Naturally, since I’ve only known Marc Steiner for the last half-century or so, a few facts about his life have slipped from memory. But I do know this — he attended high school at Baltimore City College but failed to graduate for the most honorable of reasons.
He punched out a history teacher who made a racist remark.
The young Steiner was invited to withdraw from school that very day. His parents were dismayed over this, but not entirely. They knew their son had absorbed lessons in racial sensitivity, and doing the right thing, and they knew he had uncommon courage.
He’s been displaying it ever since — often in public, on Baltimore radio stations — though his voice is about to be muted. After a quarter-century as a talk show host, the last nine years at WEAA-FM (88.9), the Peabody Award-winning Steiner’s contract has been canceled.
“So what are you gonna do with yourself now?” he was asked the other day.
“I don’t know, maybe be a homeless putz,” Steiner said. Then he laughed at himself, which is always a Steiner impulse. He’s a guy with strong political opinions, but he’s got the saving grace of never being self-important.
That’s a rarity among those who practice talk radio for a living. As a class, they all want to be Rush Limbaugh. They major in bombast. They sit in windowless studios and pretend they can see the whole world.
Steiner has never been built that way. Aside from being the political antithesis of Limbaugh, who’s stridently right-wing and exults in the sound of his own voice, Steiner’s a political progressive whose strength is bringing together disparate voices — mostly, the voices of the previously unheard and ignored — and encouraging everyone to search for common ground.
He did it beginning in 1993 at the old WJHU-FM (88.1). When Johns Hopkins University put the station up for sale in 2001, Steiner helped piece together the community group that bought it. They ran it as WYPR, where Marc was executive vice president and hosted a midday talk show that won a Peabody Award in 2007 for “Just Words,” a series of conversations with working-class people struggling to keep things together.
But he was fired a year later. The firing was part of a struggle for control of the station. Pickets marched on Charles Street, outside the station, protesting the firing. Hundreds filled a big auditorium to protest some more. Their voices were ignored.
Within a few months, Steiner was hired at WEAA-FM, the Morgan State University station where he’s done two hours of talk five mornings a week ever since.
But a few months ago, he was informed the station was “going in a new direction,” and his show would be canceled at the end of July.
Steiner was joking when he said he’d “be a homeless putz” now. He and his wife, Valerie, are doing fine. They run their Center for Emerging Media, which will now focus on a variety of journalism projects.
But the end of his radio show is a loss to Baltimore listeners, and a loss to progressive politics, and a loss to those who search for healing across disparate racial and religious divides, including some heartfelt dialogues he’s hosted between Jews and Arabs.
That kind of sensitivity goes back a long way, even before the famous City College punch-out. Sixty years ago, Marc’s mother placed her 11-year-old son in a previously all-black Boy Scouts troop.
Among his memories: going to the old Ambassador Theater, at Gwynn Oak Junction, where his scout pals weren’t allowed in because of skin color. Also, a couple of guys beating him up after the City College newspaper, The Collegian, did a feature on Marc taking part in civil rights freedom rides.
“My life has been built around” such incidents, he was saying the other day. In other words, standing up for his beliefs. Sticking up for life’s underdogs. And courageously throwing a few punches — and taking a few — along the way.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, most recently “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age” (Johns Hopkins University Press).
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