Cherry Hill is one of Baltimore's southernmost neighborhoods, anchored by the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River, and the new Port Covington district.  Cherry Hill is located about three miles from the City Center and is served by MedStar Harbor Hospital, the Maryland Transit Administration’s Light Rail, and the Middle Branch Fitness and Wellness Center.

City leaders designed Cherry Hill as a segregated community in South Baltimore for Black veterans returning from both World War II and the Korean Wars. As a planned residential community for African Americans, Cherry Hill is the first and most conspicuous example of designed residential racial segregation in the United States.

The population in Baltimore boomed between 1910 and 1970 as the opportunity to work expanded through industrial and factory jobs in the port of Baltimore. The proportion of Black families dramatically increased, growing from 15% (85,000 residents) in 1910 to nearly half in 1970 (420,000 residents). White residents met this dramatic expansion of Black Baltimore with contempt and resistance. In 1911, Mayor J. Barry Mahool signed the first ordinance in America to racially segregate the city by law, calling “for preserving peace, preventing conflict and ill feeling between the “white and colored” races in Baltimore City, and promoting the general welfare of the city by providing, for the use of separate blocks by white and colored people for residences, churches and schools.”  

Planners originally intended for the Black veterans community to be located near Armistead Gardens in East Baltimore, but concerns were raised over the insurmountable cost to physically separate and contain this Black community. Instead, local officials deemed the geographically-isolated, marshy land of Cherry Hill, located on the other side of the Middle Branch, to be a more suitable location for the development of a Black community.

Today, Cherry Hill is home to Baltimore's largest public housing project, Cherry Hill Homes, with over 1000 units, private homes and several other low-income apartments throughout the community. Across its 80-year history, the Cherry Hill community is well known for its culture of progress and pride, despite long-standing barriers of structural racism and oppression. Today, like many neighborhoods in US cities, Cherry Hill still suffers from the enduring legacy and present reality of racism.

Nonetheless, Cherry Hill has remained strong.  Despite limited access to schools, healthcare, and quality housing, this neighborhood produced some of Baltimore’s most notable sons and daughters - Congressman Elijah Cummings, Judge Robert Bell, Senator Clarence Blount - all the sons of sharecroppers who had traveled north during the Great Migration. Lucille Clifton, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and renowned singer Ethel Ennis, who is known as “Baltimore’s First Lady of Jazz”, are all products of the Cherry Hill Community. Long-time Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke’s parents met in Cherry Hill and one of Baltimore’s most noted African-American civil-rights attorney’s, William H. Murphy, Jr., was born and raised in Cherry Hill.

Local policies propelling segregation stunted Cherry Hill’s growth and quality of life for generations of residents, despite a resource-rich location perched along the waterfront south of downtown. As a result, local government officials, non- and for-profit leaders have come together to shift the trajectory of Cherry Hill by employing the Purpose Built Communities model to coordinate redevelopment through three pillars: the development of mixed-income housing, a place-based cradle-to-college strategy, and community wellness/economic development.