HERE'S A MODEST proposal for improving Druid Hill Park. Erect a statue of Harriet Tubman or another prominent African-American on its beautiful grounds. Here's why:
When you enter the beautiful park on Swan Drive from Druid Park Lake Drive, you soon see living black people and statues of four dead white men.
All of the statues sit in prominent places near the reservoir, Druid Lake.
Frozen in time are: George Washington, the nation's first president; Christopher Columbus, who brought death and misery to Indians in the New World; William Wallace, the Scotish freedom fighter; and German opera composer Richard Wagner.
The monuments were created more than a century ago when whites used the park as a social center and Baltimore was truly the Monumental City. White heroes were placed on pedestals by private societies or prominent families who rarely uttered the words, "black" and "hero" in unison.
Black people were unwelcome in areas of Druid and other parks until after 1955, when the Supreme Court outlawed segregated park and beach facilities, the aftermath of a Maryland case. Park tennis courts, golf and swimming facilities had been for one race or the other.
Demonstrations to integrate the city parks had taken place in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1946, when the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People urged the park board to end discrimination in areas of Baltimore parks, a leader of the group said two-thirds of the visitors to Druid and one-fifth of the city's population were black.
Even so, charged Addison Pinkney, executive secretary of the NAACP branch, blacks were kept from parts of the park. Three small black children, accompanied by an adult, had just been verbally abused by a policeman and had been led away from swings near the Fulton Avenue entrance to Druid Hill Park.
"These children were too young to know their color prohibited them from using swings in a certain part of the park," Pinkney told the park board.
Today, some whites and people of other ethnic groups continue to use Druid Hill Park for jogging, tennis, softball, walking and bicycling, and special events like balloon race ascensions and plot gardening. But far more African-Americans than whites find Druid a home for those activities in addition to large family reunions, swimming, picnics, golf practice, football and basketball.
Where are the statues of black people of accomplishment? Nowhere.
