Monalisa Diallo
“I’ve always been a person that felt like I’m not allowed to complain unless I’m helping or coming up with something better.” Advocate and grandmother Monalisa Diallo lets this belief guide her work as a woman who’s been at the heart of nutrition and housing justice in Baltimore for nearly three decades.
For 29 years, Monalisa’s “work for pay,” as she describes, has been as an educator with Baltimore County Public Schools, but much of her time and effort has been spent cultivating green spaces and homeownership in Park Heights and Mondawmin. For many years, Diallo was a member of Park Heights Community Health Alliance, where she cultivated a teaching garden that fed community members for free and taught growing skills. This focus on food and nutrition in Black communities reflected the influence of her mother, who she remembers “cooked meals for those in need” and “welcomed our friends and would feed them with food and a sense of warmth.”
Diallo also centers her paternal grandmother’s legacy at the foundation of her community work. Diallo’s grandmother was displaced by the construction of the infamous “Highway to Nowhere” and Diallo later promised that she would buy a house in West Baltimore in honor of her grandmother.
Since buying a house in Mondawmin six years ago, Diallo has channeled this familial history into advocacy for Black homeownership and community care while continuing to grow food out of her kitchen garden for neighbors. As president of the Douglas Square Neighborhood Association, Diallo leads the daily work of neighborhood upkeep while also organizing mental health events and community gatherings. Although recently affected by breast cancer treatment, for years Diallo has walked the neighborhood daily picking up trash, taking pictures of illegal dumping, reporting vacancies and safety concerns, and working with the Greater Mondawmin Coordinating Council to schedule cleanups.
With her perspective shaped by the vibrant women of her family, Diallo recognizes the central role that women play amongst Baltimore’s grassroots organizers, and she celebrates the women who continue to impact her like her mother-sister Sherri, artist Olu Butterfly, and Nilajah Brown, owner of Flourish Baltimore and The Birth Well.
“To do community work in any capacity, you will come across a lot of adversity. So it’s vitally important to have Sistah[s] around you that support you,” she says. “Black Baltimore’s foundation is matriarchal.” (Amari-Grey Johnson)
Christina Delgado
When Christina Delgado purchased her home in Belair-Edison in 2006, it was her mother who encouraged her to get involved in her new neighborhood’s advocacy. “She would say, ‘Reach out to your council person. Reach out to your delegate.’ And I used to be eye-rolling over the phone like, ‘Who does that?’” recalls Delgado. In the 20 years since, Delgado has become a fixture in community leadership for Northeast Baltimore as founder of collective Northeast Leaders and the visionary behind Tola’s Room, a home museum and culture space celebrating Puerto Rican and Nuyorican heritage.
Originally from New York, Delgado was drawn to Baltimore in the 2000s by the city’s music and dance scene, finding parallels between Baltimore’s vibrant artistry and markets and her community in New York. Baltimore’s creative culture became an opportunity to nurture the “quirky, artsy kid” inside her, and she found herself teaching at Baltimore Lab School.
Delgado brought a philosophy to education informed by her upbringing in a “very community-centered” family. As a child, she watched her family’s matriarch Aunt Evelyn welcome the neighborhood into her home — turning her house into a place of care, nourishment, and play that allowed her to have, as she says, “this understanding of … humanity, of empathy, compassion.” These memories of connection laid the groundwork for her work at Baltimore Lab School, where she not only designed arts classes but built partnerships with neighborhood spaces and organizations to direct resources to students.
When Delgado became a resident leader with her local community nonprofit, Belair-Edison Neighborhoods, Inc, in 2015, her empathy and teaching experience supported her in the nitty-gritty of coordinating community groups, managing block projects, mediating community issues, and eventually transitioning from BENI to co-creating Northeast Leaders in 2018. These early years as a community organizer helped her find a path at the intersection between community, art, and education. These three pillars would then go on to become the foundation of Tola’s Room, a project seeded in memory work after the passing of Christina’s father.
Named for Christina’s daughter Tola, whose name means “child of wealth,” Tola’s Room is a product of the wealth of love and connection that has traced Christina’s journey as well as a promise of the kind of community Christina has strived to raise her daughter within.
“To raise a daughter in the city … I love that my child is so in tune with who she is. She has so many people in the community that love her and support her. Anytime I see somebody — whether it’s the mayor, whether it’s the organizers, whether it’s the community leaders and elders — everybody asks about Tola.” (Amari Grey-Johnson)
Adeline Hutchinson
As a child in the youth development program 4-H, Adeline Hutchinson was surrounded by what she calls “social work” from an early age. She grew up under the influence of women like her mother and her mentor Ms. Pearl Moulton, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland’s School of Social Work and former president of the Greater Mondawmin Coordinating Council, which Hutchinson now heads today.
Living in the Greater Mondawmin community for more than 40 years now, Hutchinson is a ubiquitous and unifying presence in the neighborhood. She has served as president of the Robert W. Coleman Community Organization since 2002 and is the current president of GMMC where she advocates for neighborhood resources, the creation of green spaces, and education.
A retiree of Baltimore City Public Schools, Hutchinson closed her 30-year career in administration in 2010, and she still shows up daily for youth and families as one of the neighborhood’s beloved matriarchs. She has been a leading voice behind the successful transformation of vacant lots in Greater Mondawmin into recreation spaces like Herbert Street Park, and in her role with GMCC, she was a key advocate for representing community needs in the development of “The Village at Mondawmin.” These successes are products of the daily work of organizing meetings, building organizational partnerships, and simply showing up that Hutchinson dedicates herself to.
The legacy of grassroots organizing in West Baltimore helps her to sustain this dedication even when “we are [not] sure as to how things will go on any given day.”
“We often think about the Mitchell family, the Jackson family, and the Murphys. These individuals served most often in the West Baltimore areas of Baltimore City,” Hutchinson said. “I would like for individuals to remember me as an individual that lived and worked within the Greater Mondawmin community and served to showcase the community with the footprints of individuals that shaped [it].” As the Greater Mondawmin Coordinating Council celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, the impact of Hutchinson’s decades of work only continues to grow. (Amari-Grey Johnson)
Sonia Eaddy
The side of Sonia Eaddy’s home faces the Highway to Nowhere as it passes through Poppleton. On her wall, for every car that drives around that scar, are painted the words: “Save Our Block: Black Neighborhoods Matter.”
Below that, Eaddy’s own words appear in black lettering: “Losing my home is like death to me. Eminent Domain law is violent.”
Only Eaddy, the head of the Poppleton Now Community Association, didn’t lose her home, despite the city’s use of eminent domain law — a law that allows land to be taken for the public good — to give her land to a private developer from New York City more than two decades ago. The developer promised he would turn the West Baltimore neighborhood of Poppleton into a new SoHo. But Eaddy, the daughter of a long-time arabber who gave her the house, didn’t want SoHo; She wanted Poppleton, and she was willing to fight for it, decade after decade.
She had seen what the shock of displacement did to her neighbors and within her own family. Her grandmother, who had been vibrant and full of life, quickly deteriorated and passed after being moved from her longtime home to another. Displacement can often mean the killing off of the stability and peace that one’s home holds.
“People didn’t consider how residents’ lives would be impacted,” she says. “It wasn’t about what was good for us, it was about what was good for the city.”
Eaddy decided to organize, and eventually saved not only her own home but the adjacent alleyhomes which had been occupied by Black women since the 1800s. Those houses were taken out of the development, and Black Women Build is renovating them instead.
But it wasn’t just about her own house. It was about the power of Black neighborhoods.
“I want the way we use and talk about eminent domain, especially in Black and brown communities, to change,” Eaddy says, “Private companies should not be able to uproot people for their personal gain.” (Sope Willoughby)
Regina Hammond
If you visit Johnston Square today in East Baltimore, it looks quite different than it did over 10 years ago. Or even three months ago. Rebuild Johnston Square Neighborhood Organization along with ReBuild Metro replaced vacant homes and lots with a new 109-unit apartment complex called the Hammond at Greenmount Park, complete with a new Enoch Pratt Library, the first new branch in over 15 years.
Regina Hammond is the heart of the development in Johnston Square. She founded Rebuild Johnston Square Neighborhood Organization, and since 2013 she has worked directly with the community, training with Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development to ensure she was building the neighborhood with the vision of people who would live there.
“Community can lead transformation in their neighborhood,” Hammond said. “All of the work that has been done in Johnston Square has been community-led. The development is with, not for, the community. No one tells us what they need to do for us.”
“I love my little house in Johnston Square,” she says of her home and neighborhood, which she moved into in the 1980s. However, she saw the need for residents to remain in the neighborhood. “Slowly and surely, I saw it decline,” she said, noting that her neighbors all wanted the same things: “decent housing, recreation for their children, decent jobs, and they wanted to feel safe in their neighborhood.”
So, she began to organize. “We organized Johnston Square because we had a whole community that had been disinvested for decades. There was no reason for people to stay other than for the love of the community.”
The Hammond at Greenmount is the physical manifestation of the vision Hammond has had for the community for more than a decade and her desire to live in a place where she and her neighbors can thrive.
The park now has landscaping, a brand new basketball court, and a brand new pool. It’s a far cry from the blighted space they saw in 2013. In the spring we can look forward to a blooming garden, cementing the neighborhood as some place we want to be. (Emma Akpan)
Rita Crews
Although Rita Crews is a well-established community advocate in Belair-Edison, when you ask her about herself, she will always represent North Carolina. She was raised by her grandparents, people who were well-known in their community for making sure people were fed and clothed, and even burying those who didn’t have family who could do it. Being community-minded was something that was woven into her. “They gave me the blueprint of what a community is supposed to be like,” Crews said.
She first came to Baltimore in the 1970s as a student at Morgan State University. Upon graduation, she opted to make Baltimore her home and spent four decades working in the Baltimore City Public Schools system, first as a teacher and then as a principal. After she returned in 2016, she began with community activism and helped to create a playground at Shannon Drive and Brehms Lane.
Much like her grandparents, she wanted to help families, children, and her neighbors. “I can’t wait on anyone to help others, I have to do it myself,” she said. “You cannot be afraid, and you cannot be a coward.”
When a local grocery store was closed in her community, she didn’t simply accept what she was told. She called her councilperson and invited the local news media to a press conference. As a result, they are working to bring a grocery store back to that same community. Crews continues to embody the idea that courage and commitment can and does bring about positive change. (Sope Willoughby)
Jacqueline Caldwell
Living in Greater Mondawmin her entire life, Jacqueline Caldwell saw a need to beautify the porches in her neighborhood and wondered if there was something she could do about it. She was initially told that money didn’t exist for that improvement, but after attending a meeting with representatives from the federal housing department, she was able to ask someone directly for funds to fix the porches in her neighborhood. Although they weren’t able to help, Caldwell was able to connect with Neighborhood Housing Services, leading to a grant that paid to upgrade and fix 18 porches in her neighborhood, an endeavor they dubbed the Porch Project. At that point, she realized that if she wanted to make changes in her neighborhood, she had to be at the right place at the right time.
“I have always worked in philanthropy. While doing this work, I have always questioned who we give to and how we determine who is worthy of receiving,” Caldwell said. The people who were deemed worthy of help and support were rarely the people who looked like her.
“If you have a vision, all you have to do is trust that your work will be successful,” she says. (Sope Willoughby)
Stefanie Mavronis
As the city clocked a historic low in homicides last year, the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement was something of a lightning rod as various people sought credit for the reduction. The mayor himself attributed the radical decrease in homicides and other violent crimes to MONSE’s initiatives, which use a holistic approach to violence, trying to aggressively tackle the gun problem without neglecting root causes — exactly the kind of approach that can lead to attack from all sides.
On the one hand — the right (wing) hand, specifically — there’s State’s Attorney Ivan Bates, who dramatically announced in December that his office would no longer work with MONSE, citing a “veil of secrecy.” Others in the law enforcement community complain about the work of violence interrupters. On the other hand, MONSE’s signature Group Violence Reduction Strategy also relies on “proactive” police squads that have been responsible for some of the city’s many police shootings over the last year.
As the director of MONSE, Stefanie Mavronis stands at the center of all this and, whatever you think of MONSE, the first-generation college grad is one of the most influential people in the city. She attributes many of the ideas that have helped her shape and implement the mayor’s response to violence to her time working on “The Marc Steiner Show,” a daily radio call-in show operated out of Morgan State University. During that time she was able to hear firsthand about the things that concerned the people of Baltimore in their own words.
“The consensus was that it felt like our murder rate was fixed, and we needed to do more to solve the problem,” Mavronis said. That public affairs show (which has various connections to people who are connected to the Beat) put her in contact with then-City Councilperson Brandon Scott, who was talking about violence as a public health issue rather than as a moral blight. That meant, Mavronis thought, that violence could be solved like other public health problems.
She then earned a Master of Public Affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs in Domestic Policy with a certificate in Urban Policy and Planning in 2018 and returned to Baltimore, first to work as Zeke Cohen’s director of civic engagement and then to take over as Brandon Scott’s director of communication, before becoming chief of staff of MONSE in 2022, its interim director in 2023, and finally MONSE director in 2024.
“There’s a growing and unstoppable consensus that public safety is about violence prevention with our youth, real-time and relevant intervention with those at the highest risk of gun violence, support for returning citizens, and trauma-informed, direct support too,” she said.
Ultimately, Mavronis attributes any improvement to the people of Baltimore themselves. “We can make investments and create initiatives, but ultimately it is people making different choices that is the difference,” she says. (Sope Willoughby)
Lynn Pinder
“I see the beauty and value in Baltimore. I see the value in the city and the people of this city,” says Lynn Pinder, a native Baltimorean and the director of Baltimore Green Jobs Academy, an initiative of Baltimore Green Justice Workers Cooperative, an organization which equips those from historically marginalized and underserved communities to have a hand in creating innovative, sustainable, green solutions that help us shift power dynamics by creating more beautiful, resilient, and thriving communities. Baltimore Green Works Jobs Academy focuses on young people who are 25 and older, with the goal of learning what it takes to run an effective grassroots organization.
Pinder ultimately wants the Baltimore Green Jobs Academy to be a place where “Black genius is honored and fostered.” (Sope Willoughby)
Marisela Gomez
Dr. Marisela Gomez has spent decades in East Baltimore — first as a Johns Hopkins-trained physician, then as an organizer challenging a development model she says is rooted in extraction and exclusion.
In the early 2000s, she helped lead the fight against the Johns Hopkins expansion that displaced about 750 Black families in East Baltimore.
That organizing resulted in significant concessions for impacted families — and even an acknowledgment from project leaders that they should have listened to her sooner. Still, much of her work felt reactive.
“It’s like the train already left and we’re trying to stop it,” she said. “People make decisions behind closed doors, and not everyone who’s affected is at the table.”
Today, Gomez is focused on building something different: community-controlled development rooted in empowerment, self-determination, and collective ownership.
“We’re trying to show there are real alternatives to rebuilding healthy communities,” she said.
That vision is taking shape at 1025 and 1031 E. Monument Street, where the Village of Love and Resistance is developing affordable housing and community space owned and controlled by nearby residents.
She describes VOLAR as a three-legged stool: power, healing, and land.
“We want 300 residents within a quarter-mile radius to be co-owners,” Gomez said of the plan to sell $10 shares in a community hub. “They have skin in the game.”
She sees this work as a continuation of earlier struggles — but with a shift from resisting harmful development to constructing community-controlled alternatives.
“When people organize,” she said, “the outcomes change.” (Jaisal Noor)
Iya Dammons
“I came from being a girl who’s been doing sex work on Charles Street to my name on Charles Street,” says Baltimore Safe Haven founder Iya Dammons. “I’m a lived-experienced executive director, so I’m a fair representation of the people that I serve.”
Dammons has used that experience to correct issues of accessibility and outreach for the LGBTQIA+ community through Baltimore Safe Haven, which works as a drop-in center offering free community services ranging from harm reduction to a monthly food pantry and HIV testing.
Data collected in a 2024 survey by Trans Maryland and Queer/Trans Collective for Research on Equity and Wellness showed 85.2% of surveyors experienced barriers to access when it came to health care. These statistics are what inspire Dammons to continue to expand the support Baltimore Safe Haven offers when it comes to community deficiencies such as transitional housing, mobile harm reduction, housing support, behavioral health, workforce development, legal support, and more.
While Dammons aims to challenge our ideas of what support looks like to the LGBTQIA+ community, she also wants to change what inner monologue queer youth have with themselves.
“I want to leave a legacy behind that folks know that they can do it. Just because you’re trans, just because you’re queer, just because you’re non-binary doesn’t stop you from being able to achieve,” she says.
In 2024, Safe Haven hosted the first annual standalone Trans Pride festival in Baltimore City, where local queer and trans talent held the majority of the time on the main stage performing original works.
“I used to be the girl who shouted and did not understand everything,” Dammons says as she recounts her learning curve of leading an initiative that addresses housing disparities, promotes economic empowerment, and fosters community education and awareness.
Dammons is a reminder of what resilience looks like to a community. Her work builds on the work of Black trans women before her who have often gone unrecognized but have led movements for inclusion since the birth of the queer equality movement as a whole. (Kylynn Couture)
Ashley Esposito
Ashley Esposito knows firsthand how easily young people can fall through the cracks.
Long before she was elected to the Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners, Esposito was a child struggling with undiagnosed learning disabilities and instability at home. In high school, after moving from southern Arizona to the East Coast, she entered the foster care system. Esposito aged out, joined an independent living program, experienced homelessness and addiction, and did not find stability until adulthood after receiving a diagnosis and extensive therapy.
“When I finally got the support I needed, I was like, oh my gosh — this is what it means for education to be an equalizer,” she said.
That realization — and the memory of how easily she could have been lost to the system — propelled her to run for the school board. Esposito said she did not see anyone at the table with lived experience in foster care, learning disabilities, or housing instability.
“Lived experience is very different than being trained on something,” Esposito said. “You show up with a sense of urgency and determination.”
Now three years into her term and running for reelection, Esposito chairs the policy committee and serves on federal advocacy and state equity committees. One of her most personal accomplishments has been helping shape the district’s foster care policy — pressing officials to confront the real barriers students face, from placement changes and court dates to overburdened case managers.
Baltimore’s unsung heroes are “the aunties” — women who run community associations, check on neighbors and hold neighborhoods together, often without recognition. She says those women poured into her when she moved to Baltimore for a fresh start.
“My entire leadership has been shaped by loving accountability,” she said. “Sometimes you get pulled up. Sometimes you’re not ready to receive it. But that’s where the growth happens.” (Jaisal Noor)
Kim Jensen
Every Friday at Lake Montebello, a group of activists gathers with handmade signs and candles calling for Palestinian liberation. The vigil serves a rare public display of Palestine solidarity at a time of growing repression of the movement.
At the center is Kim Jensen — a poet, translator, professor, and activist who co-founded Baltimore2Palestine in October 2024 after witnessing a year of “the most brutal atrocities in Gaza.”
Jensen said occasional marches no longer felt sufficient. “We needed to create a regular pro-Palestinian presence in the city,” she said.
Participants share poems, reflections, art, and food, and distribute literature and speak with passersbys to keep the pro-Palestine movement visible in their corner of Baltimore.
The vigil has grown into what Jensen calls a “small but thriving community of resistance,” reflecting a broader shift in U.S. public opinion. Despite decades of unconditional U.S. support for Israel, polls show a majority of Americans now sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israelis.
Despite this shift, activists and students who speak out face discipline and censorship; Jensen has created a space to speak about the reality in Gaza.
“Israel is without question committing a genocide in Gaza, and we have the receipts,” she said, echoing conclusions by leading genocide scholars and human rights groups. “More and more people are willing to say this despite the repression.”
Jensen says her work is sustained by the women who shaped her, including her niece Nancy Mansour and colleagues such as Professors Ingrid Sabio and Courtney Sargent. In Baltimore, she draws strength from writers and organizers including Susan Muaddi Darraj, Laila el-Haddad, Carla Du Pree, Lady Brion, Emelda De Coteau, and her daughter, Ahlam Khamis.
Through teaching, poetry, and weekly presence at the lake, Jensen continues building a resilient community grounded in women’s leadership and collective care. (Jaisal Noor)
Tawanda Jones
Tawanda Jones has held on for a very long time.
She never believed the story that she got from officials that her brother, Tyrone West, died from a heart condition after being beaten by Morgan State University and Baltimore City police officers. She always maintained that he died from injuries from that beating. Shortly after his death, Jones started West Wednesdays, weekly gatherings held both virtually and around the city to honor the memory of her brother and other victims of police brutality. She’s held more than 650 gatherings so far.
After years of being gaslit by officials, Jones got some measure of vindication last year when an audit of the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner revealed that West’s was one of three dozen police custody deaths that should have been ruled a homicide.
“I literally cried out like a baby today,” Jones told Baltimore Beat after the ruling was announced. “To see my brother’s name included, and just to know that for a whole entire decade I’ve been fighting and literally taking my soul out of my body, being my brother’s keeper, and trying to convey the message that my brother was, you know, brutally murdered.”
The only thing more remarkable than Jones’ loyalty to her brother’s memory is her capacity to also care for other victims of police violence. She has extended the network that she built to bring justice to her brother’s memory to also bring awareness to the deaths of Dontae Melton Jr. and Donnell Rochester. (Lisa Snowden)
Lillie Mae Carroll Jackson
Before Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led thousands across the Edmond Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in pursuit of voters’ rights and before Thurgood Marshall argued against school segregation at the Supreme Court, a Baltimore school teacher turned Civil Rights activist galvanized a strategy to fight discrimination in the courts.
Lillie Mae Carroll Jackson was a revered Civil Rights activist and 35-year president of the Baltimore chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who led successful nonviolent campaigns for desegregation and voters’ rights decades before the rest of the nation followed suit.
“Mrs. Jackson was many things to Baltimore, but she called herself a freedom fighter, which she was indeed,” Iris Barnes, associate director and curator of the Lillie Carroll Jackson Museum said.
Born just 24 years after the abolition of American slavery, Jackson was a second grade teacher at Biddle Street School in Baltimore during a time where racial discrimination against Black students and educators was commonplace, and began to work with her daughters Virginia Jackson Kiah and Juanita Jackson Mitchell, organizing a voter registration drive and a successful “Buy Where You Can Work” campaign.
“They started looking at the fact that they couldn’t shop at certain stores, or they could shop there but they couldn’t try things on, they couldn’t return anything, and most importantly, they could not get jobs,” Barnes said. “These stores were selling to individuals in the Black community, but they wouldn’t hire anybody Black. That really bothered them.”
The success of the campaigns led to Jackson’s election as the president of the Baltimore chapter of the NAACP.
Throughout Jackson’s tenure, the chapter made significant strides toward desegregating Baltimore with the desegregation of many private and public facilities including schools like the University of Maryland, where her daughter was once denied admission because of her skin color years earlier.
Her home now sits as a Civil Rights museum on Eutaw Place in Baltimore. (Christian Thomas)
Juanita Jackson Mitchell
Once rejected from universities because of her gender, then because of her skin color, Baltimore Civil Rights activist Juanita Jackson Mitchell was no stranger to legalized discrimination. But, what once barred her from education, later became her most powerful tool to fight injustice.
Born to trailblazing Civil Rights advocate and longtime Baltimore chapter president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Lillie Carroll Jackson, Mitchell was born to fight for the rights of her community.
From a young age, Mitchell was deeply invested in the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement.
Under the mentorship of her mother, Mitchell and her sister, Virginia Jackson Kiah, founded Baltimore youth activism organization City-Wide Young People’s Forum in 1931. The organization held weekly church meetings for hundreds of the city’s youth with the goal of encouraging them to be more civically engaged.
“Juanita is somebody who became a dynamic speaker,” Iris Barnes, associate director and curator of the Lillie Carroll Jackson Museum said. “She started entering oratorical contests in high school and in college.”
As an education student at the University of Pennsylvania — a school she enrolled after being rejected from Johns Hopkins University because of her gender — Mitchell successfully organized the desegregation of the schools’ dormitories.
Throughout her life, Mitchell continued to champion the youth as a Baltimore high school teacher and National Youth Director for the NAACP, where she continued to work alongside her mother.
“She couldn’t be a child of Mrs. Jackson and not work in the NAACP in some capacity or other,” Barnes said.
After publicly financed institutions in Maryland were legally required to open to students previously denied on the basis of race — an effort led in part by her mother — Mitchell later became one of the first Black students admitted to the University of Maryland.
Mitchell continued to make history by becoming the first Black woman to practice law in the state of Maryland, where she continued to fight discrimination in the courts.
“As a whole family, they didn’t just change Baltimore,” Barnes said. “They changed this country.” (Christian Thomas)
Helena Hicks
By all accounts including her own, Helena Hicks’ decision to walk to the Read’s Drugstore lunch counter with a group of six friends was a spur-of-the-moment one. At the time, she was a senior at Morgan State College, and the lunch counter at Read’s was a segregated space in what was Baltimore’s biggest shopping district — white people were able to order freely at the lunch counter, while Black patrons of the drugstore were confined to only being able to purchase items from the store. The store’s employees reacted adversely to Hicks’ spontaneous act of civil disobedience, ultimately calling the police on her and her friends.
While the group eventually left the store, the incident prompted both vocal support from Morgan State faculty and action from Read’s — the company agreed to desegregate their Baltimore stores. But Hicks didn’t stop there, going on to earn her Master of Social Work in Public Welfare and Psychiatric Counseling in 1960, then her doctorate in public policy down the line. All of this deeply informed her work for the city government, first in the social services agency, then within the city’s housing authority and human services department. She also continued to fiercely advocate for her own community, particularly in her longtime role as president of the Park Grove Neighborhood Association.
In interviews following Hicks’ death in 2024, her daughter Lynne Wilson recalls a determined, caring mother, who lived and breathed for both her family and her community at large. This is evident in the causes to which Hicks dedicated her life — among her many achievements, Hicks fought against the demolition of historic buildings in Baltimore, picketed Ford’s Theatre for its segregation policies, and helped with the campaign to elect the city’s first Black congressman, Parren J. Mitchell. Hicks became a pillar of Civil Rights advocacy in Baltimore during her lifetime; her commitment to advancing equality in the city was unwavering, and its absence is felt. (nat raum)