Baltimore has lost so much of its collective memory that no one seems to remember the historical significance of five circa-1820 red-brick row houses that Mercy Hospital wants to raze to construct a $292 million inpatient tower. Not members of the City Council, not the preservationists who want to save the buildings in the 300 block of St. Paul Place.

Yet those stately row houses are unique. They stand as the last relics of an unusual mixed-race residential and business neighborhood which existed at the site more than a century ago. It was wiped out in Baltimore’s first city-sponsored “Negro removal” project.

This forgotten chapter started in 1914, four years after Baltimore became the first city in the United States to require by law that each residential block be segregated on the basis of the race of its majority residents. “Nothing like it can be found in any statute book or ordinance in this country,” the New York Times reported, and many cities copied the law.

The legislation served as a response to W. Ashbie Hawkins’ purchase of a row house at 1834 McCulloh St., near Eutaw Place. Because Hawkins was black and the house was on a lily-white block, his acquisition was interpreted as a “Negro invasion.”

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“The colored people should not be allowed to encroach on some of the best residential streets in the city and force white people to vacate their homes,” agitated white neighbors said in a resolution.

Hawkins was a prominent lawyer, an activist in W.E.B. DuBois’ Niagara movement and later in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He argued seminal civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and became the first African American to run for U.S. Senate from Maryland. A registered Republican, he ran as an independent to protest the GOP’s support of Jim Crow practices.

Hawkins and his partner, George W. F. McMechen, had a law office at 21 E. Saratoga St., near City Hall and the courthouse. They were evicted when Mayor James H. Preston targeted the district for razing in 1914, using an unprecedented condemnation mechanism he copied from London.

He claimed the narrow and badly congested St. Paul Street needed widening between Lexington and Centre streets as justification for the condemnation. But it is likely that Mayor Preston, preoccupied with segregation issues, saw the mixed-race district as an embarrassment. After all, genteel old white families lived there in seeming harmony with a scattering of black families at a time when politicians harangued against such coexistence.

Also located on those streets were professional offices, rooming houses, cheap hotels and educational institutions serving blacks, as well as St. Francis Xavier, the nation’s oldest Catholic church for African Americans.

Mayor Preston condemned all of that real estate. Once the area was cleared, the grateful city named the resulting green space Preston Gardens.

It is unlikely that any belated protests will be enough to save the historic St. Paul Place rowhouses. But Hawkins surely would encourage protests. After all the credo of his Niagara movement chapter was: “To sin by silence when we should protest makes cowards out of men. The human race has climbed on protest. Had no voice been raised against injustice, ignorance and lust, the inquisition yet would serve the law, and guillotines decide our least disputes. The few who dare must speak and speak again, to right the wrongs of many.”

The author of those words was Ella Wheeler Wilcox, a white poet and freethinker. She, too, has been forgotten.

Antero Pietila is writing a book about how bigotry shaped the Baltimore metropolitan area. He can be reached at hap5905@hotmail.com.