February is Black History month. It is a good time to dust off my memories of being a newspaper reporter in Baltimore, Maryland during the Civil Rights Movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

In the early 1960s, my city editor learned there was a major racial demonstration planned for Cambridge, Maryland. That was a small city south of Baltimore on the Chesapeake Bay famous for having a fleet of commercial sailboats working to dredge up oysters from the bottom of the bay.

In Cambridge, the public schools and all the local businesses, including restaurants and motels, were racially segregated. A local group of African Americans and their white allies planned to lead a Saturday night demonstration calling for more racial integration of the schools and the businesses in the community.

The demonstrators planned to parade down the main street in Cambridge and then hold a rally with speeches and singing in the main square downtown. My city editor assigned me to cover the story.

As I drove into Cambridge, I wondered what the attitude of white officials was going to be? Would they protect the black citizens in their city who were demonstrating for their civil rights? Or would they follow the lead of a number of southern governors, who had refused to use state and local police forces to maintain public safety during civil rights demonstrations?

I speculated in my mind about Maryland’s governor, J. Millard Tawes. A worrisome thought was that he was a native of rural Maryland. He thus had grown up in a rigidly racially-segregated community and no doubt as a youth had been a segregationist.

On the other hand, Tawes had been elected governor on the basis of his ability to be a compromiser and solve problems in a way that pleased most Marylanders, black and white.

If things went out of control in Cambridge and an African American civil rights demonstration turned into a race riot, would Governor Tawes intervene? Would he send in the National Guard?

Downtown Cambridge in the early 1960s resembled the downtown of any average United States small city. It was perhaps four-blocks square. The streets were lined with shops and stores. Most of the buildings appeared to have been built around the turn of the 20th Century, but many of the storefronts had been modernized with large plate glass windows and neon signs.

I walked to the major intersection in town. It was filled with people milling around and looking as though they were waiting for something to happen. The vast majority of the people were white males. Many of them were quite burly and tough-looking.

The crowd was growing larger as more white people arrived in downtown Cambridge. I asked myself: “Was I standing in the middle of a white mob? Was this the peaceful quiet before the nasty storm of a racial confrontation? Would segregationist whites soon be beating up demonstrating blacks in the middle of Cambridge?”

Four or five blocks away, on the main street of the town, I could see a large number of black citizens, and some white citizens, marching steadily toward the downtown area. Similar to civil rights demonstrators all over the United States at that time, they were waving pro-racial integration signs, singing hymns, and shouting civil rights slogans.

The white crowd was now standing in the middle of the street, defiantly blocking the path of the civil rights demonstrators into the downtown area.

Slowly and steadily, block by block, the African American protesters continued their parade for civil rights toward the downtown. When the protest marchers were just one block away, I could see their faces and hear their voices as they sang their songs and yelled their slogans.

Suddenly there was the sound of loud truck motors and screeching brakes as a convoy of military trucks pulled into the intersection in downtown Cambridge. National Guard soldiers armed with rifles jumped out of the trucks and began taking up positions around the intersection.

An Army jeep pulled up. Out stepped the commander of this particular contingent of the Maryland National Guard. He turned and walked toward the civil rights demonstrators. He raised both of his arms in the air to signal them to stop their march. He said:

“Maryland Governor J. Millard Tawes has declared martial law in Cambridge. You are all, white and black, to immediately return to your homes. A military curfew is in effect as of this moment.”

The reaction to the military commander’s orders was immediate. The civil rights demonstrators quickly retreated back down the street they had just marched along so defiantly. The whites either walked to their homes or returned to their automobiles and drove away.

Although raised in racial segregation, Governor Tawes had ordered in the Maryland National Guard to prevent violence that night in Cambridge. This civil rights dispute would be settled by negotiation, not by a white mob beating up civil rights demonstrators while the local and state authorities stood by and did nothing.

Although it ended peacefully, the confrontation in Cambridge that night was significant for its typicality. By the early 1960s, incidents such as the one in Cambridge were occurring all over the United States, particularly in the South. Taken together, all these events were building national support for civil rights reform.

“The fires of discord” are burning throughout America, said President John F. Kennedy as he sent to Congress the proposed law that became the Civil Rights act of 1964. That law ended forever legal racial discrimination everywhere in the United States, including Cambridge, Maryland.

Bob Loevy is a retired professor of political science at Colorado College. For an online tutorial on significant places and events in the Civil Rights Movement, google “Bob Loevy Home Page” and click on II,1,A.