Neighborhoods in Baltimore, Washington and Cambridge were already burning after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Annapolis Mayor Roger "Pip" Moyer feared it wouldn't be long before race rioting struck the state capital.
He looked for his oldest friend, a small-time thief named Joseph "Zastrow" Simms. Moyer was white and Simms was black, yet they had grown up together on the basketball courts in the segregated city.
Moyer sprung Simms from his cell in a Baltimore jail for a few hours, and together they walked the streets of the old 4th Ward in Annapolis, calming the people and sparing the city the destruction wrought in urban areas nationwide.
"Some of those cities are still building up after all those years," said Simms, who, like Moyer, is now 73. "Here was a white man who was able to come into the black community ... and they respected him. Don't think there weren't some tense moments, though."
Forty years later, their nearly lifelong bond paralleling the country's search for racial tolerance has been turned into a documentary. Pip & Zastrow: An American Friendship, by filmmakers Victoria Bruce and Karin Hayes, will get its first screening tonight in Annapolis.
"It's just really a beautiful narrative story of a friendship," Bruce said. "It's not a piece to try to put any issues on anyone. You just sort of fall in love with the characters and see how they conquered their own demons and political challenges."
With $100,000 in grants from the city and county, the film was shot in Annapolis over a four-year period, which produced more than 100 hours of interviews with everyone from the current mayor and Moyer's former wife, Ellen O. Moyer, to Carl O. Snowden, head of the state's civil rights office and a native of Annapolis.
"The relationship between the two is timeless," said Ellen Moyer. "Each of them had a different set of skills and talents that were key to avoiding a crisis. No man is an island. One really can't do anything alone. Those are the kinds of things that inspire us all."
Both talented athletes in their youth, Moyer played forward and center at all-white Annapolis High, and Simms starred at all-black Wiley H. Bates High. In 1959, Moyer integrated an all-black semipro team, a scandal at the time.
Moyer went on to join the Army, graduated from the University of Baltimore and then ran for city council. In 1965, he was elected mayor. Simms became a petty thief and was in and out of jail.
