The Flower Mart fights that almost doomed one of Baltimore’s favorite festivals

The Flower Mart that year started off as usual — sunshine, warmth, white-gloved ladies fanning themselves and 25-cent lemon sticks.

At some point, chaos ensued.

Baltimore’s beloved spring festival nearly died on the vine in the 1970s after back-to-back years of unrest sent civic leaders scrambling. There was another near-death in the 1990s.

The Flower Mart has endured dramas since its beginning more than a century ago, including location changes, shifting organizers and even years of cancellations. That this festival has lasted is a testament to those who wouldn’t give up on it and made it the hardy perennial that it is today.

This weekend, Baltimoreans will descend upon the square in Mount Vernon in their spring florals and Preakness hats. Children will chase each other through the grass. Teenagers will stroll in crop tops and sandals. Politicians will politick. People may even buy flowers.

The springtime ritual “perseveres because there is this visceral feeling that this event is something that makes Baltimore, Baltimore,” said Lance Humphries, a director with Mount Vernon Place Conservancy, which organizes the Flower Mart.

The Flower Mart and its longtime organizer, the Women’s Civic League, were both born in 1911, part of the nationwide “City Beautiful” movement to bring back grandeur to American cities. The Flower Mart brought residents from far-flung suburbs and inner-city neighborhoods alike to a central spot for food, music, reverie, and fun — to smell the roses of a thriving city.

Marjorie Banks, 79, who now lives in Catonsville, remembers class field trips from Public School 103 on Division Street. She’d ask her mother to chaperone, knowing she’d likely get even more treats like crab cakes, cotton candy and the famous lemon sticks.

“That was one of the highlights of my childhood,” Banks said.

Flower Mart was diverse, a “free for all,” she said, with jugglers on stilts and the chance to take a small pot home to grow a flower. It was a place where you didn’t have to worry about “the wrong elements” tearing things up, Banks added.

Then came 1970.

The Flower Mart ‘riot’

News reports do not pinpoint a precise cause of what multiple articles called a “riot” or a “disturbance.” But the event unfurled against a backdrop of racial strife on a hot day in a crowded place.

A large group of Black teenagers entered Mount Vernon Square; a large group of white teenagers was already there. Yelling erupted; elbows and punches were thrown.

Law enforcement officials blamed parents and the school system, according to newspaper stories at the time. Juvenile Court Master U. Theodore Hayes blamed the melee on “hoodlumism” and “boys showing off for girls, girls egging them on, all running wild for no reason.”

In the end, only about a half-dozen people were punished, with fines ranging from $25 to $50. Even a city prosecutor, Anton Keating, testified against police, saying they used excessive force on young people who were trying to enjoy the day.

Hoping a smaller venue would calm matters, the Women’s Civic League moved the 1971 Flower Mart to Center Plaza in Charles Center. Different scenery, same results: fighting, police and over 100 people arrested.

Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro III called the melee “a black eye” on the city.

“People expressed it was maybe too dangerous to continue it at the time,” said Robert Embry Jr., who was the city housing commissioner at the time. “I felt we had to keep it going.”

Civic leaders step up

The city seemed split between those blaming the Black teenagers for the unrest and those who blamed the mostly white organizers and vendors for their racism. Baltimore was only a few years removed from the devastating riots of 1968.

Morgan State College professor Lola Amis, wrote to newspapers imploring white journalists at The Baltimore Sun and The News-American to stop blaming the Black teenagers.

“Why not seek some way to appeal to them, to include (not exclude) them in the Flower Mart for next year instead of running (as you whites always do) to the suburbs (the white man’s panacea for the black dilemma?),” she wrote in a letter published in The Afro in 1971. “THESE BLACK CHILDREN ARE TRYING TO TELL YOU SOMETHING. For once in your lives, you white Anglo- Saxon ladies, do something constructive.”

At the time, many public places closed rather than integrate, following a 1971 U.S. Supreme Court decision that closing events and denying access to all did not violate equal protections.

Organizers vowed to keep the event going. But Baltimore wouldn’t see a Flower Mart again until 1976.

Naomi Camper, an avid gardener, Flower Mart vendor and Women’s Civic League volunteer, worked the leaders she knew to revive the Flower Mart, according to her grandsons. In 1973, the Maryland League of Women’s Clubs presented Camper with its community service award for “her concern in the development of the community and its residents through spiritual, civic and social involvements.” Camper died a few years later.

“She was instrumental in keeping it going because it was about to be shut down, said Irvin Cannady III, who was in his early 20s when his grandmother was working to save the festival. ”And she said, ‘It’s a beautiful thing, it shouldn’t be destroyed, it should be more inclusive.’”

The turbulent 1990s

Though the Flower Mart returned to Center Plaza in 1976 for its 60th celebration, it didn’t move back to Mount Vernon until 1981, and it has been there, for the most part, ever since. It was uprooted and moved to the War Memorial Plaza downtown for a year, in 1995.

The next year, it withered completely — this time because of organizational changes and apathy within the Civic League, according to news reports.

Yet, the Flower Mart rallied again, returning to Mount Vernon in 1997. By 1999, with the Civic League’s membership waning, speculation abounded that the Flower Mart was ending again. The theme:“Celebrating the end of an Era.”

Instead, the Flower Mart got new management. A nonprofit, Flower Mart at Mount Vernon Ltd., took over in 2000. Then, in 2019, the Mount Vernon Place Conservancy, a nonprofit established years earlier, assumed control and remains the festival’s organizer.

Among the thousands of revelers this weekend will be Lamont “Wes” Harvey, Naomi Camper’s youngest grandson. He’ll have in tow his 7-year-old son, Pyrrhos, who has his own flower plot in their Elkridge backyard.

“I feel strongly,” Harvey said, “that part of her life, experience and passion is passed on to him.”