school. We brought high school girls to the campus, and we had a high school queen…,” she recalls. “I would help with publicizing the athletes and the football games, getting them on radio and television.” After she earned her Morgan degree in 1952, she and Alfred resumed the romance they had started when she was in high school, but their love and their marriage in 1955 didn’t impede the career her Morgan education had made possible. Janet went to work as a teacher in the Baltimore County Public Schools the year she graduated, and she continued her education, earning a master’s degree in guidance and counseling from New York University and taking doctoral courses at Columbia, UCLA, Ohio State, the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins.
Woolridge left the Baltimore County school system in 1958 to become a counselor at Morgan and served in that position for the next five years, through the tumultuous era of student protests for civil rights. Then she returned to public secondary schools, this time as a counselor in Baltimore City, and retired as the Guidance Department head at Walbrook High School in Baltimore, in 1985. Along the way, Woolridge has authored a number of creative works, including poems, a play and three books — “This Side of Tomorrow,” “Force of the Wind” and “Behind the Blackboard” — novels that explore different aspects of African-American history and current events. She’s writing her fourth novel now. She has also taught creative writing and has served as a volunteer for organizations such as the Woman’s Auxiliary of Crownsville State Hospital – Baltimore Mental Health Association, the Baltimore Council for International Visitors and the Baltimore Council for Foreign Affairs. And, she was the driving force behind a piece of state legislation that changed the way Marylanders drive.
“(Morgan) has been a contributing force…. And I’d like to see it go on.” — Janet Clash Woolridge, Class of ’52
“Janet Woolridge…had just bought a new car and was rather outraged that the dealer had insisted on affixing on the back those little metal letters spelling out the dealership name,” the Baltimore News American reported on May 18, 1986. “What right, she asked Sen. (Clarence) Blount, does this man have to make me drive around with an advertisement for his business?” Her complaint led to a law banning the practice, which was signed by Gov. Harry Hughes on May 27 of that year. In the photo Woolridge still keeps, she and Sen. Blount (Morgan Class of 1950) stand proudly behind Gov. Hughes at his desk. By then, Woolridge had long ago proven herself a fighter. During her two years as Guidance Department head at Dunbar High School, in the early ’70s, she received national recognition for securing scholarship grants of more than $1 million to send Dunbar graduates to Morgan. “I sent more students…to college than any other high school in the city, including Western…” she says with a laugh. Many Baltimoreans, black and white, were displeased by her achievement, she says, but she was undeterred. Having bettered her own life with Morgan’s help, Janet Clash Woolridge believed strongly in giving the same opportunity to others. She still does. “Morgan has really supplied a lot of places with students, workers. It has been a contributing force. And I’d like to see it go on…,” she says. “I just finished my will, and Morgan plays a prominent role in that.”
Creating a Legacy at Morgan For information on remembering Morgan State University in your will, or if you would like to learn more about how a planned gift or life income vehicle can benefit you and support Morgan, contact Donna Howard at (443) 885-4680.
MORGAN MAGAZINE VOLUME I 2014
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