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Political Action Committee was dissolved, and an independent Civic Interest Group was formed in 1955, to partner student activists from Morgan with those from Coppin State Teachers College, Goucher College, Hopkins and other Baltimore-area schools. Although Morgan administrators could not officially support the student demonstrations, they agreed that the Morgan students could exercise their citizenship rights. and Maryland Fellowship House. They targeted Hutzler’s department store; Read’s Drug Stores; restaurants such as Bickford’s, Thompson’s, Miller Brothers, China Doll, Hoopers, Oriole, Grants and the Hecht Company’s Rooftop Restaurant; and other segregated businesses serving the public. *** The Rev. Douglas B. Sands Sr. recalls that when he was a freshman at Morgan in 1952, upperclassmen promised they would not haze him harshly if he joined them in protesting against segregation at the Read’s Drug Store near the campus, on the corner of E. Cold Spring Lane and Loch Raven Blvd. Rev. Sands recalls that students protested at the store day and night and that African-American cooks at Read’s lunch counter would sometimes serve them. However, if those cooks were not on site, service was refused. Rev. Sands went on to become the president of the Morgan State Student Government Association and a founder of the school’s Political Action Committee before he graduated in 1956. During the early demonstrations at Northwood Shopping Center and elsewhere in Baltimore, students avoided going to jail by walking away before police officers finished reading them the trespassing law. But Rev. Sands says 1955 saw a major change in tactics, when students began listening to the entire law and allowing themselves to be jailed. Morgan’s administrators had to distance themselves from the protestors: some state legislators were threatening to withhold funds from Morgan to force school leaders away from the movement. So the Morgan
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MORGAN MAGAZINE V O L U M E I 2 0 11
In an Afro article dated Sept. 2, 1961, the Rev. Marion Bascom, pastor of Douglass Memorial Community Church, backed the student demonstrators, saying, “We shall continue to bail out the students so long as their actions are nonviolent.” His comment came after the arrest of eight students charged with trespassing at the Double T Diner at Rolling Rd. and Route 40 West. The arrest resulted from an attempt by the Civic Interest Group to end discrimination policies in businesses along Route 40. Juanita Jackson Mitchell, who by then had become the first AfricanAmerican female lawyer in Maryland, represented the students in court. Students also wrote to President John F. Kennedy asking for help for their cause. The local NAACP provided bail money for students and also paid for buses to take students to sit-ins at restaurants and other establishments along the route and as far away as Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Morgan students formed a protest army, as thousands of them fought against segregation in Baltimore and across the state, long before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By the early ’60s, Morgan students had been instrumental in gaining a number of civil rights wins, including the desegregation of Read’s Drug Stores in 1955, Arundel Ice Cream Company in 1959 and the Rooftop Restaurant in Northwood Shopping Center in 1960. However, the movie theater at Northwood remained a galling holdout. ***
The protests at Northwood Theatre reached a high point during several cold days in late February 1963. So many students were arrested inside the establishment that police had to run wagons continuously between Northeastern police station and the shopping center, The Afro-American reported. As the number of arrests mushroomed, more students came to join the picket lines, overwhelming the capacity of the police to transport them.
MSU history and geography lecturer Gloria Marrow was a student at Morgan at the time. She recalls that she was willing to get arrested and go to jail but could not do so: there was no more room in the patrol wagons. Students worked in shifts to replace those who were arrested or had to go to classes. The student demonstrators were always polite and well-dressed; some even occasionally spoke in French because foreigners of color were supposed to be granted admission. More than 343 students were placed in Pine Street Jail, which was designed to house only 140 persons. Of those incarcerated, about 200 were women from Morgan State. Women from Johns Hopkins and Goucher were also among those jailed. The judge asked each student to post $600 bail, a total of about a quarter of a million dollars for all of