Former Baltimore councilman killed
September 20, 2008
A former Baltimore councilman is dead after what police say was an armed robbery.
A police spokesman says Ken Harris Sr. died early Saturday at Johns Hopkins.
He was shot at New Haven Lounge, where he’d stopped to visit the owner. When Harris and his friend came outside, police say they met three robbers.
Two robbers stole a safe from the bar, while the third fired at Harris, who ran to his car. Harris tried to drive away, but crashed a short distance away. The owner fired at the men as they fled.
Harris ran for the Fourth District seat in 1999. He gave up his seat last year after losing a primary race for council president.
He had a wife and two children.
(AP)
Marylanders helped pave the way for Obama’s journey
August 31, 2008
C. Fraser Smith, Baltimore Sun
- Sen. Barack Obama is the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee by virtue of his own talent, but he stands on the shoulders of Americans who built, over many decades, a more welcoming social and political landscape in this country.
At a party before Mr. Obama’s acceptance speech, Rep. Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the House majority leader, observed that Americans have just seen a presidential primary campaign that, for the first time, featured a black man and a woman who each had a serious chance of winning. And just two years ago, he pointed out, a woman, Nancy Pelosi, became speaker of the House. That seems like fast progress. But in the matter of race, in particular, progress has been slow. And some of the most incandescent of transformational leaders were Marylanders.
The Eastern Shore’s Harriet Tubman, quoted at the Democratic Convention here by Sen. Hillary Clinton, counseled those she led to freedom to keep on going. That’s what black Americans have done despite decades of abuse, some of it murderous. Somehow the dream did not die.
Cambridge (MD), birthplace of Harriet Tubman, elects first black mayor
July 13, 2008
Kristen Wyatt, Associated Press
- This Chesapeake Bay city of idled crab-processing plants and costly vacation homes has a history of racial strife. But when residents elected its first black mayor last week, they said their worries about joblessness and the economy were foremost on their minds - not the race or sex of the winning candidate.
“I didn’t set out to make history, but here it is,” said new Mayor Victoria Jackson-Stanley, 54, a social worker who ousted an eight-year incumbent in a nonpartisan election. The victory also marks the first time the Eastern Shore city elected a female as mayor and that times are changing.
Cambridge has only 11,000 residents. But in the history books it looms large as the birthplace of Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman, who was born into slavery in the 1840s on a rural plantation outside town. After fleeing the area, Tubman devoted her life to helping others escape northward.
In 1967, Cambridge again gained national attention when a race riot left much of the black section of the city in ashes.
Miss Jackson-Stanley recalls growing up in Cambridge when blacks lived in a section called Ward Two and attended segregated schools. She was among the first black students to attend the county’s previously all-white high school.
“It’s a very beautiful, diverse, multicultural place now,” she said of her hometown, where blacks make up just over half the population. “It wasn’t always like this.”
William Nichols, a machinist who became the first black Dorchester County Commission president a few years back, said “attitudes here have changed.”
Mr. Nichols, 49, grew up in Ward Two and remembers watching flames from his bedroom window in 1967, when a speech by H. Rap Brown ended with a segregated elementary school set on fire. The blaze spread, destroying black-owned businesses as an all-white fire department refused to douse the flames.
Cambridge was among the cities studied by the federal Kerner Commission, which is 1968 looked at racial conditions in the United States, concluding that the country is moving toward “two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal.”
Incumbent Cleveland L. Rippons, a white man, and other residents also said race played little role in the mayoral campaign.
More pressing to voters, said Mr. Rippons, who lost by about 150 votes, were disagreements over growth and jobs as traditional employment in harvesting and picking crabs dries up amid a declining crab population and competition overseas. Residents agreed that economic growth and other concerns were more pressing than the sex or race.
Cambridge is becoming a gentrified resort town a couple hours east of Baltimore and the District. For locals, times are tough as costly vacation homes and yachts supplant the crab-processing houses that once employed most area residents. Dorchester County has an unemployment rate of about 6 percent, compared with about 3.5 percent for the state average.
NAACP Urges Homeowners to Join Suit Over Unfair Lending
July 10, 2008
Ovetta Wiggins, Washington Post
- The Prince George’s County branch of the NAACP is urging homeowners who think they have been victims of mortgage discrimination to contact the organization to become part of a federal lawsuit against lenders and banks.
The NAACP sued 17 of the country’s largest lenders last year, alleging discriminatory practices. The first hearing in the lawsuit is scheduled for the end of this month, NAACP officials said.
“The NAACP has compiled evidence which proves that when credit, income and other qualifications were equal, many African Americans received less favorable loan terms than similar-situated borrowers,” said June White Dillard, president of the county branch.
Prince George’s jail death all too chilling for NAACP
July 9, 2008
BAXTER SMITH, Community Times
- The head of the Baltimore County NAACP suggested that the recent strangulation death of a black man in a jail cell in Prince George’s County is the kind of incident that sends shudders through civil rights leaders, and reminds them of the often tenuous relationship between law enforcement and minority communities.
Patricia C. Ferguson, president of the county National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, called the killing “appalling” and a sign that more diversity training is needed, especially regarding encounters with African-American males.
Ferguson said that county NAACP members deplored the Prince George’s incident at their regular monthly meeting last week. A doctor attending the NAACP meeting said, according to Ferguson, that “she felt the jail cell killing meant it was open season on African-American males.”
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