Historian/Scholar Honors

To persons who have published and are respected in the academic and professional historian community

The 2023 honorees are:

José F. Anderson earned a B.A. at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and a J.D. from the University of Maryland. After graduation, he engaged in the private practice of law in Baltimore and served for nine years in the Maryland Public Defender’s Office. He is now the Dean Joseph Curtis Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore and Adjunct Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. A frequent speaker at local and national attorney and judicial training conferences, he is the author of many articles and a textbook on Criminal Law. In 2021, after years of research, he published a ground-breaking biography of the preeminent civil rights attorney Charles Hamilton Houston, Genius for Justice: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Reform of American Law. Houston was a Harvard-trained Supreme Court lawyer for the NAACP, a pioneer in the fight for desegregating America, and the mentor of Justice Thurgood Marshall. As the person who designed the long-range legal strategy of the Brown v. Board of Education case, Houston is often called the man who killed "Jim Crow." He also transformed American law in labor, criminal justice, and the First Amendment. Houston, who maintained an office in Baltimore and conducted much work here, said, “As goes Maryland, so goes a large part of the nation.”

Robert K. Headley

Dr. Headley began documenting the history of the vanishing American movie theatre in 1968. Since then, he has continued in his unsurpassed research of this resource. Revealing a deep knowledge of Baltimore’s movie houses, his essential publications are: Exit: A History Of Movies In Baltimore and Motion Picture Exhibition In Baltimore: An Illustrated History And Directory Of Theaters, 1895-2004. From 1981-1987, Headley was editor of the journal of the Theatre Historical Society of America. He has taught courses on Baltimore theater history, appeared on talk shows, conducted tours, and served as a consultant to the Smithsonian Institution. He graciously shared his collection of rare photographs and his wealth of information with photographer Amy Davis for her publication and exhibit “Flickering Treasures.” Our movie houses may come and go, but thanks to Dr. Headley’s untiring research, their history can be known and valued well into the future.

Adam Malka

A professor of history at the University of Oklahoma, Malka published “Men of Mobtown” in 2018. It traces the evolution of the relationship between policing and Blacks from 1800 to 1870. As of 1810, a majority of Blacks in Baltimore were free, and the percentage steadily increased up until the Civil War. Initially, Baltimore’s policemen or constables received no salaries, and lived from fees and rewards. As many ordinary Whites saw Blacks as potential criminals, they acted as vigilantes, enforcing the law as they saw it. Up to 1860, the percentage of Blacks in jail differed little from their percentage in the overall population. During the Civil War, Maryland abolished slavery, but the presumption by Whites of Black criminality remained widespread. Baltimore’s police, which became more professional in the late 1850s (with salaries and uniforms), arrested a much higher percentage of Blacks in the years after 1865, supplementing White vigilantism. Professor Malka sheds light on the 19th century mindset of Whites towards Blacks, which he documents with numerous quotes and case histories.

E. Evans Paull

Longtime urban planner E. Evans Paull recounts the Baltimore Road Wars of the 1950s through the 1980s in his book, “Stop the Road: Stories from the Trenches of Baltimore’s Road Wars.” Highway planners had proposed extending I-95 and I-83 through the historic neighborhoods of Federal Hill, Fells Point and Canton, while I-70 was to connect with the downtown highways. Grassroots opposition, including neighborhood activists, preservationists, 1960s idealists and environmentalists coalesced to defeat these plans, as the Black neighborhoods of West Baltimore worked with the largely White waterfront neighborhoods. Paull also shows that some planners, along with some city officials, opposed these proposals. Frequent delays made implementation more difficult. In retrospect, the waterfront neighborhoods have thrived, but the Black neighborhoods were disrupted by the partial completion of the “Highway to Nowhere” and by the announced plans to build the I-70 connector. This is an inspiring account of how Baltimore’s citizens did their best to save their city from its own leadership.

Past honorees, in alphabetical order:

Jean H. Baker (2007)

Joseph Balkoski (2013)

Stanley F. Battle (2005)

Howell S. Baum (2013)

Randall Beirne (2006)

David S. Bogen (2017)

Taylor Branch (2004)

James Bready (2012)

John R. Breihan (2010)

Christopher Brown (2017)

Lawrence T. Brown (2022)