Elizabeth Fooks

In the record (1)

1. 1940 · 1940-04-01

   The 1940 census names Black Ocean City at last - three households of their own on the last block of South Division Street, between the street and the Inlet

   Enumeration district 24-22, sheet 3B, is the block the enumerator marked 'Here ends Block between S. Division St and Ocean City Inlet. Begin Block on West side of Balto. Ave.' On it, among white households, are three Black households headed by their own people rather than housed as servants. Household 64, renting at $20 a month - the highest rent on the sheet - is headed by John N. [surname uncertain], 26, a manager, born Maryland, with his wife Eva L., 38, their daughter Portia, 19, his brother-in-law Daniel Purnell, 25, a labourer on a chicken farm, and a boarder, Charles Robbins, 25, from Berlin. Household 65, at $10 a month, is headed by Elizabeth Fooks, 39, a married woman living without her husband, with James Graham, 37, born West Virginia, who had been living in Paterson, New Jersey in 1935. Household 70, at $6 a month, is Wade Morgan, 40, a house painter born in North Carolina, and Stella Bowen, 39, his housekeeper. Every one of them is entered in the race column as 'Neg' in the enumerator's own hand. Elsewhere in the same district Black Ocean City appears as it always has in the record - as servants in white houses: Roketta Scott and Chancil Whittington at John B. Lynch's on Baltimore Avenue, Edward Purnell at Virginia Ayres's on Atlantic Avenue, Lulu Franklin, 60, a widow, at Philip C. Dennis's, Katharine Tingle, 20, at Harry J. Cropper's, Edward Shields, 50, a cook at Ella E. Dennis's, and others. — 1942 FULL PASS, 2026-08-11 [confirmed]: Confirmed and very substantially extended. The three households this fact names on the last block of South Division Street were read from one sheet of sixty-two; all sixty-two have now been read and they show Black households throughout the incorporated town — ten on a single sheet of ED 24-22 alone, renting at six and seven dollars a month between white neighbours — and a sustained Black farming and fishing community running unbroken across a dozen sheets of West Ocean City in ED 24-24, headed at one point by a widowed schoolteacher born in Texas. The fact's own theTake, that this is what the thread had been waiting nine years for, is if anything understated. See fact:1940-black-ocean-city-inside-the-town-limits, authored in this fragment and carrying the extension.

   This is what the thread has been waiting nine years for. Every previous appearance of a Black person in this campaign's Ocean City record was made by somebody else - a permit refused, a hotel on a white mayor's building list, an old man the council had to decide what to do with, an excursion counted by the truckload. Here they are enumerated as households, with names, ages, birthplaces, rents and the streets they lived on, and the streets are the same streets: Wade Morgan's house at six dollars a month sits between a white fisherman's and a white cinema operator's. And the education column is the thing nobody would have guessed. Eva L., her nineteen-year-old daughter Portia, and Elizabeth Fooks's lodger James Graham are each entered with two years of college, on a sheet where the white neighbours are entered with grades one, four and six.

   Ocean City Inlet & JettyWade MorganStella BowenJohn B. Lynch

   Source · checked 2026-08-11