Vincent Leggett, historian and founder of Blacks of the Chesapeake, dies

Vincent Leggett, a historian and conservationist of black culture along the Chesapeake Bay, died Sunday, according to Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman.

“I was shocked and deeply saddened to find out this morning that our beloved Admiral of the Chesapeake, and Blacks of the Chesapeake founder, Vincent Omar Leggett has passed away,” Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman said on social media. “All of us must now come together and carry on his great work.”

Leggett, 71, was born in Baltimore in 1953 to Charlie Leggett, a labor union representative, and Willie Mae Leggett, an elementary school teacher, according to a biography published by Yale University. He graduated from Morgan State University with a bachelor’s degree in urban planning in 1975. A former president of the Anne Arundel County Board of Education, Leggett also worked for Baltimore City Schools, the Anne Arundel County housing authority and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.

In 2010, he told The Baltimore Sun that in 1984 he started a mission to visit as many of the bay’s port towns and villages as possible to start piecing together a collective story of black life on the Chesapeake. Through his nonprofit Blacks of the Chesapeake he started lecturing about how the bay and its tributaries served as part of the Underground Railroad.

“I’d read of all the shipbuilders, boat captains and shipping magnates who supposedly made bay history, most of them members of the majority community,” Leggett said. “Every book would have a picture of a black crab picker or oyster shucker. The caption would simply say ‘crab picker’ or ‘oyster shucker.’ There’d never be a name. These people worked,” Leggett says. “They must have had families, raised children, lived lives. Who were they? What did they do?”

Have a news tip? Contact Dillon Mullan at dmullan@baltsun.com, 302-842-3818 or @DillonMullan on X.

EMEA Tribune is not involved in this news article, it is taken from our partners and or from the News Agencies. Copyright and Credit go to the News Agencies, email news@emeatribune.com Follow our WhatsApp verified Channel