The People’s Park recognizes role as center of social change
Memorials say as much about those who erect them as those they celebrate.
When Anne Arundel County named a small, urban park and a parking garage across from the Arundel Center in Annapolis, it seemed fitting to name them for John M. Whitmore.
Whitmore was an architect of charter county government, campaigning for it along with Joe Alton and others in the early 1960s. Hewas elected as the first councilman from the Annapolis area and became the first council chair. Not a demagogue or a blowhard, he was what might later be known as a policy wonk.
He established the practice of passing the chairman’s gavel on after one year. Whenhe decided not to seek another term in1969, Whitmore said it was because he had accomplished what he wanted: A better form of government for the people of Anne Arundel County. He returned to a quiet life as a commercial printer, passing away in 1990.
He also was one of the most effective advocates for urban renewal in Annapolis.
That 20-year effort to address what his contemporaries considered blighted areas of the city hinged on moving those who had little voice to object — Black and Jewish property owners who made up the old Fourth Ward of Annapolis. The state bulldozed a lot of substandard housing considered acceptable in segregated Annapolis, a city just starting to wake from its long Jim Crow nightmare.
Whitmore and his colleagues were the architects of the last bite in this process, 33 properties on Calvert Street where Whitmore Park and the garage next door stood for decades.
Tuesday, in an effort to balance the history of that spot, Whitmore Park was renamed as The People’s Park. The name is meant to honor those who were forced to move from their homes in a cultural center of Black life in Annapolis and Anne Arundel County.
Many of those families were moved into public housing communities, where some of them remain today. Others were forced to leave Annapolis.
Certainly, the city gained something through the urban renewal process. The state government complex provides jobs and a sense of grandeur. But it lost just as much. What would have happened if Annapolis had invested in the Fourth Ward rather than sweeping it away to, as Whitmore himself once put it so bloodlessly, put properties back on the tax rolls?
Annapolis as a community found the time and resources to save some of the dilapidated homes and buildings know considered treasures of the Historic District. That took place just as urban renewal was digesting the last bit of the old Fourth Ward.
It was a simple thing to physically change the name from Whitmore to People’s on the sign that hangs across from the Arundel Center, even if the change in mindset took years of work from people like historian Janice Hayes Williams and the election of Steuart Pittman as county executive.
The park on Calvert Street was changing before its name was altered, first with the addition of the Civil Rights Foot Soldiers Memorial and then with the Michael E. Busch Amphitheater. It has been a fitting locus for Black Lives Matter rallies that started at the Kunte Kinte-Alex Haley Memorial at City Dock, and other civil rights prayer-walks, vigils and protests. There was one about racism in the media on Thursday.
Whitmore Park was, for most of its history, not much of anything more than a strip of pavement across from a government building.
Renaming it, in some small way, gives it back to the people whose community was destroyed under the banner of progress. The People’s Park recognizes its role as a center of social change.
It is the people who made this happen, and it is the people working to be heard who are breathing new life into this space.
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This editorial originally appeared in the Capital Gazette, a Baltimore Sun Media member, and was written by its editorial board.