Swimmingly
Swann Drive
October 11, 2015
Near Liberty Heights Avenue’s Shaarei Tfiloh synagogue, built 94 years ago by Jewish immigrants, Eli Pousson leads off Baltimore Heritage’s Black and Jewish Civil Rights bike tour of the city’s once Jewish—now largely African-American—west-side neighborhoods. While American Jews overwhelmingly supported the Civil Rights movement, Pousson notes that, in Baltimore, it was a complicated relationship at times.
Pousson highlights the migration of the city’s Jewish population from its East Baltimore tenement roots to the Druid Hill Park area and finally, to Park Heights, Mt. Washington, and Pikesville. Jews, Pousson points out, were also victims of Baltimore’s notorious segregated housing laws—one reason they moved to the then-empty western city suburbs.
The ride passes the home of Abram Hutzler, who launched the family’s iconic downtown department store—segregated like others—as well as that of Walter Sondheim, who oversaw the desegregation of the public schools in 1954, and the former residence of Clarence and Juanita Jackson Mitchell, the first couple of Baltimore’s Civil Rights movement.
There’s also a stop at “public pool No. 2,” once designated for Druid Hill Park’s “colored” patrons—the only outdoor pool then available to them. Young white and Jewish progressives protested the park’s segregated tennis policies in 1948, organizing an interracial tennis match, but the park’s two pools remained separate until 1956. Later, in disrepair for decades, the pool—lifeguard chairs intact—was filled with dirt and grass and turned into a memorial landscape by artist Joyce Scott.
“Black kids are still three times as likely to be drowning victims—a direct result of discrimination. There was no place for their great-grandparents to swim and that legacy has been passed down through generations,” chimes in pediatrician/bicyclist Dr. Ralph Brown. “I harp on that with everyone—have you gotten them swimming lessons yet?”