Theodore (Ted) Newkirk
Key Player in the Desegregation of St. Mary’s County Schools
September 1, 1926 – April 21, 2013
Theodore (Ted) Newkirk was a key player in the desegregation of St. Mary’s County Schools and the fight against workplace discrimination at the Patuxent River Naval Base. Oral history interviews were conducted with him in 2003 and 2007, and his story is available in those oral history transcripts as well as in the video documentary With All Deliberate Speed: One High School’s Story.
“I’m glad I got my kids exposed to it early because discrimination is not going away. You fight it, you fight it, fight it, fight it, fight it. But just don’t sit back in a corner and say this is the best I can do. No, the best you can do is fight it every day.” Theodore Newkirk.
Born in Wilmington, North Carolina, he moved to Baltimore, Maryland after serving in the Army Air Corp in Japan. In 1954, he moved his family to Lexington Park, St. Mary’s County, Maryland. The family found the county a starkly segregated place, and over the following decades joined efforts with others fighting for their civil rights to dismantle segregation in the schools, workplace, housing, and county services. Mr. Newkirk served in leadership positions in the St. Mary’s County branch of the NAACP and the Parent Teachers Association at the segregated Carver school in the late 1950s
He worked with a local and National NAACP team to support the Groves’ family’s successful legal struggle to enroll Joan and Conrad Groves in the all-white Great Mills High School in 1958. He enrolled his children in schools where they were early “pioneers” in the slow transition to an integrated system. In the 1960s, as a Patuxent Naval Air Test Center electronic engineer, Mr. Newkirk successfully fought discriminatory hiring and promotional practices, bringing equal treatment at the job site on military bases across the country. As president of the local NAACP in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s he led a group active in anti-discrimination efforts across a variety of community concerns. In 1988 he founded and was President of Newkirk Enterprises, Inc., a construction company that built affordable homes.
“There’s a penalty you pay when you upset that white community. It’s what they’ve been doing all their lives and they never thought of it. I thought that I could just push my little self in there, try to make a change, Blacks and Whites would accept it. I was just as wrong as wrong could be. I was wrong. I even had Black people to tell me, ‘Ted Newkirk, you ain’t nothing but a troublemaker.’”
Additional Resources
With All Deliberate Speed: One High School’s Story: a documentary by Meredith Taylor, St. Mary’s College, Maryland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qg7TXldDgYw
Theodore Newkirk, Sr. Obituary | Southern Maryland (somd.com)
Interview transcripts, The Slackwater Archives, St. Mary’s College of Maryland https://smcm.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p4105coll5/id/430/rec/1
https://smcm.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p4105coll5/id/431/rec/2
http://somd.com/news/headlines/2010/11132.php
