Alma Bell had a message for Mother Nature as she waited for Baltimore’s first AFRAM to unfold at Hopkins Plaza and Charles Center 50 years ago.
“We are here to stay. The rain will have no effect on us,” Bell, who was on the festival’s planning committee, told local papers in 1976.
AFRAM was a heavy lift even back then, said Bell, now 81. Many on the committee had never planned such a large festival, which ultimately attracted 50,000 people and included performances by Lou Rawls and Gil Scott-Heron.
“It was unbelievable because people were very pleased to have a festival that focused on them,” Bell said.
The journey of AFRAM over the last 50 years to become one of the largest African American festivals on the East Coast is one of change, resilience and, most of all, exuberant celebration of Black vitality. While dates and venues changed, with varying degrees of success, Baltimore’s commitment to honoring Black history and culture never wavered.
“When you look at everything that was happening at that time, it’s amazing that AFRAM was successfully birthed and that it existed and continues half a century later,” said Edwin Johnson, a historian and Special Assistant to the Provost at Morgan State University.
When President Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on poverty” in the 1960s, Baltimore was one of 63 cities to receive federal funding for anti-poverty programming, also known as the Model Cities Program.
Baltimore’s neighborhoods were still significantly segregated because of years of redlining. Bethlehem Steel, a world-renowned, top employer in the area, laid off thousands as the city’s population declined.
Through Model Cities and later the Urban Services Agency, Norman E. Ross, a former Dunbar High School choir director, led the Cultural Arts Project. The project focused on bringing music, dance, theater, photography and other creative opportunities to Baltimore after the Neighborhood Parents Club at Dunbar advocated for more cultural arts.
In 1976, the same year Black History Month was federally recognized, Ross put in a proposal for AFRAM, a bicentennial celebration of African American contributions to America. Ross’ idea merged concepts from mini-festivals the Cultural Arts Project had hosted in East Baltimore and the Soul Festival, an unrelated annual event created to uplift the contributions of Black people.
But there were other influences.
“I got the cultural festival idea from Rev. Jesse Jackson and his PUSH Expo in Chicago,” Ross, who died in 2015, told The Evening Sun in 1976.
Looking back, Bell said she doesn’t know how the first AFRAM could have gone any better. But over the decades, the event, like the city it calls home, has seen major changes.
In the late ’70s, the AFRAM Expo took over Rash Field at the Inner Harbor before relocating to stops near the Convention Center, Mondawmin Mall, Camden Yards and Pimlico Race Course in the ’80s and ’90s. At its height, organizers estimated that 200,000 people attended.
There were bumps along the way, like the 2017 event at Druid Hill Park, which saw Mayor Catherine Pugh downsize the festival and forgo the usual national musical acts.
The truncated version, Pugh said at the time, was a return to the festival’s locally focused roots. But she added that AFRAM had become too expensive — with $535,000 in consulting fees paid to a Baltimore entertainment company to help run the event in 2016.
“The city can’t afford to do that,” Pugh told The Baltimore Sun at the time.
Backlash to the decision was swift, while attendance that year shrunk to 4,000, The Sun reported.
A few years later, like most live events at the time, AFRAM 2020 was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The next year, the event was virtual, but still a priority for newly elected Mayor Brandon Scott.
“We had to keep it going so that we could get to this 50th year and look towards the next 50 because so many festivals of this kind have not survived,” Scott said earlier this month.
Post-pandemic, larger crowds have returned as AFRAM has remained at Druid Hill Park on a fixed date. In 2022, after years in July and August, Scott moved the festival to the weekend of Juneteenth, which became a federal holiday in 2021.
Scott said it was “a no-brainer” to explicitly connect the city’s celebration of Black culture with the anniversary of enslaved Americans’ emancipation. Plus, he said, the decision addressed the common feedback he’d heard.
“You would hear consistently — and their words, not mine — from particularly older Black folks, ‘It’s too damn hot to be outside in July and August in Baltimore,’” Scott said.
Future AFRAMs will continue to take place at Druid Hill Park. “It’s too hot to do it on parking lots,” he said.
Growing up in Park Heights, Scott said AFRAM was the event he circled on the calendar in the summer. The music was always a main draw, he said, shouting out past performances by LL Cool J, Doug E. Fresh and Patti LaBelle.
Under Scott’s watch, AFRAM’s music lineup has been elevated in recent years, said Marquis Gasque, the veteran Baltimore Club producer better known as Mighty Mark. Aside from recent headliners like Juvenile and the Isley Brothers, he appreciated that AFRAM presented dedicated programming to Baltimore club , the city’s exuberant and influential strain of fast-paced dance music.
“That was a huge, huge deal to be able to play my original works at a legendary festival like that,” said the Cherry Hill native. who performed at AFRAM in 2025.
Beyond an array of entertainment, local food and crafts vendors, AFRAM has emphasized practical and health resources for attendees — such as the 2000 Dot.Com Village, which provided hands-on computer training, and free health screenings and vaccines.
One year, five people were immediately taken to the hospital after testing because it was discovered that they were about to go into a diabetic coma, said Downtown Partnership President Shelonda Stokes, who took over production of AFRAM in 2010 under Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.
“We knew that you might come for Doug E. Fresh, but you might get your blood pressure checked or your blood sugar checked and find out you need to make a follow-up appointment,” said Rawlings-Blake. “That’s optimizing. That is doing the best for me as a celebration of Black Baltimore.”
This weekend, AFRAM expects to draw more than 300,000 attendees across its three days, Linzy Jackson III, director of the Mayor’s Office of Arts, Culture and Entertainment, said in a press release.
Music will again be a major draw, with well-known acts including 14-time Grammy nominee Charlie Wilson and platinum-selling rap group the Lox. Baltimore natives who’ve made global marks are also scheduled to perform, like the critically acclaimed trumpeter Brandon Woody, R&B singer Mario and house music queen Ultra Naté.
Ultra Naté, whose 1997 hit “Free” was named one of the 100 best dance songs ever by Billboard, said her performance will be a full-circle moment for a Baltimorean who fondly remembers “being a teenager, running around like a psycho in the ’80s” at AFRAM.
Her first-ever AFRAM set will feature a full band of all Baltimore musicians, a fitting detail for a far-from-average gig, she said.
“To be acknowledged by the powers that be in this city, to platform me in that way with AFRAM this year for their 50th, is very monumental,” Ultra Naté said. “It’s not lost on me at all.”
Scott said that at a time when some Americans “want to erase Black history and Black culture,” AFRAM is more important than ever.
“They might take it out of the books, but they can’t take it out of the parks. They can’t take it out of the street corners. They can’t take it out of the people,” he said. “That’s why we have to keep AFRAM going for the next 50 years.”
Banner reporter John-John Williams IV contributed to this article.
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