In one week recently, this newspaper reported on a prestigious black couple's bid to at last integrate the Baltimore Country Club, on Newt Gingrich's suggestion that Maryland retake the property it ceded centuries ago to create Washington, D.C., and on opening arguments in the racial conundrum known as the O.J. Simpson murder trial.
There was yet another article in the paper that week whose roots ran as deep as those of the Wye Oak into that melange of racial and geographical current events: It described this summer's groundbreaking for a historical park in Baltimore County's Oella, where Benjamin Banneker once lived and marveled at the heavens.
Banneker was born in 1731 to a free woman and a former slave. His inspirational story will be retold often this Black History Month. An unschooled tobacco planter, Banneker built a clock apparently without ever having seen one. He taught himself mathematics and astronomy and helped survey the District of Columbia.
His feats are all the more remarkable given the world in which he accomplished them, as described in Silvio Bedini's biography about the "first black man of science." His Maryland wasn't the one we know today, which boasts some of the country's greatest concentrations of upper-income, college-educated African-Americans. His Oella was a rocky outcropping populated by wild turkeys, wildcats, wolf packs and a farming community. Blacks were at worst enslaved, at best ostracized. Toward the end of Banneker's life, then-Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson was ridiculed simply for acknowledging the man's achievements.
An archaeological park endowed to shed light on Banneker's accomplishments and 18th century Maryland would be a valuable addition to this state's cultural attractions. It would blend with the $15 million black history and culture museum being planned east of the Inner Harbor, as well as the Banneker-Douglass Museum now in Annapolis. The Banneker park would help the state's visitor industry mine an "ethnic tourism" market. In fact, the state began packaging its African-American attractions to black tour groups a few years ago.
The Banneker farm could possess an even broader appeal. Planners must create whatever links they can, through pedestrian bridges or shuttle buses, to nearby historic Ellicott City, to feed the mass of attractions and businesses necessary to make tourist economies thrive. This park is a very worthwhile project.