Sandra B. ‘Sandy’ Stewart
Political activist in Baltimore, government worker and entrepreneur founded a consulting firm and transitional home
Sandra B. “Sandy” Stewart — who wore many hats as a political activist and entrepreneur, and had multiple careers in nursing, medicine and government — died Feb. 11 of cancer at the Gilchrist Center Baltimore at Stadium Place. The longtime Randallstown resident was 84.
“Sandy was a great political activist who had a passion for people and cared about community. We don’t see that much anymore,” said Lawrence Bell III, former Baltimore City Council president and a political ally, who first met Ms. Stewart when he was a student at the University of Maryland during the 1982 campaign season.
“I always admired her energy and how she connected grass-roots people to higher-up political figures. She was a bridge,” he said. “She was always very sincere and could bring people together.”
“She was an eloquent, powerful no sh-t kind of woman,” Vanessa Jackson, a former board member of the National Black Women’s Health Project and a close friend of more than three decades, said. “She’d say, ‘Control your own sandbox. Take your position. Ignore what other’s are doing. Clarify your own purpose. Stand your own truth. Know who you are.’”
The eldest of 11 children, the former Sandra Brown, daughter of Samuel Leroy Brown, a government illustrator, and Lula Mae Brown, a nursing supervisor, was born in Buffalo, New York, and later moved with her family to Sutherland, Virginia. She graduated in 1955 from the segregated Southside High School in Dinwiddie, Virginia.
She studied at what were then Virginia State College and the Community College of Baltimore before earning a certificate in business management from the University of Baltimore.
She married John C. Stewart after high school and took a job as a certified psychiatric nursing attendant at what is now the Central State Hospital in Petersburg, Virginia. The hospital was established after the Civil War for “colored persons of unsound mind.”
Ms. Stewart, whose marriage ended in divorce, went to work for the Social Security Administration during the early 1960s in Petersburg, and in 1969, moved to SSA headquarters in Woodlawn where she was a claims analyst. She later moved into the field as a trainer and traveled throughout the country until ending her two decade career with the agency in the 1980s, family members said. From 1974 to 1983, she worked in training for the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.
In 1983, she founded and was president of Leaders International, a management consulting firm she headed for a decade. She then became executive director of Baltimore County’s Elan Vital, a residential program for women and their children in Owings Mills.
Ms. Stewart told The Sun in 1995 that many of the transitional housing center’s residents had been abused and that its mission was to help women get job training and continue their education, while also offering a safe place to live.
“I’m sure there’s nothing like this in the state, and I believe it’s a model for the country,” she said.
After leaving Elan Vital, Ms. Stewart worked in administration at Mercy Medical Center before becoming an administrative assistant to Dr. Michael Rhodes Grever, head of the oncology center at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.
When Dr. Grever was named chairman of the department of internal medicine at the Ohio State University College of Medicine in Columbus, Ms. Stewart followed him as his senior administrative assistant, a position she held until retiring in the early 2000s.
Ms. Stewart had a great love for the rough-and-tumble Baltimore political scene.
“We called her ‘Politics Central,’ ” said a daughter, Tracy Denise Stewart of Cockeysville. “She lived, breathed, slept and ate politics.”
Mayor William Donald Schaefer appointed her to the Off-Street Parking Commission in 1979, and three years later she headed Project Alliance, which she established in 1980 and whose mission was to coordinate the voter registration effort in 1983 for William H. “Billy” Murphy Jr.’s unsuccessful bid to unseat Mayor Schaefer.
In 1984, she was co-director of the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson’s Baltimore Rainbow Coalition as he sought the Democratic Party’s nomination for president that year. Former Vice President Walter Mondale ultimately won the nomination.
Ms. Stewart was a delegate from the 7th District, committed to Jackson, at the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. Two years later, she ran an unsuccessful congressional campaign for the 7th District.
She was a firm believer in empowering women.
She served two terms, 1988 to 1994, as president of the Black Women’s Health Project in Atlanta, and had a “long history of conducting empowerment conferences and workshops for women as well as delivering keynote speeches at conferences,” according to a biographical profile submitted by her family.
From 1980 to 1983, she was a member of the board of National Blacks in Government and during the 1990s was actively involved with Wellness Empowerment of Maryland Women.
Ms. Stewart’s work earned her awards from Associated Black Charities, Bowie State University, the SSA and the Northwood Little League.
Ms. Stewart’s name was back in the news in 2017 when her son, Air Force Maj. Gen. Alfred J. “Buddy” Stewart, a career officer and squadron commander, who died in 2014, was denied burial in Arlington National Cemetery on a technicality, The Sun reported.
When he was cremated, half of his ashes were given to his widow and half to Ms. Stewart.
Rebuffed in her efforts that went all the way up the chain of command to the military liaison for then-Vice President Joe Biden and President Barack Obama, Ms. Stewart was undeterred.
She told the newspaper she was “devastated” and that he “deserved an appropriate resting place.”
In 2017 on Veterans Day, Gen. Stewart, a U.S. Air Force Academy graduate, became the first to be given a grave site in Dulaney Memorial Gardens’ newly-created Garden of Honor, an extension of its Field of Honor, where 3,500 veterans are interred.
“I was not going to settle — not for him,” she told The Sun. “This is providence. My son is home now.”
She was an avid world traveler.
“When I think of her, I think of her love, strength, honesty and incredible sense of humor,” Ms. Jackson said.
A memorial service will be held from noon to 4 p.m. Friday at the March Life Tribute Center, 5616 Old Court Road, Windsor Mill.
In addition to daughter Tracy Denise Stewart of Cockeysville, Ms. Stewart is survived by two other daughters, Gwendolyn Stewart-Williamson of Towson and Dawn Christina Stewart of San Diego; three brothers, William Brown of Sutherland, Virginia, Michael Brown and Christopher Brown, both of Buffalo; a sister, Annette Brown of Jacksonville, Florida; 10 grandchildren; 12 great-grandchildren; and a great-great grandson.