As a social historian specializing in community studies, I am often asked to do media interviews after catastrophes or significant accidents. These tragedies can profoundly impact the social, economic, and historical fabric, altering lives, historic buildings, landmarks, and artifacts.
Mike Dixon TV interview on Station WJZ in Baltimore
This was the case this week. After a three-alarm fire destroyed a 170-year-old hotel in Elkton on Sunday, May 21, 2023. WJZ-TV Baltimore asked me to provide context around the landmark’s story, discuss how things have changed over the centuries, and comment on the impact of the destructive fire for the interview.
Once located on the main thoroughfare between Philadelphia and Baltimore, the Howard Hotel was an anchor in downtown Elkton for generations. It was a popular destination for travelers, families, and locals- a gathering place for generations.
The Northeastern Maryland landmark bustled with activity as waitresses served fine meals, bartenders dispensed drinks, and overnight guests booked comfortable rooms. This was long before Interstates and dual highways bypassed the town center, and hotel chains sprouted up along those new roads. In that earlier age, traveling salesmen, families making their way up or down the east coast, and others passing this way came right down Elkton’s Main Street, formerly Route 40.
The Howard Hotel was more than just a place to stay. It was a gathering place for the town. People met here for celebrations and to catch up with friends and neighbors.
Now a place that has anchored downtown since before the Civil War and prospered under the guidance of generations of hotelkeepers and tavern owners is gone.
In the 1920s, traffic flows through downtown Elkton on the Philadelphia Road. The Howard Hotel is in the background. (Source: Evening Bulletin, Philadelphia)
I am researching the struggle for equality in healthcare, a lesser-known dimension of the civil rights movement. Although the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a blow to “separate but equal” in public schools in 1954, segregation persisted for years in medicine. However, by the mid-1960s, a combination of protests, federal legislation, and judicial rulings had significantly disrupted the Jim Crow practices that had long plagued hospitals, nursing homes, and clinics.1
As I delve into this complex and multifaceted intersection of civil rights and medicine, one area I am concentrating on is the integration of Delaware nursing schools, a significant achievement for the civil rights movement. During the 1950s, nursing schools commonly practiced segregation, limiting opportunities to pursue careers in the caring professions and make meaningful contributions to their communities.
Delaware Schools
Delaware Nursing School (undated, Wilmington Free Library)
In 1950, Delaware had seven nursing schools--four in Wilmington, one in New Castle County, and two downstate. These programs excluded Blacks leading to a severe shortage of professional African American nurses in the state.2
The National League of Nursing Education produced this 1950 list:
Delaware State, Farnhurst, established in 1929, 13 students
Beebe, Lewes, 1921, 10 students;
Milford Memorial, 1926, 21 students;
Delaware, Wilmington, 1897, 160 students;
Memorial, Wilmington, 1888, 92 students;
St. Francis, Wilmington, 1924, 66 students;
Wilmington General, Wilmington, 1910, 50 Students
To gain insight into nursing schools in the City, I am examining records of three Wilmington hospitals. The materials archived at the Lewis B. Flinn Medical Library at Christiana Care offer valuable insight into the policies, practices, and enrollment of these institutions during the mid-20th century.
In 1954, a significant civil rights healthcare milestone occurred in Delaware. Late that year, Wilmington Memorial Hospital Superintendent, Grace L. Little, announced a groundbreaking decision to open admission to the school for qualified candidates regardless of race. This decision marked a significant turning point in the fight for integrated medical education in Delaware, overturning in one institution the discriminatory policies that had long excluded Black students from the program.3
In the fall of 1955, when a new class began at Memorial Hospital, two African American students, Ive Brown of Felton and Carrie Thomas of Chester, PA, proudly stood alongside their classmates for the annual “probie” photo.4,5
A Civil Rights Healthcare Milestone
For the first time, African American students were admitted to a registered nurses training program in Delaware. When the hospital held its 65th graduation in 1958, Carrie Thomas and fifteen other young women had completed the course of study for registered nurses. Ive Brown graduated from a one-year practical nursing course at Brown Vocational High School.6.
This milestone, a significant step forward in the struggle for equality in healthcare, contributed to Delaware’s civil rights movement. My work on other dimensions of the civil rights struggle in medicine continues in Delaware.
1955 of the “probies” of the class of 19587 (Source: Medial Library, Christiana Care)
For additional photos on integrating nursing schools in Delaware, see this album on Facebook.
National League of Nursing Education, “State-Approved Schools of Nursing: Schools Meeting Minimum Requirements Set by Law and Board Rules in the Various States and Territories, (New York), 1950[↩]
Hospital to Accept Nursing Students Regardless of Race,” Morning News, December 7, 1954[↩]
“32 Student Nurses Start Memorial Class, Journal-Every Evening, September 7, 1955[↩]
“Probie Class Photo,” 1958, Wilmington Memorial Hospital[↩]
“15 Graduate at Memorial,” Morning News, September 4, 1958[↩]
Memorial Hospital, Probies-Class of 1958, photograph (Wilmington, DE, 1955), Lewis B. FlInn Medical Library, Christiana Care, Newark, DE.[↩]
BEL AIR, Feb. 9, 2023 — I had the opportunity to attend an award ceremony for Janice East Moorehead Grant, 89, where she received the first Harford County Civil Rights Leadership Award from Harford Community College.
Mrs. Grant (2nd from the left front row) worked with students in one of my U.S. History classes
In the 1950s and 1960s, Mrs. Grant led various efforts to support civil rights in northeastern Maryland. These included protests for fair housing, open schools, and greater economic equality through employment, and she was arrested twice for her activism.
She also led efforts to desegregate Route 40 and joined the 1961 Freedom Riders on the Maryland highway. One of the earliest campaigns of the Freedom Riders focused on the highway in northeastern Maryland and Delaware.
In 1964, she participated in the Mississippi Freedom Summer effort to register voters and set up “Freedom Schools in the State. Later she joined the Peace Corps and served as a teacher in Liberia, where she earned one of her three master’s degrees.
On February 21, WMAR’s Kelly Swoope aired a segment about the civil rights leader’s accomplishments and the honor she received at the College.
In a historical context, the term bee brings to mind social gatherings or events where a group of people came together to accomplish a task or achieve a common goal. Often called work bees or community bees, they were associated with quilting, barn raising, and spelling—activities where a crowd assembled to work for a purpose, share skills, and socialize with one another. These collective endeavors had a sense of community, teamwork, and common purpose, as the effort involved cooperative social undertakings.1
But while completing a study on lynchings for the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project in 2019, I discovered a disturbing association for the colloquial term. Newspapers often discussed lynching bees—occurrences where mobs conducted extrajudicial spectacle hangings for amusement. This contrasted with horrific, racially motivated violence inflicted on victims more quietly, often in the still of the night.
Researching Lynchings
My focus on researching racial terror lynchings started twenty-one years ago on the Lower Shore when the literature on these crimes was scant, and traces of this dark past were elusive. Of course, secondary literature and original research have advanced in recent years. However, in 2002, all I discovered during my literature review was Dr. Polly Stewart’s groundbreaking research at the Nabb Center. After she started teaching at Salisbury University in 1973, the folklore professor learned that lynchings took place in the area.
So, she started investigating these incidents, applying academic rigor to determine the facts, issues, and dynamics around the undocumented history2. The scholar encountered steep resistance to sharing this history, however. In those early years, Linda Duyer, a geographer, also did pioneering work building upon Professor Stewart’s investigations3.,4
This postcard reads, “Looking for the negro, Princes Anne, Md.” Although undated and uncanceled, it is likely from a 1906 incident. A lynching did not occur that day as the judge sent the man to Salisbury. (personal collection)5
Using the work of these two forerunners, I began fieldwork in the communities. Of course, open access to digitized periodicals had not evolved, and the undertaking involved struggling to read old microfilmed newspapers at libraries in Crisfield and Prince Anne. My investigation also involved days of fieldwork–interviews and records searches in out-of-the-way places such as attics and basements of municipal buildings and courthouses. The phrase never caught my attention as I pieced together enough information to develop case studies for my courses on the history of criminal justice on Delmarva at the University of Delaware.
Lynching Bees
My understanding of associations with the term changed in 2019 while completing the Maryland Lynching Memorial investigation. As I dug into the Maryland Archive holdings–19th-century circuit court records, judgments, case files, correspondence, jury records, minutes, pardon dockets, police blotters, and a much broader array of digitized newspapers–this puzzling, troubling term shocked me. What is a lynching bee I mumbled as the first notice caused me to dig much deeper into late 19th and early 20th-century periodicals to determine if this was an outlier. Correspondents and editors often used this phrase, as it turned out.
Here is a recap of the first 3 column inch narrative from the Midland Journal in Rising Sun, which brought the phrase to my attention. Following an attempt in Rowlandsville, a rural community near the Susquehanna River in Cecil County, the editor applied a larger font to the headline. On Christmas day 1907, an account of a drunken “lynching bee” at Rowlandsville appeared in city papers, the editor wrote. As villagers celebrated with a shooting match that turned into a booze fest, an African American named Webster was lying in a drunken stupor.
“In the spirit of fun (?),” he was suspended by the neck from the wagon bridge and left hanging until life was nearly extinct.” The editor added that the account created considerable commotion and “different versions of its authenticity circulated around the area. Some stated nothing of the kind happened while others said it was greatly exaggerated, but something of the kind did actually take place.”6
Understanding the term
A search of over 20 million pages at Chronicling America at the Library of Congress located 4,148 pages where a correspondent mentioned the phrase. For example, on March 31, 1900, the Baltimore County Union reported that Bel Air had a lynching bee.
Using the idiom “lynching bee” to describe the horrific act of racial lynching was shocking. How could these appalling acts that terrorized generations of Black people be compared to other types of social bees? However, I had worked with this literature and the primary sources for decades, so I shouldn’t have been surprised as I knew about the shocking actions of jubilant spectators creating carnival-like atmospheres in many cases when any of these horrific acts occurred.
“Bee, n” OED Online, Oxford University, June 2022[↩]
Ross Altman, “Polly Stewart – Lynching in Maryland,” FolkWorks”[↩]
Linda Duyer, “The Complex Task of Writing History,” Delmarva African American History, December 31, 2018[↩]
Linda Duyer. “Mob Law on Delmarva: Cases of Lynchings, near-Lynchings, Legal Executions, and Race Riots of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia 1870-1950.” Amazon, The Author, 2014 .[↩]
