A trip into history: Harford Civil Rights Tour opens eyes

Nov. 2—On a drizzly Saturday morning Oct. 1, a group of about 25 people representing a diverse cross section of Harford County boarded a charter bus for a tour of historic significance.

This was the first Harford Civil Rights Tour, organized by the Harford Civil Rights Project at Harford Community College and the local branch of the NAACP.

The tour included six stops: the former site of the Bel Air movie theater on North Main Street, now a coffee shop; the southern corner of Baltimore Pike and Tollgate Road in Bel Air, where a car bomb exploded in March 1970, killing two people; the former site of the Havre de Grace Consolidated School, now the Roye-Williams Elementary School; the previously segregated Harford Memorial Hospital in downtown Havre de Grace; and the site of a former restaurant at 2 S. Philadelphia Road in Aberdeen that Freedom Riders attempted to integrate on Dec. 16, 1961.

The tour began and ended at Ray's Caribbean American Restaurant on Route 40 in the Perryman area of Aberdeen. The building has housed various restaurants over the years; as the Sportsman Grill, it was another restaurant Freedom Riders attempted to integrate in 1961.

The Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who traveled by bus from northern states into segregated areas of the South and worked for integration.

"I wanted to come on the tour to learn more about my history and the place that I live in, what happened in the past," said Vanessa Venyo, 16.

Venyo was one of three students from Harford Tech High School who attended the tour, along with Ama Okyere, 16, and Nathalie Nguyen, 17. The students take a history class at Harford Community College.

"We don't talk a lot about the past, which is why the trip was so surprising," Nguyen said. "These are places we've probably all been to and didn't know the history."

The project is led by HCC history professor James Karmel, who has been researching the Harford County civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Karmel, along with HCC students, has been compiling information, collecting artifacts, and cataloging oral histories from those who have ties to the county's African American history, including recorded interviews with some of the county's oldest African American residents.

"It's important that we collect and document this important part of Harford County's history before we lose any more of it," Karmel said.

The result has been a website, harfordcivilrights.org, and a companion app that features several locations on a virtual tour, including the stops that were a part of the in-person tour.

"I thought that since there was a virtual tour, why not take an in-person tour?" said Vicki Jones, president of the Harford NAACP.

As the tour bus weaved its way through the county on two-lane back roads and state routes, Karmel shared anecdotes from the project with the participants.

"I've learned bits and pieces about the county's history but going on this tour, I got a better understanding from hearing the really intimate stories about memorable people in the community," said Laura Burke, 37, a Bel Air native and student wellness specialist at HCC.

"It's been eye-opening," said Medford Campbell of Joppa, who has lived in the county for 35 years. "Things have changed, but they really haven't changed a whole lot."

As Karmel pointed out along the tour, the county's progression to desegregation was a slow march in some areas, such as education. Harford County's public schools were not fully desegregated until more than a decade after the Supreme Court's milestone Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 found segregation unconstitutional.

One of the stops on the tour that elicited numerous questions was the former Havre de Grace Consolidated School. As a cornerstone marker on the exterior of the brick building states, the school opened in 1953 as a K-12 school for black students who lived in the northeastern part of the county and existed until it was integrated in the 1965-66 school year and renamed Oakington Elementary School.

In 1982, Oakington was again renamed Roye-Williams Elementary School. The name honors the principals of the county's two consolidated schools — Leon Roye, the first principal of Havre de Grace Consolidated School; and Percy Williams, principal of Central Consolidated School, the segregated school that had been for Black students in the southern half of the county.

When Central Consolidated School in Bel Air desegregated, a proposal to rename it after Williams was oppsed by white parents whose children were going to attend the integrated school, Karmel said. That school was eventually renamed Hickory Elementary School.

"Hearing about how they wanted to name the elementary school after Williams and there was an uproar, that story is still permeating our life and society now," Burke said. "That history is still impacting us."

Karmel said there are some plaques in the Roye-Williams Elementary School lobby to commemorate its legacy, but he doubted whether the school's history is taught to current students.

"Why is African American history not being taught in our schools?" asked John Sawyer, 67, of Havre de Grace. Sawyer, an Army veteran originally from Alabama, said that when he was in school in the South, he was taught Black history and world history.

"It is," said Paula Stanton, supervisor of equity and cultural proficiency for Harford County Public Schools, who happened to be in the group. "Sometimes that history is taught as part of U.S. history because it is U.S. history."

Stanton, who was also a teacher in the school system for several years, said she decided to go on the tour to learn firsthand about this part of the county's history.

"It was personal for me," Stanton said.

Not only did civil rights activists fight to desegregate Harford's schools, hospitals and other public institutions, they also fought against unfair and unequal housing and employment practices in the county.

Tour attendees said the most memorable stop was the hospital. Inside the lobby are photos of Patricia Stamps and her baby, Carlos. Both died in November 1960, when the baby experienced complications after childbirth that could not be treated because they were on a segregated floor of the hospital that did not have the same medical equipment as the whites-only section.

A third photo is of a notable Black Harford County doctor, the late George Stansbury, who was the Stamps' doctor. The photos were placed in the lobby in 2018.

"I've gone there a lot of times, and every time I go there I learn something new," Okyere said. "I probably wouldn't have known what happened to the Stamps family if they hadn't put the plaques up there."

Sheree White also said the hospital stop stood out to her.

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"It was the most memorable part of the tour because of the portraits of the mother and her child," White said. "It's amazing that we're still facing discrimination in hospitals and health care today."

White, 61, who is Black, invited her neighbor, Barbara Herold, 76, who is white, to go with her on the tour. The two Edgewood women say they've been discussing history recently and the tour was timely for them.

"I don't remember hearing about all of this," said Herold, who grew up in the Hamilton neighborhood of Baltimore. "My family didn't talk about things like this."

Herold said that as a mother, she was moved by the picture of the Stamps baby.

"I cannot imagine anybody not getting the care that they need," she said, tearing up. "I never knew that was happening to Black people. And to hear [Karmel] say that it's still going on in some places, I just can't fathom it."

After the tour ended, participants were treated to lunch at Ray's, the Caribbean restaurant. Many huddled in small groups and discussed what they saw and heard on the tour.

"There so much more I don't know, that I want to and need to learn about the history right where I live," White said after the tour.