Baltimore does not easily forget the past, but far too often, it is forced to move on too quickly past its painful history. But there are some stories we can’t afford to leave behind. Not when the very streets we pay for the privilege to walk today were paid for by people in chains, not when today’s injustices echo so loudly from our collective yesterdays.
Maryland, and Baltimore in particular, didn’t just participate in the domestic slave trade. We helped build it. From the early 1800s through the Civil War, Baltimore became a major port for the buying and selling of Black people—not across oceans, but within the borders of the United States. The so-called “peculiar institution” wasn’t just a Southern phenomenon. It thrived right here.
On the same National Road that still cuts through West Baltimore—Route 40—Black families were bound together, marched in shackles and led south to the cotton fields of Alabama and Mississippi and the sugar plantations in Louisiana. It is less than ironic that the street name on the east side of the city bears the name Orlean Street. The city’s waterfront, now lined with shops and tourists, once launched ships packed with enslaved men, women, and children bound for places like New Orleans. These were not discrete crimes. They were part of the city’s business that ported between 800,000 and 1.2 million captives to the industrial agricultural South.
This was not a shadow economy, it was big business and out in the open. Baltimore traders like Austin Woolfolk, Hope Slater, James Franklin Purvis, John Denning and Joseph Donovan were not fringe figures—they were city politicians, business leaders, respected men. Banks gave them loans. Insurance…