By Frederick N. Rasmussen , fred.rasmussen@baltsun.com|October 20, 2009
Betty Hyatt, a longtime Southeast Baltimore community activist who had been president and director of the Citizens of Washington Hill Inc., where she spent decades fighting for rehabilitated and new housing for community residents, died Wednesday of cancer at Joseph Richey Hospice.
The Washington Hill resident was 83.
"Betty Hyatt was a trailblazer and a gifted organizer. Had it not been for Betty, Washington Hill wouldn't be the vibrant, close-knit community it is today. Betty loved her city. She believed that neighborhoods weren't meant to be rows of houses and numbered streets," Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski said Monday.
"They were communities, places where people lived, worked, played and prayed. They were places where people knew their neighbors by name," she said. "Betty worked tirelessly to create a better community, and to improve the lives of those who lived there."
The daughter of Ukrainian immigrants, Betty Tomsky was born in Baltimore and raised in a rowhouse on East Fairmount Avenue.
A talented artist, she was attending Eastern High School when she fell in love with James Hyatt, a young World War II soldier from South Carolina. After dropping out of school and running away from home, she married and moved to McColl, S.C.
Because her husband was an alcoholic and estranged from his family, Ms. Hyatt was forced to seek work as a bobbin spinner in one of the town's three cotton mills in order to support herself and five children.
"The children were all born at home, in houses with no running water or other modern amenities," recalled a son, Thomas Grover Hyatt of Roland Park. "In 1954, knowing that she could not continue a life in the South with an absent and at times abusive husband, she took her five small children, ages 3 to 10, on a bus back to Baltimore."
Settling into the Perkins Homes on Pratt and Caroline streets, and with financial support from Baltimore social services, Ms. Hyatt remained home until her children could attend school.
During this time, she began volunteering with the Southeast Community Council and was elected president of her children's elementary school PTA.
In 1962, she began to work at the Caroline Street United Methodist Church with the newly created Head Start program, taught arts and crafts classes and African-American studies programs to neighborhood youth.
Ms. Hyatt expanded her neighborhood activism in the 1960s, when she became interested in community development and urban planning issues.
