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white upper and middle class elements of the hinterlands. It also had important
vehicles of "mass culture": cinemas, theaters, and music halls, the major radio
stations, and, above all, the newspapers. The Baltimore Sun papers (the Sun and
the Evening Sun), in particular, circulated throughout the state. And as Baltimore's
culture was segregated, so was its cultural sway over its hinterlands. The
institutions of Baltimore's Black community had much influence and attracted
much attention in the Black communities throughout the state. Baltimore's
Pennsylvania Avenue, for example, with its entertainment spots like the Royal
Theater, was a major site of the national Black cultural renaissance of the 1920s.
Additionally, the Baltimore Afro-American (one of the most important Black
papers in the country) was widely read outside the city, helping to make Black
Baltimore a kind of metropolis in its own right.
Finally, Baltimore's influence extended beyond the state into much of the
upper seaboard South, making this area, in a weaker sense than the areas in the
state of Maryland, part of its hinterlands as well. As has been noted, Baltimore had
a privileged commercial relationship to the upper South to which it had easy access
via the Chesapeake Bay and the railroads. Apart from the state of Maryland itself.
Virginia and adjacent areas were the origin of much of the Black and white
immigration to Baltimore in the 1910s and 1920s. And the cultural institutions of
Baltimore, such as Johns Hopkins University, were magnets far South of the
Maryland border, where the Sun papers and the Afro-American also attracted
attention and circulated freely.-*?
However, while Baltimore's influence was growing steadily within its region
and over its hinterlands during the 1920s, this influence should not be overstated.
In Metropolis and Region, Otis Dudley Duncan and four other scholars analyze
cities throughout the U.S. at mid-century, and classify them according to their
"metropolitan functions" and "regional relations." They conclude that Baltimore in
1950 had relatively weak relationships with its hinterlands, far weaker than those of
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