Wade Morgan
house painter, Ocean City · b. 1900
House painter of Ocean City, enumerated on 1 April 1940 as the head of his own household on the last block of South Division Street, between the street and the Ocean City Inlet. He was 40, single, and born in North Carolina; he had been living in the same place in 1935. He rented at $6 a month. The census records his occupation as 'Painter', his industry as 'House Painting' and his class of worker as PW - a wage or salary worker in private employment - and gives his 1939 work as 26 weeks for $520, with 60 hours in the week of 24 to 30 March 1940. Stella Bowen kept house for him. The race column against both their names is the enumerator's 'Neg'. His neighbours on the same page were a launchman on the dredge boats, a deep-sea fisherman, a hotel house-cleaner and a moving-picture operator, all white.
In the record (2)
1940 · 1940-04-01
Stella Bowen worked fifty-two weeks in 1939 for $175; the man she kept house for worked twenty-six for $520
Line 76 of sheet 3B of enumeration district 24-22 gives Stella Bowen, 39, single, Black, born in Maryland, housekeeper in the household of Wade Morgan on the last block of South Division Street. Her occupation is entered as 'Maid', her industry as 'Private Home', her class of worker as PW - wage or salary worker in private work. She worked 30 hours in the week of 24-30 March 1940, and 52 weeks in 1939, for $175. On the line above, Wade Morgan, 40, single, Black, born in North Carolina, is entered as 'Painter', industry 'House Painting', also PW: 60 hours that week, 26 weeks in 1939, $520. Their neighbours on the same sheet: Archie Simpson, 24, white, a launchman on dredge boats, $624; Horace J. Hudson, 31, white, a deep-sea fisherman, $540; Mabelle Simpson, 21, white, a house cleaner in hotels, $85; Franklin Lewis, 28, white, a moving-picture operator, $150. Morgan and Bowen rented their house at $6 a month.
Twice the weeks for a third of the money, in the same house, in the same year. The census asked every American two questions nobody had ever been asked before - how many weeks did you work and what were you paid - and the answer on this one line is the clearest single measurement of what Black domestic work was worth in Ocean City. And the comparison that hurts most is not with the white fisherman down the street; it is with Mabelle Simpson, white, cleaning hotel rooms for $85. Nobody on this block was doing well. Stella Bowen worked every week of the year and was still the second-lowest paid person on the page.
Source · checked 2026-08-11
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 & JettyStella BowenElizabeth FooksJohn B. Lynch
Source · checked 2026-08-11