popularized when we think of how zil rights is talked about today. so is that a good way of giving me the very hard question to start with? >> that's good. >> i think our audience will agree that -- just on that fundamental basic level of understanding that we so often think of the popular things that come to mind, but so often what gets overlooked is the -- sort of the in-the-streets, social, bottom-up history that oftentimes gets overlooked. it's something as simple as we're going to get to dr. hicks just sitting down at the counter at a place where you're not supposed to be. and so we bring forth the definition of civil rights and bring it now a little closer to baltimore city. so i'm going to ask mr. sor zi if he could, as best as he can, sort of describe the politics of the city of baltimore during the

sooifl rights era and sort of what relationship did it have to the movement itself? >> i was relieved to hear that the civil rights era is not a finite thing. because i've never really thought of it in those terms, although i've seen it defined any number of ways from '55 to '68 and so forth. i guess i go back in my mind to at least reconstruction from a political standpoint, and in baltimore to 1890 when the first black city councilman was elected, harry cummings, a republican. the first of six republican councilmen who sat through 1931. harry cummings was not, by the way, contrary to some published fficial, the first elected

in maryland. that distinction belongs to an annapolis alder man actually. but anyway, that being said, i wanted to sort of not -- i'm not really a historian, as you can probably tell, not much of a speaker which is why i kind of make my living writing, i guess. i guess i wanted to speak a little bit about the mckel done jackson collection as it relates to politics. i was a reporter for the sun and i first became aware of the mckel done jackson collection maybe 20 years ago, probably at least 20 years ago when i discovered when i was on a genealogical bender up here one day that they had, as jeanologists want to go on -- i discovered they had a transcript

of an interview of a gentleman by the name of william lloyd adams, also known as willy adams or little willy adams. that name may ring a bell with some of you. he just passed away last year at 97. he was -- it's funny how death will change things, change people's recollection ps of things. but he was a multi, multi millionaire, developer, real estate i guess magnate, if you will, and a political power from probably the -- i would say the '40s right on through i guess the '80s, the mid '80s.

i've always been fascinated by him. i first wrote about him actually when i was in high school like 40 years ago. this was a gold mine i discovered in this transcript of this interview, and he touches on many of the campaigns that he had an involvement with. he doesn't talk about all of his relationships, there are many. he clearly understood the importance of politics in doing business and in making advances for the blacks in baltimore but i would not civil rights icon by any means. he recently has been sort of elevated a bit. he was a shrewd businessman, a very gentle man who started literally in the cotton fields of north carolina and came to

baltimore when he was 15, started in east baltimore as a rag picker. met a couple of people and became involved in the numbers business. he became very, very successful, more than numbers runner. he was probably ran all the black numbers in baltimore eventually. because there was a fellow who preceded him who had run it for the democratic party basically for years. a fellow by the name of tom smith who is oftentimes a little bit dismissed, but was a great spokesman for, as "the sun" would say, his people, meaning the black community of baltimore. i guess i wanted to sort of -- with that in mind, i guess i'm not sure what my time looks

like. i have time, right? i wanted to jump ahead to -- from the time of tom smith to mr. adams in, let's say, 1950. at this point, he has -- he's been -- he's raised a lot of money for a lot of democratic candidates, all white. his -- he has partnered with a fellow by the name of loyal randolph in west baltimore who was kind of his front man and sort of the democratic leader, sort of took the mantle from tom smith. and royal randolph was a good friend, became very friendly with victorine adams who city c

of the legislature, and in 1946 talked her into forming what became something known as the colored women's democratic club. and she had a spin-off later which i'm sure we'll get to called women power. that group was critical in registering black voters in west baltimore in the fourth district which is the harry cummings district which was the greatest concentration of black voters in the city, and became instrumental in breaking the lock on -- of the white political -- democratic political machine that was run by a name that some of you might

recognize, jack pollack. and that was done in 1954 when harry cole ran against pollack, state senator by the name of mall nick cough. and he beat him. he was banked and back rolled by willie and also helped by the ladies that victorine had pulled together. to me this is the turning point so far as black politics went because to that point blacks had been nominally sort of dealt crumps from the table, if you will. and at this point they forced the democrats to take them

seriously and take them as a -- it just changed the -- i was going to say changed the complexion, but changed the landscape of politics in the city thereafter. pollack reacted next year running a black candidate for city council from the fourth district. and four years later knocking off harry cole from the state senate seat with a black candidate of his own. anyway, i bit off a little more than i could chew here. that sort of i think is the turning point for politics, although there's a long history. >> what time do you all want to leave? >> i won't do that. >> real quick to my fellow

panelists, apparently the folks in the back want to see your lovely faces. so they're asking when you do speak if you could stand if that's okay. thank you in the back for letting us know. i guess that includes me. so it sounds like from your description then that as african-americans began to gain more inclusion in the political world between folks like harry cole and willie adams, there is this movement that's beginning to take place in the mid '50s as well that's known as student nonviolent protests. so we have one of the participants, one of the pioneers and innovators of that student protest movement with us, dr. helena hicks. i'm going to ask dr. hicks if she could sort of talk about her

participation in the 1955 reid's drugstore sit-in, and sort of what were some of the feelings that come back to you as you revisit the site now? we'll talk about your position in the commission. but the significance of that for you. >> i'm not sure -- is this on? i'm not sure it makes any difference if i stand or sit. you probably still can't see me any better. but it was a fascinating time in the '50s being a morgan college student. morgan college was a private religious school, a methodist do ch school, so that things a little differently than they could a state-funded

school. and many of them were ministers. they were very much interested -- [ phone ringing ] >> there we go. they were very much interested in seeing that we made our way toward a different life than what blacks had had before, even black college students. and so would were taught early that the only way you can get what you want, is to go out and fight for it. we had heard that message -- those of us in baltimore city, there were other students there from other places on the east coast and from south of washington who pretty much had had a similar kind of

experience. on campus we had no organizations that actually worked in civil rights, per se. but we heard the tales of what happened in '43 when students decided to get into the community battle over opening ford's theater. and they went with the pickets and they were a large presence in order to let the white world know they were -- they could come into the theater. they came in -- there's a long story, before they got to sit on the first floor. but they at least got in and could sit in the balcony. by the time i got there -- we were told this. i knew about it because i lived in baltimore. my parents had been involved in the naacp and in lots of protests, all the protests on pennsylvania avenue. i put out as a youngster lots of flyers for voter registration and community meetings and heard

lots of discussions around the dinner table. so it was not foreign to me. as far as that particular day in the city, i think what had happened was the variety of kinds of experiences, had happened. and you get to the point where you say i'm going to do what i have to do as they taught me to get my rights. so you're standing on a corner in 35-degree weather and you have someone from new york who is not used to being denied their rights and someone from north carolina who is used to be denying even fewer rights, it's an ungodly mix. and we were cold and we wanted something hot to drink. we kept seeing the buses packed going down to morgan, couldn't get on the bus, and we saw people going into reid's, so we went in.

we said, well, we'll go in here, sit down and get warm and get something hot to drink. of course, we were a shock to them. i think we were shocked that we did it. but you know what happens when you're 19 and 20, you think you own the world and you can do anything and get away with it. you never think about the consequences. that's the beauty of youth. so we went in there and they invited us nicely at first then they said you niggers get out of here which probably let a big bonfire. then we really weren't going anywhere. we sat there a while. and the manager came down, and we were afraid that we were going to wind up in pine street two blocks away, the worst police station in the city, that they were going to call them down if we did not move. so we moved. and we went to school.

we told the president. he was not unhappy. he was unhappy that we did an impromptu. he would have preferred it be planned so that there were some adults around so that if we got in trouble, they could get us out of it. they weren't happy about that. he said don't do that anymore. he was fine with the fact that we had done it. and so it was like, okay, now we know we can do this. you always say, if you are fighting the enemy, what can be my next move that will surprise them? so we will sit in. we won't have to be outside with pickett lines. they can ignore that. we can just charge into a place and let them deal with people coming in who are saying we want to be served. of course, it was illegal. we didn't know if we would eventually be locked up.

we didn't know if we would be put out of school. we didn't know what the consequences were going to be. actually there were no consequences that were bad. they were good consequences in the sense that we found a new way to fight. and we kept going so that as late as the 60s -- it took us that long to break that bond of segregation in eating establishments in baltimore. it was the '60s before reid's totally desegregated. what they did was open that one store. they did not -- they were individually managed, so they opened that one store. they did not open them all. then we had to go back and the protests had to go to north wood and to the reid's drugstore there. at the same time huts her's and hex on, so forth and so on. we had felt for a long time that

we could not be treated that way. we were going to college. some of those people who were trying to keep us -- keep us out, they weren't even -- they couldn't even get into college? like how dare they think that they're better than we are? and so you have that kind of resolve, i'm just as good if not better, and i'm going to go ahead and we did. we came out and we got on the bus and came to school. now, as the protests continued, we went back that april to make sure that they really did keep it open. and the owner, i imagine, or probably the manager kept calling -- whenever he would go there, he called dr. jenkins and said, your students are in here bothering us.

he had this famous saying that we laugh at. he said if you don't want my students out there, you have to put a sign outside that says no dogs, cows, pigs, whatever, no niggers allowed. he said we can't do that. he said if you don't put a sign up, there's no way to keep them from coming in. i can't keep them from coming n in. the agreement was reached that they would keep it open. lots of us clustered to go down to that school. we ladd seen that same behavior on pennsylvania avenue. we're going to do it. and it's up to you to figure out what to do once we do it. we ladd seen it when we had the big battle about the voter

registration and the binders. they let us ledge center the voters and count the votes, but they couldn't let us carry the binders down to city hall polls. an they said that they changed the numbers after they got them down there p. so they decided they were going to give up the binder, they would take them by taxi down themselves and stand there and get it them get locked away. so i had seen that kind of activity. so was i the leader? i was the first one in the door. but i don't think it was leadership. i said let's go in there any ways. nobody said no, they just came along and went. and three of us are still alive. really four. there was one interestingly, one

african who was on that line. and he's now a big deal in the u.n. i keep in touch with him and try to get him to come, but he won't come. but he said every time we said we can get locked up, he said locked up, i could have been deported. so we took it lightly. we had no widea the rippling effect. i'm still fighting about their article recently not mentioning us. but that's partly our fault because as a school, as a city, we should have made more of it than we did. i don't think african-americans

at least at that time thought that you had to go the publicity route to the wider public in order to acknowledge the victory we had won. we had a mixed group, we had jews and gentiles and african americans and a well-known person, radio person, was on those lines with us. and we're still friends as a result of that. lots of students. people didn't want too cross

thto cross that picket line. it was just people that did not believe the store should be segregated and she said they would rather close than let us in. so we said we'll deep going and they'll have to choose between those two, and they did close down. which is one of the successes we felt in terms of what college students and young adults can do to make a difference in the whole battle for civil rights[ ] >> thank you so much. and we all owe you a gratitude for your actions that day. and i was telling dr. hicks earlier that i owe her a great deal because i whied will her dissertation in my graduate work. . so on a personal level, thank

you. and so as dr. hicks is a part of that first group igniting the flame of student protests, i'm going to turn to professor larry gibson and ask him to sort of talk the protest movement. and dr. hicks referenced how much credit greensboro gets for the first sit-in in 1960, but i know for a fact that professor gibson has documented the protests at morgan. so if you would. >> thank you. it's really aeasu to be here on the occasion of the public opening of the henderson photographs. this group of photographs is an

absolute national treasure. before you leave, go to the second floor, i guess they can, and see just the handful of photographs that are on exhibit there. but this is a group of 6,000 images. this museum and society needs additional resources to be able to process them and they should be processed because they chronicle and document the civil rights movement. first i'm very clear this my mind as to what i call the modern civil rights movement. when it begins, when it stops. and you're right, 1935 is the first main sujor success, but i move back two more years, 1933

to 1964. let me tell you what i mean by that. that is the period where the initiative started to be taken on behalf of blacks and civil rights that are not reactive, but pro active. up until then, most of what was done by the naacp and urban league and others were reacting on thing it is that were happening to black folks. e efforts to deprive them to the right to vote. something happened in 1933 to lead to a change. it was the last lynching that occurred in maryland in 1933. this was a man who was lynched on the eastern shore and for some reason, it set a spark

loose that said to many people in maryland, black and white, we're going to have to change things in this country. and that began the activities that ultimately led to that 193 baltimore branch of the naacp from 2000 people -- from 200 people to hat was the very first successful proactive case that the maryland school of law. paul henderson photographed all of that. one of his most poignant photograph photographs is in 1933 following the lynchs of george armwood. what the demonstrators did is they put nooses around hair necks as a part of the

demonstration. and you've probably seen this in photographs.as a part of the de. and you've probably seen this in photographs.necks as a part of demonstration. and you've probably seen this in photographs. what was horrendous about the george armwood lynching is people believe he was returned to theho to be lynched. he had been brought to baltimore for safe keeping, but a judge ordered him on come back supposedly for an arraignment. the afro knew -- everybodynew what was going on. the afro crew left. there was no bridge at that time and they can't want to risk going by way of the ferryboat. so by the time they got this, george arm wood had been lifyncd and the afro put on the front of the paper his body.wood had bee and the afro put on the front of the paper his body of things happening in baltimore city

among whites, belong blacks, leading to this massive membership drive. just another comment about photography. in 1935, many of you have seen a photograph of young thurgood marshall, his first civil rights case, he's standing there looking like he's in court and his mentor, charles hamilton houston, is at the table as well as the plaintiff, donald gains marry. and in 90% of the books i've seen, this is described as a court scene. in fact that was a staged picture in the offices of the afro. they went up to the afro after they had gotten the court decision and staged this photograph. activities in a lot of places started to happen, but very aggressively so in