Walter R. Dean Jr. was honored at his retirement ceremony last month by Baltimore City Community College colleagues for opening young minds to wider worlds during a 40-year career.
"I never considered that it was 'working' at the school," he said. "It was an avocation that paid me."
Dean, 75, who lives in Lochearn, recently reflected on his life in Baltimore, his involvement in the civil rights movement and the dozen years he spent in the Maryland House of Delegates.
As a child — he was the oldest of nine — he spent time on Bond Street in East Baltimore and in Cherry Hill, where his mail carrier father campaigned to have a new public school constructed and later headed its PTA. Young Dean loved walking the streets of East Baltimore and was lucky to have two grandmothers whose doors were never locked during the day. "Imagine that," he said as he broke into a smile.
He said two institutions made a difference in his life.
"I spent nearly every day at the Pratt Library on Broadway. I'd get a book and read it at night. And in the third grade, I was taken to the Baltimore Museum of Art where I saw a Mary Cassatt painting. It opened me to the world of art. I never forgot that day," he said.
When the Pratt branch on Broadway seemed too small, he would "race across the Orleans Street Viaduct" and find more books at the central Pratt on Cathedral Street. A lifelong reader, he often puts away two books a week, if not more.
"He was one of the best-read people on the faculty in a variety of fields," said a faculty colleague, mathematics professor Joan Finucci. "He could talk about anything. He challenged his students to think. He didn't just give them information and accept it."
After graduating from Dunbar High School — he heaped praise on its faculty — he went on to Morgan State University and was editor of its newspaper, the Spokesman. As a black college student at the height of civil rights activism, he had meetings in his news office about the demonstrations and sit-ins being staged in and around Baltimore at that time.
"Maryland was a peculiar state," he said. "We had a lot of segregation but a tremendous body of enlightened people who supported us. We didn't have the rancor of the Southern states."
The students focused on the Northwood Shopping Center on Loch Raven Boulevard near the Morgan campus. Dean was arrested March 26, 1960, at a segregated restaurant in the Hecht-May Co. department store. The management refused to serve black dining patrons and posted guards at the door.
Dean was taken into police custody with three others that day. The incident had such an impact on other department stores that the owner of Hutzler's ordered his tea room and lunch counters open to all customers three weeks later. Another department store, Hochschild Kohn, had already desegregated.
"Baltimore is a genteel town in some ways," he said. "It is also a harsh town, too."
When arrested for trying to be served at a small Annapolis restaurant, he was put in the city jail, but the door to his cell was left unlocked. "I could have walked out," he said.
Ever the reader, he was reading a copy of W. Somerset Maugham's "The Razor's Edge" one day at a table outside a fancy Rome hotel during the 1960s. Dean, in the Air Force and stationed in Germany and Italy, was approached by the novelist's secretary, who spotted his book and took him to chat with Maugham. Dean also visited dozens of German and Italian art museums and considered the condition of Europe during the Cold War.
"In Naples in the 1960s, I realized how dangerous poverty was," he said. "I saw mothers offering their daughters as prostitutes."
In the mid-1960s, he was chosen by Mayor Theodore R. McKeldin to work in the federal Community Action Program established by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
"It was no accident that the explosion of the black middle class began during the Great Society program," he said of one of Johnson's initiatives.
He earned a master's degree in social work at the University of Maryland and began teaching urban affairs at what was then Baltimore Junior College, headed by Harry Bard. "He was the kind of guy who got things done," Dean said of Bard.
He also joined the Citizens Planning and Housing Association and worked alongside its director, Frances M. Froelicher, as well as future Mayor William Donald Schafer and his housing commissioner, Robert C. Embry Jr.
He then went on to Annapolis, where he served in the General Assembly from 1971 to 1982. He ran his campaigns under the slogan The Dean Team.
He went on to chair the college's Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences and remains an advocate of a college education.
"Baltimore is a city with a huge number of illiterate people," he said. "But we are a city rich in universities. We have the tools. We just have to use them."
