African American

This week, beginning Tuesday, Feb. 19, Seven Oaks Elementary School in Perry Hall will help students celebrate diversity through the school's annual “African American Read-In Chain.” Throughout the week, visitors to the school will share with students some of their favorite  literature written by African American authors.   Some of the school's scheduled readers are Sen. Katherine Klausmeier, Delsgates John Cluster and Eric Bromwell, County Councilman David Marks, and several Baltimore County Public Schools friends and educators, as well as former Seven Oaks Elementary administrators and teachers.

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,

Nova A. Scott, a retired Baltimore public schools educator who became the first African-American woman to serve on the Howard County Commission on Aging, died Wednesday of complications from an infection at Howard County General Hospital. She was 86. "Nova was always very low-key. She never talked about what she was doing, she just did it, and she did lots of good during her life," said Betty S. Brown, a retired Baltimore public schools educator and a friend for more than 50 years.

An upstairs room at Asbury Methodist Church is stuffed with memorabilia and documents of the Annapolis church, from faded photos of generations of church leaders to mugs commemorating the recent 200th anniversary. The filing cabinets that line a back wall in this informal exhibit space contain a trove of church records - births, deaths and marriages among them. The glass cabinets elsewhere in the room hold other items, including a tea kettle that a century ago sat on a wood-fired stove in the church, used to boil water for tea for the pastor and his visitors.

Hattie Harrison, the matriarch of East Baltimore politics who often greeted colleagues as "Baby" and was known for her signature curled hair and Southern cooking, will be remembered at a funeral at noon Feb. 9. Mrs. Harrison died of heart disease complications Monday at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. She was 84. Appointed to the House of Delegates representing the 45th District in 1973 and re-elected thereafter, she was the oldest member of the General Assembly. She was also the longest-serving member of the House of Delegates and the first African-American woman to chair a major committee, Rules and Executive Nominations.

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.

The Rev. Gertie T. Williams feels very much at home when she volunteers at the restored Ellicott City Colored School on Frederick Road. The Howard County native's ease in her surroundings is for good reason: From grades one through seven, she attended a nearly identical two-room schoolhouse for African-American students, located in Elkridge. So when county officials hit upon the idea of holding an open house Jan. 21 on Martin Luther King Jr. Day at the Ellicott City facility - the first Howard school for black children built with county funds - Williams was the obvious choice to give the invocation, said Jacque Galke, supervisor of the county's heritage program.

The civil rights movement was full of dynamic and evocative images. Today, even many of us born after its iconic moments were captured on film can describe Martin Luther King Jr.'s outstretched arm pointing a sea of people toward a future decades beyond the short span of his life, or German shepherds in Birmingham ripping into black skin, as if we had watched these events live. But 50 years after the March on Washington, one local institution is helping audiences revisit this period in American history and examine details that were largely overlooked.

Anyone who has followed the effort to repeal the death penalty in Maryland knows that the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee is the last obstacle needed to bring it to a long-overdue floor vote. The Maryland State Conference of the NAACP believes that repeal of the death penalty is too important to be stymied by the committee's makeup. Death penalty abolition would save Maryland millions of dollars and prevent future murders. The question deserves an up or down vote on the floor of the Maryland Senate - even if it means restructuring the committee.

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.