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CHAPTERS
Ethnicity and Race

Interviewer: Relative to your schooling, do you recall feeling at the time
that, although you were in a segregated school, you were getting as good
schooling as the whites were in their schools?

Clarence Milchell: Well, at the time I didn't even consider that question
because I had not lived in a situation where I had any means of judging what
it would be like to go to an integrated school. The neighborhood in which I
lived was reasonably integrated. The Greeks, Italians, Jews, some Germans,
I think - yes, I'm sure they were there. But it was not the normal kind of
relationship. They were mainly there in business capacities, although they
lived over the businesses. One, for example, one of the Germans had a
grocery store. One of the Jewish people had a shoe store and also a grocery
store on another corner. Then the Greeks had what was, I guess, an ice
cream parlor. The Germans had what can best be described as a butcher
shop.

Then there was a man named Norden Holdtz. It sticks in my mind
because it was my first experience of ever going into a saloon. His saloon
was around the corner from where we lived, and one night, a very hot night,
I was walking with my father, and he decided that he would go in to have a
glass of beer. They had what was called a ladies parlor in this place, and he
sat me down on a very lovely ~ in retrospect it seemed very lovely - chair.
Well upholstered. The place was very neat. And they brought me in a very
big glass of what we called sassaparilla in those days. It was such a pleasant
experience, it sticks in my memory.

Clarence Mitchell, interviewed by Ed Edwin on
growing up in Baltimore in the 1920s1

To say the obvious, ethnicity and race were important factors in the social
structure of Baltimore on the eve of the Great Depression and deeply conditioned
the social struggle that emerged in this region in the 1930s. First-person, literary,
and secondary sources report that throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries racial-ethnic communities proliferated in Baltimore, displaying a range of
community institutions and traditions similar to those found in other U.S. cities -
particularly Northern cities. Ethnically-based benevolent and self-help