A street runs through cities and towns of black America that back in the day was Black Wall Street.
In Cambridge, it is Pine Street. Like many others, it is no longer the business and social hub for a disenfranchised group of people that during the years of racial segregation had no other place to go.
“It was the chitterling circuit,” recalls Mayor Victoria Jackson-Stanley, who, in 2008, made history as the city’s first black and female mayor. “The James Browns and Ella Fitzgeralds who couldn’t find a place as they were going south, would stop in Cambridge to stay and perform. Pine Street was the place to be, the heart of the black business community.”
Historians cite urban renewal and racial integration as key contributors to the diminished significance of streets around the nation that were economic and cultural hubs for black life. Barber and beauty shops. Grocery stores. Restaurants. Nightclubs. Hotels and bed-and-breakfast lodging that served notables in entertainment, religion and civil rights. Name it and it was there.
The undoing of Pine Street sets it apart from the others. The best of it burned to the ground, destroyed at the hands of members of the same community it served. A half century later, members of that same community, many of them who witnessed the burning, join to reflect upon an emotionally complicated step toward a better way.
A series of events this summer is not intended to glorify the July 24, 1967, rally for racial equality that erupted into civil unrest. Activist H. Rapp Brown had delivered a fiery speech that day to a black crowd in the 600 block of Pine, located in the city’s minority 2nd Ward. According to historical accounts, his words, “If Cambridge doesn’t come around, Cambridge got to be burned down,” incited a crowd that set a blaze that destroyed the core of black life.
![A handcuffed H. Rap Brown is led into a federal building cell block July 26,1967 in Alexandra ,Va, after being arrested by FBI agents. Brown, charged with complicity in a riot at Cambridge,Md, was being held pending a hearing on his removal to Maryland. He is the head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. (AP Photo) [Via MerlinFTP Drop]](https://www.delmarvanow.com/gcdn/-mm-/7d2b3d7fccdef7c94e16f139f07c844fe085e9b7/c=0-120-2000-1250/local/-/media/2017/01/31/Salisbury/Salisbury/636214706853141747-H.-RAP-in-Alexandria.jpg?width=660&height=373&fit=crop&format=pjpg&auto=webp)
Rather, the 50th anniversary of the blaze, “Reflections on Pine,” is a chance to heal, organizers say. It will recall the struggle and the role Cambridge played in the national Civil Rights Movement. It will honor Civil Rights leader Gloria Richardson and her lieutenant, Fred Jackson, as well as abolitionist Harriett Tubman, a native of the region.
READ MORE:Cambridge riot of 1967 offers lessons for today
It celebrates a period of pride in black history, when blacks owned businesses, some of them granting loans when banks were off-limits. Most of all, it is a stage to set the record straight about one of the most misunderstood events in history.
“Forty or more businesses were destroyed in Cambridge during that fire,” said historian and author Clara Small, professor emerita of history at Salisbury University. She has researched and written books on events of the era. “The fire wiped out the black power structure. Now, people are starting to look at why — inequality. The fire needs to be clarified.”
What matters, says William Jackson, who was a preteen at the time, is that the world knows that the intention was to burn one building — the government controlled former Pine Street School — in symbolic protest.
“Everybody wants to remember the fire, but nobody wants to remember the struggle before and after the fire,” Jackson said. “The school was the target because the burning was more about bringing attention to poor education conditions. The fire just got out of hand.”
Black Cambridge in the 1960s was a time of outdoor bathrooms at houses in town. Unemployment was high and segregated, substandard black schools remained more than a decade since the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954 that declared separate schools based on race as unconstitutional.
“What drove the movement was economy and housing; a lot of people were renting substandard homes and a lot of houses had outside plumbing,” said community activist Dion Banks, an organizer of the remembrance at the Eastern Shore Network for Change, the event sponsor. The notion that the fire was ruthless black-on-black destruction is what the Network wants to erase.
“It’s all that people know us for — the fire put us on the map,” said Banks, who founded ESNC with attorney Kisha Petticolas. “This is the 50th anniversary of the ‘long, hot summer,’ as it is known, and the ESNC is committed to creating economic prosperity for change.”
Gloria Richardson, now in her early 90s and living in New York, was from a prominent Cambridge family and regarded the first woman to lead a grass-roots civil rights campaign outside the deep south. Richardson was outspoken, “and did not denounce violent tactics,” Small said.
“She was unique because she was a woman leading the movement. Rosa Parks was a figure; she did not lead the movement,” Small said, and recalled Richardson’s passion for decent housing, and community frustration over the postponement of a proposed 200-unit housing project for blacks in the city.
Richardson, notable leader of the 1960s Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee, could not be reached for an interview for this article, but a close family member who did not want to be named remembered that “one of the big issues on Pine was the substandard school next to beer gardens and clubs — People wanted to close it.”
The Cambridge fire is a scar on an overall movement that was nonviolent, said Jackson-Stanley, the mayor. She recalls a story told about Richardson lieutenant Fred Jackson, her father.
“My father, during the height of that movement, was praying on a corner with other demonstrators and some person started smashing eggs on his head, trying to get him to respond,” she said. “My father sat there and took it. He made the point: ‘You’re not going to get me angry enough to respond.’ “
![Troops of the Maryland National Guard, with bayonets fixed, move down Pine Street to disperse an unruly, rock throwing mob in Cambridge, Maryland, July 27, 1967. The disturbance followed a rally in the predominantly black Second Ward, scene of a riot and fires on Monday night and Tuesday. (AP Photo/Bob Schutz) ORG XMIT: APHS391125 [Via MerlinFTP Drop]](https://www.delmarvanow.com/gcdn/-mm-/41758885aca378fe49b6539f1044af04b907bdef/c=0-536-2998-2230/local/-/media/2017/01/31/Salisbury/Salisbury/636214707825502213-Maryland-National-Guard-in-Cambridge.1.jpg?width=660&height=373&fit=crop&format=pjpg&auto=webp)
The aftermath of the Rapp Brown rally even numbed participants. Some in the community blamed Brown and even Richardson, who had moved from the region and is said to have encouraged his visit.
“It was a divided community and some think nothing came out of that,” Small said of the period. “In ’65, National Guard troops stayed in Cambridge. Leaders blamed Gloria Richardson. She moved to New York in ’64, but still worked part time for SNCC,” or the national Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, for which the CNAC was modeled.
Others blame white firefighters they say wouldn’t put out the fire. Flames soon jumped utility lines and spread.
“That is a night I will never forget — flames were flying all over the place,” said Gilbert Cephas, who was 18 at the time. “They begged them to give us a hose. When they finally got one, it was too late.”
Emerging from the ruin was Elks Dorchester Lodge 223. The Pine Street landmark is one of two businesses or institutions destroyed that rebuilt. It continues to flourish. The other survivor is a Baptist church around the corner that backs up to Pine.
“After we lost the hub, one by one the businesses dropped off,” said Cambridge-based Carlton Stanley, president of the Tri-State Association of the Elks. “The Elks had resources to get started. But in order for us to get financed — no one bank would finance us — four banks agreed to lend us the money for financing for this building.”
Some point to the 2008 election and 2012 re-election of Jackson-Stanley as mayor, calling it progress.
“We have not rebounded the way some of our neighboring communities have,” Jackson-Stanley said. “But the wounds are scabbing over enough that we’ve got to move forward.”
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