Esther McCready never skips her volunteer visits to the University of Maryland, the school she forced to offer her an education 60 years ago when she was a hopeful, young black student.
McCready, a retired nurse and teacher, is now 78 and spends hours each month volunteering at the school's nursing museum in Baltimore, where her letter of admission is enshrined.
Civil rights scholars say it was McCready's persistence that opened the university system's doors to black undergraduate students during the days of court-sanctioned racial segregation in Maryland.
"People ask if I was bitter about what happened," she said of her initial experiences at the then-all-white school. Speaking recently at Maryland's School of Nursing on West Lombard Street, she said, "I don't allow bitterness to enter my life. Bitterness destroys you."
McCready, then an 18-year-old living on Dallas Street in East Baltimore, had graduated with honors from Dunbar High School, worked as an aide at Sinai Hospital and wanted to go to nursing school. She and a friend applied to all the nursing schools in the telephone book (they divided the alphabet and McCready took the second half), and she informed the schools she was black.
"Hers is another one of those Rosa Parks situations," said University of Maryland law professor Larry Gibson. "In both cases, women, acting on their own, just made up their minds that they were not going to accept discrimination anymore and then did something about it."
McCready received an application from the University of Maryland, where the only black students accepted were in its law school.
"I often wonder who was in that office sending out these applications," McCready said. The other schools wrote back saying that they did not allow "negroes."
McCready filled out the application and took a required medical examination from her physician, Dr. Raynor Brown. To this day, she assumes that he contacted the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and soon she found herself being asked by an NAACP attorney why she had applied to the school: "Who put you up to it?"
"Nobody put me up to that. I did it by myself," McCready recalled saying.
She applied for admission to the 1949 class; the school sat on the application and did not admit her. The NAACP took up her case. Several attorneys, including Thurgood Marshall, who later served as a justice of the Supreme Court, argued her case in Maryland courts. It took a year - McCready won on appeal - and then she faced the reality of being the first black undergraduate at Maryland. Soon, Maryland's other professional schools opened their doors, as did the College Park undergraduate program.
