A lot of the stories that began circulating about Mary Pat Clarke after her death on Sunday focused on her famously effective constituent service.

Like the time city workers weren’t responding quickly enough to a rodent problem. Clarke went straight to the woman’s house in Waverly and removed the dead rats herself.

Close friends and colleagues have much more to add about this progressive public servant whose 32-year career on the Baltimore City Council was spread out over 45 years, including two terms as Council president, the first woman elected to that position.

Back then, female elected officials were a novelty.

When Clarke first arrived on the council in 1975, joining Barbara Mikulski and Victorine Adams who were already there, she realized their male counterparts still didn’t know what to call them.

“They knew it couldn’t be Councilman Clarke,” she recalled. “And it couldn’t be councilgirl, although that’s what Mimi DiPietro always did,” she said, referencing the famously sexist representative from Highlandtown, Dominic “Mimi” DiPietro.

Clarke’s respect for Baltimoreans high and low, her familiar presence in Black and white neighborhoods, her role in forming the council’s first-ever integrated ticket – these qualities and accomplishments ought to be celebrated, said her friend Lawrence A. Bell III.

“She really loved being a council person. She loved going to the meetings. She loved talking to people. She didn’t just stick with the elites or stay in her office or keep to her district,” said Bell, who succeeded Clarke as council president in 1995.

“How many people can walk around any part of the city, including the inner city, and people say, ‘Hey, Mary Pat?’ You just don’t see that today,” he continued. “Some of the old-time politicians resented it because she was more popular than they were in their districts.”

Bell and others said Clarke should be remembered as well for her early and sometimes lonely liberal stands on issues including the environment, gay rights, reproductive rights and tenants’ rights.

These efforts on behalf of working people and minorities spanned her entire career.

As council president in 1994 , she pushed through a bill said to be the first of its kind in the nation mandating that city contractors pay workers a living wage set by the Board of Estimates.

Twenty-three years later as a council member, she attempted to get a $15 minimum wage passed. She would have succeeded had not then-Mayor Catherine Pugh reversed a campaign pledge and vetoed the measure.

“Mary Pat was not popular with the money people,” noted former Councilman Anthony “Tony” Ambridge. “She didn’t just blindly accept what developers wanted, just bend to their will like today’s class of politician does.

“So she didn’t have huge monies thrown her way. But what she did have was her constituency. She had the people.”

Skillful Strategist

Clarke died Sunday morning at age 83, surrounded by family after a brief illness, Mayor Brandon Scott announced in a statement.

“I learned so much from her about helping people, especially those in deep need,” he said, describing Clarke as “an impeccable public servant.”

Born in Providence, RI, on June 22, 1941, Clarke received her undergraduate degree from Immaculata College and a master’s in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania before going on to teach high school and then work as an instructor at Johns Hopkins University and other colleges in the Baltimore area.

Her first involvement in community issues was as an activist, eventually heading the Greater Homewood Community Corp., a coalition of neighborhood groups formed in the wake of the 1968 Baltimore Riot that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

In 1975, the Tuscany-Canterbury resident was elected to represent the old 2nd District, at a time when there were six councilmanic districts with three members each.

During her first two terms, she racked up a number of legislative wins, including passage of first-in-the-nation tenants’ right of first refusal legislation.

But she failed in a 1983 bid for City Council president, losing out to her Eastside colleague, Clarence H. “Du” Burns.

In 1987, Clarke tried again. This time she succeeded, only to face an immediate slap-back by members who stripped her of her power to assign committee chairmanships.

“It was really terrible for her,” said Councilwoman Odette Ramos.

“Mary Pat was the first woman to run citywide and win, and immediately the men took away some of her powers,” said Ramos, who succeeded Clarke after she retired in 2020.

“Mary Pat was the first woman to run citywide and win, and immediately the men took away some of her powers”  – Odette Ramos.

Bell remembers some of the battles that followed in 1987, including redistricting efforts by Clarke and council allies that would give Black candidates a chance to win more seats, while then-Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke pushed for “a more status-quo plan.”

“It was tough to be a council president who was not in lockstep with the mayor,” Bell said. But Clarke succeeded in getting bills through and winning back the power to appoint committee chairs.

“You really had to know how to count votes, how to pull people together. That was a real skill, and she had it,” Bell said, pointing to Clarke’s beginnings in an era when rival political clubs duked it out for primacy in the city.

She belonged to one of the city’s two more liberal political clubs, the New Democratic Club or NDC2, as it was then known.

“She was a link to the old-school days when you had all these political clubs and teams. She spoke their language,” Bell said.

Tough Cookie, Happy Warrior

In 1995, Clarke experienced one of her biggest political disappointments.

She ran for mayor against two-term incumbent Schmoke and lost after a campaign that some critics said Schmoke made racially divisive.

Jamie Kendrick, who served as her evening and weekend driver during the election (and went on to work in the city Transportation Department), recalled her all-encompassing work ethic.

“We drove every street in the city, went to every neighborhood. Every community cookout and festival. She took me to AME churches, Greek Orthodox churches, synagogues and mosques,” said Kendrick, remembering how people would cry out “Mary!” and she would pull out a note card and scribble details for a follow-up with some agency.

“Later in life when I was at DOT, I was on the receiving end of those note cards, now in the form of texts and emails,” he remembered. “She was relentless.”

Active to the End

Kendrick was referring to Clarke’s third stint on the council. She may have lost the mayor’s race, but she wasn’t done with politics yet.

In 2004, after the city reconfigured the council into 14 single-member districts, she won north-central Baltimore’s 14th District.  She retired from the body four terms later in December 2020, having endorsed Ramos to succeed her.

During this last legislative chapter, she was able to continue efforts she began decades ago, including opposition to extending Baltimore’s contract with the polluting trash incinerator long known as BRESCO.

In her final year in office, standing with activists half her age, Clarke sponsored a bill prohibiting city contracting with incinerator operators.

In 2020, her final year in office, standing with activists half her age, Clarke sponsored a bill prohibiting city government from contracting with incinerator operators and extending existing contracts.

A quarter century earlier, she had tried unsuccessfully to strip incinerators out of the Ten-Year Solid Waste Plan. The industry, which regularly funneled campaign contributions to politicians, opposed her.

Her bill went down after six council members walked out of the chamber, one of them declaring Clarke’s legislation “a disgrace” showing “just how far she will go.”

Sleeping in Public Housing

In the 14th District and across the city, people have been sharing their warm feelings about Clarke.

Some residents remember how she slept at a dilapidated public housing project for two nights, Ramos wrote in an online post, noting that constituents often start their reminiscences with “that’s my girl” or “she was friends with my mom.”

Sticking to her beliefs was sometimes bruising for her, Ambridge said, recalling that he once saw Clarke weeping at an event at the Institute of Notre Dame.

Amid widespread debate about abortion rights, Clarke, a Catholic, had taken a pro-choice position, and she was publicly confronted about it in ugly terms at the event.

“She said, ‘These people, they just don’t understand,’” Ambridge recalled, saying he was struck by her empathy for women facing a difficult choice and by her own difficulty having made a hard decision.

Generally though, Clarke was both a tough cookie and a happy warrior for causes she believed in, always ready to share her view with anyone who inquired when she took her cigarette breaks outside of City Hall.

In 2010, amid a fight over a two-cent bottle tax said to be needed to prevent city government layoffs, a councilman who had opposed the tax cast a key vote for it.

An advocate of the tax, Clarke was so taken aback by Councilman Warren Branch’s vote “that she voiced an expletive and enthusiastically slapped him on the back.”

Two years later, when a proposal to increase the tax by three cents to generate funds to float bonds for city school repairs, Clarke described the stakes in blunt terms.

“This is part of a big plan for our children, something that is going to fix the schools while we’re still alive to see it work,” she declared, raising the ire of retailers and the beverage industry.

The bill passed.

Clarke’s death follows the passing of her husband of 60 years, J. Joseph Clarke, who had a long career in real estate development.

The couple met in Philadelphia, where they were both high school teachers.

In the late 1960’s, they moved to Baltimore where they would raise their four children, John, Erin, Susan and Jennifer, across the street from Joe’s mother, Rose Ellen.