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11.28.06

Civil rights marcher sues for gay marriage

On his first trip as a civil rights activist, Charles Blackburn already knew the rules: Disconnect the lights in your car so you're not an easy target for snipers. Drive down the center of the road to make it harder to be run off the side. Stick to the black neighborhoods whenever possible.

A white Unitarian minister, he was headed from his home in Huntsville, Ala., to McComb, Miss., where a string of bombings had devastated black homes and churches. It was October 1964. Nine white men arrested in the bombings had just been released.

"I knew what the violence was and that these people were out on the street," Blackburn says. But he made the lonely trip all the same, arriving at a bus station where he was met with a sea of white faces. "I knew what was in my heart, and I knew what I believed. And if they had known this, my life would have been worth very little to them."

He carried another secret in that bus station, and in his years fighting for civil rights in the South: He was gay. It was a secret he would keep for 10 more years, until 1974, when he separated from his wife and moved to Baltimore.

Now, four decades after risking his life in a civil rights struggle for others, Blackburn, 73, says it is time to fight for himself. Along with his partner of 28 years, Glen Dehn, he is a plaintiff in a lawsuit seeking to expand marriage to gay and lesbian couples in Maryland. Blackburn is a bridge between the two movements, a man with a creased face and thinning hair who knows what it means to stand up, and why it is essential.

The Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, will hear the case Monday. Blackburn's campaigns for equal rights have taken him to courthouses before: In 1964 he was thrown into a jail cell crawling with cockroaches and bedbugs for trying to help an elderly black couple register to vote.

In the next few years, as Blackburn crisscrossed Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, he would be targeted with rocks and obscene phone calls. Once, someone attempted to burn a cross on his front lawn. On another occasion, he was spirited out of Shreveport, La., in a private plane after he learned the sheriff was waiting at the public airport to arrest him.

"He was brave and courageous," says Evelyn Falkowski, 81, who was a member of Blackburn's church at the time and now lives in Rockville. "Anybody that took a stand for civil rights in those days was taking some risk. I admired him."

Talking one recent afternoon in the 19th-century Bolton Hill townhouse he shares with Dehn, Blackburn drew parallels between the two rights movements that have bracketed his life and the opposition he faced then and now.

As in the 1960s, he says, half-measures will not do. He wants full marriage rights for same-sex couples, not civil unions that seek to duplicate marriage without using the actual word.

"It's just like the old argument of separate but equal facilities for blacks," he says. "They weren't, they never will be and they never could be. And it's the same. It's the same."

Back into the closet

As the son of a Methodist minister in Florida, Blackburn's early experience with black people was limited to yardmen, washwomen and church sextons. His parents were not activists, but they showed a respect and concern for others that took hold in Blackburn.

He also had a personal interest in the rights of minorities. When he moved to Washington in 1954 to attend American University, he quietly came out as a gay man. But his experience at gay clubs was so traumatizing that he quickly retreated.

"It was horrendous," he says. "You never gave your last name. You never said where you worked. I ran back to the closet and stayed there for 17 years."

In 1957, he married a woman he had met while he was a military police officer in Fort Gordon, Ga. She was a contestant for Miss South Carolina and a music teacher. They moved to Berkeley, Calif., where Blackburn enrolled in a Unitarian seminary.

After his ordination, he took a job as minister of a church in nearby Hayward. Married and with an infant daughter, he was content, if not fulfilled. It was the early '60s, the civil rights movement was gaining momentum, and he yearned to be a part of it.

"It started the thought process that if anyone should be part of this in the South, two Southerners should be," he says of himself and his wife.

A new Unitarian church was forming in Huntsville, Ala., and Blackburn didn't hesitate. He was soon called to Magnolia, Miss., to help register black voters. He escorted a 94-year-old Baptist minister and his 80-year-old wife to the county courthouse, where they were arrested for trespassing.

He was thrown in jail along with 16 other ministers and rabbis who were there doing the same work, newspaper records show. Fed stale cornbread, fatback and rubbery grits, the group decided to fast. It was not, Blackburn says, a hard decision. They were held 48 hours before mounting public pressure forced the sheriff to release them and drop all charges.

Back home, Blackburn's work was causing ripples in the church. "He was certainly controversial," says Falkowski, the church member. "There were several of us who were quite supportive of him and others who were afraid he was going too fast."

But Blackburn couldn't slow down. He installed floodlights outside his house and heavy wire mesh screens over the windows to guard against Molotov cocktails. He and his wife inspected their car for bombs every morning.

He led groups from his church to Selma for marches on March 6 and 8, 1965. He was hardly alone, but a photographer got a picture of him standing by himself, carrying a sign that said "Huntsville." The Huntsville Times ran the photo on the front page.

That would cause problems - including more than 250 obscene and threatening phone calls - but first Blackburn received the awful news of an attack on a friend.

When he left Selma on March 8, he warned his friend and fellow Unitarian minister Jim Reeb to not leave the black neighborhoods. Blackburn was from the South and knew the intense hatred some whites felt for civil rights workers. But Reeb was from Boston and did not.

Reeb had dinner at a downtown restaurant. When he walked out, he was set upon by an angry mob. He suffered massive head injuries, but not a single white ambulance in Selma would carry him to the hospital in Birmingham. A black funeral driver provided a hearse for the trip. Reeb died two days later.

"I don't know what the implement was they used," Blackburn says, "but they bashed his brain in."

Rocks, shotgun blast

Blackburn participated in two more marches, in Selma on March 15 and in Montgomery on March 25, 1965, and he worked on civil rights and integration issues in Huntsville.

But after his photo appeared in the local paper, the situation became untenable. The threatening phone calls forced his family to get an unlisted number. Rocks were thrown through the windows of his church. Blackburn began to realize, for his wife's sanity and his church's sake, that his family had to leave.

In 1966, he took a position with a church in Rockland Springs, N.Y. He was there for less than a year, "bored to tears," he says, before he became a field director with the American Civil Liberties Union based in Atlanta. He traveled the South again and, at one point, before he was to give a sermon in a Unitarian church in New Orleans, a plate-glass window was blown out with a shotgun blast from a moving car.

Blackburn gave his sermon anyway.

By 1969, he was back in New York, working at the ACLU headquarters. He was also, slowly, coming to terms with his own sexuality after years of repression. He wanted to stay in his marriage, but his wife learned the truth. In 1974, they agreed to a divorce.

"I really didn't think I was gay for the longest time," Blackburn says, "until I finally acknowledged it in New York."

His ex-wife, who now lives in North Carolina, was not available to comment for this article, and Blackburn was reluctant to discuss a difficult period in his life.

In 1975, he moved to Baltimore to become the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's director of development and to make a fresh start. Within a few years he met Glen Dehn, a legislative analyst for the Social Security Administration.

They are, in many ways, direct opposites. Dehn is shy and soft-spoken. He worked at the same place for 31 years. He bought an Italianate townhouse in Bolton Hill in 1969 but did little in the way of decorating. He has a dry, almost imperceptible sense of humor. Noting the house cost $23,500, he says, "It's worth twice that now!"

Blackburn is outgoing and gregarious, the kind of person who will offer a visitor a spontaneous tour of his home. He is in constant motion. Until he moved to Baltimore, he never lived anywhere more than a few years. He's a talker and has a wide circle of friends.

On the couple's third date, in 1978, Blackburn says, he was walking up the steps of the house and thought, "I'm home. He doesn't know it yet, but I'm home." On the next date, he said to Dehn, "You know, I really like Bolton Hill. I think I'll look for a place here."

Dehn got the hint, and Blackburn moved in. Their red brick townhouse, filled with 35 stained-glass windows and lampshades that Blackburn made, has been on the BSO's homes tour and was featured on the cover of Victorian Homes magazine in December 2000. ("Stunning," the magazine said. "Elegant.")

They have been together 28 years now, but until recently the idea of marriage never came up. "We had a party to celebrate our relationship," Blackburn says, "but knowing marriage wasn't possible, we just never discussed it."

Then a friend asked Blackburn and Dehn to join the ACLU's lawsuit for same-sex marriage rights in Maryland, and they immediately saw the benefits. If one of them is hospitalized, it would guarantee the other visitation rights. If one were to die, inheritance issues would be simplified. Blackburn could also sign up for Dehn's far-superior federal health insurance plan. He says it would save him $5,000 a year in insurance premiums.

But that's not all.

"There's a philosophical and psychological aspect, too, and a respect aspect," Blackburn says. "Respect for a relationship requires marriage. People know what it means."

On their left ring fingers, Blackburn and Dehn wear identical silver bands from the Human Rights Campaign, the country's largest gay and lesbian rights organization. If they are married, those rings will be their wedding bands. And if they are married, Blackburn will be given away by his daughter, Marcia.

'Go for it!'

Marcia Blackburn, who is 43 and a college professor in Binghamton, N.Y., said her first reaction when she heard of the lawsuit was: "Go for it!" She says her father and Dehn are committed in every way that a traditional married couple is, but that didn't mean marriage would come easily.

"I knew they were going to be up against a lot of walls, but my dad has never backed down from a fight for civil rights," she says. "If there's one thing that was instilled in me by my dad, it's to stand up for what you believe in."

While some black ministers have taken offense at those who equate the gay rights struggle with the civil rights movement, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund has filed a brief supporting Blackburn, Dehn and the other plaintiffs in the Maryland case.

The brief draws a direct line between the fight for interracial marriage and the fight for same-sex marriage, saying both struggles are about "an individual's right to marry the person of his or her choice."

The other day, Blackburn went down to the Inner Harbor to record a narrative of his life for StoryCorps, a project that is preserving Americans' memories about their lives. Some of the pieces will be aired on National Public Radio. In his talk, Blackburn connected the civil rights movement and the fight for same-sex marriage.

He knows the battle is only beginning. He closed with these words: "It is self-affirming to be a part of this civil rights continuum, though we might well not see the fulfillment of our dream of equal marriage throughout the United States in our lifetime."

That was the end of his recording, but it is not the end of his story. He is 73 years old. There is fight in him yet.

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