In the middle of Canton on Juneteenth, a crowd gathered and looked up at 48 names enshrined on a new metal historical marker.
“These are the names of our ancestors,” said She Anderson, a member of the Canton Anti-Racism Alliance. “Mothers, fathers, children, that are not here, but we are recognizing them and giving them a voice and saying, ‘We see you.’”
The marker was unveiled to community members, local politicians and passersby at an event on Thursday. It is a culmination of a two-year effort to recognize the darker parts of Canton’s history as an opium plantation owned and operated by Captain John O’Donnell, the namesake of a street and public square in Canton.
The 48 names on the marker were listed as O’Donnell’s property in probate records. The community’s recognition of the people enslaved in 18th-century Canton is part of an effort to reckon with the Baltimore neighborhood’s history and chart a path for a more honest, inclusive and welcoming future, according to the alliance.
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“Stolen Black labor built the plantation wealth that was converted unto industrial wealth that built the Canton we live in today,” said John Ford, co-chair of the Canton Anti-Racism Alliance, whose efforts, in large part, led to the new marker.
Ford said it’s important for the local community to step up and put Black people at the “very roots of Canton’s history,” if the community wants to be welcoming in the present.
In the center of O’Donnell Square Park, behind the crowd assembled for the unveiling, is an empty space where a statue once stood to memorialize O’Donnell, founder of Canton. The statue was erected in the 1980s and torn down in 2021 as a result of the work of the alliance. Not everyone agreed with action, believing that the statue’s removal was an erasure of Canton’s history.
The alliance was founded in 2020 by members of the community who were motivated by the larger anti-racism movement in the nation. Their work started with a deep dive into Canton’s history.
The statue came down after Ford worked with archivists at the Maryland State Archives to find O’Donnell’s will and probate records from 1805. “First and foremost, at the top was a list of people he had owned at the time of his death,” Ford said.
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Included were infants, and a majority of the people were under the age of 18 at the time. Some were labeled mixed-race, which, based on other records of the time, suggested coercive sexual violence against Black women, Ford said.
Members of the alliance said they were shocked as they looked over the records.
“When you see that written out, it is just overwhelming,” said Maura Taylor, a member of the alliance. “A set of dishes being worth more than a child? There is no way to reconcile that.”
The more complete history of Canton recognized on the marker is what people at the event in O’Donnell Square Park were confronting, with the hope it will help chart a future for the neighborhood.
“The history of Canton is a big part of what has made it the opposite of welcoming and inclusive for so many of our neighbors who, unfortunately, felt unwelcome for so many years [by living] in a neighborhood where, in its center square, was a statue of a man who had enslaved their ancestors,” said state delegate Mark Edelson, a founding member and former chair of the Canton Anti-Racism Alliance. He was joined by current City Council President Zeke Cohen.
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At the’s unveiling, Cohen reflected that, at a time when it feels as though the rest of the nation is working to forget painful and complex moments of our history, the will of the Canton community is doing the opposite by choosing to center names and faces that had been erased and chart a future of “the community we deserve.”
Danny Skariah, a born-and-raised Marylander, stumbled upon the square on a morning coffee run.
Standing at the back of the crowd with his toddler in his arms, Skariah said, “While he doesn’t understand words yet, I want my son surrounded by love, diversity and the belief of honoring everyone.”
Scared as a Brown man in America at this moment, Skariah said the new marker helped him find what community members in Canton, by reckoning with their past, are hoping for their future.
Correction: This article was updated to reflect the proper time frame in which the people were enslaved and the year the statue of Capt. John O’Donnell was taken down.
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