Chapter 06 — Foundation
Freedom Square
1864 – Present
They told you where the movement started. They never told you where it was built.
One neighborhood in West Baltimore — a church, a newspaper, a courtroom strategy and a boy named Thurgood — assembles the machinery the Civil Rights Movement would later run on.
The Story
Freedom Square is not a person. It is a place — a few blocks of West Baltimore where, generation after generation, ordinary people built the institutions that made national change possible.
It begins in the 1880s with the Stewart Sisters, who refused to give up their seats on the steamship Sue and took the case to court seventy years before Montgomery. It continues through Rev. Harvey Johnson, who preached and litigated against segregation; John Murphy, whose Afro-American gave Black Baltimore a voice; Lillie Carroll Jackson, who turned a branch into a movement; and the Mitchell family, whose strategy work shaped decades of legal fights.
A young Thurgood Marshall grew up inside that ecosystem. What looks like individual genius was, in fact, a neighborhood's inheritance. Today Rev. Dr. Alvin Hathaway Sr. works to preserve the buildings and the record, asking the question the chapter turns on: if we don't preserve this history, who will?
They built more than buildings. They built freedom — one square, one purpose, generations of impact.
Timeline
The life,
in order.
1864
Union Baptist Church founded
The congregation becomes the civic anchor of the neighborhood — sanctuary, schoolhouse and organizing hall at once.
1880s
The Stewart Sisters and the Steamship Sue
Two Black women refuse segregated accommodation on a Chesapeake steamer and sue. The case becomes an early test of equal accommodation law.
1872–1923
Rev. Harvey Johnson leads Union Baptist
Founds the Brotherhood of Liberty and funds litigation against segregation — courtroom strategy decades before the NAACP formalizes it.
1892
John Murphy buys the Afro-American
A formerly enslaved man turns a church bulletin into one of the longest-running Black newspapers in America.
1935
Lillie Carroll Jackson takes the Baltimore NAACP
Builds it into one of the largest branches in the country and mentors a generation of organizers.
1930s–70s
The Mitchell family
Clarence Mitchell Jr. becomes the movement's chief lobbyist in Washington; Juanita Jackson Mitchell becomes Maryland's first Black woman lawyer.
1930
Thurgood Marshall is turned away from Maryland Law
The rejection sends him to Howard — and back, five years later, to sue the school that refused him.
1954
Brown v. Board
The strategy that wins in Washington was rehearsed for seventy years on these blocks.
Present
The preservation mission
Rev. Dr. Alvin Hathaway Sr. restores the historic sites and records the stories before the buildings — and the witnesses — are gone.
Curated Primary Sources
The evidence on screen.
“The complainants were refused the accommodations for which they had paid.”
Steamship Sue case record
Seventy years before Montgomery, the argument is already fully formed on paper.
“The Afro-American.”
The Afro-American, front page
A newspaper as infrastructure — the movement's memory, printed weekly.
“Justice and Jurisprudence.”
Brotherhood of Liberty pamphlet
Harvey Johnson's organization funds Black attorneys when Maryland's bar will not admit them.
“Est. 1864.”
Union Baptist Church cornerstone
We shoot the stone itself — the oldest continuous piece of the square still standing.
What Didn't They Tell Us?
- Why does history remember individuals and forget the neighborhoods that produced them?
- What happens to a movement's memory when its buildings are demolished?
- If we don't preserve this history — who will?