Maryland, our Maryland - historic sites, museums and churches through which to explore the history of African Americans in Maryland - Advertising Supplement: Maryland's African American Culture

American Visions, April-May, 1993 by Henry H. Chase

On a March day in 1634, the Ark, bound from England in the service of the Catholic peer Lord Baltimore, sailed up the Potomac River and landed the founding members of an experiment that became the state of Maryland. Stepping from the ship onto soil untouched by any other than America's aboriginal people was a son of Africa. Mathias de Sousa, of African and portuguese descent, arrived as one of nine- indentured servants of Jesuit missionaries, His life in a Maryland not yet defined by slavery was little affected by his blackness. His ability was recognized and utilized: The Jesuits placed him in charge of the boat and the cargo (and the white crew) that sailed to trade with local Indians. Already the first black Marylander, de Sousa in 1642 became the first black member of the Maryland Assembly.

Today, there is a window through which we can see early Maryland, an America brutish but not yet corrupted by mass slavery. For where the Ark's passengers stepped ashore, there they founded St. Mary's, the fourth permanent English settlement in America and Maryland's capital until 1695. Today, Historic St. Mary's City, on the peninsula jutting into Chesapeake Bay, is an 800-acre outdoor museum with a monument to de Sousa, costumed living history interpreters, and three major exhibit areas, including the Godiah Spray Tobacco Plantation, which recalls a working farm of the 1660s - and the crop whose intense labor requirements and large profits spurred the mass enslavement of Africans.

Following de Sousa, the long night of slavery descended, whose remnants in Maryland can still be traced near St. Mary's at Sotterley in Hollywood. The Sotterley mansion dates back to 1717, but today's visitors also can wander the grounds and gardens, which provide a somewhat clearer picture of what life was like for those who served the mansion's masters. The starkest contrast to the mansion, of course, is found at the extant 18th-century slave quarters, a plank one room building. Complementing this portrait are sundry outbuildings where much of the African-American labor of a working plantation was performed: a spinning cottage, which began around 1780 as a small frame building and now serves as a Guest Cottage; the 200-year-old Corn Crib, which now houses the farm exhibit of 19th-and 20th-century implements required to operate a plantation; the Necessary, which speaks for itself, though without the effluvium of yesteryear; and the gardens, which still please the eye though they are no longer tended by the disenfranchised.

One result of slavery's long night is that we know few of the names of black Marylanders, not because - as with de Sousa - their blackness was unimportant to their social status, but because their blackness deprived them of status in civil society. Only African Americans of astounding capability - such as Benjamin Banneker and Frederick Douglass - escaped a historical namelessness. Banneker, the 18th century free black farmer, scientist and proponent of black equality, and Douglass, the 19th-century escaped-slave-turned-militant-abolitionist, were both Maryland born. Today, their names adorn Maryland's pre-eminent black heritage museum.

From Africa to bondage to resistance to the perils and limitations of freedom, the story of Maryland's African Americans is interpreted at the Banneker-Douglass Museum, in Annapolis. African art and utilitarian objects of the Dogon, Malinke, Bambara, Baule and Guro cultures; documents, books and artifacts from the days of slavery and the abolitionist struggle; photographs, manuscripts and artifacts touching upon the post-Civil War world of emancipation; and oral history tapes, works of art and everyday 20th-century items that detail the lives of individual black Marylanders and of a community segregated because of race are on view in a museum that repeatedly repays exploration.

Banneker-Douglass' black heritage content is doubly underscored by its 84 Franklin Street address. This historic church building, which for almost a century housed the free black Mt. Moriah A.M.E. congregation, is located five blocks from the plaque commemorating the 1767 landing site in Annapolis of the slave ship Lord Ligonier, which brought Kunta Kinte and 97 other abducted Africans to the New World. Aptly, Mt. Moriah, which was scheduled for demolition after its congregation moved, was saved through the efforts of the Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture, whose other efforts include the founding of the Banneker-Douglass Museum that now graces the 1874 building.

More than 150 years ago, slaves and former slaves labored by torch-light to construct one of the first A.M.E. churches in Baltimore. The Orchard Street Church began with prayer meetings held in the home of the West Indian-born former slave Trueman Le Pratt. Almost half a century later, in 1882, the congregation finished the third church structure to occupy the Orchard Street site; that building has been restored and will serve as the headquarters of the Baltimore Urban League and as an African-American cultural museum. One element of the museum will be subterranean; an archaeological excavation of the site uncovered a tunnel beneath the church that may have served as a hiding hole for runaway slaves aiming to escape to Pennsylvania.