By Gabrielle Dean, PhD
Special to the AFRO
Who is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery? The historic Black cemetery in Westport, Baltimore, which is owned and operated by the Sharp Street Memorial United Methodist Church, was founded in 1872. That’s a lot of local history.
“Looking at cemetery records, death certificates and tombstone data, we’ve documented over 60,000 burials,” said Nancy Bramucci Sheads, the retired Maryland State Archives archivist who has been building a database for the cemetery since 2013.
Beyond names and dates, the cemetery is also the key to many life stories from the past. Digging deeper into historical records, undergraduate students in the Johns Hopkins University class, titled “Researching the Africana Archive: Black Cemetery Stories,” have compiled the biographies of several noteworthy individuals interred at Mount Auburn—movers and shakers from a few generations ago whose accomplishments have been lost to time.
The students gave well-deserved props to the subjects of their cemetery research in a presentation on May 9 to Sharp Street congregants and other guests, and have published their biographies on the publicly accessible class website, Mourning in Baltimore.
Lillie May Carroll Jackson, pioneering civil rights leader, Joe Gans, one of greatest lightweight boxers of all time, and Nellie Louise Young, the first African-American woman licensed to practice medicine in Maryland are all local luminaries buried at Mount Auburn. Students learned about them on a tour of the cemetery with Jesse J. Bennett Jr., a retired educator who serves as Mount Auburn’s volunteer research coordinator.
But how about Roy Satoyia Bond and wife, Elvira Bond, or William McCard and brother Harry Stanton McCard? Does Estelle Cummings Fennell or Aldina Hawkins Brown ring a bell?
“They may not be household names, but these folks did incredible things in their time,” said Bennett.
“We knew that several trailblazing early civil rights lawyers were buried in the cemetery–William Ashbie Hawkins, Harry Sythe Cummings and William McCard,” said Gabrielle Dean, a librarian and JHU faculty member who teaches the class along with Sheads and Bennett. “We also wanted to look at their families, because civil rights commitments are often nurtured in the family. And family connections can also lead us to the achievements of women in the early 1900s, who can be less visible in history because they face barriers related to both race and gender in many arenas.”
Each student chose someone to research from the families of Hawkins, Cummings or McCard, or a fourth lawyer from the following generation, Roy Bond. Clues came in the form of Census records, death certificates, obituaries and newspaper coverage.
“Information about social events, occupations, details that help us feel like we know these people as people—all that came from the AFRO archives,” said Dean. “This class couldn’t happen without the AFRO’s long history of community reporting.”
Roy Bond, the “Divorce King” of the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, used to counsel couples to stay together before he took their case, according to the biography by Joelie Garcia, a physics major graduating this year who also studies in the Museums and Society program. Popular and cheerful, a dynamic participant in many fraternal organizations, Bond seems to have taken some of the sting out of divorce, which used to carry more social stigma than it does today.
Despite his legal specialization in divorce, Bond himself stayed married for almost 30 years to Elvira Molson Bond until her death in 1951. Maybe it was a good match because Elvira Bond was as much a powerhouse as her husband. She put her energy into political organizing and civic and church leadership, noted Kya Nicholson, a senior public health and Africana studies major. Elvira Bond started out as a domestic science teacher and became “a community giant of her time,” in Nicholson’s words.
Nicholson had to resort to bullet points to list all of Elvira Bond’s accomplishments. So did Sarah Marquez, a junior who is majoring in biology and history of medicine, in her biography of physician Harry Stanton McCard. With his brother William, the lawyer, Harry McCard relocated to Baltimore from Illinois after serving in the Spanish-American War. McCard set up a medical practice affiliated with Provident Hospital and mentored many young doctors. But his interests were wide-ranging—he played in the Mandolin Club at the University of Wisconsin and also founded the first Black national sports organization, the American Tennis Association.
Professions like law and medicine were much harder for women to break into in the early 1900s. But the women researched by juniors Summer Suliman, a sociology and Africana studies major, and Toyosi Fowowe, a public health major, found their own ways to make a mark. Fowowe was drawn to Aldina Hawkins Brown, the daughter of William Ashbie Hawkins, because of her artistry and community service as a dressmaker. Like Elvira Bond, Aldina Brown started out as a teacher, but many of her classes were aimed at adult women looking for economic independence. She ran a family business renting out a vacation cabin in Luray, Virginia, and eventually moved to Brooklyn, New York, where she taught new migrants from the South and the Caribbean during some of the toughest years of the Great Depression. Her remains were returned to Baltimore and she was buried there near her family.
Suliman chose Estelle Cummings Fennell, in part,because of her illustrious siblings—Harry Cummings, the first African American councilman of Baltimore City, was her older brother, and Ida Cummings, a leader in the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, was her older sister. Estelle Cummings followed in their footsteps. She became the second wife of Joseph Fennell, the proprietor of a pharmacy on Druid Hill Avenue, after a career in teaching, and then devoted her time to civic and advocacy organizations like the YWCA, the NAACP, the Citizens’ Committee for Justice, and the Frances E. W. Harper Temple of the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks. Back then, it was called racial uplift; today we might call this the necessary, behind-the-scenes work of community building and social justice.
Uncovering these lives filled with civic, church and community purpose as well as professional success and family ties made a big impact on the students. When asked what they took away from the research experience, all of them said that they were inspired to become more involved in community organizations.
For more information on ancestors’ names and dates at Resurrecting Mount Auburn Cemetery please click here.