The full text of Sandy Rosen’s latest blog post, “Maryland, My Maryland, ” is available online on The Huffington Post.
The post begins:
“In the summer of 1962 my family and I moved from New Haven, Connecticut, to Baltimore, Maryland, where I worked for a year as a law clerk to Simon E. Sobeloff, the Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. I had been below the Mason-Dixon Line only five times before we moved. The first three visits were during or before 1954, the year in which the U.S. Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, which declared racial segregation of public schools unconstitutional. By 1962, not a lot seemed to have changed since my earliest visits.
We remained in Baltimore until 1969, when my family and I moved further South to Atlanta, Georgia, and then to Austin, Texas, before returning to the North, and then to the West where we settled in San Francisco.
Since 1939, “Maryland, My Maryland” has been the state’s official song. Its lyrics were written in 1861 as a call to arms against the Union. It remains the state’s official song; but my, how Maryland otherwise has changed since I moved away from it!
It boggles my mind that Maryland was one of the first states in the Union to validate same-sex marriage in a plebiscite, and is the latest state to abolish capital punishment. I understand the demographics that changed Maryland into a solidly progressive “blue” state, and those that morphed Georgia and Texas into solidly conservative “red” states, but I still have to square the Maryland of today with the Maryland in which I lived in the 1960s for seven years, struggling against its ante-bellum racism and no nothing-ism.” Read more>