Politics, not the office kind, cost Alvin Hathaway his first two jobs. The first, a computer programming gig for the B&O Railroad, was done in by the 1970 Clean Air Act (think fewer coal trains). The second, as a community court liaison for Milton Allen, the city’s first Black state’s attorney, got cut after William Swisher, a white candidate running a racially charged campaign, defeated Allen in his re-election bid.

“I was in my mid-20s, feeling sorry for myself, angry, too,” Hathaway recalls. “I still had a bit of an edge then.” A mentor suggested the now 69-year-old get out of Baltimore and see more of the world.

“He told me I needed perspective, and so I bought a $39 Greyhound bus ticket,” Hathaway says with a laugh. “I took the north route to San Francisco, where I had an aunt. I saw Notre Dame, Indiana; Minneapolis; Cheyenne, Wyoming. Then I took the southern route back out of Bakersfield. Saw the tumbleweed in New Mexico and passed right through Bristol—where its Bristol, Tennessee, on one side of the highway and Bristol, Virginia, on the other. I’d crossed the Mississippi at its narrowest point and its widest. I felt like Tom Sawyer.”

Late in his eight-month journey, a bus buddy tried to convince him to look for logging jobs in Portland, but Hathaway decided to come home.

“I had an uncle who was a pastor and activist in Richmond, and he told me he had work for me,” Hathaway says. “He brought me back into community advocacy and social-justice organizing, then I returned to Baltimore.”

In 1977, he became one of the organizers behind BUILD, the still-thriving Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development, a non-partisan, interfaith, multiracial community organization grounded in the city’s neighborhoods and congregations.

Nearly a half-century later, as he plans his retirement next month after a life of organizing and pastoring, Rev. Dr. Alvin C. Hathaway Sr. is now putting the finishing touches on an $8-million funding package for the preservation of the historic Henry Highland Garnet School. (A radical abolitionist, Garnet was born into slavery in Kent County, escaped, and later became the first Black preacher to give a sermon in the House of Representatives.)

Read the Full Article as published by Baltimore Magazine

Written by: By Ron Cassie