At 8 a.m. each morning from 1963 to 1971, James B. Carpenter, dressed in a top hat, white gloves and coattails, would ring Lexington Market’s historic, 200-pound bell to signal the start of the business day.
Carpenter, who ran a three-chair shoeshine and repair service inside the market, spent his “retirement” as the market’s official bell-ringer, after a long career working on steamships, docks and railroads, waiting tables and later owning and running a restaurant. He became “one of the most respected men in the market,” the Baltimore Sun reported in 1968, and something of a local celebrity.
“There’s only one thing you can steal without getting locked up,” Carpenter, a son of enslaved people from Virginia, told a Sun reporter, “and that’s knowledge.”
A few years later, Carpenter, then 84, remarked to an Evening Sun reporter that he kept a packed schedule “so I don’t have time to die.”
James B. Carpenter rang the opening bell at Lexington Market in the 1960s and early 1970s. A celebrated local figure, he also ran a three-chair shoeshine and repair service in the market.
Decades later, Carpenter’s great-grandson, Jayson Williams, lives by his forefather’s work ethic as he strives to redevelop parts of Baltimore, including the so-called Superblock of defunct retail stores that ties Lexington Market to the core of downtown Baltimore. The West Baltimore native is the CEO of Mayson-Dixon Companies, a one-stop development firm that includes a construction company and a building supplier, as well as consultants and marketing specialists.
Williams built Mayson-Dixon out of frustration with business-as-usual in Baltimore’s real estate circles, which he found excluded people of color and quick to dictate to communities what they needed instead of the other way around.
Now, with a growing team, his own downtown office building and the funds to invest in projects as an equity partner, Williams wants to lay the foundation for more Black wealth, equity and ownership in his hometown, in homage to his roots.
Click here to read the rest of the article written by Hallie Miller over at The Washington Post
