This year, (2026) the United States will mark two hundred and fifty years since its founding—a number that invites both celebration and unease, a round anniversary heavy with unfinished arguments, like those found in the reparations discussions this past December. As the nation rehearses its familiar story of revolution, expansion, rupture, and repair, the Baltimore Legacy column proposes a different vantage point: not the balcony view of history, but the street-level perspective of a city where national forces have long collided, coexisted, and been quietly reimagined.
Baltimore has always occupied a peculiar position in the American imagination—Southern and Northern, industrial and maritime, proud and wounded. It was here that the country’s largest free Black population once lived, worked, worshipped, and organized, creating a civic culture both fragile and formidable.
In the late nineteenth century, Maryland occupied an uneasy middle ground in the American imagination: a slave state by law, yet increasingly ambivalent in practice. Nowhere was this tension more apparent than in Baltimore, a city that quietly defied the prevailing logic of the South. While slavery continued to expand elsewhere below the Mason-Dixon Line, Baltimore was becoming something of an anomaly. By the early decades of the century, nearly ninety per cent of the city’s Black residents were free—a demographic fact that made Baltimore home to the largest free Black population in the nation. Some twenty-five thousand free Black people lived here, comprising roughly fifteen per cent of the city’s total population…