The Stamps Family and the Desegregation of Harford Memorial Hospital
Willie Stamps, Harford Memorial Hospital: Two Tragic Deaths and the Birth of a Civil Rights Leader
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Born in 1940, Charles "Willie" Stamps grew up as a person of color in rural Mississippi. As a child, Stamps' family saved enough money and bought a small apartment house in Chicago. By the 1950s, many in the family had joined the Great Migration and settled in either Chicago, Illinois or Detroit, Michigan. Stamps' father maintained a small parcel of farmland in Mississippi where he lived before moving to Detroit in 1955. Stamps recalled his childhood visits by train northward and the times when his family would have to switch into segregated cars upon re-entering the South.
After moving to Chicago and working various jobs, Stamps met his future wife, Patricia (Pat) Taylor, while enrolled in a mortuary science program. Willie and Pat married in September 1959 and soon after they moved to her hometown of Port Deposit, Maryland on the Susquehanna River to be with her mother after Pat's father died unexpectedly. By mid-1960, Pat was pregnant. Willie attained a job at Harford Memorial Hospital (HMH) working as an orderly in the emergency department and delivery room. He learned through his work that HMH had segregated delivery facilities for Blacks and whites.
On November 10, 1960, Pat was in labor and at HMH to have her baby. The Stamps' baby boy Carlos was born breech and was in severe jeopardy. But the incubator and other equipment that may have saved his life were in the whites-only delivery section of the hospital. Despite a nurse's frantic dash up a back stairway with the baby to get him help, Carlos died. Pat died also in the hospital after collapsing and going into respiratory distress after hearing about Carlos. Her life would probably have been saved had she had speedier access to equipment more easily accessible to white patients.
Dealing with his grief, Stamps did what he could to mourn and celebrate Pat’s life with her family in Maryland before eventually moving back to Detroit where he remarried and started a family with his new wife Geri. Yet he remained in close contact with Pat’s mother in Maryland who also worked at HMH and continued to do so after the deaths of her daughter and grandson. Stamps also filed a five million dollar lawsuit against the hospital, leading a hospital board member to travel to Detroit to visit him at his home in 1963. In their conversation, Stamps agreed to drop the lawsuit in exchange for HMH ending racial segregation. This occurred a year before the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 which wiped away racial exclusions in public accommodations nationwide and around the time that Maryland passed a Public Accommodations Act to be ratified by voters in the 1964 elections (the state law lost relevancy after the federal law passed).
Stamps’ Maryland experience opened his eyes to the brutality of Jim Crow segregation, culture of racism, and American culture that he had not grasped in his earlier years. In 1967, he took a job as a janitor with the Detroit Edison Company: a job he qualified for based on tests the company made potential employees take at the time. He quickly became a union chairman at Detroit Edison. In that position he also led a group of black employees and began hearing from employees about incidents of perceived discrimination such as being denied equal opportunity for promotions. Soon, he became the lead plaintiff in a landmark federal lawsuit entitled Stamps vs. Detroit Edison Co. (1973).
The plaintiffs won their case, upheld by a federal appeals court. The court mandated that the company pay the employees a collective $5 million in back pay to be split by 301 employees and a host of other actions to rectify unfair practices in hiring and promotion. Stamps vs. Detroit Edison Co. became a well-known case for the advancement of civil rights in employment. As a union leader, businessman and civil rights leader in Detroit for decades, Mr. Stamps was often busy yet maintained his ties to Maryland and visited Harford County regularly to tend the graves of Pat and Carlos.
In 2010 he re-connected with the hospital about a ceremony to honor their deaths and the ending of segregation at HMH. That ceremony finally happened in November 2018, 58 years after the Stamps tragedy occurred. As of 2021, pictures of Pat and Carlos were visible in the hospital's lobby along with plaques describing the 1960 event and its aftermath. In addition, the hospital similarly honored the legacy of Dr. George Stansbury, an African American doctor involved in the Stamps story and a local legend as a physician serving the African American community in Havre de Grace for many decades in the 20th century.
