78

1920 the proportion of Blacks in the city's population was fairly steady, 14.8% to
16.2%. Of course, as the city's population grew, so did the Black community's, from
27,898 in 1860 to 83,911 in 1920. Steady rural migration was responsible for a large
portion of the community's population growth. This migration was, however, never
so large throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as to be
massively disruptive of community development. And since most in-migration to
Baltimore originated in Baltimore's direct hinterlands in Maryland, or, secondarily
in its more distant hinterlands in Northern Virginia, the transition of the migrants
from rural to urban life was somewhat eased for the migrants themselves and for
the community as a whole.

In the early twentieth century, during the Great Migration surrounding
World War I, migration from the countryside to Baltimore increased, and for the
first time the proportion of African Americans in Baltimore's overall population
increased beyond the 16.2% ceiling to 17.7% in 1930. In the 1920s, Baltimore's
Black population grew 31.2%, 5 times as fast as the white population. While the
increased migration no doubt put a strain on the Black communities institutional
and cultural network, the important point to emphasize is how small the increase in
the Baltimore community's population was compared to other cities. For example,
in the 1920s, the Black population of Cleveland grew 108.7%, Chicago grew
113.7%, New York grew 114.9%, and Detroit grew 197%. Moreover, unlike these
cities Baltimore continued to receive most of its migrant Black population from
adjacent rural areas in Maryland or the upper South: in 1930 59.4% of Baltimore's
population was born in its state compared to 29.5% for Philadelphia and 24.5% for
New York. Unlike African American communities in other cities, especially to the
North, Baltimore's Black community was never largely a transplant from distant
rural areas, and even the Great Migration failed to demographically disrupt its
processes of community- and culture-building.