Octavene Saunders, who in 1992 became the first black woman elected to the Cambridge City Council, also participated in the demonstrations and recalls the reaction of Dorchester County whites. |
“ They would kick you and spit on you,” Saunders recalls.
Grubb says it wasn’ t so much the reaction of whites that astounded her as who it was doing the spitting
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and kicking.“ I just couldn’ t believe it, particularly the reaction from the women,” Grubb says.“ In many instances the females were worse than the males.”
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Cambridge’ s unrest propelled Agnew’ s rise to power
By DeWAYNE WICKHAM
Spiro Agnew was an accidental governor who became an infamous vice president. He rode into both positions on waves of racial unrest that swept the nation during the 1960s.
In 1966, Agnew – a Republican – easily won election as Maryland’ s governor. He beat George P. Mahoney, an opponent of legislation that would outlaw housing discrimination, whose campaign slogan was“ Your home is your castle – protect it.”
To keep Mahoney out of the statehouse, a coalition of white and black Democrats threw their support behind Agnew, the Baltimore County executive.
Agnew easily won the General Election in a state where registered Democrats outnumbered registered Republicans by 3-to-1.
But shortly after Agnew took office in 1967 the relationship between him and Maryland’ s black leaders started to rupture. In April, he warned that the push for passage of an open housing law in Maryland was being hurt by black leaders who led protests in opposition to the Vietnam War. The following month he called Stokely Carmichael, head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee( SNCC)“ one of the most irresponsible people to have ever entered the national political scene” and urged black leaders to denounce him.
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of civil rights. We do not like being told to keep quiet about Vietnam,” the Rev. Marion Bascom said at the time.
In July, when H. Rap Brown, SNCC’ s new leader, gave a speech that sparked a riot in Cambridge, a tiny hamlet on Maryland’ s Eastern Shore, Agnew put even more distance between himself and black leaders. He ordered law enforcement officers throughout the state“ to immediately arrest any person inciting to riot and to not allow that person to finish his vicious speech,” leaving it to police to decide what constituted such objectionable talk.
The following year, when rioting broke out in Baltimore shortly after the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, Agnew called about 100 black leaders to a meeting with him in an office building just blocks away from where National Guardsmen and federal troops were patrolling.
“ You were beguiled by the rationalizations of unity; you were intimidated by veiled threats; you were stung by insinuations that you were Mr. Charlie’ s boy, by epithets like‘ Uncle Tom,’” Agnew told them. As he spoke, the governor was surrounded by the state police superintendent, Baltimore’ s police chief and the commander of Maryland’ s National Guard.
His words outraged many of the black leaders, more than half of whom walked out in the middle of the governor’ s speech. But Agnew’ s words caught the attention of North Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, who just four years earlier quit the Democratic Party to become a Republican in protest after President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
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strategy – a plan to bring the then largely Democratic South into the GOP fold. In return for this, Thurmond exacted a promise from Nixon that he would pick a vice presidential running mate who was acceptable to the South.
When a list of seven possible choices for Nixon’ s running mate was presented to Thurmond, the former Dixiecrat said only Agnew was acceptable to the South, according to a report in The New York Times. Agnew, Thurmond said, was a strong“ law and order” man.
Nixon and Agnew won the 1968 election and were reelected in 1972. Nine months after taking the vice presidential oath of office for the second time, Agnew resigned amid charges that he had accepted bribes while Maryland’ s governor – and during his time as vice president.
In return for his resignation, Agnew was allowed to plead“ no contest” to a single charge of income tax evasion and escape a prison sentence. •
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Spiro Agnew / Associated Press Photo |
“ We are … disenchanted by the governor’ s attempt to tell us what we can speak out for, or against, and how what we say will affect the progress |
In 1968, Thurmond was a key supporter of Richard Nixon’ s bid for the presidency. He helped Nixon forge the Southern |
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