History

Linton Robbins

householder, Ocean City · b. 1902

Head of a Black household inside the corporate limits of Ocean City at the 1940 census — 38 years old, born Maryland, renting at fifteen dollars a month, with his wife Mary, 37, and three Dennis step-children, Ruth, 17, Gardner, 16, and Alston, 15. His household sits on the same sheet as, and between, white households, which is what the sheet is evidence of: Black Ocean City lived in the town, not only across the bay.

In the record (1)

  1. 1940 · 1940-04-01

    All sixty-two sheets of the 1940 census for Ocean City and West Ocean City have now been read, and they show what the town's minute book never says: Black households living inside the corporate limits, street by street, alongside white ones.

    The 1940 pass reached six of the sixty-two manuscript sheets for enumeration districts 24-22, 24-23, 24-24 and 24-25 and produced the campaign's first named Black households — three of them, on the last block of South Division Street. All sixty-two have now been read. The picture is an order of magnitude larger. Inside the incorporated town, on sheet after sheet of ED 24-22, Black householders rent for six and seven dollars a month between white neighbours: William Pitts, 64, with two lodgers, Agnes Hill, 65, a widow, and William Campbell, 54, born in Georgia; Linton Robbins, 38, and his wife Mary, 37, with three Dennis step-children; George Slowell, 37; Samuel Dennis, 63, and his wife Alice, 51, born in Florida, with a boarder, Emma Brittingham, 19; Louisa Cherry, 49, with her cousin Mary Robbins, a lodger Otis Williams from Virginia and her grandson Earnest Schaffner, 4; Henry Morris, 35, with a housekeeper, Jennie Adkins, 45; Robert Armstrong, 22, and his wife Gladys, 20; John Dennis, 20, and his wife Paulina, 20, with a two-year-old and a one-year-old. And Black women and men are entered as servants in the white houses of the town's officers — Roketta Scott, 28, and Chancil Whittington, 23, in John B. Lynch's house at 1404 Baltimore Avenue; Beatrice Purnell, 23, in Alexander Jackson's on Atlantic Avenue; Edward Purnell in Virginia Ayres's; Maggie Jones, 34, at John S. Townsend's; Flossie Ross, 36, and George B. Ross, 37, at Joseph Mann's. Across the bay in West Ocean City, ED 24-24 is a sustained Black farming and fishing community running unbroken over a dozen sheets — Thomas H. Purnell, 42, and Ida M., 37, with nine children; William S. Davis, 69, and Hester, 61; Arzie L. Dennis, 37, and Persis W.; John W. Kennis, 55, and Mamie J., 52, with six children and a nephew; Elwood Fooks, 32, and Eliza, 31, with six; Harry Henry, 28, and Carrie, 25; and at the head of household 224, renting for three dollars a month, Margaret Reed, 58, a widow born in Texas — a schoolteacher, and the only Black professional the campaign has yet found in this place.

    Margaret ReedLouisa CherryJohn B. LynchAlexander Jackson

    Source · checked 2026-08-11