African American Voices, Memories and Places: A Four Rivers Heritage Trail
This virtual trail and its companion guide highlight publicly accessible historic sites that provide a tangible place to visit, explore, and contemplate important African American individuals, families, people, historic places, events, struggles, and accomplishments. It also included many privately-owned sites, and in far too many cases, sites physically lost to time. This interactive tour acknowledges and celebrates contributions by African-Americans over the County’s 370-year history; those who tilled the soil on farms that made Anne Arundel County prosper prior to Emancipation, those who harvested, processed and shipped the Bay’s seafood to feed an expanding Country, and those who physically built the grand colonial houses for wealthy landowners, many of whom were enslaved. We honor those families and individuals that came together in good times and bad, to start a church and a congregation, to found a school, to build a community, and to create a legacy.
Please note that many of the tour stops are privately owned and not accessible for visitation. Thank you for respecting the privacy of these properties. Sites open to the public are clearly marked.
Explore the Civil Rights Era in Anne Arundel County, Maryland
Relying upon more than 50 oral histories, this virtual tour is a rare opportunity to hear about local history through the eyes, voices, and memories of those who experienced it first-hand. Highlighting local places, residents, and their stories, the project offers accounts of everyday activities during a time of segregation. It documents spaces of leisure and recreation, where people of color could gather and enjoy solidarity and empowerment; places like stores, ballfields, beaches, juke joints, movie theaters, beauty salons, and barber shops. A team of historians, led by Lyndra Marshall (née Pratt) and Dr. John Kille worked with citizens who generously shared their memories of what life was like during segregation, and uncovered compelling stories of injustice, resistance, and sacrifice, as well as perseverance and triumph. The full interviews and transcriptions are accessible by request from the Maryland State Archives.
Geraldine Whittington (1931-1993), known to most as Gerri, is a notable woman of the Civil Rights Era. She left her mark on history as the first African American secretary to a U.S. President in the White House.
Gerri was born in Lothian, a historically important African American enclave in southern Anne Arundel County. As a child, she went to Lothian Elementary School, a Rosenwald school built in 1931, the year Gerri was born, to serve African American children during the period of segregation. In the 1940s, she attended Wiley H. Bates High School (now listed on the National Register of Historic Places), the only public high school available to black students in Anne Arundel County at the time. From there, Gerri went on to Virginia State College (now known as Virginia State University), historically renowned as one of the earliest, public colleges for both African American men and women in the southern United States.
Gerri left Virginia State College in 1950, where she pursued a bachelor’s degree in business administration, and promptly entered federal service with the Agency for International Development (AID) in the State Department, where she worked with Ralph Dungan. When Ralph Dungan became appointments secretary to President John F. Kennedy, Dungan invited Gerri to work with him in the White House, which she began starting in July of 1961. After JFK’s assassination in 1963, she continued to work in the White House at start of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, at first for Walter Jenkins and William Moyers, LBJ’s closest assistants. Very quickly, they referred her secretarial services to the President.
Gerri thought it was a prank when President Johnson called her to reassign her as her secretary to the White House. How do we know? LBJ taped this conversation (as he did every conversation in the White House) and we can listen to it today. She began working as LBJ’s personal secretary on Christmas of 1963. Her reassignment started on Air Force One, where she accompanied LBJ on his flight to Texas for the holiday.
On January 18, 1964, Geraldine Whittington stands in conversation in the White House with four prominent civil rights leaders: James Farmer, Roy Wilkins, Whitney M. Young, and Martin Luther King.
Right at the start of Gerri’s tenure as LBJ’s personal secretary, she found herself walking into an all-white country club in Texas on the President’s arm, a calculated move on LBJ’s part to signal the end of segregation. In that moment, she became a prominent face of the Civil Rights Movement. The setting, at the very end of 1963, was a New Year’s Eve party at the Forty Acres Club, a faculty club for the University of Texas. The previous year, the faculty club had signaled its refusal to integrate by infamously turning away an African American official of the Peace Corps, which spurred boycotting and faculty resignations in protest. It was a calculated move on LBJ’s part to signal his support of Civil Rights and effectively ended segregation at the club.[1]
Geraldine Whittington’s introduction to the nation as the first African American secretary to a US President was an unconventional one. On January 19, 1964, she made a guest appearance on episode #696 of the television show, What’s My Line?The game show consisted of a panel of celebrity judges that had to figure out the occupation of invited guests by deducting from the guest’s answers to 10 questions. You can actually watch Geraldine Whittington’s debut for yourself here.
Ms. Whittington was at the heart of an administration that oversaw the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, shortly followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, important turning points in the history of the United States. In the photograph above, you can see her chatting with Civil Rights leaders at the forefront of the movement, including Martin Luther King. Geraldine stated that the proudest moment of her career was when she was the first to learn of the appointment of the first black Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall. She would have been the first to shake his hand.[2] Gerri continued to work in the White House as LBJ’s personal secretary until the end of his term in 1969. Gerri was featured regularly in Jet and Sepia magazines as one of the success stories of the Civil Rights movement. She knew her position enabled her to represent and inspire African American women to break barriers.[3]
In February of 1969, Geraldine had to leave civil service after suffering a stroke at the young age of 38 due to cerebral thrombosis. Fighting for recovery from partial paralysis and some speech impediment, she was honored a year later at a party at the U.S. Capitol, where she was toasted by friends for her courage and for the mark she left on the White House.[4]
Geraldine Whittington continued on as a Civil Rights icon throughout her life. In 1993, at the age of 61, she lost a battle to cancer and is buried at home in southern Anne Arundel County with her mother in the cemetery of historic Mt. Zion U.M. Church in Lothian, a church that was an important epicenter of the African American congregation since the late 19th century. Gerri passed away on January 24, 1993, the same day as Thurgood Marshall.
Contributed by Stacy Poulos, Archaeological Sites Planner, Anne Arundel County Cultural Resources Section
In celebration of Women’s History Month this March, The Lost Towns Project and the Anne Arundel County Cultural Resources Section wish to highlight a number of significant women in the history of the County.
Margaret Mercer was born on July 1, 1791, daughter of John Mercer, the future 10th Governor of Maryland (1801-1803), and his wife Sophia Sprigg Mercer. Margaret was one of four children. Her father John had been a member of the Virginia House of Delegates after serving in the American Revolutionary War; however, after marrying Sophia he moved to her estate, Cedar Park, in Anne Arundel County. She grew up on the family estate in Galesville and read widely from her father’s library. Margaret determined two things at a young age: that she would not marry; and, more importantly, that slavery was immoral.
John Mercer died in 1821 with $17,000 of debt that he passed on to his children. At that time, Margaret inherited a number of her father’s 72 enslaved individuals. Creditors pushed Margaret to sell the men and women whom she had inherited but she refused, not wishing to break up families. While her brother, John, inherited Cedar Park and remained on the plantation, Margaret moved to Essex County, VA, where she lived with her uncle, James Mercer Garnett, a former member of Congress and prominent planter. Margaret worked with her cousins, Garnett’s daughters, teaching at a local school in Elmwood, VA for four years. During this time, Margaret joined the Virginia Colonization Society, a branch of the American Colonization Society. The society advocated purchasing the freedom of enslaved people and resettling them in Africa. In 1823, the American Colonization Society purchased land on the Guinea Coast of West Africa, naming it Liberia. Throughout those four years in Virginia, Margaret corresponded with prominent members of the Colonization Society, including her cousin Congressman Charles Fenton Mercer, one of the founders, and her cousin John H. B. Latrobe, a Baltimore architect.
Cedar Park in the 1930s
In 1825, Margaret returned to Galesville and Cedar Park, founding a girls school called “The Cedar Park Academy,” which she ran out of her family home until 1834. The school focused on teaching girls math, astronomy, natural sciences, philosophy, religion, agriculture, and public health. The profits she raised from running the school were used to settle the family debt. During this time she manumitted all of the enslaved men and women she had inherited from her father, including the Young family, John, Milly, and their son Forrester in 1830, and a woman named Nelly Sparrow. In 1832, six of the people whom she had manumitted were sent to Liberia under the auspices of the American Colonization Society. Sometime that year, they arrived in Liberia aboard the schooner “Margaret Mercer.” The Captain of the schooner, Abels, remained in Liberia for 13 days and wrote a letter about his positive experience there, which was published by the Colonization Society. Unfortunately, within three years the Liberia experiment proved unsuccessful: of the six people sent to Liberia by Margaret, three people had died, one had returned to the United States, one had moved elsewhere in Africa, and one was never heard from again. Margaret never sent any more people to Liberia, and similar results among many of the freedmen and women settling in Liberia led to a decline in the entire Colonization movement.
In 1836, Margaret heard from her cousin, Charles Fenton Mercer that Ludwell Lee, a Loudoun County, VA planter and politician who had co-founded the Loudoun County chapter of the American Colonization Society had died and his heirs had placed his 1,000 acre plantation, Belmont, up for sale to pay off debts. By that summer, Margaret had moved to Belmont. In the fall, she opened a second school for girls called the “Belmont Academy,” and in December she formally purchased 400 acres of the property for about $7,000 dollars (the modern equivalent of approximately $150,000). The purpose of the school was agricultural education as a way to remove the need for enslaved labor. Other courses were in philosophy, ethics, the Bible, French, Latin, geography, geology, and astronomy. Her commitment to ethical education was such that she even wrote a book on the topic for use in the classroom in 1841: Popular Lectures on Ethics, or Moral Obligation: For the Use of Schools.
Margaret Mercer
Most of the students at Belmont Academy were daughters of the local landed gentry, who paid $250 a year in tuition and $10 a year to board on the property. Local children also studied at the school, including the children of enslaved families and free African American women. At its peak enrollment under Margaret’s management there were 45 students enrolled and seven instructors employed. While the colonization efforts of Liberia waned, Margaret was continually committed to the abolitionist movement; in 1842 she purchased 22 enslaved men and women from her brother John Mercer, all of whom she manumitted.
Margaret Mercer died at Belmont on September 17, 1846 from tuberculosis. She was 55 years old. Belmont was subsequently purchased by George Kephart, whose eldest daughter, Eugenia Kephart, continued to run the school Margaret had started, moving it to Oak Hill Plantation in 1856, before it closed in the 1870s when Virginia’s new constitution enabled free public education. One of the executors of Margaret’s estate, her nephew Richard S. Mercer, most likely used some of the proceeds of the sale of Belmont to build the Parkhurst manor in Harwood, near to the family home of Cedar Park. In 1848, Casper Morris wrote a biography of Margaret Mercer, The Memoir of Miss Margaret Mercer. Margaret Mercer was a woman committed to her ideals and spent her entire life focusing on the causes of abolition and education.
by Amelia Chisholm, Archaeological Laboratory Director, Anne Arundel County Cultural Resources Section
A couple of sources used for this summary that are unlinked above include:
New site features more than 50 oral history interviews with residents documenting Civil Rights Era
Annapolis, MD (February 8, 2022) Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman announced the launch of an oral history virtual tour of the Civil Rights Era in Anne Arundel County. The virtual tour, completed by Anne Arundel County’s Cultural Resources Section in partnership with local historians, can be found at www.aacounty.org/civil-rights-era.“Having stayed up way too late the other night watching the interviews on this site, I can tell you that they are captivating, inspiring, and uplifting,” County Executive Steuart Pittman said. “I am so grateful to the men and women who shared their history and the historians who are bringing it to the public and to our students. This is the kind of honest, direct presentation of history that makes us a better community.”
The new site features more than 50 oral history interviews collected from residents across the County, and is presented as a tour of local places, people, and everyday experiences during a time of segregation. It documents spaces of leisure and recreation, where people of color could gather and enjoy solidarity and empowerment; places like stores, ballfields, beaches, juke joints, movie theaters, beauty salons, and barber shops.
“Historic preservation is not only about saving grand old buildings, but about preserving the stories of the people and the places that have profoundly influenced County history,” said C. Jane Cox, Administrator of the County’s Cultural Resources Section in the Office of Planning and Zoning. “Documenting this chapter of local history from the not so distant past helps our Office in its mission to preserve diverse aspects of local history for future generations.”
The project began in 2017 with funding from the National Park Service’s Civil Rights Grants Program. A team of historians from Anne Arundel County in partnership with the non-profit Lost Towns Project, Inc worked with citizens who generously shared memories of what life was like during segregation, and uncovered their compelling stories of injustice, resistance, and sacrifice, perseverance and triumph. Lyndra Marshall (née Pratt) was the lead historian on the project, supported by Dr. John Kille.
“What I love about the Civil Rights Oral History Project: it connects people with their memories and with the way life was during the Civil Rights Era,” lead historian Lyndra Marshall (née Pratt) said. “These stories give a glimpse into the many ways residents engaged in recreation and leisure during segregation. They found creative ways to have fun times with family and friends in spite of being blocked from public spaces or they became owners of social spaces.”
Map of locations highlighted in the virtual tour
The project has also resulted in a ground-breaking partnership between Anne Arundel County and the Maryland State Archives. The Archives has established a dedicated Special Collection where the full length oral history footage and transcriptions are to be housed in perpetuity, and can be found here.
Katara West from the Office of Equity & Accelerated Student Achievement and the Social Studies Office at Anne Arundel County Public Schools lauded the tour as a “valuable resource for learners of all ages. The AACPS Local History Initiative plans to utilize this site to educate students and staff about the stories of perseverance, triumph, and strong community bond of African Americans in Anne Arundel County during the Civil Rights Era and beyond! This site will serve as another valuable tool in building social studies and other curriculum that is inclusive of Anne Arundel County history.”
To view the virtual tour and experience local history through the eyes and stories of those who lived it, visit www.aacounty.org/Civil-Rights-Era.
