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Chester L. Wickwire Collection       ( CLW)

Table of Contents

Chester L.Wickwire & Levering Hall

by Jessica Elfenbein, Ph.D.

The remarkable legacy of innovative social welfare work returned to Levering Hall YMCA in 1953 when Dr. Chester Wickwire, an ordained United Church of Christ minister and Yale Divinity School graduate, was hired as Executive Secretary. Wickwire, a human rights activist, connected to the legacy of Daniel Gilman, first president of Johns Hopkins University, and John Glenn, a 19th c. Baltimore pioneer in social welfare work, by incorporating community service to create through Levering Hall an "open fellowship of men and women ... interested in developing the highest ideals of Christian life and service, and especially in applying these ideals to life." He justified links between religious, informal educational and "student union" activities through the "Old Testament conception of all life being within the province of religious concern and motivation."

Under Wickwire's leadership, Levering Hally YMCA attempted to provide an open platform for people of all opinions, causing criticism from "both the left and the right for providing an open forum for all political views, including those with which Levering Hall's leaders strongly disagreed." During the 1950s, Wickwire and Levering Hall were involved in the panic generated by McCarthyism. Wickwire "brought a set of commitments that were shocking for some and inviting for others." During those years, conservative members of the Hopkins Board of Trustees and the YMCA's Board of Managers tried to prohibit leftist speakers with threats to accuse Wickwire of being a communist. Wickwire and Levering Hall were not deterred, inviting speakers like Saul Alinsky in 1965 and Bayard Rustin the African-American organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, in 1966. Rustin's appearance caused considerable uproar on campus. JHU President Milton Eisenhower, concerned about Rustin's refusal to serve in World War II and his alleged homosexuality asked, "do I have to let that sonafabitch on campus." The night before Rustin's visit, the Klan burned a cross on campus. Segregationists disrupted the events.

Wickwire urged Hopkins students to become involved in local community concerns. In 1958, as hundreds of Hopkins students volunteered to work at agencies across the city, Levering Hall YMCA had 624, 63 faculty, and 14 other members who soon expanded their work to include tutoring for inner-city children and a committee on "social action and political education," a group that would take on issues like the low wages of city laundry workers and voter registration. By the mid-‘60s tutoring had become the major community service work of Levering Hall's student and faculty members and their wives. So quickly and strong did the Levering Hall tutoring project grow that it soon became the center for tutoring efforts throughout Central Maryland, which in 1966 comprised 600 tutors from 28 other organizations, including many local colleges and universities. Levering Hall YMCA provided tutor orientation and training for all participants. It also provided many tutors, peaking at 300 Hopkins student and faculty tutors in 1969.

As master of student activities, Levering Hall YMCA organized jazz and folk concerts featuring nationally and internationally known performers like Dave Brubeck, Herbie Mann, Theolonious Monk, and Simon and Garfunckle, among others. In 1959, Wickwire arranged for a major jazz concert at the 5th Regiment Armory, the first in the city that was open to both blacks and whites. The race riots that university and YMCA officials feared never materialized. Early in the 1960s, Levering Hall organized The Room at the Top (later Chester's Place) as a coffee house/ folk music venue.

In 1967 Wickwire commissioned Robert Hieronimus to paint one wall of the top floor of Levering Hall. In time the mural, The Apocalypse, expanded to cover three walls and the stairwell. Levering Hall's informal educational program evolved into the no-tuition Freedom School that in 1968 operated four nights a week under the sponsorship of Response, an outgrowth of the Committee for Responsible Leadership, a group of 450 Baltimoreans who "banded together to protest publicly Governor Agnew's chastisement of moderate Negro leaders following the April riots in Baltimore." Wickwire served as Response's president. Freedom School included courses like "Black Organizations and Aims" which enrolled more than 500 students. The dual masters of Hopkins and the YMCA complicated the Levering Hall Secretary's job. Early in his tenure Wickwire complained, "the person in this position is not seen by the Y or the University communities as a full member of either structure." Yet, in times of controversy, dual masters provided protection: "while serving Hopkins and the Y ... we developed programs for which the university and the Y, if either disapproved, blamed the other."

Under Wickwire, Levering Hall YMCA long enjoyed "extraordinary freedom" which was enhanced by the support of the city's black and Jewish leaders and by Hopkins faculty like John Gryder, professor of physics and long time Levering Hall chairman of the board. By the mid 1960s, the duality of Wickwire's position was causing increasing concern for both the YMCA and Hopkins. These were hard years for the YMCA of Metropolitan Baltimore (the former Baltimore YMCA) which faced fiscal difficulties and expressed interest in withdrawing from Levering Hall in which it had a financial interest. Concurrently, some in the Hopkins administration believed that if the Y's presence on campus ended, Wickwire and the political activism he represented could be removed. Mild compared to student activism on other campuses, at Hopkins "what passed for political activism was centered around Levering Hall." When students, particularly those connected to the Student Association, got wind of the university's intentions, they undertook a petition drive to keep Wickwire on campus. They were extremely successful, getting nearly ninety percent of the undergraduates to sign the petition within two days. Many in the larger community also supported efforts to retain Wickwire, of whom Douglas Memorial Church's Rev. Marion Bascom said, "If there is any person in this city who by color is white and at the same time is regarded as black, it is Chester Wickwire." So strong was community support for Wickwire that leaders from the Black Nationalist headquarters called student leaders at Hopkins volunteering to burn down the university if he was fired! In the face of intense student and community protest, Wickwire was retained even as the YMCA's withdrawal from Levering Hall was finalized.

By April 1969, the disengagement from the YMCA was complete. Levering Hall ceased its 86 year tradition as a campus YMCA. The university assumed complete financial and administrative responsibility and bought out the Y's interest for $225,000. Wickwire had been named Chaplain of the university in 1968, a position he held until his retirment in 1984. Under his direction, many of Levering Hall's programs, including the tutorial project, draft counseling, Chester's Place, and the free university continued. Never deterred, Wickwire redoubled efforts to broaden the scope students' education and widen their world view, whatever their "bag"! The social activism modeled by Wickwire through Levering Hall YMCA had a profound impact on Hopkins students like Paul Niebanck, Dean Pappas, and Joseph Weinberg. Niebanck, part of the "panty raid generation," arrived on campus in 1953 and quickly became involved in Levering Hall activities as an antidote to the campus' predominant fraternity culture. His first years at Hopkins were "a time of low consciousness" in which Levering Hall YMCA, with "pervasive, insistent, active and creatively loving" Chet Wickwire at its core "brought the world to a set of very cose-minded, though good and smart, people." Through Levering Hall YMCA, Niebanck came to know the music of Nina Simone and had the opportunity to travel to Paris for the centennial of the international YMCA. That experience, in turn, empowered Niebanck in 1956 to participate in an interracial living experience through the American Friends Service Committee. A professor of urban planning, and leader of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare in the 1970s, Niebanck credits his commitment to social just to Wickwire who he says "located me. I have carried him through a life of increasingly useful service."

Dean Pappas came to Hopkins in 1961 for graduate studies in physics. He joined Levering Hall for the Folk Dance Club. What he found was a place offering an international flavor and a chance to meet other graduate students, many of whom were peace activists. Pappas, who had arrived on campus "pretty conservative and a-political, leaning more right than left" credits his radical political awakening to his Levering Hall YMCA exposure. Through Wickwire and Levering Hall, Pappas became involved in tutorials and community organizing. He attended SDS and CORE meetings. He helped organize "lots of protests against Hopkins and its war machine." To Pappas, Wickwire was "a righteous gentle man" willing to "speak truth to power." He was also the force that launched Pappas' "career in activism."

Joe Weinberg arrived as a freshman in 1965 and found that Levering Hall was one of the "few activist places on an apathetic campus." A joiner, Weinberg quickly volunteered with the Newsletter and Levering Hall YMCA, where he tutored and became active in civil rights. By his sophomore year he served on the Board of Levering Hall and attended the YMCA National Convention in Chicago where he met Jesse Jackson. President of Levering Hall Student Association his junior and senior years, Weinberg remembers Levering Hall as "the absolute center of student life." As its leader, Wickwire brought both "a passion for student life as well as for civil rights."

Those passions allowed Wickwire and the students and faculty with whom he worked to have a credibility with students that other administrators lacked. So, when a riot in the freshman dorms ensued following a police raid for drugs, it was Wickwire, Weinberg and other Student Association leaders who were trusted by students to negotiate the end of a stand off-between them and President Lincoln Gordon. A physician specializing in pediatric emergency medicine, Weinberg believes that his commitment to the care of indigent children comes from his work with Wickwire, his "personal mentor" and Levering Hall.

Levering Hall YMCA was a place of enormous importance to many Hopkins students and faculty, not only as a center of student activities and religious life, but also as a place for philanthropic activity and activism. It is the place where the legacies of Daniel Gilman and Chester Wickwire meet. It is the place, too, where generations of Hopkins students and faculty gathered to plan how to make the world a better place.

Langsdale Library Special Collections • 1420 Maryland Avenue • Baltimore, MD 21201• Research Request