I had not walked through Gwynn Oak since the early 1960s, when I recall spending a day there with classmates. The park was then filled with amusement rides, a train and boats in the pond. It was also segregated and closed to Baltimore's African-American families.
That changed in the summer of 1963, when a well-organized series of demonstrations and well-publicized arrests put the shame of segregation in a national perspective. Local activists, as well as prominent members of the national clergy, converged on this corner of Baltimore County just outside the city limits. It was a high point of the civil rights movement in Baltimore.
