Harford County civil rights tour shows residents a 'part of history you wouldn't know'

Nov. 2—A longtime Harford County civil rights leader joined other social justice advocates, college and high school students, and county residents Oct. 21 on the second Harford County Civil Rights Tour.

The tour is part of the Harford Civil Rights Project, an oral history collection and mobile application created by James Karmel, history professor at Harford Community College, and students at the school. It also was sponsored by the Harford NAACP.

At 9 a.m., the bus departed from Harford Community College for a three-hour tour of locations in Bel Air, Havre de Grace and Aberdeen that were instrumental in the community's efforts to desegregate the county in the 1950s and 1960s, and paid homage at sites that were part of the African American community prior to desegregation.

This year's tour included stops at a coffee shop in downtown Bel Air, which formerly was a movie theater with segregated seating for African Americans; the former Bel Air Central Consolidated School, now Hickory Elementary School, in Bel Air; UM Harford Memorial Hospital in Havre de Grace; the former Havre de Grace Colored School, now a museum and cultural center; a plaza at 200 N. Philadelphia Blvd. in Aberdeen; and Ray's Caribbean American Restaurant in the Perryman area of Route 40.

Wearing a cobalt blue sweater, the color she often wears that represents her sorority, Zeta Phi Beta, Janice Grant, 90, was joined by two sorority sisters on the tour. The Aberdeen native, who was instrumental in the county's civil rights movement, added anecdotes as Karmel recounted the history while the bus traveled to the various stops. One was about the efforts of African Americans to push Harford County to desegregate its public schools.

Grant was a county public school teacher at the time, first in the county's Blacks-only consolidated schools in the 1950s. When the county schools were desegregated in the 1960s, however, "Black teachers could still only teach Black students," Grant said. "They thought that's all [Black teachers] could do."

Grant and her late husband, Woodrow, were parties in lawsuits to desegregate Harford's public schools. It was their final lawsuit in 1964, 10 years after the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 that integrated the country's schools, that eventually forced the county to fully desegregate in the 1965-66 school year. Karmel called it the "slow walk of desegregation in Harford County Public Schools."

Grant was a product of the segregated public school system. When the tour bus pulled up to the Havre de Grace Colored School and Museum, Grant excitedly pointed out the window to a room at the back of the school.

"That's my homeroom," she said.

Inside, Grant showed some of the tour participants around the classroom and dug through a stack of framed photographs to find a photo of the Class of 1951, her graduating class.

"Find me," she challenged the group, before pointing herself out on the bottom row of the photo.

"We had a lot of love here," Grant said. "It was like one big family. As children, we didn't know what we didn't have, as far as school supplies or textbooks, even though we had old, hand-me-down books. Our teachers were wonderful, and they kept us together."

Grant's sorority sister, Roberta Clay, wandered through the classrooms at the school, looking at the museum displays. Clay, 79, moved to Aberdeen during the Vietnam War to work in the labs at Aberdeen Proving Ground. Although she's lived in the county for more than a half-century, she said she came on the tour "just to see the sights I had missed and to learn more about Black culture in Harford County.

"You don't know everything," Clay said.

Clay said the tour should be a full day.

"There are so many sites," she said. "We could've spent the whole morning in Bel Air alone."

She said she had heard about the former Bel Air movie theater — now the site of a coffee shop — but didn't know where it was until the tour made its first stop of the day. A peek over a fence into the side alley of the building reveals the outline of a second-floor entrance, now bricked up. A set of stairs (no longer there) once led to the colored-only section of the movie theater.

"The former theater is one of the last remaining buildings in Bel Air from the Jim Crow era," Karmel said.

A few tour participants asked if the coffee shop owners knew the history of their building and if they are going to put up a plaque or sign to denote it. Karmel said the project has tried unsuccessfully to reach the owners.

The Harford Civil Rights Project and Visit Harford, the county's tourism bureau, however, are working on a recognition program that would install plaques at several locations around the county with QR codes that passers-by could scan to pull up information about that site, Karmel said.

"We're hopeful that the installation will take place next year to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964," Karmel said.

Two of those sites will include the mixed-use plaza on Route 40 at 200 N. Philadelphia Blvd., which previously housed a motel and restaurant, and the building that now houses Ray's, which has been a restaurant for most of its existence. Restaurant sit-ins were held at both during the 1961 Freedom Rides, an effort to desegregate restaurants on Route 40 between the Maryland state line and Washington.

"Aberdeen was a hotbed of activity during the Freedom Rides of 1961," Karmel said. "Mobs of protesters met the Freedom Riders at several counters."

As with last year's tour, the most moving stop was at the hospital where the group was divided into two smaller groups in order to view three plaques inside of the hospital's small lobby. The plaques tell the tragedy of the Stamps family that occurred at the hospital.

In November 1960‚ Willie Stamps took his wife, Patricia, to hospital to give birth to their son. The hospital had segregated areas for Black patients, including a separate maternity ward. They were attended to by the first and only African American physician to be given residency at the hospital at that time, George Stansbury, who had attended the same segregated primary school as Grant.

When Patricia Stamps and her newborn baby, Carlos, experienced complications, a machine to sustain life was not available in the segregated ward, and both mother and baby died. The hospital was desegregated in the wake of their deaths, Karmel said.

The story hit close to home for Jeff Boynes of Aberdeen, who was born in November 1955 at the hospital, as he stood in the hospital lobby reading the plaques on the wall.

"He must have been the doctor that delivered me," Boynes said while taking a picture of Stansbury's plaque. "I never knew who the doctor was. That's amazing."

"It's all moving," said Cassandra Diaz, 40, of Edgewood.

Diaz was invited on the tour by her daughter, Esperanza Stokes, 19, a student in Karmel's history class.

"It's important to see the stories being passed around," Diaz said, as others on the tour shared their connections to various sites.

Diaz attended Hickory Elementary School and had no idea of its tie to history.

Stokes, a fine arts major at Harford Community College, bounded out of the bus at each stop with her camera strapped to her, snapping pictures.

"This is African American history," she said, "a reminder of what happened and where we came from."

But Stokes said the story of the Stamps moved her most, and she wanted to learn more about them.

"It's sad to know that happened, but we need to know that," she said.

Retired social studies teacher Beverly Talbot and her husband, David, also came on the tour to learn more about the history of African Americans in the county. The Talbots are members of the Racial Justice Alliance of Maryland, an interfaith group of five churches, including their home church, Bel Air United Methodist.

"It's important to understand the history of the county," said Beverly Talbot, who has lived in Harford since 1976.

The couple compared the stories about the segregated schools and facilities with recent activity in the county, such as signs posted from various extremist groups and the meddling of some of those groups, such as Moms for Liberty, in the school system.

They called the current fight against teaching African American history in the county schools "disturbing."

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"Children should learn the truth about our history," David Talbot said. "It benefits all of us."

"Telling the full story brings about awareness, and awareness brings about change," Beverly Talbot said.

Tour participant Tika Sampson, of Churchville, agreed.

"We need to know the good and the bad, so we know how we can affect change," Sampson said.

A New Jersey native, Sampson has lived in the county 19 years.

"I'm not from here, so I didn't realize there's a lot of history in Harford County on segregation, and that the buildings are still here," she said. "I had no idea about the movie theater. I've been in that area so many times and didn't know, and that's part of history you wouldn't know if it wasn't for this [tour]."