Prince George's County senator and civil rights activist Gwendolyn T. Britt died early yesterday, shortly after being taken to Doctor's Community Hospital in Lanham, according to a spokeswoman for Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller. She was 66.
She had not been feeling well and was absent from the General Assembly's session Friday, the spokeswoman said. The cause of death was not available.
The five-year Democratic state senator was expected to introduce legislation this year that would legalize same-sex marriage in Maryland - and by agreeing to do so, she had become a "hero" to that community, wrote Dan Furmansky, executive director of Equality Maryland.
"Thousands of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Marylanders and their families only knew Senator Britt by name, and yet this name truly meant everything to them," he wrote.
When the group asked her to be the lead sponsor on the bill, Mr. Furmansky wrote that "she did not hesitate or ask to think it over first. Her answer was definite, her pride apparent, her convictions solid."
Mrs. Britt's political career began as a student activist at Howard University. In June 1960, 18-year-old Gwendolyn Greene walked into Montgomery County's segregated Glen Echo Park with several students and tried to climb onto a horse on the merry-go-round.
According to a Washington Post story about the confrontation, which sparked five days of protests, she and members of the D.C. Nonviolent Action Group were arrested for trespassing, spat upon and harassed by counter-demonstrators.
Growing up in Northeast Washington, Mrs. Britt knew the color line, she told the Post in 2004. At Hecht's, she could try on clothes, but she couldn't go into Woodward & Lothrop. Every summer, white children would be bused to the gleaming pool at Glen Echo, while black children were transported to separate and very unequal facilities in Washington.
Mrs. Britt left Howard to join the Freedom Riders, who were challenging Jim Crow laws in the South. In 1961, she spent 40 days in a Mississippi jail for sitting in a whites-only train station.
"She would never say, `Look what I've accomplished,'" said Del. Victor R. Ramirez, a Prince George's County Democrat, whose district overlaps Mrs. Britt's. "She'd talk about the civil rights movement if you brought it up, but she was one of those people who spoke soft but carried a big stick."
