Six Anne Arundel County women will be honored Wednesday for their pioneering contributions to the community that echoed the spirit of a Mississippi civil rights activist who risked her life in the 1960s segregated South.
The Anne Arundel County Martin Luther King Jr. Committee will present the 2006 Fannie Lou Hamer Award at 7 p.m. on Wednesday during a reception at the Banneker-Douglass Museum on Franklin Street in Annapolis.
This year?s recipients include:
» Eudes Carrillo, an English as a second language teacher in the public school system who started a driver?s education school for Hispanic immigrants;
» Danielle Mosely, the first black woman to be appointed a district court judge in Anne Arundel County;
» Tonia Jones Powell, who oversees the operations of the Betty Shabazz Academy, an academic and personal enrichment program open to Anne Arundel County girls ages 11 to 14;
» Barbara Samorajczyk, a two-term County Council member who became an outspoken champion for environmental issues during her eight years on the council;
» Barbara Silesky, a member of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Committee who led the effort to raise the $400,000 needed to complete the King memorial at Anne Arundel Community College;
» and Marquenta Taylor, a guidance counselor at Meade High School, who is believed to be the first woman tocoach junior varsity football.
Samorajczyk, who is running for a seat in the Maryland House of Delegates from District 30, said her enthusiasm for the environment grew after she was asked to use her legal background to help a neighbor preserve a vacant, environmentally sensitive plot of waterfront property next to his home from development.
“I got so frustrated with the county, I decided to run for office and bring focus to those issues,” she said.
Among her list of environmental victories during her term on the council, Samorajczyk said she was most proud of successfully passing legislation to protect bogs and amending the county?s critical area laws to mandate nitrogen removal technology in new septic systems.
The Hamer Award is given annually to women of different racial backgrounds.
The honor, established in 1995, was named after a black sharecropper from Montgomery County, Miss., who became one of the organizers of that state?s Freedom Summer in 1964.
Freedom Summer brought hundreds of college students of both races from northern cities into Mississippi to register black voters.
