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how so? Philadelphia is in, uh, PA. Sorry but this is an asinine statement.
I actually agree with his statement. Philadelphia has more in common with New Jersey (a geographically small state) than it does the overwhelming majority of Pennsylvania. Another way of saying this is that there's more of New Jersey that's similar to Philadelphia than there is Pennsylvania that's similar to Philadelphia. I don't thin that's asinine.
I see you think you're better than linguists at the University of Pennsylvania. Baltimore does not have Southern speech patterns. Baltimore being a Southern city for most of its history? Maybe up to the Civil War...during the Great Migration that certainly changed. The Baltimore accent is not Southern sounding to my ears, nor is it southern sounding to professional linguists. So however Southern sounding you think it is, you're wrong. You're not a professional linguist.
That wasn't my analysis. That was Hans Kurath's.
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He is predominantly known for publishing the first linguistic atlas of the US, the Linguistic Atlas of New England, for which he received the Loubat Prize, and for being the first main editor of the Middle English Dictionary. Together with Raven I. McDavid, Jr. he also published a linguistic atlas of the eastern United States, The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States.
Was Baltimore a northern city when it was enforcing Jim Crow back in the 50s and 60s? Was it a northern city when the state legislature adopted "Maryland, My Maryland" (imploring Marylanders to resist the "northern scum") as the state song in 1939, nearly 75 years after the Civil War?
Was Baltimore a northern city when it was enforcing Jim Crow back in the 50s and 60s? Was it a northern city when the state legislature adopted "Maryland, My Maryland" (imploring Marylanders to resist the "northern scum") as the state song in 1939, nearly 75 years after the Civil War?
Oh, so you finally address me directly. Hans Kurath placed Baltimore in the South? That's a new one. U of Penn, which is just as respected doesn't, and puts D.C. either right on the line or slightly above it. Jim Crow didn't make a place Southern. And Baltimore wasn't nearly as Jim Crow as Mississippi or Alabama. As far as the state song goes, it doesn't match up with the culture, industrial history, demographics (apart from African American), etc. and speech patterns. Kurath did NOT place Baltimore in the South, nor did the U Penn line. I thought we weren't interacting anyway. Let's keep it that way. We know you think Maryland and Baltimore belong with Virginia and North Carolina anyway. I give up. You, murksiderock, and all other Southern loyalists go on expressing your fraudulent views. I've got a life to live. Go on, make another one of your wise cracks at me...it'll make me laugh that much harder.
Oh really? So Jim Crow, slavery and tobacco plantations do not make a place southern? Mmmkay.
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Originally Posted by nlst
And Baltimore wasn't nearly as Jim Crow as Mississippi or Alabama.
This is true. That's why most people consider Mississippi the Deep South. Maryland was just considered the South.
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Originally Posted by nlst
As far as the state song goes, it doesn't match up with the culture, industrial history, demographics (apart from African American), etc. and speech patterns.
Baltimore was a large, dense, industrial city with rowhouses back in 1939 when "Maryland, My Maryland" was adopted as the state song. And it was a southern city. Rowhouses and heavy industry do not make a place "unsouthern." All the evidence you cite for Baltimore not being southern (industry, rowhouses, etc.) it had back when it was voting for secession candidates and forcing blacks to use separate facilities. There's a whole social/cultural aspect you seem unwilling to confront here.
And Kurath clearly identified Baltimore as having a variant of the Virginia Piedmont dialect. That's southern, mang.
When most people think of sit-ins at lunch counters and "whites only" and "colored" water fountains, they think of Selma, Alabama, not Washington, DC or Baltimore. Similarly, when people think of Harriet Tubman, they think of her taking slaves from deep in Virginia to the North, not her rescuing slaves from bondage in Maryland. Way too much white washing and sanitizing of history (and simply flat out downplaying it and ignoring it).
This is even more interesting. It's a KKK rally in Mt. Rainier, MD. For those not familiar with the DC area, Mt. Rainier is right on the PG County/DC Line. So this is an adjacent suburb of DC, not some far flung exurb in St. Mary's County.
The two Klansmen, Xavier Edwards, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan from Wheaton MD, and Alton Shelton, Imperial Chaplain had staged a 20 mile march from Laurel to Mount Rainer touting white supremacy and were staging a street corner rally.
This is 1966. So much for Maryland not being a part of the South since the Civil War.
When most people think of sit-ins at lunch counters and "whites only" and "colored" water fountains, they think of Selma, Alabama, not Washington, DC or Baltimore. Similarly, when people think of Harriet Tubman, they think of her taking slaves from deep in Virginia to the North, not her rescuing slaves from bondage in Maryland. Way too much white washing and sanitizing of history (and simply flat out downplaying it and ignoring it).
That's everywhere, not just the south. Do you think that segregation wasn't just as bad in the north? The reason slavery ended in the north wasn't because they wanted to free blacks, it was because they has no use for blacks since the north was so industrial. Blacks were equally hated on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. All of this "North is better than south" and vice versa is very, very corny. Nobody is better than anybody.
That's everywhere, not just the south. Do you think that segregation wasn't just as bad in the north? The reason slavery ended in the north wasn't because they wanted to free blacks, it was because they has no use for blacks since the north was so industrial. Blacks were equally hated on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. All of this "North is better than south" and vice versa is very, very corny. Nobody is better than anybody.
I'm not an adherent to the benevolent white northerner/evil white southerner paradigm. That's not why I posted those links. It's just that when someone makes the claim that Maryland stopped being the South in 1865, I feel compelled to set the record straight. It's simply not true. The difference between discrimination in the North and South was that there was a de jure white supremacist power structure in the latter that enforced separation of blacks and whites. And the "latter" includes the state of Maryland. And the legacy of that power structure reveals itself in the present day. This is why Baltimore and DC are more culturallysegregated than cities in the Northeast.
I'm not an adherent to the benevolent white northerner/evil white southerner paradigm. That's not why I posted those links. It's just that when someone makes the claim that Maryland stopped being the South in 1865, I feel compelled to set the record straight. It's simply not true. The difference between discrimination in the North and South was that there was a de jure white supremacist power structure in the latter that enforced separation of blacks and whites. And the "latter" includes the state of Maryland. And the legacy of that power structure reveals itself in the present day. This is why Baltimore and DC are more culturallysegregated than cities in the Northeast.
I said culturally segregated. We already know Baltimore is segregated by race.
Blacks in the Northeast are more influenced by Italians and Puerto Ricans than blacks in Baltimore (we have WAY more of each of those groups). Blacks have obviously adopted a lot of vernacular from Italians. Similarly, blacks have adopted vernacular from both the Boricuan and Italian communities. And of course, there has been a lot black influence on the Boricuan community with people like Jennifer Lopez, Rosie Perez, Angie Martinez and Danny Garcia being examples.
I don't see any of that in DC or Baltimore (which is even blacker than DC). I think part of it is because there was never really much beyond black and white in these cities (the size of the Italian population in B-more has been significantly overstated). Boricuas, who mix most naturally with blacks, have never really existed there either (B-more has 3,107 of them). The other part of it is that Jim Crow laws created strongly ingrained patterns of segregation. Even stronger than what you see in the Northeast. If you were riding a train south from Philadelphia to DC, blacks had to switch to separate "colored" cars. And theaters, public facilities and lunch counters were all segregated. Baltimore even had a law that prohibited blacks and whites from living on the same block.
This is not to say that the Northeast didn't have significant racial discrimination. It did. However, there's a difference between experiencing discrimination in job hiring, being called racial epithets, etc. and living under Jim Crow.
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