Hall of Fame 6.7.26 - Flipbook - Page 43
Hall of Fame | Sunday, June 7, 2026 43
CARL
SNOWDEN
In the late 1990s, a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan told Anne Arundel County it would “like to help make a difference” in their community and adopt a road.
The county asked lifelong civil rights leader Carl Snowden for his opinion. He suggested the only thing the Klan should be allowed to adopt is a sewer tank.
“Needless to say,” he remembered, “my recommendation was not accepted.”
Although the county went on to resist the Klan —
fending off objections by the American Civil Liberties Union before ending the roadway program altogether — Snowden felt something more needed
to be done, something big, something tangible. He
mobilized a response from the Black community: a
privately funded statue celebrating Martin Luther
King Jr. atop Anne Arundel Community College’s
western campus.
To make the $400,000 memorial a reality, several
years before the country established its own in Washington, Snowden offered up his home as collateral.
“If you know history, there has been no great progress without sacrifice,” he said. “You have to sacrifice. There’s no way of getting around it. And fortunately, it worked out. I’m not homeless.”
While he may have dodged the bank, Snowden
has been tagged by power before.
When he was in high school, Snowden was expelled for protesting the lack of Black teachers and
administrators in the county’s education system —
a cause he’d later renew at its community college.
White supremacists have threatened him. The Klan
once marched in Annapolis against him. And his efforts have made him the subject of illegal, covert
dossiers by both the FBI and his own county’s government.
“The one thing anybody will learn from him is
that he is certainly not easily intimidated by what hat
someone is wearing,” said Anne Arundel County
Councilman Pete Smith. “He will always do what
he thinks is right for the causes that he is pursuing.”
Across the state, Snowden has been involved in
social justice campaigns for more than 50 years. He
has held public office in his home city of Annapolis,
organized protests and forums as convenor of the
Caucus of African American Leaders and even pioneered a position in the Maryland Attorney General’s Office dedicated to civil rights.
As a writer, commentator, professor and activist,
Snowden has also tried to reshape or redirect the
county’s culture through the stories it tells.
Joseph Johnson grew up with Snowden in Anna-
Carl Snowden
Age: 72
Hometown: Annapolis
Current residence: Annapolis
Education: Key School, B.A. from
University of the District of Columbia;
master’s from Lincoln University
Career highlights: First civil rights director
for the Maryland Office of the Attorney General;
Ward 5 alderman for Annapolis City Council
from 1985 to 1987; president, founder and
CEO ofthe Carl Snowden and Associates
anti-discrimination firm; professor at
Anne Arundel Community College and
Sojourner Douglass College; author; radio and
television commentator; intergovernmental
relations officer for the Anne Arundel
County Executive’s Office
Civic and charitable activities:
Convenor of the Caucus of African American Leaders; founder of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Committee; spearheaded fundraising campaigns
for memorials in Anne Arundel County
to Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King,
Malcolm X, U.S. Rep. Parren J. Mitchell,
Delorma “Dee” Goodwin, the civil rights
foot soldiers and the five staff members killed
at the Capital Gazette; organized efforts to
name buildings after prominent local Black
leaders Sarah E. Carter, Carol S. Parham,
Walter S. Mills, Joseph S. Johnson, Morris H. Blum.
Family: Sons Abayomi and Kojo;
daughter Marilyn (died after birth);
six grandchildren; one great-grandchild
polis and always knew him to be a “rabble rouser”
— the kind of person who would see a pot, “get a
stick and stir.”
After becoming the city’s first Black police chief
in 1994, Johnson witnessed Snowden’s persistence
gain step after step. “Slowly but surely,” he said,
places that were more or less untouchable to them
as children were making room for unsung heroes:
Buildings were renamed after the county’s first Black
council member and superintendent of schools, as
well as champions and allies of Black voices. In 2021,
Snowden honored the five staff members killed at
the Capital Gazette with a waterside monument in
Annapolis to the First Amendment. With that tribute, he not only empowered the memories of the
colleagues from his hometown paper lost in 2018
but crafted a reminder to the power and necessity of
an American idea: a free and independent press.
Years earlier, when Snowden rallied to have the
city police station named after Johnson, the chief
said it meant and still means the world to him and
his family. From his office at that same building,
Johnson could see the cemetery where his grandfather was buried.
“It wasn’t just any particular class of person,”
Johnson said of the memorials, “but a person who
had made a real contribution to Annapolis.”
Individually, Snowden described the tributes as
small victories. “It’s the collective” that counts.
“They are guideposts to the future,” Snowden said.
“These memorials remind people of where we’ve
been and hopefully point people in the right direction as to where we need to go.”
Last year, Snowden began fundraising for his final
memorial: a Malcolm X dedication outside the Michael E. Busch Library in Annapolis.
Like his other projects, the monument will serve
an educational purpose — one of their goals, he said,
has always been to drive people to Google someone’s name. But it will also act as a time capsule.
Dozens of people, from elected leaders and activists to clergy members, teachers and students, were
asked to describe what they think race relations will
look like in 50 years, when their opinions will be unearthed.
To make sure everything is ready in time for the
memorial’s Aug. 5 reveal, Snowden has once again
risked his house as collateral to the bank.
— Luke Parker
