The admirers of Clarence H. Du Burns now wish to honor Baltimore’s first black mayor by erecting a statue of him at Harborplace. This is pretty nice. But there are some who remember a day when Du was still alive, and explain how he was secretly Italian.
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He was standing there one afternoon with his friend Dominic (Mimi) DiPietro, back when the two of them still served on the Baltimore City Council. The friendship wasn’t supposed to happen. Here were two men raised on the city’s east side in an era of deep racial antipathy and suspiciousness, who had reached the twilight of their lives and bonded politically and personally.
“A lot of people don’t know it,” Du was saying that day, “but I’m Italian. Now, you take Mimi. He’s Italian by being born in Italy. I’m Italian by way of Belair Market.”
The market was one of the city’s great melting pots. Du had worked there at the Palmisano food stall. The years went by, but he held onto the memory. He was a black man who found work with a white business back when such things were considered a rarity. It was one of Burns’ passports to the greater America.
Now some of Du’s old friends and relatives want to finance a statue of him. A nonprofit group headed by his great-nephew, Sean Burns, is raising about $600,000 and Maryland sculptor Simmie Knox is prepared to do the work.
All that’s standing in the way are some members of Baltimore’s Public Art Commission, who declared on Wednesday that a statue of Burns, closely following approval of a statue of William Donald Schaefer and both intended for the inner harbor area, might be a little excessive. We shall talk about this in a moment.
The argument for erecting the statue is obvious: Burns made history. After a few hundred years of nobody but white men running the city, then-Mayor Schaefer went to Annapolis to be governor, leaving his No. 2 guy, City Council President Burns, to run Baltimore.
You know what? That distinction’s enough to warrant a statue. But it’s not the main reason. The main reason is that Du Burns was a wonderful teacher. He taught by example, and he taught every time he talked to us in his gentle way and convinced us we could get past the old racial divisions and make the city work for everyone.
He made himself an Italian by way of Belair Market, isn’t that beautiful? He was saying to Italians: Please include me as one of your own. Instead of mutual suspiciousness, and ethnic anxieties, let’s make jokes about it.
And he made himself mayor because he refused to be confined by race in a time when so many were. All those years he couldn’t get a decent job, and made a living handing out towels in the boys locker room at Dunbar High – but simultaneously learned to work the political precincts over in East Baltimore until he won himself a seat on the City Council.
The council already has allocated $200,000 for the statue, and the state legislature has set aside another $100,000. Naturally, in the current economy, some will argue that it’s money we can’t afford.
The point is well taken — but the current recession will not last forever. This is an argument about honoring a man who made a difference, and the importance of a community holding on to his memory — and the wrong-headed worry that we might have “too many” statues of great people in one place.
For a lot of years, Baltimore was known as the Monumental City. We knew how to hold on to our history. Yes, we’re talking about a statue of Burns barely two months since we OK’d a statue of Schaefer.
But this should only be a start, not a finish. Such statues don’t only honor the men — they remind any community of its own greatness. That’s why we need more statues: Of Barbara Mikulski, not only because she was the first female U.S. senator from Maryland, but for the spirit of ethnic America, and street-corner America, she brought to Washington.
And Bea Gaddy, the patron saint of Baltimore’s homeless.
And Eubie Blake, who gave the world ragtime, and Jim Rouse, who gave us Harborplace, and Walter Sondheim, who gave the city about 70 years of dedicated service, and Barry Levinson and John Waters, who made movies that gave the whole world a sweet look at Baltimore, and a couple of generations of the Mitchell family, who helped lead the fight for racial fairness.
And that’s just the tiniest beginning. Each statue reminds the home folks of the great people we’ve produced, and lets all outsiders know it, too. It’s hard to imagine having “too much” of that — in any location.
