PROJECT STREET NAME
“Road names are pieces of history. They encode the culture and geography of America.”
- Washington Post
FUNDING OPPORTUNITY: HUB West Baltimore Community Development Corporation is currently seeking equity-focused funding to employ, on a part-time basis, high school and college students from the CDC focus area to work with relevant civic and historic organizations to compile a database of the origins of key Baltimore street names. The focus will be on those lesser-known names that seem, at least on first glance, to be related to an individual from Baltimore’s past. (So for instance, efforts will not be expended on names like Lincoln, nor on those named after trees.) The ultimate objective is to tell a fuller, richer story of the history of some of Baltimore’s iconic street names, and do it through the eyes of Baltimore’s next generation of leaders. The student researchers, for their part, will be expected to grown their research and reporting abilities, and also gain a greater appreciation of how individuals in the past become part of history in the present.
The Slavers of Baltimore
Did you know, one of the city’s key early leaders, John Eagar Howard - revolutionary war hero, former governor, important shaper of Baltimore, including areas of Mt. Vernon around the Washington Monument and beyond - was a slaveholder until he died? Howard Street is named after him, as is John Street and Eager Street. When he died, his children were bequeathed the blocks around the Washington Monument, already surveyed for new houses that would soon rise there, and thanks to another of Howard’s ideas - ground rent - would sustain them for generations. But it’s unclear what happened to the five slaves that he still owned on his death. It’ll likely never be know for sure. Howard’s legacy is complicated, but it’s just one of the many it’s hoped this project will bring to greater light and a more complete understanding. Not all streets of Baltimore of course are named after slaveholders, but a number undoubtedly are, and they’ll be an important focus of this project.
See the “Slavers of New York” Instagram page here, a project begun in Brooklyn that’s uncovered hundreds of street and place names so far with slaveholder origins.
Visit a Washington Post database of the more than 1,700 congresspeople who enslaved Black people, including 137 from the State of Maryland, a number of whose names, again, ended up on Baltimore street signs. And you can listen to the incredible process Post writers and researchers went through to generate the list here. The list of names is still being whittled down with on-going research - much of it now crowd-sourced. This project may be able to help.