Sending at the Wrong Frequency

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Feb 19
i-shot: As a child in 1960s Baltimore, my mother would drive me down to Lexington and Howard streets. It was the epicenter of the city’s grand shopping district, home to mammoth-yet-elegant department stores built in the previous century. It was an occasion coming down here, and men and women dressed the part. It was also, unbeknownst to us at the time, the beginning of the end of an era. The segregationist policies that kept African-Americans out at some of these very establishments would, ironically, drive the stores themselves out of the neighborhood and into the suburbs. A 1955 sit-in at Read’s drugstore, on the corner of this street, predated the more famous southern sit-ins by five years. It would ignite the social change in Baltimore that by 1960 would see most retailers admitting African-Americans. And most whites moving out, and on. {Westside Story series. West Baltimore, Maryland. No. 1.}

i-shot:

As a child in 1960s Baltimore, my mother would drive me down to Lexington and Howard streets. It was the epicenter of the city’s grand shopping district, home to mammoth-yet-elegant department stores built in the previous century. It was an occasion coming down here, and men and women dressed the part.

It was also, unbeknownst to us at the time, the beginning of the end of an era. The segregationist policies that kept African-Americans out at some of these very establishments would, ironically, drive the stores themselves out of the neighborhood and into the suburbs.

A 1955 sit-in at Read’s drugstore, on the corner of this street, predated the more famous southern sit-ins by five years. It would ignite the social change in Baltimore that by 1960 would see most retailers admitting African-Americans. And most whites moving out, and on.

{Westside Story series. West Baltimore, Maryland. No. 1.}

Reblogged 3 months ago from i-shot

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Baltimore,