The late Victorine Q. Adams helped black politicians challenge Baltimore's white establishment in the 1950s, became the first black woman on the City Council in the 1960s and founded one of the nation's first nonprofits to help people pay energy bills in the 1970s.
But the Baltimore organization that represents her legacy isn't assisting anybody this winter. The Victorine Q. Adams Fuel Fund has suspended business, the result of a bitter disagreement with its main financing source, the Fuel Fund of Maryland.
Baltimore residents are getting energy assistance through other organizations. But the marquee agency that started it all has stopped paying its small staff amid a dispute that includes allegations of racial insensitivity by one side and poor management by both.
Says Charles W. Griffin, president of the Victorine Q. Adams fund: "We felt that this is a matter of divide and conquer, an opportunity to dismantle the memory of what Victorine Q. Adams stands for."
Says Fuel Fund of Maryland Director Marnell Cooper, whose group cut off Griffin's organization in late 2007: "Because of the fiscal irresponsibility of the current structure of the VQA, Mrs. Adams' name is in danger of dying unless something is done."
Disagreements began soon after the petite Adams died in 2006 at the age of 93.
The woman described paradoxically as a "soft-spoken firebrand" left a double legacy: political progress for African-Americans and the inspiration for a network of private nonprofits helping the neediest families pay electricity, natural gas and oil bills.
She founded the Baltimore Fuel Fund in 1979, got Baltimore Gas and Electric to help finance it and created a model that has spread nationwide.
"She is one of the elders in the fuel fund movement - a voice and an advocate for this particular kind of institution at the earliest that people thought of it," said George Coling, executive director of the National Fuel Funds Network, a neutral trade group with hundreds of members. "We really revere her."
The Fuel Fund of Maryland distributes donated resources to low-income families through numerous agencies across the Baltimore area. It wanted the Baltimore City fund, renamed for Adams, to increase the number of people it was helping. Both sides agree on that.
The Adams' fund's Griffin, who is on the Board of Regents at Morgan State University, says that "there was never any talk about limitations on spending" in discussions about expanding assistance.
