A father’s mission
Jill Carter was 7 years old when her father died of a heart attack in 1971 while speaking at a meeting of Baltimore’s Black United Front. Walter Carter was 48.
The North Carolina native came to Baltimore after earning a master’s degree at Howard University. While leading the Baltimore branch of CORE, the Congress for Racial Equality, Carter took part in sit-ins, freedom rides and other protests throughout Maryland. He was arrested at least six times between 1961 and 1963.
He pushed for desegregation in Ocean City, Westminster and at the Gwynn Oak Amusement Park. In his own words, he attacked segregation “militantly, forcefully and unrelentingly.”
“You got to be militant but you got to be smart,” he told The Baltimore Sun in 1968. “You got to operate on soul feeling. Your goal’s got to be liberation, not integration.”
Carter led protests against the Baltimore real estate tycoon Morris Goldseker, whom Carter and other activists accused of blockbusting — a practice through which developers stoked racial fears to increase profits. The day before his death, Carter won a court decision against Goldseker, who had sought to block activists from picketing outside his office.
He was known for not pulling punches. He once criticized Mayor Theodore McKeldin as a “tom,” and D’Alesandro — who became a Carter supporter — as a candidate who “bought himself an office.”
After the City Council voted down his nomination to head the Community Action Agency, Carter described the council as being controlled by racists.
The councilmen “want me to say they are good white folks and that I am the slave and they are the masters, but those days are gone forever,” he said. “They stand for absolutely everything I deplore.”
Lenwood M. Ivey remembers Carter as relatively subdued. Ivey, president of the Baltimore City Foundation, bonded with Carter over their upbringings in the South.
He said Carter was more strategic than other civil rights leaders of the time.
“Walter was fairly quiet, softspoken,” Ivey said. “Most of the leaders of the movement at the time were ministers. They tended to preach and yell and fire people up. Walter was more disciplined. When he spoke, he didn’t speak a