Search results for ""Author C. Fraser Smith""

Baltimore's "Do It Now" mayor, two-term Maryland governor, and recently elected comptroller of the treasury, William Donald Schaefer may be the most colorful character ever to play on the Free State's political stage-though competition for the honor is intense. In this wonderfully readable account, Fraser Smith explores the formative influences, backroom deals, personal relationships, quirky Baltimorisms, vicious fights, civic pride, splashes in the National Aquarium seal pool, victories, defeats, draws-everything that makes Schaefer's career colorful and that helps us to understand the man himself. A seasoned reporter who covered Schaefer's terms as mayor and governor for the Baltimore Sun, Smith takes a serious-minded but also throughly human-interest approach to his subject-a study in character and the capacity of certain people to make a difference in the story of their time and locale. In Schaefer's case, the story concerns the struggle of Baltimore to survive and, if possible, renew itself. Smith draws on a sizable body of documentary source material; his scores of interviews provide him with juicy quotation and vibrant commentary. The book includes a gallery of photos, most never before published, which recall memorable moments in Schaefer's eventful career. William Donald Schaefer: A Political Biography will fascinate Maryland voters, appeal to students of twentieth-century America, and engage anyone who loves a good story well told. "His life in politics had been vouchsafed by do gooders, club house operators, slick businessmen, and others. He managed to find the best in each of these without being a servant to any. He was a classic 1950s-style Can-Do man, a veteran of the Second World War, a holdover from the time in American life when learning from experience and respected elders was a way of life. He was a career politician who ran for office to serve-to work for people, to care about their welfare. He wanted to think of himself-and to have others think of him-as a distinguished city father, a public servant. He seemed to be the last Baltimorean to see how well he had succeeded."-from the Preface

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Though he lived throughout much of the South-and even worked his way into parts of the North for a time-Jim Crow was conceived and buried in Maryland. From Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney's infamous decision in the Dred Scott case to Thurgood Marshall's eloquent and effective work on Brown v. Board of Education, the battle for black equality is very much the story of Free State women and men. Here, Baltimore Sun columnist C. Fraser Smith recounts that tale through the stories, words, and deeds of famous, infamous, and little-known Marylanders. He traces the roots of Jim Crow laws from Dred Scott to Plessy v. Ferguson and describes the parallel and opposite early efforts of those who struggled to establish freedom and basic rights for African Americans. Following the historical trail of evidence, Smith relates latter-day examples of Maryland residents who trod those same steps, from the thrice-failed attempt to deny black people the vote in the early twentieth century to nascent demonstrations for open access to lunch counters, movie theaters, stores, golf courses, and other public and private institutions-struggles that occurred decades before the now-celebrated historical figures strode onto the national civil rights scene. Smith's lively account includes the grand themes and the state's major players in the movement-Frederick Douglass, Harriett Tubman, Thurgood Marshall, and Lillie May Jackson, among others-and also tells the story of the struggle via several of Maryland's important but relatively unknown men and women-such as Gloria Richardson, John Prentiss Poe, William L. "Little Willie" Adams, and Walter Sondheim-who prepared Jim Crow's grave and waited for the nation to deliver the body.

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