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C.V. McTeer today, as he prepares to return to McDaniel College to teach a course on civil rights law.
Photography by Joe Rubino, Courtesy McDaniel College

Written By Andrea Shalal-Esa

When Charles Victor McTeer left Carroll County in 1969 as one of Western Maryland College’s first two African-American graduates, he admits he had developed “a great hostility toward anything white” and had little desire to ever return.

Now, more than 40 years later, McTeer, who recently retired from his law practice and splits his time between Greenville, Mississippi, and Florida, is giving back to Carroll County in a big way.

McTeer, 61, says he has finally made his peace with the college, now renamed McDaniel College, and Carroll County, both of which he says have changed a great deal over the past four decades.

After years of keeping his distance, McTeer has endowed a scholarship at the college and is working closely with fellow alumni, students and staff to expand community service opportunities. He will be back in town in July to teach a course on civil rights law during the 16th annual Common Ground on the Hill, and on July 5 will give a keynote lecture on current U.S. race relations.

“I love this place,” McTeer told a group of students at the college last fall as he described the scholarship which bears his name and that of his former coach, mentor and longtime friend, Ira Zepp, who died last August.

“I love the people that I met here who had my back. I love the courage that it gave me because I felt that if I could make it here, I could do it anywhere,” said McTeer.

McTeer endured a great deal of hostility, discrimination and shunning by fellow students and the broader community during those years, but said he also met white people who stood by him. The whole experience eventually propelled him on the path to becoming a prominent civil rights lawyer in Mississippi.

Initially, McTeer planned to earmark the scholarship for minority students, as he has done with other scholarships he has funded in Mississippi, but decided after some soul-searching to open them to students of any racial background who are working to alleviate poverty.

“These worldwide problems affect all of us, and all of us can address them,” McTeer said. “How could I, at this point in time, engage in the same kind of distinct treatment and bar somebody who is wholly qualified solely on their lack of color?”

McDaniel has dramatically increased its outreach to students of color since McTeer’s time on campus, and minorities now account for about 14 percent of the undergraduate student body. That is nearly more than double their share of the total county’s total minority population. which hovers around 6 percent.

McTeer grew up in Baltimore and felt comfortable with white students from his days at Forest Park High School, but he and fellow African-American athlete Joseph Smothers were in for a shock when they arrived on the Western Maryland campus in 1965.

Back then, most restaurants, movie theaters and other public places in Westminster and Carroll County were still segregated. Together with a student from the Congo, they were the only students of color at the college, and it would take another 15 years before the college hired its first black professor.

In fact, when their teams ate out before tournaments, their coaches often had to run interference with restaurant owners to ensure that the two young black men would be served.

Times were often tough for the two young men, who both had scholarships and rarely ventured beyond the relative sanctuary of the campus, except for sporting events. Even as a 240-pound, 6-foot, 4-inch lineman on the college football team, McTeer says he knew “that you didn’t walk off campus at certain times of the day . There were guys down there who were as nasty as I was.”

Years after leaving Westminster, McTeer said he met Jim Parker, a former offensive lineman for the Baltimore Colts, who also encountered resistance and outright discrimination when the team held its summer training camp at Western Maryland College.

“He wanted to meet the colored boy who was crazy enough to stay in Carroll County,” McTeer said.

In a eulogy for Zepp, McTeer remembered the “unanticipated fear and outright rage that initially dominated my spirit” after arriving at the college as a 16-year-old. “Like so many other racial victims I would later come to know as a civil rights lawyer, I was dumbstruck. I could not believe people would treat me as they did just because I was black.”

Zepp offered his shoulder and prayed with McTeer that he could learn to love his enemies, a message that eventually hit home.

“Somehow looking at that earnest, honest, understanding face, he made me know that anyone could be godly, regardless of their race, sex, color, religion, ethnicity, sexual preference, national origin or any of the other artificial distinctions that mankind has erected to separate ourselves from God,” McTeer wrote in Zepp’s eulogy.

In addition to Zepp, there were many “better angels” watching over McTeer during his college years, including fellow football players and friends like Common Ground on the Hill founder Walt Michael, who encouraged McTeer to get involved in the college’s Student Opportunities Service (SOS), which was building a library to promote literacy in the impoverished Appalachian region of Panther, West Virginia.

He also became friends with Ralph Wilson, one of the few white students who treated McTeer like any other student; and David Carrasco, one of the first Latino students at the college, with whom he later volunteered in Puerto Rico.

The summer after he was graduated, McTeer joined another SOS project in Mississippi, just five years after three civil rights activists were murdered there.in the state. That experience, McTeer said, was “perhaps the most wonderful and courageous thing I ever did in my life.”

He remembers frightening encounters during his first trip down South, including being chased for miles by a group of white men because he’d been seen riding in an open convertible with a white woman, a fellow literacy volunteer.

After earning a law degree at Rutgers University, he returned to Mississippi to stay two years, and his daughter is now the mayor of Greenville, Mississippi, the very town where he once taught people to read and helped them register to vote.

McTeer has now launched a drive to bring together alumni with current faculty and students at McDaniel and breathe new life into the spirit of community service that crowned his own time at the college.

Like many colleges around the country, McDaniel has put increased emphasis on community service in recent years. Students participate in a variety of outreach and service activities, including the Westminster Boys & Girls Club, the Special Olympics, community cleanups, work in Habitat for Humanity and recovery efforts in New Orleans.

Many professors also integrate community service into their classes, including partnering with the Hashawha Nature Center or local agencies, preparing tax returns, working with seniors and raising money for charities. The nine fraternities and sororities on campus also require members to do community service projects, as do the 10 affinity or club houses on campus.

After a recent meeting with students involved in current service projects, McTeer was truly inspired by today’s projects:

“These kids have got it going on. What they’re doing is so wonderful. This is far afield from anything I knew.”