There’s a bronze plaque that notes that Baltimore’s Cherry Hill community was started 80 years ago. One of the women who spent her childhood there is ready to tell that story.
Linda Grace Morris, the neighborhood’s intrepid historian, is anticipating the anniversary. A community celebration is planned for May 16 at Martin’s West.
“The city government did not know where they were going to put the neighborhood. No one wanted a Black neighborhood near them, so the federal government stepped in and built Cherry Hill,” Morris said. “Then, years later, Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro signed a $3 million check to buy back the neighborhood.”
Morris, who now lives in Germantown in Montgomery County, is a natural collector of people and their stories. She has her own podcast and firmly believes that history is best served by having people just sit down and tell their own stories.
She calls her project “Baltimore Boomer Tales from the Hood.” It’s a podcast about Baby Boomer nostalgia.
“And I’m looking for a sponsor,” she said.
“It’s not all about Cherry Hill. It’s about people and their stories, of how we all fit together in a small world. Even people who tell me they don’t have much to say often have connections with something interesting. I believe that everyone has a story.
“It’s a harsh world, and I want to put a positive slant on things,” she said.
Her own tale is pure Baltimore. Her grandmother was part of the Great Migration and left the Eastern Shore of Virginia (Northampton County) to first settle in West Baltimore, in one of its alley houses.
“My mother said they drove up to Baltimore in a truck that looked like the Beverly Hillbillies,” Morris said.
“The landlords tested you to see if you kept their property well and were stable. Soon the family numbered 11 persons (three separate families) and they moved to a three-story house on Gilmor Street at Edmondson Avenue.
“Cherry Hill had opened and my father qualified to live there because he was in the government at Social Security. There were income limits then. I started school in Cherry Hill in the third grade. By the fifth grade my father had reached the income limit, and we were forced to leave,” she said. “We moved to Monastery Avenue in Irvington. My sister, Judy, took the No. 8 streetcar to Towson State. By the time I was ready for college, we had a car and I could drive to college, but the rule was I also had to drive my mother for grocery shopping and be the family chauffeur.”
Our generation was not born free with full rights,” she said of the 1950s era of lingering and persistent segregation.
While racially segregated, Cherry Hill had a neighborhood town center with the A&P and a Pressman Brothers grocery stores, pharmacy, dry cleaners, hardware store, clothing shops, pool hall, Arundel ice cream parlor and the Hill Theatre, which was packed on Saturday afternoons for the kids’ matinee, she said.
She also told how her father spent three years — 10 to 13, after both his parents’ deaths — in a Black orphanage run by the Catholic Church at St. Gregory’s parish in West Baltimore.
A white physician, Dr. William Hobson Woody, originally from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, adopted her father and raised him in Bolton Hill and Homeland.
“Dr. Woody and his wife were the closest thing to grandparents we had,” said Morris.
She also recounted how her brother, John Henry Morris Jr., a promising Polytechnic Institute student, became a graduate of Yale University and its School of Law.
“Dr. Woody opened the doors to Yale and helped my brother on his own way. John supplemented the help with student loans,” she said.
She is Cherry Hill’s ambassador and is the author of “Cherry Hill, Raising Successful Black Children in Jim Crow Baltimore.”
“Cherry Hill has a fascinating history. It shows what the government can do when it has the will. It was an engine for upward mobility.
“I want people to be proud they are from Cherry Hill,” she said.
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