By 1952, blacks were promoted to streetcar motormen and bus drivers by the Baltimore Transit Co., segregation was abolished at Ford's Theater and black students were admitted to the 'A' course at Polytechnic Institute.
While a City Council bill that would have required all places of public accommodation in the city to serve all "qualified persons" failed in 1958, the Lord Baltimore Hotel and the Congress Hotel dropped their restrictive guest policies.
Blacks were welcomed in all first-run downtown movie houses, and the Baltimore News-Post eliminated racial designations in news stories. It would take The Sun another three years to drop racial designations in crime stories.
Thomas Edgar Morris Jr., a Douglass High School graduate, received a state scholarship and was the first black student to enter Washington College while the formerly all-black Morgan State College graduated its first integrated class.
There were, by 1958, integrated classes at the Johns Hopkins University, Loyola College and the University of Maryland. The Planned Parenthood Association, whose clinics historically had operated on an interracial basis, added a black gynecologist to its staff.
Other advancements that year included adding 100,000 black registered voters — 22,000 more since the 1956 presidential election.
From 1946 to the last report it issued in 1962, the Hollander Foundation charted the slow march toward equality and freedom for Maryland's black citizens.
Its last report noted that the "issue of discrimination in places of public accommodation dominated race relations in Maryland in 1961, overshadowing solid but less than spectacular developments in education, employment, recreation, professional associations and civic participation."
The 1960 census reported that black homeownership had increased from 15,684 in 1950 to 32,895 by 1960, a gain of 109 percent.
The Real Estate Board of Greater Baltimore admitted six black members and Realtors. The state's four training schools for delinquent boys and girls were integrated.
Robert B. Watts, an African-American attorney, was appointed a judge of the Baltimore Municipal Court, while Charles A. Richardson Jr. became the first African-American to hold a clerkship in a Maryland court of record.
George L. Russell Jr. became the second black person to be appointed to the Baltimore Jail Board.
Baltimore's meter maids became an integrated police unit, while Mayor Harold Grady named Sonja Reynolds as a clerk, the first black person to ever work in a Baltimore mayor's office.
The University of Maryland had more than 300 black graduate students, and the board of trustees at Gilman School voted to desegregate in the fall of 1962.
After Eastern Shore college students threatened to boycott Salisbury restaurants, city leaders persuaded eight restaurants to serve black patrons.
"The idea of standing up and fussing is catching on," Douglas B. Sands, executive secretary of the Maryland Commission on Interracial Problems and Relations, told "Toward Equality" in 1961.
"Negroes are less worried about the feelings of white people than they used to be. If they have an urge to crusade, they will," he said.
