Frank DeFilippo: Black History Month Ends With A Lesson On Organization Politics

By Frank A. DeFilippo, Maryland Matters

February 28, 2022

A felicitous note on which to conclude Black History Month is to double back for a look at how Black Marylanders rose to political prominence in our state through their drive for representation in Baltimore City.

Their rise began in heavily populated precincts of the center city and eventually spread to the warrens of East Baltimore and to the outer reaches of Northwest Baltimore. Declining white population and reapportionment helped.

The drive involved the well-traveled pattern of people moving in straight lines. Black residents followed the footprints of Jewish residents and other ethnic migrations that hopscotched neighborhoods to new jurisdictional lines toward and into the newly developing surround of counties. Prince George’s County is another story of its own.

As the highly-regarded Del. Howard “Pete” Rawlings once observed, “People vote for people who walk like them, talk like them and smell like them.” (Decoded into political parlance — identify your vote, organize your vote, and get out your vote on election day.)

Adjust your rearview mirror. Time-travel to an era when politics was a face-to-face business and political organizations were the building blocks to elective office. Gradually, Black politicians learned to challenge white ones at their own game by mimicking their tactics.

Begin with Sen. Verda F. Welcome, the first woman of color elected to the Maryland Senate in 1962, and the second Black woman in the U.S. to serve in a state senate. But initially, she was elected to the House of Delegates in 1958, not the first for a Black woman, but nonetheless a significant achievement for the era.

Though she has claim to several firsts, Welcome was not the first Black lawmaker elected to the General Assembly. Those chevrons belong to the class of 1954 and the election of Del. Truly Hatchett, Sen. Harry Cole and Del. Emory Cole, according to the Legislative Black Caucus of Maryland. And, accept it or not, the two Coles were Republicans from Baltimore City. Harry Cole was later the first Black judge appointed to the Maryland Court of Appeals. (Prince George’s elected its first Black member of the General Assembly in 1966.)

Two names dominated the politics of Baltimore’s Fourth District back in a time when the city was divided neatly into six compact legislative districts — political impresario James H. “Jack” Pollack and Sen. Welcome. For it was Welcome who broke Pollack’s iron grip on the Fourth and chased him into the adjoining Fifth District where his decline and fall accelerated.

From his Trenton Democratic Club’s clubhouse on Trenton St., just off Park Circle, Pollack made certain that bright young Jewish candidates were elected up and down the ballot with only an occasional gesture to Black residents. Yet it was Pollack who sponsored the first integrated ticket in the Fourth District, mainly out of necessity — Irma Dixon, Walter Dixon (no relation), Maurice Sopher and Harvey Epstein.

But when the racial composition of the district began to change, Welcome led the charge to elect more Black candidates. As Trenton’s power slipped away, Pollack shifted his base of operations to the Fifth and did business under the banner of the Town and Country Democratic Club. Several decades ago, Trenton’s clubhouse was put up for sale. In its heyday, the Trenton Democratic Club’s annual Victory Dance at the old Emerson Hotel was a political happening that usually attracted upwards of 2,000 people, allies and rivals alike.

Welcome’s club, the Fourth District Democrats, met regularly on a top floor of a former theater at North and Pennsylvania Avenues, later bulldozed to accommodate a subway entrance. Eventually, one of Welcome’s proteges, Sen. Troy Brailey, ran against her and defeated her. And a member of a rival organization, Del. Ernie Young, put out an assassination contract on Welcome. A bullet grazed her buttock. Two men were convicted for the attempt.

The Mitchell Family’s power base also was the Fourth District which regularly sent Mitchells to the State House, City Hall and to Congress. Among them was Clarence Mitchell IV, known as C-4, who was elected to the House of Delegates where his father’s career in politics began. And now another Mitchell, Keiffer, serves as a top aide to Republican Gov. Lawrence J. Hogan Jr. Clarence Mitchell Jr., the renowned NAACP Washington lobbyist, was father and brother on the family tree, and his wife, Juanita Jackson Mitchell, was the daughter of Lillie May Carroll Jackson, founder of the Maryland chapter of the NAACP.

William “Little Willie” Adams, one of America’s wealthiest Black men, was Welcome’s rival for political power. Adams was allied with Pollack. Through his political club, the People’s Democratic Club, Adams regularly fielded slates of candidates against Welcome’s tickets, but it was Welcome who usually won because of her alliance with the Mount Royal Democratic Club and the four precincts it controlled along North Avenue.

Adams’ protégé and business partner was City Councilman Henry G. Parks, founder and president of Parks’ Sausages in which Adams was a substantial investor, as well as Adams’ wife, Victorine, who also served on the Council.

Eventually, Adams formed an alliance with Irv Kovens across district lines into the Fifth District, and it was then that Adams became a major political force in the Fourth District. Kovens would become the major domo of Maryland politics under the patrimony of Gov. Marvin Mandel, elbowing aside Pollack as Democratic political boss.

There were other, less obvious, but nonetheless major organizations that played a role in the Fourth’s politics — including the Frizbee Society and Woman Power, which was co-founded by Victorine Adams.

The old Second District, squat in the center of the city, used to bump against the Fourth. Cross North Avenue in either direction and you’d be in one or the other. Move in an easterly direction and its population, to a degree, resembled the Fourth’s concentration of Black residents. The political rivalry between the Westside and Eastside was an unlikely feud over social standing, with Westside Black residents suggesting elevated status because of location.

The Mount Royal Democratic Club’s members were the original “shiny-brights” of Maryland politics — a nametag bestowed on them in 1964 for their support of the reform candidacy of Joseph D. Tydings for the U.S. Senate and the 1962 campaign for governor of David Hume.

The Mount Royal Democratic Club began as a social club in the late 1950s when bankers and developers wanted to level the grand old mansions on Bolton Hill which had become mainly lower economic class rental properties. Indirectly, they were really threatening to destroy Tom Ward’s political base. Ward was a City Council member, Mount Royal’s honcho, and later a judge.

Mount Royal’s membership dwindled over the years from its high-water mark of 400 when it was one of the most influential clubs in Baltimore. It sponsored one of the best Christmas parties in the city, regularly attracting more than 500 members and political voyeurs to the original Maryland Institute College of Art building. Mount Royal members used to meet at the Montfaucon American Legion Hall in the 900 Block of St. Paul Street. At its low point, the few remaining members met at the Officer’s Club in the Fifth Regiment Armory.

By contrast, its rival, the New Democratic Club, (NDC-2), was an offshoot that was formed when former City Council President Walter S. Orlinsky lost a power-play to Ward in 1968 in a fight over control of Mount Royal’s newsletter. Orlinsky’s former political knock-about and Bolton Hill next-door neighbor, Sen. Julian Lapides, aligned himself with Ward and stayed with Mount Royal where he served as president.

One source of Mount Royal’s early strength was its support of Welcome in the upper four precincts of Bolton Hill where they intersected with the adjoining Fourth District.

NDC-2, home base of former Council President Mary Pat Clarke, rose to the forefront of city politics in 1970, two years after it was formed. Orlinsky brokered a fusion ticket with Clarence “Du” Burns’ Eastside Democratic Organization. Together, the two clubs defeated every Mount Royal candidate except Lapides and Del. Joseph Chester, who ran on the Mount Royal ticket.

Burns would become Baltimore’s first Black mayor when, as City Council president, he succeeded William Donald Schaefer who moved on to become governor. Kurt Schmoke would become the city’s first “elected” Black mayor when he defeated Burns in a run of his own.

In yet another splintering, Sen. Nathan Irby broke away from Burns’ EDO to form the Eastside Democratic Forum.

In the middle of all the Black politics of the center-city was the Hampden Democratic club, a white male island bracketed by two Black districts. Its clubhouse on Chestnut Avenue, in the heart of Hampden — now a kitschy, partly gentrified area known mainly for Christmas lights and offbeat eateries — and while its real estate was technically in the Second District it worked the surrounding margins of the Fourth and Fifth Districts.

Hampden in the 60s was the setting of riotous racial disturbances and its fierce resistance to Black residents moving into the former working-class neighborhood of former warehouses and mills, now reborn as offices and condos.

And so it went for Black residents, just as with other ethnic groups before them — Irish, Jews, Italians, Germans, Poles, and others — finding safety in familiar numbers and strength in political organizations. Yet centuries before Black politicians took command of certain precincts, they as a cohort found solace in their churches which became the rallying points for much of their communal, social and civic activity.

Upon those precinct organizations, the early architects of political structure fashioned the stepping stones for today’s robust Black presence in the aisles of power and on the ballots that, come June and November, might provide even more recognition as well as a silent salute to those generations that, prior to passage of Maryland’s public accommodations law in 1964, couldn’t sit down to a burger in a greasy-spoon diner in the Free State.

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