Remembering a Healer Who Sought Common Ground

We lost one of our great healing figures when Mary Antonia “Toni” Keane died last week, at 77, at a time when Baltimore can use all the cross-cultural healing it can find.

For 46 years, Keane taught sociology at Loyola University, where she’d tell her classes, “A lot of stories are getting lost. I want you to do a thing on family folklore that you can give to your children. I want you to write a paper by talking to your own families.”

She was worried about the loss of specific ethnic cultures. She wasn’t one who thought we should all look and sound alike; she wanted us to embrace our background differences and exult in them, and feed them across cultural lines as a gift to each other.

“I teach kids who are pretty assimilated … and they haven’t bothered to ask where they came from. When you talk to them about ethnicity, they kind of draw a blank,” she said one evening early this century when I interviewed her for a book, “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press).

The book was about our victories and defeats stirring the American melting pot. We sat in a Southeast Baltimore apartment she shared with her husband, the late Judge John N. Prevas.

Her students’ papers overwhelmed her. “They were exquisite,” she said. “The Italian kids all wrote about holidays and food and relatives and World War II love stories. And the Irish kids, it was tales of poverty, it was ‘Angela’s Ashes.’ Then I had one girl whose family had been in the Greek Civil War. She only knew snippets before this. We sat there reading them, and we cried.”

She looked at Prevas, who nodded. The papers echoed pieces of their own lives, and everyone’s, black and white, gentile and Jew. Prevas was the Greek kid whose parents had differing outlooks on the importance of their own heritage, while Keane — who was half Slovakian and half German — now worshiped at a church newly embraced by Spanish parishioners caught between their old and new worlds.

“And that’s been a gift,” she said, connecting with her own roots through reminders handed to her by her students, and by those newly arrived in America.

She knew that all American families, ultimately, come from the same distant place: Somewhere Else. And she wanted that acknowledgment as a first step toward understanding that so many of us feel like outsiders, and want to find common ground while holding onto the things that make us unique.

The teaching at Loyola was part of it. She also chaired the Baltimore Community Relations Commission, served as a Enoch Pratt Free Library trustee, taught part-time at Towson University and Notre Dame University of Maryland, lectured at the Baltimore City Police Academy, and served as a special consultant to the city police Youth Division – and was a key advisor and friend all along the trail of Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski’s political career.

In all efforts, Keane was a healer. She reached for common ground, even as she encouraged people to hold on to the ancient cultural differences that are their great comforts, and their exquisite differences.

Michael OleskerA former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” has just been re-issued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

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