Home to a county with changing demographics, the College of Southern Maryland steps in to facilitate discussions surrounding race and class.
For a suburban area of Washington, D.C., Southern Maryland has remained unusually “Southern.” Its rolling tobacco fields, former slave quarters and lonesome two-lane roads through piney woods seem more reminiscent of the Deep South than the nation’s capital. So, too, have its attitudes on race.
That became evident on Dec. 6, 2004, when five men set fires to 27 homes under construction, destroying 12 of them. All were in a Charles County subdivision favored by upscale African-Americans moving to the area from other parts of metropolitan Washington for its peace and affordable homes.
Stunned, county leaders bristled over the county’s negative reputation in the national media. The situation worsened later when some White high school students scrawled graffiti such as “KKK” on the doors and sign of a predominantly Black Baptist church to protest the infl ux of minority families. The Black population grew 25 percent from 2000 to 2003.
“This sent the wrong signal about the kind of community we had in Charles County,” says Thomas “Mac” Middleton, a state senator from the area who talked with a trustee at the College of Southern Maryland about what to do.
The community college ended up taking the lead in a countywide effort that included the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and law enforcement agencies to turn the situation around.
“We put together a working group to talk about what happened, Figure out what we could do and what we can do,” says Dr. Bradley M. Gottfried, the college president who arrived from New Jersey in 2006.
