The Liberty Road Corridor: Julian Jones and the Making of Black Suburban Power

On Tuesday night Baltimore County did something it had never done in the seventy years of its charter government. It elected a Black county executive. Julian Jones defeated Republican Pat Dyer 151,256 to 90,372, about 62.6 percent, ending an unbroken line of thirteen white executives that runs from Spiro T. Agnew to Dutch Ruppersberger. The win looked sudden only to people who had not been watching the Liberty Road corridor. It was the product of forty years of organizing on the county's west side, and the precinct returns show exactly where that organizing lives.

The Road Out of the City

Maryland Route 26, Liberty Road, runs northwest from the Baltimore city line through Lochearn, Milford Mill and Randallstown toward Eldersburg. Beginning in the 1960s, Black families who had built middle-class lives in northwest Baltimore crossed that line and bought homes along it. They met blockbusting, steering and white flight, and they stayed. Sociologist Gregory Smithsimon's Liberty Road (2022) describes what they built: one of the country's largest Black middle-class suburbs, with high homeownership, dense church and civic life, and a habit of collective action carried over from the civil rights movement.

They did not arrive in an empty county. Black Baltimore County is older than the county's suburbs. Before emancipation came to Maryland in November 1864, the county already had more free Black residents than enslaved ones, and communities such as Winters Lane in Catonsville, East Towson, Cowdensville, Granite and Oella had their own churches, schools and landholders. In 1935 Thurgood Marshall sued on behalf of Margaret Williams, who had been shut out of Catonsville High School. The Liberty Road migration joined a long Black presence in the county. It did not start one.

Dining-Room Tables and District Lines

Population did not turn into power on its own. For most of the twentieth century the county council was elected in ways that left Black neighborhoods without a seat, and the west side had to fight its way onto the map. The Liberty Road Community Council, founded in 1958, gave dozens of neighborhood associations along the corridor one voice. In the mid-1980s and early 1990s a determined cohort of organizers laid the groundwork for Black representation in Baltimore County. Many drew their discipline from Morgan State University, carrying civil rights and student organizing into suburban precinct work.

The training ground was Morgan itself. In 1986 Morgan students and faculty anchored the congressional campaign of Augustus "Gus" Adair, a Morgan political scientist who had mentored Kweisi Mfume when Mfume was a student at Morgan. Mfume, by then a popular commentator on Morgan's radio station, WEAA 88.9 FM, ran against his former mentor for the open 7th District seat. Mfume won the 1986 race and went to Congress from Maryland's 7th District. He went on to chair the Congressional Black Caucus, lead the NAACP, and serve as president and CEO of the National Medical Association beginning in 2010, before returning to Congress. Two of the young people working in the Adair campaign were Harold Gordon and Stephen G. Hall, the historian who would later found HistorianSpeaks.

Hall and Gordon kept working on political issues, off and on, through Hall's years at Morgan. In 1990, the year Hall graduated, Gordon launched the first of several campaigns for the Baltimore County Council, proving that the west side could be mobilized block by block. Hall worked with him on strategy, planning, canvassing and debate preparation. In that work he also came to know Dr. Ella White Campbell, whom he still calls the most adroit politician and leader he has ever met, and worked closely with Adrienne Jones, Lenwood Johnson and Bob Vassar, another Morgan graduate and state employee.

"My long-term interest in politics informed my lifelong interest in African American and global Black history," Hall says. That interest led him to found HistorianSpeaks in 2020, and it drives this site's focus today: the global Black world and the work of everyday people to change the political direction of their communities and their countries.

Working from inside county government, Lenwood Johnson, a county planner, mapped the corridor's demographic realities and pressed for equitable planning. Adrienne A. Jones came out of county community work and went on to become the first Black and first woman Speaker of the Maryland House of Delegates in 2019. In the county executive's office itself, Bob Neely served as chief of staff to County Executive Dennis F. Rasmussen (1986–1990), proof that Black executive leadership was indispensable even while the county council had no Black member.

At the center stood Dr. Ella White Campbell, an educator who brought her organizing to the corridor and chartered the Randallstown NAACP in 1990. A Republican and a fiercely independent civic leader, she called community leaders to her dining-room table to settle disagreements before they reached the public. She fought the redistricting battles of 1991, 2001 and 2011 to keep Black suburban voting strength from being split. The 2001 fight produced a district the west side could win. In 2002 Kenneth Oliver became the first Black member of the Baltimore County Council, representing District 4. When Oliver stepped down in 2014, Julian Jones succeeded him.

The Paradox of the Corridor

Smithsimon's central point is that civil rights victories did not bring equal investment. The corridor's residents are educated, employed and civically engaged, yet the road itself filled with strip lots, dollar stores, self-storage units and gas stations while sit-down restaurants and full-service groceries went elsewhere. Planners call it retail leakage: residents spend their money in other parts of the county because they cannot spend it at home. The 2008 foreclosure crisis hit the corridor hard.

Ryan Coleman, president of the Randallstown NAACP, describes the result plainly: "an affluent African-American neighborhood that's a food desert." That frustration is political fuel. On the council, Jones's District 4 work turned on zoning and development fights along the road. His campaign for county executive asked voters to give the corridor's demand for equal investment the county's top office.

Where the Votes Came From

The precinct map shows the organizing network at work. Jones won all 52 majority-Black precincts in the county, taking 46,233 of 51,252 votes there, or 90.2 percent. Those precincts are concentrated along Liberty Road, in Woodlawn and toward Owings Mills. Across all 258 precincts, his vote share tracks the Black population share closely, a correlation of 0.83.

The west side was the floor, not the ceiling. In the county's other 206 precincts Jones won 54.9 percent, and he carried 182 precincts in all. A Black candidate built a base on the west side and then won majority-white suburbs east and north of it. That is the crossover model this series has followed from Georgia to South Carolina. In Baltimore County it ran through a firefighter who had collected firsts all his life: the first Black lieutenant, captain, battalion chief and division chief in the Anne Arundel County Fire Department, and the first council member elected chair for three straight terms.

The Network Behind the Win

No single campaign built that floor. The networks were already there: the Randallstown NAACP, the Liberty Road Community Council, the churches of Randallstown and Woodlawn, the Caucus of African American Leaders, the Baltimore County Democratic Central Committee and the professional association of Black firefighters Jones helped lead. Many of the people who knocked on doors in 2026 learned how from the people who knocked on doors in 1990. The work was year-round, local and patient, which is why it held when the money ran thin. Jones spent nearly $2 million, most of it surviving a three-way Democratic primary he won with 41 percent.

The county's government had been changing too. County Executive John Olszewski Jr. named Stacy L. Rodgers the county's first Black chief administrative officer in 2019 and Robert McCullough its first Black police chief in 2023. Tuesday's ballot also elected the first nine-member county council. Jones takes office with Black leadership already inside county hall, not just knocking on its door.

What the Hope Requires

"When you call, you will get an answer," Jones told his victory crowd, promising to keep working "until I can deliver a return on the hope you have invested in me." On Liberty Road the return has a clear shape: grocery stores and restaurants instead of another storage lot, public investment equal to the taxes the corridor pays, and schools that serve every child fairly. Howard County's Calvin Ball became Maryland's first Black county executive in 2018. Jones now leads a larger county with a deeper Black political history.

Baltimore County's first Black executive did not appear out of nowhere. He came out of a corridor that organized for forty years to be counted.