforceable changes in the electoral system. Section 5’s ability to freeze the implementation of electoral changes provides a filter to hinder a state or political subdivision from “denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color”361 before it is in place.

The original Voting Rights Act of 1965 Section 4(b) identified the following jurisdictions that were to be covered for preclearance in entirety: AL, AK, GA, LA, MS,

SC, VA. In addition to these states, the political subdivisions of AZ, HI, ID, and NC were also partially covered jurisdictions362. Criteria set forth in Section 4(b) was only applicable these jurisdictions if it was met during November 1964.

The first reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 came in 1970, five years later just as the envisioned temporary legislation was scheduled to sunset. This

359Andrew, Cohen. “Not Yet Section 5's Time To Die | Brennan Center for Justice.” America's Faulty Perception of Crime Rates | Brennan Center for Justice, 1 Mar. 2013, www.brennancenter.org/analysis/not-yet-section- 5%E2%80%99s-time-die. 360 "Voting Rights Act of 1965." West's Encyclopedia of American Law, edition 2. 2008. The Gale Group 11 Jun. 2018, https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Voting+Rights+Act+of+1965. 361 Ibid. 362 “Section 4 Of The Voting Rights Act.” The United States Department of Justice, The United States Department of Justice, www.justice.gov/crt/section-4-voting-rights-act. Moaney 136

reauthorization renewed the special provision for another five years and moved the date of reference for the unaltered coverage formula to November 1968. As a result, ten additional jurisdictions were partially covered and subject to preclearance: AK, AZ, CA,

CT, ID, ME, MA, NH, NY, WY363.

Following 1970, the next reauthorization occurred at the sunset of the first. In

1975 the special provisions of the Voting Rights Act were renewed for another seven years and the coverage formula was left untouched except for the date of reference being moved to November 1972. Differing from the previous reauthorization, the second brought forth an expansion of the “test or device”364 criteria to include providing election information only in English to suppress “language minority groups”365 where members of these groups account for more than 5% of the voting age population. These language minority groups are comprised of citizens who are of American Indian, Asian American,

Alaskan Native or Spanish heritage. Ultimately this incorporated AK, AZ, and TX in entirety and partially covered CA, FL, MI, NY, NC, and SD366.

Seven years later, as the 1975 reauthorization was at the height of its duration, the

Voting Rights Act was reauthorized yet again. In 1982 the unedited coverage formula was extended for another twenty-five years. Also, the third reauthorization gave all U.S. states and political subdivisions the potential to be covered. By enhancing Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, all U.S. citizens were empowered to challenge any voting practice or procedure on the basis that it’s racial discrimination by intent or effect regardless of their geographic location. Additionally, in 1992 two provisions passed regarding to

363 Ibid. 364 Ibid. 365 Ibid. 366 Ibid. Moaney 137

bilingual voting assistance. The former extended the requirement for bilingual voting assistance for an additional 15 years and the latter expanded the scope of coverage to include jurisdictions with at least 10,000 members of a language minority with limited

English proficiency.367 From 1999 to 2005, 153 proposed changes were withdrawn after the Justice Department proceeded with investigations368.

2006 marks the year of the last and most recent reauthorization of the Voting Rights

Act. Otherwise known as the Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King Voting

Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act of 2006, this reauthorization passed the

U.S. Senate with an uncontested 98-0 count and the U.S. House of Representatives by an overwhelming 390-33 count369. The coverage formula, left untouched since 1972, and its special provision were extended for another 25 years to 2031. Since its passing thirty-one discriminatory restriction have been blocked370.

The succession of constitutional and political controversy over voting at the beginning of the 21st century is not the basis of eligibility but rather the ground rules of elections for chief judges like Mr. Cotton and disenfranchised citizens alike. Many of these controversies impacting people of color, low-income communities, people with disabilities and students follow two distinct courses371: proof of eligibility and voter convenience. In Shelby County v. Holder372, the United States Supreme Court 5-4 ruling

367 https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43626.pdf. 368 The Editorial Board. “Voting Rights Act Wasn't Broken: Our View.” USA Today, Gannett Satellite Information Network, 26 June 2013, www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/editorials/2013/06/25/voting-rights-act-supreme-court-editorials-debates/2456173/. 369 “The Voting Rights Act: Protecting Voters for Nearly Five Decades | Brennan Center for Justice.” America's Faulty Perception of Crime Rates | Brennan Center for Justice, 26 Feb. 2013, www.brennancenter.org/analysis/voting-rights- act-protecting-voters-nearly-five-decades. 370 Andrew, Cohen. “Life After the Voting Rights Act | Brennan Center for Justice.” America's Faulty Perception of Crime Rates | Brennan Center for Justice, Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 19 June 2013, www.brennancenter.org/analysis/life-after-voting-rights-act. 371 “Restore the Voting Rights Act Now.” VRA for Today, vrafortoday.org/learn/. 372 "Shelby County v. Holder." Oyez, 1 Jun. 2018, www.oyez.org/cases/2012/12-96. Moaney 138

on June 15, 2013 undercut the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and reassigned full electoral authority to states until Congress passes legislation with a modern formula to address contemporary needs. By declaring Voting Rights Act of 1965 Section 4(b) unconstitutional no jurisdictions identified under the forty-one-year-old coverage formula are subject to seek preclearance prior to implementing voting changes. This directly invalidated Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in nine full states and fifty-seven counties throughout five partially-covered states373. Shelby County v. Holder did not get rid of preclearance mechanism in its entirety but instead stopped its use by declaring it unenforceable. Aggrieved voters still able to independently challenge voting laws under

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 but without the pro-active filter originally established by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 these efforts are costly and lengthy.

Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the majority opinion to disclose the underlying constitutional argument and further explain the United States Supreme Court ruling.

Providing context to the original Act, the legislation represents an “extraordinary departure from the traditional course of relations between the States and the Federal

Government”. This “otherwise unfamiliar to our federal system”374 however was justified in its implementation as responding in a “permissibly decisive manner” to “exceptional conditions”375. However, Chief Justice Robert argues the “insidious and pervasive evil”376 that “originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the

373 Ibid, Brennan Center for Justice. 374 “NORTHWEST AUSTIN MUNICIPAL UTIL. DIST.NO 1v. HOLDER.” LII / Legal Information Institute, 29 Apr. 2009, www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-322.ZS.html. 375 “South Carolina v. Katzenbach.” LII / Legal Information Institute, www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/383/301. 376 Ibid. Moaney 139

covered jurisdictions”377. Applying the Voting Rights Act of 1965 formula reauthorized and updated in 1982 to present day circumstances, it is apparent that the jurisdictions subject to Section 5 have removed the barriers that provoked their coverage. In a different political climate than that of what led to advancement of this legislation it becomes evident that Section 5 “imposes substantial federalism costs and differentiates between states, despite our historic tradition that all States enjoy equal sovereignty”378.

At the time the coverage formula was implemented it adequately employed a cause and effect solution to geographically address adverse implications of unprecedented authority. Discriminatory tests and intimidation produced low voter registration and turnout warranting the use of preclearance. However, the constant reauthorization of this unique federal departure raised the bar for jurisdictional requirements without reassessing the status of the conditions that justified them. Using decades-old data, induced by “first generation barriers”379, to shape a coverage formula that is needed to combat “second generation barriers” is not grounded in current conditions. Approaching impediments to the casting of ballots in the same manner as electoral arrangements that affect the weight of minority votes highlights what Chief Justice Roberts considers the “irrationality of continued reliance on the Section 4 coverage formula”380. Therefore, on this constitutional argument the United States Supreme Court struck down the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act and tasked Congress with crafting a formula to adequately address combat modern voter suppression.

377 “Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. ___ (2013).” Justia Law, Justia, supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/570/12- 96/. 378 Ibid. 379 Ibid, Chief Justice Roberts. 380 Ibid, Chief Justice Roberts. Moaney 140

As of December 2013, just six months following the Shelby County v. Holder decision, 92 restrictive bills were introduced in 33 states381. A year later, 83 restrictive bills were introduced in 29 states382. The influx of restrictive electoral practices come as a direct response to the United States Supreme Court rendering the enforcement of the

Voting Right Act inoperable383. At its core, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act has three salient features: geographic targeting, preclearance, and clarification of the federal oversight role.

After the third month of the 116th United States Congress, U.S. lawmakers in 41 states have introduced 589 expansive, compared to the 531 in May of 2017 and 464 in

June of 2015384. Although Maryland ranks atop the ongoing U.S. Supreme Court litigation regarding partisan gerrymandering cases for General Assembly’s redrawing of the 6th Congressional District385, Maryland is in the company of twenty-three other states defiantly expanding access to the franchise386. By implementing automatic voter registration for the first time in the lead-up to the 2018 federal elections, Maryland voter registration had been transformed using two common-sense tactics387: voter registration has become opt-out instead of opt-in and government agencies electronically transfer voter registration information, rather than using paper forms. In the rural 1st

381 “Voting Laws Roundup 2013 | Brennan Center for Justice.” America's Faulty Perception of Crime Rates | Brennan Center for Justice, 19 Dec. 2013, www.brennancenter.org/analysis/election-2013-voting-laws-roundup. 382 “Voting Laws Roundup 2014 | Brennan Center for Justice.” America's Faulty Perception of Crime Rates | Brennan Center for Justice, 18 Dec. 2014, www.brennancenter.org/analysis/voting-laws-roundup-2014. 383Kara, Brandeisky, et al. “Everything That's Happened Since Supreme Court Ruled on Voting Rights Act.” ProPublica, 4 Nov. 2014, www.propublica.org/article/voting-rights-by-state-map. 384 “Voting Laws Roundup 2019.” Voting Laws Roundup 2019 | Brennan Center for Justice, 12 Mar. 2019, www.brennancenter.org/analysis/voting-laws-roundup-2019. 385 “Lamone v. Benisek.” Benisek v. Lamone | Brennan Center for Justice, 26 Mar. 2019, www.brennancenter.org/legal-work/benisek-v-lamone-amicus-brief.

386Wendy Weiser and Max Feldman. “The State of Voting.” The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, June 2018, www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publications/2018_06_StateOfVoting_v5%20%281%29.pdf. 387 Automatic Voter Registration | Brennan Center for Justice, 15 Mar. 2019, www.brennancenter.org/analysis/automatic-voter-registration. Moaney 141

Congressional District, where the provision Federal Communications Commission- standard broadband remains a forefront battle, the ability to streamline the update of citizens’ existing registration information unless they affirmatively decline is profound.

Organic relationships between the AME Church and political organizations across the

MD Eastern Shore has enabled the civic education of historically Black and socioeconomically depressed tidewater populations.

During the 2018 election cycle Maryland’s First Congressional district displayed a favorable Democratic future, the greatest differentials occurring in two counties with some of the most notable historically Black tidewater communities: Talbot and Kent counties. Although Republican Governor Larry Hogan won the entire district by a near twelve-point margin over Ben Jealous, incumbent Andy Harris was met with staunch

Democratic opposition on the Upper Shore. Congressman Harris, understanding that

President Trump (R) won MD’s Congressional district in 2016 by nearly thirty points, voted in line with President Trump 87.4% of the time and, so far, has mirrored the

President’s position 100% of the time388. Despite his solidarity with the unprecedented political juggernaut, Rep. Harris’ performance on Capitol Hill and impartiality towards his own constituency has warranted a spirit of disdain389 across the MD’s 1st, irrespective of their standing ideological spectrum.

This sentiment did not dissipate at the polls on November 6, 2018 in Talbot County.

Democratic candidate Jesse Colvin, actually won Talbot County by approximately 3% over the incumbent. A significant point of leverage rests in the advantage the Democratic

388 Aaron, Bycoffe. “Tracking Congress In The Age Of Trump.” FiveThirtyEight, 10 Apr. 2019, projects.fivethirtyeight.com/congress-trump-score/andy-harris/. 389Juana, Summers. “Maryland GOP Rep. Harris Faces Fury at Home-State Town Hall.” CNN, Cable News Network, 1 Apr. 2017, www.cnn.com/2017/03/31/politics/maryland-town-hall-harris/index.html. Moaney 142

Party gained in early voting. Democrats outvoted the field by over a thousand votes during this period and a difference of just under 500 remained after the election day tally390. Kent County was the cite of similar results. Jesse Colvin defeated the incumbent by nearly ten percent, with Democrats outvoting the field by over 900 votes during the early voting period and a difference of 700 remaining after election day391. Therefore, it is no surprise that the Democratic advantage of four points Talbot County392 and ten points in Kent County393 confirm that the blue wave of 2018394 not only had traction in

MD’s only Republican district but that it may have longevity if Rep. Harris’ approval rate, from MD’s 1st not conservative advocacy organizations395, continues to plummet.

These three U.S. Supreme Court cases exemplify the MD Eastern Shore’s civic symbolism as a crucible for a consecrated journey towards human dignity, equitable access to the pursuit of happiness and recognition as first-class citizens. Black tidewater populations have sustained an adage across generations that embodies the synergy between civic activism and religious justice-seeking. It is as follows, “something on the inside, is working on the outside. Oh what a change in my life! The Holy Ghost on the inside, is working on the outside. Oh what a change in my life!” In other words, the AME

Church has been instrumental in offering the persecuted deeply-hued inhabitants of the coastal and rural MD Eastern Shore a tangible virtue with which they were already accustomed to: patience. The kingdom of Christianity is a waiting community396 and

390Peter, Heck. “Talbot Election Results - Updated.” The Talbot Spy, 7 Nov. 2018, talbotspy.org/talbot-election-results- updated/. 391 Summers, 2017. 392 “Maryland Election Results 2018: Live Midterm Map by County & Analysis.” POLITICO, 15 Apr. 2019, www.politico.com/election-results/2018/maryland/. 393 Ibid. 394Harry, Enten. “Latest House Results Confirm 2018 Wasn't a Blue Wave. It Was a Blue Tsunami.” CNN, Cable News Network, 6 Dec. 2018, www.cnn.com/2018/12/06/politics/latest-house-vote-blue-wave/index.html. 395 “Rep. Andy Harris.” GovTrack.us, www.govtrack.us/congress/members/andy_harris/412434. 396 Holmes, 124. Moaney 143

since their arrival, the Black tidewater populations of the MD Eastern Shore have enjoyed political and civic fulfillment from praying the reality of their sense of belonging into being.

Embedded within the fabric of this case study is a political mobilization and communal sustainability toolkit applicable to marginalized demographics in geologically isolated congressional districts throughout the nation, and particularly in the American

South. Collective Black efficacy, across political epochs, in the historic free Black tidewater communities of the MD Eastern Shore need not be isolated as mere phenomena but rather embraced as evidence of an ongoing tradition of democratic survival in MD’s

First Congressional District. The potential of Black autonomy and agency to crystallize, whether in concept or in practice, has been feared throughout the Chesapeake since the eighteenth century. One of the most prominent natives of the region to articulate the poignancy of this racial paranoia is former president of the United States of America,

Thomas Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia. A commonplace sentiment amongst the agricultural gentry, in what would become the heart of the Confederacy in less than a century, was that true egalitarianism would yield “convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race”397. On the periphery of the Chesapeake’s landmass and in the political crevices fostered by its tributaries, this notion was and continues to be subverted.

The earliest fruition of the ‘great experiment’ occurred in the tidewater communities, islands and ports on the MD Eastern Shore. In the midst of innumerable

397 Thomas Jefferson. Notes on the State of Virginia. J. Stockdale, 1787, pp. 229.

Moaney 144

moral contradictions embedded within the ideological orchestration of the American democracy’s architects, free Black blocs innovated political landscapes and fulfilled the

Enlightenment principles via economic, social, political and religious avenues of their own accord. If the core institutions of America, and the souls of those who forged them, were susceptible to the very societal ills they were intended to repel, then in seeking the governing forces of life in the shadows beyond their purview clarity can be granted to an invaluable source of redemptive vision needed going forward: the literal voices of the marginalized.

To be cautious of transporting twenty-first century moral sensibilities back into the eighteenth century, it is essential to embrace that George Washington, and Thomas

Jefferson alike, just as other contemporaneous Virginia planters, “bought and sold slaves without a second thought”398. America’s birth was situated in a larger Western, white,

Anglo-Saxon, protestant racial perspective of social Darwinism that based Black inferiority in science. For example in the 1854 publications of Treatise on Sociology,

Theoretical and Practical and Sociology for the South: or the Failure of Free Society, social scientists Henry Hughes and George Fitzhugh argued that “only in a society built upon slavery and Christianity, as in the South, could "morality and discipline be maintained”399. In light of what the American Revolution symbolized, this racialized environment produced what social scientist Gunnar Myrdal posits as the American

398 Philip D. Morgan, “"To Get Quit of Negroes": George Washington and Slavery," Journal of American Studies, 39,

3, December 2005, pp. 413.

399 James Turner, "The Founding Fathers of American Sociology: An Examination of Their Sociological Theories of

Race Relations," Journal of Black Studies, 9, 1, September 1978, pp. 5.

Moaney 145

Dilemma; “How could Americans continue to brag about their country being the model of true democracy, freedom and equality when the Africans remained pitifully oppressed even in freedom?”400Washington and Jefferson’s preoccupation with manifest destiny and the Articles of Confederation created a political paradox. Their “overriding interest in creating the Union, their concern for property rights, and their visions of race war and miscegenation drastically conflicted with “their embrace of a revolutionary ideology that made emancipation inescapable”401. To reconcile this dilemma over the course of their lifetime each Chesapeake Founding Father approached race publicly and privately with personal suspicion, paternalism and apposite policy with the foresight that in the distant future society would evolve beyond their reality with the aid of providence.

There is record of the first President of the United States of America attaining human property as early as the age of eleven. Throughout his youth, Washington firmly believed that “Blackness was synonymous with uncivilized behavior”402. Washington freed his slaves for three basic reasons: profit, principle, and posterity... The inefficiencies of slavery as a labor system were what first drove him to question the institution”403. Therefore, “tak[ing] all necessary and proper care of the Negroes” and

“using them with proper humanity and discretion”404 was an economic gesture of investment, not one of moral compassion. Although few if any recognized Black humanity, Washington was pragmatic in recognizing the possibility of Black skill. From

1766 onward, Washington employed slaves as doctors and overseers; at one point three

400 Turner, 6. 401 William W. Freehling, "The Founding Fathers and Slavery." The American Historical Review, 77, 1, Spring 1972, pp. 84. 402 Morgan, 408.

403 Morgan, 425. 404 Morgan, 409. Moaney 146

of his five farms were under black supervision405. Twenty years later, Washington would confess that “there [was] not a man living who wishe[d] more sincerely than [him], to see a plan adopted for this abolition of [slavery] but there is only one proper and effectual mode”406. That mode of course being “the legislature by which slavery in the Country may be abolished by slow, sure, & imperceptible degrees”407, given his priority of making America a nation of laws.

As a fellow Virginian, Thomas Jefferson was all too familiar with the “plantation life style, with its elegant manner and extravagant tastes, lessened the chance of reducing debts”408 which made the prospect of abolition impractical. Between 1774 and his death on 4 July 1826, the number of slaves Jefferson owned fluctuated between 117 and 223409.

Jefferson embodied Myrdal’s “American Dilemma”. He simultaneously tasked “free people to burst the chains of despotism” in his Declaration while in his Notes told Black people that “they will have to pursue their happiness elsewhere, anywhere but [in

America].”410 From his vantage, slaves were “dull, tasteless, and anomalous” and ultimately “inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”411

Jefferson’s suspicion drew from the aforementioned science to make conclusions that justified his racial beliefs that disparaged Blacks’ anatomy and psychology. He concluded that “they secrete less by the kidnies, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour”, as well as being draped in an “immoveable

405 Ibid. 406 Morgan, 419. 407 Ibid. 408 Freehling, 85. 409 Bruce, Fehn. "Thomas Jefferson and Slaves: Teaching an American Paradox," OAH Magazine of History, 14, 2, Winter 2000, pp. 25. 410 Peter S., Onuf. “Thomas Jefferson, Race, and National Identity” (University of Virginia Press, 2007), pp. 206. 411 Onuf, 207. Moaney 147

veil of black . . . [that] covers all [their] emotions”412. While Jefferson freely expressed these views in his Notes, racism permeated his legislative influence also. Nearly two centuries in advance of Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), Jefferson’s proposed clause to the VA slave code required any white woman who had a black child to leave the state within a year or be placed "out of the protection of the laws"413. Despite his private paternalistic regard for the large group of biracial children on his own plantation by referring to them as "my family"414, Jefferson’s public intolerance of Blackness was at its best ambiguous.

Throughout the Chesapeake Blacks “[were] pests in society by their idleness”415 and their continued existence catalyzed a “degradation which no lover of this country, no lover of excellence in the human character can innocently consent.”416 This perspective spread well beyond the planters of the Chesapeake and South that used large quantities of human labor. Jefferson was hardly the public official of his time to “propose peacefully accepting the end of [a] world”417 where white supremacy reigned unchallenged. As the inevitable crumbling of the institution of slavery began to gain momentum beyond rhetoric, Jefferson invoked the Holy Spirit as the final arbiter: “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever”418. A metric of this justice is the sustained legacy of formerly subjugated Black tidewater populations whose cordoned counterpublics caress the Bay’s tributaries. The daily opportunity of all-

412 Onuf, 206. 413 Freehling, 84. 414 Fehn, 25. 415 Fehn, 27. 416 Ibid. 417 Freehling, 84.

418 Jefferson, 272.

Moaney 148

embracing mobilization, rural communion and maritime economic empowerment afforded by the ecological underpinnings of the region propelled democratic rally absent inland. It is with this micro-political apparatus augmenting socioeconomically-depressed minority communities that the Democratic Party has lost touch throughout the American

South. The 2020 President Election presents the new MD Democratic Party chair an unprecedented political climate to champion a redemptive paradigm shift that secures human dignity and social justice for all Americans, particularly those who have been historically denied each in similarly isolated congressional districts.

The Democratic coalition of the twenty-first century taunts one of the most diverse collections of public opinion to ever consolidate in a partisan fashion. However, this has presented a disparity and detrimental disharmony between messaging at the national level and the state level. States like California and Massachusetts with liberal majorities and historically dense metropolitan areas of socioeconomic diversity have benefited from the progressive agenda due to the political metrics of sheer size and ideological scope. However, in states like Maryland, where the Chesapeake Bay has not only created legally-fixed political boundaries but also curated insular cultures to the point of stalemate, the Democratic Party will need to lend an ear to more than just the empirical analysis of the political landscape to ensure the blue wave has longevity.

In a region where social currency stems from intergenerational trust, market skills that encompass cultural symbolism and democratic agrarianism, the dignity of labor reigns. The work of Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) is an exemplary display of the ability of expedient rhetoric to equip the distressed with tangible hope. On the MD Eastern Shore, it is inherent that any subversive Democratic message acknowledge, and embrace, that, Moaney 149

other than the governorship, MD’s 1st is the last remaining Republican stronghold in the entire state. While its populations are dispersed, infrastructure, both digital and tangible, are waning that does not impede communities from exhausting their capacities on day-to- day micro-political foundations. It is within these that the public sphere, and various counterpublics, have been able to fulfill the extremities of their American and Maryland citizenship with breadth and relatively lengthy periods of stability.

Any attempt to foster the momentum of GOP districts flipping to Democratic after visceral reactions to moral and economic malfeasance must be able to address the essence of a community. First, these communities must be listened to under conditions they have set and be heard within the spaces they have developed. Displacing communities, especially those of color, for the sake of exposing their trauma to a larger, politically- motivated audience simply enhances their exploitation. Second, historically-marginalized demographics need not to be pitied but instead empowered. In doing so, through equitable democratic inclusion is proven to increase civic engagement andcollective efficacy. Finally, in this quest for social justice, the political premise of the free Black tidewater tradition is to be seen as equal. Whether religious, ethnic, cultural, economic or even educational, points of disjuncture that arm difference with the power to cast dissent to the periphery is not only a shortcoming of the American republic but a social venom.

Although 2020 presents a very large opportunity for the Democratic ticket, without a narrative that centers continuums of marginalized voices who have invested in place- making as a means of political survival, like the founding free Black communities of the

Maryland Eastern Shore, the blue wave will merely be a ripple.

Moaney 150

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