African American History

Valley Brook Community Church will celebrate African American history with "Thus Far By Faith," Sunday, Feb. 17 at 11 a.m. at 7065 Deepage Drive, in Columbia. This special service, which includes song, poetry and worship, celebrates God's faithfulness through the journey of African Americans. The commemoration will culminate in a free soul food dinner at the church's Fellowship Hall, at 3333 Spencerville Road, in Burtonsville. The art of Randy Walters will be featured. For more information, call 301-476-9499,

Having just seen the wonderful film, "42," the other day, I, too, was struck by the absence of a mention of the Baltimore Afro-American's Sam Lacy in the sports reporting of such a momentous time in baseball, America's and civil rights history. Your article, "Sam Lacy's son upset by father's absence from '42'" (April 16) reveals Tim Lacy's surprise and hurt by the absence of any mention of his father's name despite all of his reporting as an eyewitness to history with Wendell Smith (the Pittsburgh Courier editor-reporter featured in the movie)

BALTIMORE'S RICH African-American history comes from a combination of its unique locale and its status and opportunities as a port city during slavery and the Civil War. Residents never considered the city a part of the Deep South, although Maryland was a slave state. Baltimore's harbor was once a port in the slave trade. However, because the city wasn't an agricultural area, there were free blacks as well, which created a more open political and social climate for slaves seeking freedom.

Valley Brook Community Church will celebrate African American history with "Thus Far By Faith," Sunday, Feb. 17 at 11 a.m. at 7065 Deepage Drive, in Columbia. This special service, which includes song, poetry and worship, celebrates God's faithfulness through the journey of African Americans. The commemoration will culminate in a free soul food dinner at the church's Fellowship Hall, at 3333 Spencerville Road, in Burtonsville. The art of Randy Walters will be featured. For more information, call 301-476-9499,

Somewhere in his parents' attic, Philip Merrill's collection of 22,000 baseball cards gathers dust. Who knows where those hubcaps he used to grab from the roadside are stashed? Or the baseballs and bats. Or the marbles.All discarded passions. They are nothing, nothing compared to Mr. Merrill's newest collection: the slave shackles, KKK robe, 1944 yearbook from Tuskegee (Ala.) Institute, Muhammad Ali boxing puppet, the slave quilt with red squares (a cryptic show of support for abolitionism)

Keturah Stovall, 9, turned to a small mirror and admired the African-inspired pink and orange designs freshly painted on her face. "I like my face," she said softly to her mother, Monique Fitzgerald of Baltimore. "It's beautiful." Stovall and her mother were among those yesterday who visited the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture for its fourth annual Kwanzaa celebration. Organizers said they expected 1,000 people for the daylong event. Yesterday was the second day of Kwanzaa, a seven-day holiday that honors African-American people, history and culture.

Walking in the steps of African-American history in Annapolis takes you by familiar narrow streets, grand houses and State House statues, but the goal of a newly devised narrative is to make you see those sights anew. Starting Feb. 4, the Kunta Kinte-Alex Haley Foundation will team up with a commercial tour company, Watermark, to offer a weekly series of African-American Heritage tours. Similar water tours are planned for later this year, designed to satisfy interest in the bay city's history.

She remembers it as though it were yesterday — the rows of fresh-faced students, the stern but caring teachers, the potbelly stove in the two-room building. And for Gertrude Makell, the homework never seemed to stop: arithmetic, spelling, history. That was 54 years ago, when Makell was a third-grader at the tiny Galesville Colored Elementary School, the only grade school then open to African-American children in the rural town on the water. Today, she's poised to make some history of her own. Workers will soon complete a mission Makell dreamed up seven years ago — the full restoration of the structure, which started its life as a one-room schoolhouse in 1929, marked several key stages of African-American history and anchored Galesville's black community for generations.

What obstacles will you overcome today?" The spirit and mission of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture -- as well as its sometimes difficult journey toward a June 25 opening -- are neatly encapsulated in a billboard-sized sign mounted on its north wall. The $33 million building at Pratt and President streets was constructed to celebrate African-Americans in Maryland who have overcome obstacles and gone on to make lasting contributions to society.

The Maryland Historical Society celebrates African-American History Month with craft activities, a living-history performance and refreshments tonight at 5:30 p.m. at its Monument Street headquarters. Robert Schoeberlein, former MHS curator of prints and photographs, will share insights about the society's extensive African-American collections. Viewers also can take a look at portraits by Joshua Johnson, a Baltimore native and America's first African-American portrait artist, and letters, photos and memorabilia relating to ragtime pianist Eubie Blake, also a Baltimorean.

I suddenly find myself concerned about my blackness. It had never occurred to me to worry about it before. Then came the incident last month on ESPN's "First Take" program that initially got commentator Rob Parker suspended and then, last week, fired outright. It seems Mr. Parker, who is African-American, analyzed what he saw as the insufficient blackness of Robert Griffin III, rookie quarterback for the Washington, D.C., football team that is named for a racial slur. Having returned their team to relevance for the first time since the Clinton era, RG3, as he is known, can do no wrong in the eyes of Slurs fans.

On a steep hillside up the street from an auto repair shop, a group of McDaniel College students are piecing together long-forgotten lives. The students pull back brambles, trim branches and press flour into tombstones carved a century or more ago. They are trying to uncover the details of the lives of some of the early African-American residents of this small Frederick County town. "They were forgotten, but we're bringing their names back," said junior Emoff Amofa, 21, who is taking professor Rick Smith's January session class on tracing family histories.

Concerned that Baltimore is in danger of losing valuable aspects of its African-American heritage, civil rights activists and preservationists gathered at City Hall Tuesday to urge the formation of a Baltimore City African-American Civil Rights Historic Commission. As outlined in legislation introduced in June, the panel's mission would be to "catalog, preserve, link and promote" resources memorializing the "pioneering civil rights struggle which occurred in Baltimore City in the 1950s and 60s," as well as other key moments in local African-American history.

As old photographs of local jazz musicians flashed on a screen, those gathered in the Pennsylvania Avenue branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Druid Heights on Monday night shouted out names or furrowed their brows, racking their memories for old acquaintances and friends. About 50 people gathered for local historian Thomas Saunders' program "Revisiting Pennsylvania Avenue: A Trip Down Memory Lane" at the library branch and long-standing community landmark, which just completed a three-month renovation.

When the country's largest museum devoted to African-American history and culture opens in Washington, Maryland people and places will get a healthy share of the limelight. A two-story log house built by freed slaves from Montgomery County, dubbed the Freedom House, is one of the largest single objects planned for display inside the $500 million museum, for which ground was broken Wednesday. Other Maryland-related objects include a silk shawl given to abolitionist Harriet Tubman by Britain's Queen Victoria, a hymn book used by Tubman and a first edition of abolitionist Frederick Douglass' autobiography.

It's easy to miss the little two-story, boarded-up house behind the Historical Society of Baltimore County in Cockeysville. Known as "the Pest House," it was once a haven for patients suffering from contagious diseases, such as smallpox. Built in 1872, it's been empty for decades. But efforts to convert it into a research center for county African-American history would take the old stone building beyond its dreary past into a brighter future, provided fundraisers can obtain more than $300,000 for the renovation job. Lead organizer Louis S. Diggs, for whom the center would be named, has written a dozen books on early African-American life in the county, exploring the history of Piney Grove, Turners Station, Catonsville, and Belltown in Owings Mills.

On Feb. 21, The Sun reported in a front page story "Tribute questioned: 'Negro Mountain' called an honor, others see racism. " I take this opportunity to express myself in a very serious way on the attempt to change the designation of Maryland's "Negro Mountain" to something else. Although I realize that the term Negro is offensive to some Americans of African heritage, this effort (however well intentioned) would not yield a good result. First, from a historical perspective, "Negro" as a word is an important part of American history and neither "Black Mountain" nor "African-American Mountain" would be a good substitute.

People with spare means but sure hands built a cabin in East Towson in the 1800s, leaving their mark in tight joinery and chestnut logs. The builders put up a cabin that might now be one of the oldest structures in this area of town, which was settled by freed slaves and their descendants between the 1850s and the 1920s. The house has survived a literal trial by fire and now nears the beginning of its second life as a tiny museum furnished to represent a very modest home of its time.