This chapter examines how the legal climate around prostitution in Baltimore changed in the wake of the Civil War. Growing fears about vagrancy following emancipation and the triumph of a free labor economy prompted crackdowns on streetwalkers and public sex workers, who found themselves incarcerated in the city’s growing network of carceral institutions. Meanwhile, real estate speculators’ growing disenchantment with brothels as investment properties and pressures from a growing urban middle class that expected the state to act as an active guarantor of their property rights brought challenges to the decades-old regime of toleration around indoor prostitution. Brothels, once regarded as a comparatively benign sexual labor arrangement because they kept illicit sexuality contained and out of sight, came to be firmly defined as threats to private property rights and to the future of the middle class. Authorities began to utilize the precedent set by an 1857 equity decision, Hamilton v. Whitridge, as they moved to crack down on sex workers and evict them from “respectable” neighborhoods. As they did so, they began to create informal red-light districts.

This chapter traces the development of the anti-vice and good governance movements that eventually succeeded in securing the closure of Baltimore’s already ailing red-light districts in 1915. The most successful of Baltimore’s anti-vice movements had its origins in evangelical Christianity, but concerns over industrialization, urbanization, and women’s role in the changing economy ensured that it developed a diverse following. Women’s rights organizations, Progressive political reformers, and physician and public health advocates all focused on prostitution as a symbol of the perils of urbanization, economic inequality, and political corruption. The relationship between political reform and anti-vice reform eventually proved to be the most significant one, as reform Democratic and Republican victories in state elections ushered in a period of state support for anti-vice measures. Following the white slavery scare of the 1910s, Maryland’s governor appointed a new Police Board and a state-level anti-vice commission. The combined efforts of the Police Board and the Maryland Vice Commission would ultimately result in the closure of Baltimore’s formerly tolerated brothels.

This chapter examines black women’s increased participation in the sex trade in the aftermath of the Civil War. During the 1860s, thousands of black women, children, and men arrived in Baltimore as refugees from war and enslavement. As police increasingly pushed brothels out of “respectable” neighborhoods, black Baltimoreans who faced limited housing prospects found themselves occupying the same neighborhoods as sex establishments. As the overlap between brothel districts and black neighborhoods grew, black women entered the indoor sex trade in larger numbers and began to remake it to suit their needs and preferences. Although selling sex was an important part of personal economies of makeshifts for black sex workers, sex work fueled long-standing racial stereotypes about black women’s libidinousness and black men’s unfitness as patriarchs. Middle-class black Baltimoreans who founded the city’s Colored Law and Order League attempted to resist these stereotypes by publicizing their efforts to clean up their neighborhoods, but they failed to sway the city’s white politicians, who used the alleged “disorder” of black residential enclaves to argue for racial segregation of housing.