Wickwire.
I remember the name sticking in my mind the first time I heard it. Had a certain style to it, I felt, as if whoever thought of it was going for alliteration in a surname.
And I remember the first time I saw the man with the name too: average height, with a crew cut, slightly bald and slightly built. He carried a crutch, the better, I later learned, to help him walk around after a bout with polio in his younger years.
His full name was Chester Wickwire. For years he was the chaplain at Johns Hopkins University, where I met him in the late 1960s. I didn’t know it at the time, but the man had quite a history here in Baltimore.
Quite a history, indeed.
Those new to the Baltimore area — and some who were born right here in these parts — might not know who we lost when the 94-year-old Wickwire died at the Broadmead retirement community recently. His memorial service was held this past Sunday at Broadmead, with at least 200 people attending.
Wickwire came to Baltimore in 1953 to work as the Hopkins chaplain and as the executive secretary of the Levering Hall YMCA, located on the campus. The Baltimore that welcomed Wickwire, his wife, Mary Ann, and sons Lynn and Jon was, to put it kindly, no oasis of racial brotherhood. Credit for any progress made in race relations since that time should go to a tiny cadre of dedicated activists, and Wickwire was right in the thick of ’em.
Here was a white guy, born in Nebraska, raised in Colorado mining camps, rolling around Baltimore with a bunch of black ministers and civil rights advocates known as “The Goon Squad.” When civil rights demonstrators engaged in civil disobedience to desegregate Gwynn Oak Amusement Park in 1963, Wickwire was among those arrested. When tensions between the Baltimore Police Department and the Black Panther Party reached a head in 1970 and a shootout seemed imminent, Wickwire spent the night at BPD headquarters to make sure that didn’t happen.
He brought black ministers to the Hopkins Club and desegregated it. He invited civil rights activist Bayard Rustin — known to be the most radical and most gay of all civil rights activists — to the Hopkins campus. He made the enemies’ list of Baltimore Police Commissioner Donald Pomerleau, which earned Wickwire a permanent warm spot in my heart.
I’ve written before, but it warrants repeating, that Pomerleau took to civil liberties and the Bill of Rights the way a vampire takes to sunlight, only with less enthusiasm. Whatever Wickwire did to incur Pomerleau’s disdain should be commended. Baltimore’s City Council of the 1960s didn’t have much use for Wickwire either. Several of its members dismissed him as a “pinko.”
Wickwire was no pinko but a liberal in the best sense of the word. I met him in 1968, as a participant in an anti-Vietnam War chorus Wickwire originated called “Word Rock.” Soon I was involved in the Tutorial Project, which Wickwire started in 1963. He had black inner-city kids bused out to the Hopkins campus for tutoring in reading and math, to the consternation of some university staff who were appalled that he was bringing the “cullard” folks into their midst.
It should come as no surprise to you that a guy like Wickwire somehow managed to become the first white president of the predominantly black Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance. I remember when Dr. Wickwire — others called him “Chet,” but he was always and will always be Dr. Wickwire to me — told me about it. For a change, he had aroused the ire of someone black, not white.
The local Nation of Islam minister, part of the IMA, objected to Wickwire’s leading the organization.
“The other ministers got him to accept me as a brother in Christ” Wickwire quipped to me after he became the IMA president.
That line brings a chuckle to me to this day. But for all Baltimoreans and all Marylanders, the Rev. Chester Wickwire brought so much more.
I’ll miss ya, Doc.
Gregory Kane is a columnist who has been writing about Baltimore and Maryland for more than 15 years. Look for his columns in the editorial section every Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at [email protected].
