“This Independent Fight We Are Making Is Local”: The Election of 1920 and Electoral Politics in Black Baltimore

Abstract

In 1920, William Ashbie Hawkins, an esteemed lawyer and veteran of the struggle for civil rights, became the first African American to run for the U.S. Senate in Maryland. Hawkins’s independent campaign reflected a growing political insurgency among African Americans in the local Republican Party which built upon a longer tradition of independent political action with roots in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. For black Baltimoreans, this movement was part of a plan to force white Republicans to acquiesce to black demands revealing fluidity in political activity on the local level. Although African Americans may have identified and registered as Republicans, party affiliation did not prevent them from building and sustaining independent political movements on the local level to advance a civil rights agenda.