Seventeen-year-old Teresa Blackstone needed a dress. And not just any dress. She needed something special, a dress suitable for her new role as a vivacious young performer with the Weldon J. Irvine Singers, a popular community-based chorus made up of teachers and students from Annapolis' Bates High School. "My uniform was supposed to be a black dress, but I didn't have one. People only wore black dresses for funerals!" So off she went with her father into town, looking for that special dress, but there was none to be found.
That's not to say there weren't any pretty black dresses in fashionable shops in Annapolis. But Teresa couldn't just saunter into a dress shop on Main Street and find what she wanted. This was the 1940s, and downtown stores were off-limits to "colored people," as African Americans were referred to then. There were only certain places where girls like Teresa could shop and most of them had limited selections.
Many of the shop owners who catered to the black community had close relationships with their customers. Teresa's father, Lawrence Blackstone, knew such a man who owned a shop on Maryland Avenue. Her father came to the shop owner with his problem. "Mr. Blackstone," she remembers the shop owner telling her father, "I'm going to see what I can do for you." He arranged for an associate to drive to one of the big Washington department stores to bring the dresses to Annapolis.
Teresa could have gone to D.C. herself to shop for a dress. But she knew that as a black person she would not be allowed to go into the dressing room and try it on. "You even couldn't put on a hat," she says. "Couldn't do any of those things."
She still remembers the day the man known as "Mr. Leonard" drove up to her home at 108 Calvert St. with a car full of dresses: "I'd never seen so many black dresses in my life." For over an hour and a half, Teresa tried on the dresses, modeling each one for her parents and relatives. In the end, she chose a sophisticated little number with gold buttons radiating from the neckline, arguably the prettiest dress of any girl in the Irvine Singers and one that helped her stand out from the crowd.
Teresa wasn't afraid of standing out. The Blackstones were well-respected members of the community and longtime members of Asbury United Methodist Church on West Street. Bishop Edgar Love at the church had noticed how well Teresa was doing in her studies in religious philosophy at Howard University and decided that a girl with her education and talent would make a good addition to the church's outreach efforts in the deep South. He told her parents that right after graduation, Teresa was not to go home to Annapolis. Instead, he directed her straight to Union Station to take a train to Louisiana for her new job in the ministry.
To go from Howard University, one of the country's most esteemed African-American colleges, to Shreveport, La., in the late 1940s was quite a shock for a young black woman, even one who had grown up in the sleepy southern town of Annapolis. Early on in her residency, she was sent to St. James Parish on church business. "Well," Teresa says, "I got on a bus and sat in the first empty seat I saw. The driver told me to go to the back of the bus. I said no. He insisted, and threatened to call the police. I told him, you just go right ahead." In the end, the bus driver let her stay where she was, but news of her trip reached the Rev. Calvin, district supervisor of the Louisiana Conference. "He explained to me that down here, colored people ride in the back of the buses." After that, private transportation was arranged for Miss Blackstone.
The Rev. Calvin got to know the feisty young woman from Maryland well. He said, "You know, we make a good team." Teresa agreed. And in 1954, he traveled to Annapolis to ask her parents for her hand in marriage. She remained in Louisiana as his wife and partner for the next 18 years.
In 1972, Teresa Blackstone Calvin found herself back in Annapolis, a widow with four children returning to her family home. But 108 Calvert St. - the home where Teresa was born, where her father was born, the home her grandfather bought with cash earned from fighting in the Civil War as a Union soldier - was no more. In its place was the state treasury building, a brick complex so large it necessitated razing every home on Calvert from Bladen to Northwest streets. And not only was her home gone, but an entire community had disappeared. The vibrant Fourth Ward shopping and entertainment district, where generations of black families and businesses had lived and thrived, was simply gone.
While she was still in college, Teresa recalled, her father and uncle would hold meetings in the basement of 108 Calvert St. to discuss the government's plans for redevelopment of the Fourth Ward. They had hoped there was some way to stop the destruction of their community. But in the end, they realized there was nothing they could do. "Father had to be careful," she said.
The changing face of the Fourth Ward was part of a nationwide trend for urban development. It was all done in the name of progress, but for Teresa it was quite the opposite, a literal and physical dismantling of the Annapolis she remembered as a girl.
The Wright Hotel on Calvert Street (now the site of the Arundel Center and Gotts Court garage), where entertainers like Ella Fitzgerald and Cab Calloway performed, was gone. The Star Theater, gone. Family homes, doctors' offices, everything - "they just leveled it." The maternity hospital her cousin, Dr. Johnston, had built to treat black patients was no longer there. Even Catherine Gray's restaurant, where people lined up for 10-cent crab cakes was just a memory.
In their place stood The Treasury Building, the Arundel Center, a bank, county offices and a parking lot on the corner of Calvert and Clay streets that eventually became the county garage, a concrete behemoth that visually cuts off the Fourth Ward from the rest of downtown.
Teresa Blackstone Calvin went on to a career as a teacher in Anne Arundel County schools. She still is a member of Asbury United Methodist Church on West Street, one of the few remaining grand buildings of the old Fourth Ward, where her daughter, Lenora Calvin, continues the Blackstone family tradition of service to the church.
Nowadays, Teresa, along with many Annapolis residents who remember what the Fourth Ward used to be, regret how the streets of her old neighborhood have changed. It is a life and a world gone forever. But there are good changes, too. She can walk into any shop on any street in Annapolis that she wants to. And when she's told that Sylvia's Soul Food of Harlem might be opening a restaurant on Clay Street her face lights up.
"That's great!" she says. And in her eyes you can see a glimmer of hope that someday the Fourth Ward might, just might, once again be the vibrant community that it was for the young girl in the prettiest black dress.
Janice Gary is an award-winning writer of creative nonfiction. She teaches memoir-writing at Annapolis Senior Center. Do you have an Annapolis story? Contact jangary22@hotmail.com
EDITOR'S NOTE: Annapolis Stories tell the living history of the Annapolis area through the lens of individual experiences.
Additional note: These stories are personal recollections and as such, are subject to the vagaries of time, memory and point of view.
