For years, whenever I heard suburban Republicans criticize Baltimore and other cities, or urban life generally, I noted the irony of people offering unsolicited — and usually negative — opinions about something they had abandoned decades ago.

Republican political leaders have had almost nothing to do with the nation’s major urban centers since sometime in the last century; Democrats have run the most populated and most challenging cities.

Baltimore has not had a Republican mayor since 1967; given the city’s deep blue hue, most people born since the Sixties are surprised to learn of the existence of Mayor Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin, Republican.

He is best known these days by the public spaces named after him — the university library at College Park, an area of Patapsco Valley State Park, a building at Morgan State University, a section of the Baltimore Beltway and, of course, the plaza near Harborplace that honors McKeldin’s vision for a redeveloped, people-friendly waterfront.

McKeldin, who grew up in South Baltimore, had been mayor in the 1940s, governor of Maryland through the 1950s. He came back to his hometown to run for mayor again in 1963 and won his second term at age 62.

“He was arguably the most important Maryland Republican of the 20th century,” writes historian William J. Thompson. “He was the last GOP mayor of Baltimore and the first Republican reelected as governor.”

It was during his second mayoral inauguration that McKeldin spoke of demolishing the old piers and turning the Inner Harbor into an attractive public place.

“Envision with me,” he said, “a new Inner Harbor area, where the imagination of Man can take advantage of a rare gift of nature to produce an enthralling panorama of office buildings, parks, high-rise apartments and marinas. In this, we have a very special opportunity, for few other cities in the world have been blessed, as has ours, with such a potentially beautiful harbor area within the very heart of downtown. Too visionary this? Too dreamlike? Certainly not.”

But it’s not just his embrace of creative public spaces that makes him a figure worth remembering 60 years later, as Baltimore’s tourist waterfront struggles and citizens debate whether a redevelopment plan will revive it or ruin it.

McKeldin, whose push for integration met resistance from Democratic City Council members, was a political species now extinct in America: a moderate-to-liberal Republican.

Turbulent Time

McKeldin called himself a “practical idealist.”

“I have always fought for equal rights for everyone,” he once said, “because I cannot tolerate injustice and certainly not those injustices which government can correct.”

McKeldin, who had grown up in a highly segregated city, pushed the City Council to forbid discrimination in housing in his hometown. He did this in 1966, the year in which my new play, the third about Baltimore, is set.

The first two plays were based on some of my personal experiences as a columnist for The Baltimore Sun and the bygone Evening Sun. For the third play, I had to dig into books and newspaper archives to learn more about the city in the Sixties and the events that shaped the Baltimore we know today.

“I cannot tolerate injustice and certainly not those injustices which government can correct”  – Theodore McKeldin, former Baltimore Mayor.

I knew the Orioles, led by Frank Robinson and Brooks Robinson, won the American League pennant and the World Series in 1966. But I didn’t know much else. I was curious about that last Republican mayor, the civil rights movement, the city’s history of segregation and racial block busting, and the start of the long white flight to the suburbs.

By coincidence, Thompson, the historian, had the same focus for an essay (“Theodore R. McKeldin and Baltimore’s Long Hot Year”) that won the 2024 Joseph L. Arnold Prize for outstanding writing on city history from the Baltimore City Historical Society.

“For McKeldin,” Thompson wrote, “no year presented him more challenge than 1966, a time when, in the aftermath of the civil rights bills, cities in particular were facing a white ‘backlash’ combined with an increased militancy among African-American activists (the “Black Power”- “Freedom Now” divide), which threatened to undermine progress and public support for black equality.”

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination based on race, religion, gender or national origin, ensured equal access to public accommodations and public schools, and prohibited employment discrimination.

A year later, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act to end election practices that had been designed to disenfranchise Black voters, primarily in the Southern States.

Battle to Desegregate

But it’s not like everyone suddenly shouted hallelujah. Baltimore had been super-segregated for decades. In 1966, the owners of saloons and restaurants believed they still had a right, under a liquor board rule, to refuse service to Black customers. And most Black families were still unable to buy a home wherever they wished, assuming they had the means.

McKeldin and civil rights leaders pushed for an end to discrimination in the rental and sale of housing. But they were rebuffed by Democrats on the City Council. At a huge town hall on one of the housing bills, held in the War Memorial, Baltimoreans defending segregation and property rights shouted down proponents of open housing and booed Cardinal Lawrence Shehan.

A vile segregationist named Connie Lynch held rallies against open housing in Patterson Park and provoked violence against Blacks. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), one of the nation’s leading civil rights groups, pushed McKeldin to do more to end housing discrimination and targeted Baltimore for summer demonstrations.

While CORE picketed an apartment building whose owner refused to rent to Blacks, the Ku Klux Klan came to town to conduct a counter-demonstration across the street.

McKeldin worked over the summer to negotiate a non-discrimination agreement with the owners of eight apartment buildings, but civil rights activists continue to push him to do more. He implored the owners of bars and restaurants to stop discriminating against Black customers; among the first to agree were the owners of strip clubs on The Block.

Meanwhile, with a gubernatorial election in the fall, the Maryland Democratic Party nominated a candidate with a campaign pitch that appealed to voters who resented the push for open housing.

George P. Mahoney’s slogan, “Your Home Is Your Castle, Protect It,” became one of the most infamous in state history. His racist message split the Democrats and Spiro T. Agnew, the Republican Baltimore County executive, became governor.

In the meantime, the Orioles won the World Series. The trade that brought Frank Robinson to Baltimore from the Cincinnati Reds is still considered one of the worst in baseball history, with the Reds giving up an All-Star outfielder who, as an Oriole, won his second Most Valuable Player Award and, in 1966, the Triple Crown.

Frank and Brooks led the team to the World Series four times within five years, winning two of them.

Meanwhile, in early summer of the following year, Baltimore’s Republican mayor decided against running for re-election.

“The year had taken a toll politically on McKeldin,” Thompson writes. “His efforts to secure open housing legislation failed in the City Council .… Even so, McKeldin could point to successes. The city, even with racial tensions, never boiled over.”

That would come, of course, two years later, when the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. set off riots here and in 100 other cities, another in a long series of events that shaped the Baltimore we know today.

And what about tomorrow? That’s lately feeling precarious at best.

As I finished researching McKeldin for the play, Donald Trump won the 2024 election and, soon after taking office, his administration started chopping away at long-established programs to protect civil rights, address disparities and encourage equity in how we function as a racially and ethnically diverse society.

The MAGA opposition to the gains made by people of color went into high gear as the Trump administration fought time-honored efforts to ensure fairness and equal opportunity for people historically deprived of both.

Here’s hoping for a day when their movement fades and that political parties, while disagreeing on many things, never again find its abhorrent thinking acceptable.

Dan Rodricks’ third play, “No Mean City: Baltimore 1966” will be staged this month in the Meyerhoff Theater of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Further reading: “Integrating The Orioles,” by Bob Luke; “Here Lies Jim Crow” by C. Fraser Smith, and “Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City,” by Antero Pietila.