Commentary

*I am uncertain of the circumstances to which the letter responds. I had given up my apartment near St. Paul and Preston. Majoring in English, I was going to school full time on a Frederick Douglass scholarship and supporting my self on work study at the Education Department library. Half of my course work was accepted from Morgan State, which I had attended from 1965-1968.

I dropped out to join the black consciousness movement headed up by the Student Non-Violent Coordination Committee (SNCC). It was during that period I became a draft resistor and gained the friendship of Walter Lively and Bob Moore, who became my political mentors. From them I gained a political and social knowledge of Baltimore. I became a voracious reader of racial and socialist literature.

SNCC had an office at 432 E. North Avenue. It later became the office of Liberation House Press, out of which we operated a printing press for movement activities. I also during this period worked as an organizer for a Community Action Program, named MUND (Model Urban Neighborhood Development).

During this period, I met Danny Gant of the local Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and his wife Andrea who aided me in my draft resistance. In a meeting, with the then Mayor Delasandro, I saw Gant perform the outrageous act of putting his feet up on the mayor’s desk. Being from the rural South I had never seen black men so militant and so bold. In Washington, I met Stokeley Carmichael; in New York, I met Rap Brown. At Rap’s trial in Belair I met his famed civil rights lawyer William Kunstler in Havre de Grace in a house on Revolution Street. During the trial, two black men from D.C. (Che and Featherstone) died in a car bombing. We received a call in Havre de Grace and several of us (Walter Lively, Fred Mason, and Tiger Davis) went to the state troopers barracks for identifications. I knew the owner of the car.

In 1969, I joined Local 1199’s hospital union drive and served as body guard for Coretta Scott King, wife of the assassinated civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., while she stood outside Johns Hopkins on Madison Avenue. The Kings were friends of labor. Mrs. King came to town to encourage black women to join the union for dignity and better wages.

I later became a paid organizer for the Baltimore Local 1199, during Fred Punch’s presidency. I trained union workers and handled grievances for workers at Sinai, GBMC, Levindale, and House in the Pines nursing homes. It was at the 1199 office that I met my wife Evelyn Duncan, who was Punch’s executive office secretary. Our marriage lasted four years. These were hectic, though fruitful times. The center would not hold and I left 1199 after two years. Though I disagreed with the internal politics of the local, this hospital union for numerous years, was my favorite labor union. In 1969, five thousand workers had been organized in Baltimore in six months time. A lot of good had been done economically; in addition, the consciousness of the people was raised to an extraordinary level.