A little after 1 p.m. on Aug. 28, 1963, Charles Langley arrived at Gwynn Oak Amusement Park with his baby daughter. The 28-year-old black clerk at the nearby Social Security Administration did not belong to a civil rights organization. He had never participated in the many protests at Gwynn Oak. And he certainly had not expected to find a group of reporters eager to record this family outing.

But he was smothered by attention as he strolled through the amusement park. After visiting various arcades and looking at the rides, Langley put Sharon on the merry-go-round.

When he settled his daughter's frilly pink dress on the carousel horse, a white woman asked Langley if he could keep an eye on her daughter as she was riding. Then a white boy took a seat on the horse next to Sharon's.

"I hope people of both races continue to support the park," Charles Langley told reporters. "I see no reason why it shouldn't be a tremendous success."

Ed Chance, Chester Wickwire and Alison Turaj, demonstrators who had gone to jail so that the Langleys could enjoy the park, were not there to savor the evidence of their hard-earned victory. Like hundreds of thousands of other activists, they were in Washington, listening to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver the speech that would become the hallmark of the civil rights movement.

As chairman of Baltimore's chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, Chance helped organize buses going to the March. Buoyed by the victory at Gwynn Oak, the 30-year-old black social worker felt the momentum of the Movement. He was certain his children would never know the pain of segregation and was proud he was helping to end it.

Alison Turaj, a 25-year-old white activist from New York, traveled to Washington with a busload of folks she had gathered from Harlem. Only a month earlier, her bloodied image had spoken of the hostility at Gwynn Oak, and she felt apprehensive about the large mixing of whites and blacks expected in the nation's capital. Instead, the day unfolded like all of her wishes for it, inspiring her to work even harder at ending the miseries of the ghetto.

Chester Wickwire, coordinator of religious activities at Johns Hopkins University, traveled to the historic march on a bus that was still segregated. And, there on the Mall, the 49-year-old white minister renewed his pledge to accompany his black brothers and sisters wherever their journey might lead.

On a hot summer day in 1998, Ed Chance walks quickly so the chocolate sundae he brought his son won't melt. Eddie is waiting eagerly in the hospital day room. He hugs his father with his right arm; his left is pinioned by a wrist restraint.

Ed Chance's old friend, Chester Wickwire, has come along to meet the young man. A long time ago, Wickwire contracted polio and spent six months in a hospital ward where he didn't belong. He says he feels kinship with 25-year-old Eddie. He thumbs through Eddie's journal, commenting on its daily litany of events: getting dressed, taking a shower, watching television. Monotonous routines can soothe people who have Eddie's form of autism, his father explains.

Eddie answers questions cheerfully with a broad smile. When the hospital loudspeaker announces dinner, however, the young man gets antsy. He doesn't like to miss a moment of mealtime.

The time has come for his goodbye ritual.

"You're my main man," Eddie tells his father.

"And you're my main man," Chance says. "And we are ..."

"Best buddies!" Eddie finishes.

It is tender and painful, this nightmare that no one imagined.

After the success at Gwynn Oak, Ed Chance moved gradually into the black nationalism he thought could best bring social change. For a while, he was chairman of the Black United Front at Union Baptist Church and president of the Black Social Workers.

But as other activists looked toward political careers, Chance determined to excel in psychiatric social work. He became the first black to direct a clinical department at Spring Grove State Hospital. Then, when a new superintendent eliminated his department, Chance struggled to ensure that social workers could perform their jobs as they had been trained and have the professional supervision they deserved.

By the mid-1970s, however, Ed Chance was beginning to understand his life's biggest challenge. Something was wrong with Eddie Jr., the child born 10 years after the victory at Gwynn Oak.

Something was very wrong.

When Eddie was eventually diagnosed as developmentally disabled with autistic-like behavior, Ed and Shirley Chance began to confront the consequences of his unpredictable temperament. Tantrums were second nature to the boy. Whatever you told him as he was biting and spitting and kicking and punching just didn't get through.

After he had spent elementary and middle school in special-education classes, Eddie's outbursts brought him into the psychiatric ward of Johns Hopkins Children's Hospital. He was released after eight months, however, because doctors concluded he was not mentally ill. No medication would improve his behavior.

Instead, Eddie lived for six years at the National Children's Center in Washington with children who had Down's syndrome, autism, retardation and other developmental disabilities. The state of Maryland paid for his care because it did not have a similar long-term facility.

When Eddie turned 21, the state placed him in a supervised apartment in Woodlawn where his destructive outbursts began to occur more frequently. Several times, police drove him to the psychiatric units of local hospitals.

In November 1994, two weeks after Ed Chance retired from his 34-year career at Spring Grove State Hospital, his son was admitted there.

The psychiatric social worker's quest to find the right care for his child would only grow more complicated. Following several violent outbursts, Eddie was placed in the hospital's forensic ward. Then he attacked a nurse who filed charges against him.

Because Eddie is considered extremely dangerous and unpredictable by the hospital's doctors, he has been placed in leg and arm restraints for long periods of time.

Ed Chance disputes the doctors' characterization of his son as well as his treatment. He does not believe Eddie belongs in a mental hospital and thinks the restraints have been used far longer than necessary.

At 65, the former civil rights activist has acquired the pained expression of those preoccupied by unsolved problems. He remains slender, intense and focused: Talk about the past quickly leads back to the subject of his son. Chance is waging his most difficult campaign so far.

He has discussed Eddie's situation with politicians, attorneys, reporters, ministers and comrades from the '60s.

The question he raises is always the same: By not offering Eddie treatment specifically geared toward his disabilities, is the state violating his child's human rights?

Chester Wickwire hunches over the phone book on his desk, looking up names. As chairman of the Maryland Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, the 84-year-old activist is marshaling forces to examine how the police and courts treat Korean-Americans in Baltimore. He calls 40 or so Korean-American stores to invite the owners to air their concerns at a public forum.

Later, he drives his red Ford Explorer through litter-strewn neighborhoods where kids open fire hydrants and flood the sidewalks in front of Korean-American stores. He listens while the owners complain that police look the other way when dealers sell drugs inside their businesses.

It is the week before Wickwire learns he must have a pacemakerimplanted in his chest. Over the years, the silver-haired civil rights activist has endured several operations as well as the strain of the polio that affected his shoulders and his back, severely weakening his right leg and left arm. But nothing has slowed him down.

The year after the victory at Gwynn Oak, he headed a statewide committee to stop George Wallace in his bid for the presidency. When the Alabama governor traveled through Maryland to rally support, the minister arranged for a truth squad from Alabama to follow him.

In 1968, when race riots ripped the fragile seams joining Baltimore's black and white communities, Wickwire stepped forward to help repair the damage. He denounced Gov. Spiro T. Agnew's blaming of the city's black leadership for the civil disorder. He assembled a group of white Baltimoreans, including future housing commissioner M. Jay Brodie and future senator Barbara Mikulski, who took out full-page newspaper ads pledging to "change white attitudes and promote social reconstruction."

That summer, Wickwire set up a Freedom School to educate whites about black literature, the psychology of racism, the black power movement and racial employment patterns in Baltimore.

In the 1970s, the chaplain became the only white minister to serve as president of Baltimore's Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance. But he did not limit his activism to black/white issues. He also defended students' right to protest the Vietnam War, visited conscientious objectors and gave shelter to American Indians on their Long March to Washington.

And at a time when many of his contemporaries had already retired, Chester Wickwire began leading groups of faculty on human rights missions to El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras.

"I have had difficulty not going ahead and getting involved in things." His voice is slightly flat, common-sensical. "I try to live my life to be responsible with a certain amount of abandon. You don't have to count the cost all the time, you just go out and do what's right. And that's what I try to do. I'm just trying to keep the ball in play."

After the announcement that Gwynn Oak Amusement Park would integrate, Wickwire celebrated by holding a service of thanks. As he saw it, the victory was an occasion for hope and humility. It was, after all, only one small step.

His message resonates as deeply now as it did 35 years ago.

"If you whose rights have been denied can forgive us for being slow to hear you, and halting in joining you, we shall try to accept your forgiveness graciously, knowing that we do not deserve it," he told those assembled.

"If you will let us go with you -- this is our fight too, we are not afraid -- we will go, black and white together, into the courts, into the streets, and into the jails, and we will win."

At 60, Alison Turaj Brown is a vivid figure in a jewel-colored Liz Claiborne outfit and iridescent earrings. Her long, strawberry blond hair is pulled up in a clip, her blue eyes are piercing. The jagged lines of the scar she received at Gwynn Oak are barely visible over her right eye.

After her release from jail for trespassing at the park, Alison Turaj considered pressing charges against the woman who had thrown the rock at her. Mostly, she just wanted to find her, look her straight in the eye and ask: Why did you act in such a violent and hateful way? Right in front of your own children!

The experience only strengthened her resolve. Turaj continued to demonstrate and was arrested a total of 21 times. She divided her energies between organizing voters in the South and neighborhood groups in New York's Lower East Side. Then she signed on full time with an anti-poverty program in New Jersey, where she worked with blacks, farm workers, Puerto Rican immigrants -- anyone in Middlesex County who was down and out.

But by 1968, she was tired. And she had met the man who would become her husband -- John Brown, a black soldier finishing his tour in Vietnam. That year, the couple moved with his two daughters to the Virgin Islands where interracial marriages were more readily accepted. With her tan, Alison Turaj Brown was generally assumed to be a light-skinned black raising two young stepdaughters. She finished her college degree, worked for the federal government on economic development grants and helped set up Headstart programs.

When their girls became teen-agers, the Browns returned to New Jersey. Alison took graduate courses in business and public administration and forged a career in law enforcement, eventually working as a state medical investigator.

Now divorced from her husband of 20 years, Brown lives in Bordentown, N.J., with her grandaughters Natassia, 16, and Gabrielle, 22.

One of Brown's stepdaughters works as a computer programmer. Her other daughter, the mother of Natassia and Gabrielle, is a crack addict. Alison Brown has six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, both of whom are in foster homes.

But no one, she emphasizes, is on welfare. She is determined all the children will go to college. Gabrielle is enrolled in nursing school. Natassia, who wants to become a lawyer, delivered the class speech last June when she graduated from middle school with honors.

"Sometimes the kids' friends will look at me and say, 'She's white.' And my family will say 'No, she isn't.' And that's it. When people have been around you so long, they forget you're white," Brown says.

"When I came back to the States, I started to look up friends from the civil rights movement. They said, 'Look, the pressure was so great on us, we have gone back into the white society.' I said, 'Hey, man, I went into the black society.' Because I always went the other way."

Brown is wry, ironic and as passionate as ever. She also has a mind that travels easily, and restlessly, between present and past. One memory in particular continues to haunt her, reminding her of how differently the world appears to black and white Americans.

When Alison flew home after Gwynn Oak, her New York friends greeted her at the airport with signs praising her bravery. At the party that night on Riverside Drive, her bandage might as well have been a medal.

The party's host treated Alison as if she were a celebrity. "Do you know who she is?" he asked one of his black guests.

The man glanced at Alison and shook his head.

"She's the one who had her head opened on that demonstration."

The man turned and stared. Then he said, "She should have expected it."

Alison froze. How could this person whose rights she had been struggling for, how could he, of all people, say something so mean-spirited?

"It took me years to understand what he meant," she says. "And what he said was true. Had I known what he knew, I probably would have expected it. Those black folks who warned me at the park that day, they knew what we did not know."

To walk through the smooth green landscape that once held Gwynn Oak Amusement Park is to revisit an old battlefield. There is no evidence of the wooden roller coaster, the pony rides, the amusements that entertained generations of white Baltimoreans.

Only history informs the visitor that anything out of the ordinary occurred here.

In the summer of 1963, larger amusement parks were already beginning to edge out small, family-owned businesses like Gwynn Oak. As its owners predicted, many whites stopped going to the park after blacks won the right to join them. In the years that followed, however, the racial balance gradually evened out.

"There's no question that integration was the right thing to do morally," says Dick Price, son of one of the park's late owners.

In 1963, Price was 14 years old and working in the arcade. "At the time," he says, "I viewed it from a selfish standpoint: It was an assault on a family business. When you really thought it through, everyone said we were wrong, and we submitted. We were caught up in changing times."

The owners declared bankruptcy after Hurricane Agnes flooded the property in 1972. Eventually Baltimore County bought the park and turned it into a recreation area now used mostly by African-American families.

And what of the first black child to ride the carousel at Gwynn Oak, the baby who symbolized so much?

Sharon Langley studies the photograph of herself on the merry-go-round, the image of the father who died almost 10 years ago. Her parents never made much of the event, she says. They knew the day-to-day struggle for equality -- and Sharon would know it, too.

After her parents divorced in the 1970s, she and her mother moved to Atlanta, where she attended a mostly white high school. She was admired for her writing and singing, her poise and personality, her awards in track, her honor roll grades. Although she loved her school, Langley was still the only black student in the college prep courses.

And her mother made sure she stayed there.

Marion Moore Langley had a history of activism. As a teen-ager, she had stirred up quite a fuss in Georgetown, Ky., when she demanded to go to the all-white high school. The rundown high school for blacks, she pointed out, was not giving her an "equal" education.

Instead, Scott County paid for her and several other students to attend a black high school in Lexington, and also paid to bus them there. However, the young girl's efforts forced their hand: The following year so many students demanded an equal education that segregation simply became too expensive. In 1957, blacks were admitted to Georgetown's white high school.

Twenty years later, Sharon Langley found she and her black friends were still confronting prejudices her mother had faced.

"Back then, the big question was access," she says. "Now the greatest question is attitude. I still feel that whites think I'm not as smart. And every time I'm introduced, and every time I work in another setting, I'm proving myself over and over again."

Langley received a degree in mass communications from Atlanta's Clark University. Before she graduated, however, she set another record as the first black woman to be crowned Peach Bowl Queen.

She has lived in Los Angeles for the past decade. She worked at budgeting productions for Disney television shows, then won a fellowship to Bill Cosby's script-writing program. Now, at 35, she teaches at one of the city's showcase elementary schools. Deeply committed to her church -- she is a soloist in the choir -- Sharon also critiques scripts for the Sundance and Humanitas Foundations and is trying to develop a career of writing made-for-television dramas.

The footnotes to Langley's story, however, reveal difficulties she attributes to racial prejudice.

At a recent temporary job, she received nothing but compliments from her supervisor. Yet when the position became permanent and she applied for it, she was told she lacked the necessary skills.

Langley believed this explanation until her supervisor asked her to train her successor: a white woman who didn't possess even Sharon's abilities.

Instead, Langley took another job.

"In the New Testament, Jesus says, 'Be wise as a serpent but harmless as a dove.' In other words," she says, "don't be blind to things that go on around you as though they don't exist, as though we settled this issue once and for all, when there's still more work to be done.

"At the same time, for the sake of your own character, don't become bitter. You can't become bitter."

But always be ready to make a stand.

Eleven years ago, Sharon Langley took to the streets for her first civil rights protest. She was 24, the same age as Alison Turaj when she was arrested in Cambridge, Md. This time, the front line was Forsyth County, Ga. This time the issue was housing and employment discrimination.

A week earlier, 400 white supremacists and Klansmen had overwhelmed a small group of demonstrators in this all-white county north of Atlanta, chanting "Go Home, Nigger" and pelting them with rocks and bottles. Now 20,000 protesters were marching against racism. It was the largest civil rights demonstration in the South since the 1960s.

When Sharon Langley stepped off the bus at the county's border, helicopters thundered overhead. There were more uniformed men with guns than she had ever imagined. And as she walked past members of the National Guard and Georgia State Patrol, she thought of news clips of police with billy clubs, of broken bodies being dragged away.

She searched the faces of the officers sent to protect her. Some smiled. Others made her think of white sheets and Confederate flags.

But as she walked, she also realized she was marching as testimony to what had been accomplished within her own lifetime. Not so long ago, she thought, the National Guard would have been protecting a white man's right to segregation. Now they were protecting a black woman's right to integrate.

She was marching because civil rights were not yet an inheritance to be passed down from mother to daughter. She was marching to keep the account open. She was marching with people she'd known from school, people she'd seen at church and lots of others she had never met. And as she walked into the town of Cumming, into the very heart of Forsyth County, Sharon Langley breathed in the spirit of the Movement. There they were again, all of them, drawn together to do the right thing.

Pub Date: 8/24/98