Playing for Civil Rights

On July 11, 1948, members of the Young Progressives of Maryland and the Baltimore Tennis Club staged a nationally famous interracial tennis match to protest the park's Jim Crow regulations, which prohibited mixed-race use of facilities, and the poor conditions of the Negro courts at Druid Hill Park. As soon as the match began, police ordered the players to leave. When the players sat down in protest, they were removed in paddy wagons called Black Mariahs to the Northern District Police Headquarters. In his last column for the Baltimore Sun, H.L. Mencken demanded that such relics of Klu Kluxery be wiped out of Maryland. Baltimore parks were desegregated in 1952.

Baltimore, Maryland · United States