Maryland U.S. Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski was inducted Saturday into National Women's Hall of Fame in Upstate N.Y.

SENIOR  U.S. SENATOR  HONORED  SATURDAY
AT SITE  OF  HISTORIC SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT
THAT BEGAN IN UPSTATE NEW YORK IN 1848

Baltimore-bred  jazz  singer  Billie  Holiday
and Clinton Cabinet Secy. Donna Shalala
honored along with 8 others, five dead

By Alan Z. Forman

Maryland’s senior U.S. Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, the longest-serving female senator in American history, was today inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame at a ceremony in Seneca Falls N.Y., along with 10 other inductees that included Baltimore’s famed 1930s and 40s-era jazz singer Billie Holiday.

Also honored was former Clinton Administration Health and Human Services Secretary Donna E. Shalala, 70, who served in the cabinet for the entire eight years of the Bill Clinton presidency from 1993-2001; and Coretta Scott King, who died in 2006 and was the wife of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

Born in 1936 in Baltimore, Mikulski, 75, was the first woman in the Democratic Party to serve in both houses of Congress and the first female U.S. senator to hold a seat in the upper house without having first succeeded a husband previously elected to the post.

Initially elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1976 after having twice won election to the Baltimore City Council in 1971 and 1975, Mikulski was elevated by Maryland voters to the Senate a decade later, assuming office in January 1987, where she began serving an unprecedented fifth term early this year.

In 1984 she was a frontrunner for the post of vice presidential nominee on the ticket headed by former Vice President and U.S. Sen. Walter Mondale of Minnesota, who lost the election that year to incumbent Republican President Ronald Reagan.

MONDALE CHOSE FERRARO OVER MIKULSKI

Mondale ultimately chose New York Congresswoman Geraldine A. Ferraro, who died last March, as his running mate. The two lost in a landslide to the enormously popular Reagan and his then-Vice President, George H.W. Bush, who succeeded him as President four years later.

Torch singer Billie Holiday was raised in Baltimore by her mother, a native Baltimorean, after having been born in Philadelphia in 1915 following her 13-year-old parent’s expulsion from the family home in West Baltimore.

Her mother then moved back to Baltimore where she married Holiday’s presumed father, Clarence Holiday; and the young Billie — then known as Eleanora Fagan — attended the House of the Good Shepherd, a Maryland reform school. She later revealed she was raped on numerous occasions during her formative years, including once by a neighbor who her mother witnessed attacking her when she was 14 years old.

BEGAN HER CAREER AT POD AND JERRY’S

After working as a prostitute in a brothel and serving a brief prison sentence for solicitation, the budding jazz great went to New York, where she began her illustrious singing career at Pod & Jerry’s (a/k/a the Catagonia Club) on West 135th St. in Upper Manhattan, a Harlem nightspot frequented by the bawdy actress Mae West, later working during the early 1930s at another famous jazz spot known as Monette’s.

Nicknamed “Lady Day,” in the late 30s she was a featured big-band singer with jazz legends Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Artie Shaw, having earlier recorded her first songs with Benny Goodman.

She struggled with alcohol and narcotics addiction most of her life and died at age 44 of cirrhosis of the liver in 1959 at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Hospital Center on New York’s Upper East Side, where she was arrested in her hospital room for possession of illegal drugs as she lay dying.

She was known for singing in a very personal and intimate style similar to the way jazz musicians played their musical instruments, and is considered to have effected a major change in the art of American pop music.

Billie Holiday grew up in Baltimore, was inducted Saturday into the National Women's Hall of Fame, N.Y.

One of her record producers, the late musician and music critic John H. Hammond 2nd, not only spotlighted Holiday, Goodman and Basie but also is credited in some quarters with discovering contemporary superstars Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, as well as Pete Seeger and Aretha Franklin.

STOPPED CONSTRUCTION OF HIGHWAY

Mikulski, a former social worker whose Polish immigrant family ran a bakery in East Baltimore, came to prominence locally in the late 1960s and early 70s when she led a reform movement that halted construction of a planned superhighway scheduled to decimate the then-ungentrified historic neighborhoods of Canton, Highlandtown and Fells Point, as well as parts of Federal Hill.

A so-called “monument” to that movement still exists along West Franklin Street near Edmondson Avenue adjacent to downtown, a one-mile stretch of highway that goes nowhere, that was built before Mikulski and her cohorts famously stopped the road.

Her high-profile activity catapulted her from community activist to city councilwoman, then to congressional representative and ultimately to the U.S. Senate, where she says she now spends much of her time championing women’s rights.

When she gave up her House of Representatives seat in 1986 to run for Senate to succeed longtime liberal Republican Sen. Charles McC. Mathias, who was about to retire, most Marylanders thought she was a sure loser, the frontrunner at the time being popular incumbent Gov. Harry R. Hughes, who was prevented by term limits from succeeding himself in Annapolis.

SAVINGS AND LOAN SCANDAL SANK HUGHES

However a major savings and loan scandal rocked the financial institutions of the state, landing several bank presidents in jail and saddling Hughes, despite his noninvolvement, with the blame, enabling Mikulski to easily defeat him in the Democratic primary and roll to victory in the general election that November.

Mikulski was educated in local Catholic parochial schools, then earned a Bachelor of Arts Degree from the former Mount St. Agnes College in Mt. Washington, now merged with Notre Dame of Maryland University, and received her Masters in Social Work from the University of Maryland.

Five of the 11 inductees to the National Women’s Hall of Fame were honored posthumously Friday and Saturday.

In addition to Holiday and King’s wife, they include St. Katharine Drexel, a missionary who founded a religious order devoted to the education and care of Native Americans and African-Americans, and who is the second recognized American-born saint; Dorothy H. Eustis, a philanthropist who helped co-found the nation’s first canine guide school; and Abby K. Foster, a major figure during the 1800s in the national anti-slavery and women’s rights movements.

FOUR OTHER LIVING HONOREES

Other living honorees inducted over the weekend include Loretta C. Ford, an internationally renowned nursing leader; Helen M. Free, a pioneering chemist who co-developed the first dip-and-read diagnostic test strips for monitoring glucose in urine; Lilly Ledbetter, a lobbyist for equal pay for women; and Kathrine Switzer, an Emmy Award-winning television commentator and the first woman, in 1967, to officially enter the Boston Marathon.

Founded in 1969 the hall is the nation’s oldest membership organization recognizing the achievements of American women and has inducted a total of 236 women on a biennial basis since its inception.

This year’s 11 inductees join a notable group that includes early 20th century suffragette Susan B. Anthony; civil rights activist Rosa Parks, who died in 2005; and Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman justice of the United States Supreme Court, now retired.

The hall is located east of Geneva in the Upstate New York town of Seneca Falls, historic gateway to the Finger Lakes, which hosted the landmark 1848 women’s rights convention generally credited with being a major stimulus for the women’s suffrage movement in the United States that finally afforded females the right to vote, culminating in 1920 with the passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.

alforman@voiceofbaltimore.org