Though he's facing an undefined FBI investigation, this isn't the first time Sen. Ulysses Currie has stared down adversity.
The head of one of Maryland's most powerful Senate committees got where he is only by struggling past poverty, hard labor and racism.
The hard-core Democrat from Prince George's County has earned the esteem of his colleagues - on both sides of the aisle. Almost everyone seems shaken that a shadow is hovering over a man who otherwise seems nothing less than upright.
"Uly is one of the people least likely in the legislature to have something like this happen," said former Sen. Barbara A. Hoffman, who led the powerful Budget and Taxation Committee before Currie and recommended him as her successor.
"It just boggles the mind. When I found out, I just said, 'Who? It's not possible.' That's not the Uly Currie I know."
Details of the investigation are spare. FBI agents visited Currie's District Heights home on Thursday after also serving a search warrant at Shoppers Food & Pharmacy's corporate headquarters in Lanham. Currie is an "outside consultant" for Shoppers Food, according to the company.
Currie was raised in poverty in rural North Carolina. Because his mother died when he was 18 months old, his father, a sharecropper, raised him. Until he was a teenager, he lived without running water or electricity.
Like many children who grew up in farm communities, the young Currie often missed classes in the one-room building that was his school to work the fields.
The money he saved from farming and working summers on a railroad - $120 - covered his enrollment fees and his first quarter at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State College. He graduated from A&T in 1959 with a degree in social studies.
As a black man in the segregated South, he lived racism's realities, carefully avoiding the white-only bathroom, finding his seat at the back of the bus.
Pursuit of education
When he moved north to Havre de Grace to stay with his aunt, Odessa Phillips, she urged him to pursue a career in education - which he eventually did. Now retired, Currie worked as a principal at several Prince George's County schools.
"My whole life has been as much of a struggle for an education as anything," Currie told The Sun last year. "I still feel that's the gap. Education. Trying to close the gap and catch up."
Not long after moving to Maryland, he enlisted in the Army and was stationed at Fort Dix, N.J., and later in Germany.
