Longtime Activist Named Md. Civil Rights Director

Newly Established Post Will Review Complaints

Long before he crusaded for social causes as an alderman in Annapolis, before he became a preeminent local commentator on racial issues, even before he graduated from high school, Carl O. Snowden was watched by the FBI.

Starting in 1970, when he was 16 and pushing for the creation of a black studies curriculum, agents monitored and recorded Snowden's activities. They transcribed radio programs on which he appeared. They questioned his mother.

Last month, when Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler (D) named Snowden to be the state's first civil rights director, a man once viewed as a dissident activist became a top law enforcement bureaucrat. With the appointment, Snowden, who was expelled from public school for his role in student demonstrations, continued along the path he has traveled from radical to official.

"Carl is, it sounds trite, but his entire life is about civil rights, and wrongs being done to any and every group," said former Anne Arundel county executive Janet S. Owens (D), who created a cabinet-level position for Snowden, a political supporter, soon after she took office in 1998.

In his new job, Snowden, 53, reviews civil rights complaints and suggests legislative and legal remedies, including, in some instances, referral to the FBI. Gansler said Snowden's long experience in civil and human rights causes made him "the obvious choice" for the job.

Seated in his new office in downtown Baltimore, Snowden said he backed Gansler in the Democratic primary -- over Stuart O. Simms, a black candidate -- because of Gansler's environmentalist and activist approach to the role of the attorney general's office.

"It's a perfect fit," Snowden said. "Perfect."

Snowden's towering Afro hairstyle vanished years ago. He wears a suit; his hair recedes slightly. The most striking sartorial nod to his past: a watch carrying on its face the image of Malcolm X.

Snowden, who was born in Annapolis to a butcher and a domestic worker, said he was motivated by injustice even as a child. At age 6, he said, he watched as a friend's father, a sharecropper, was spat on by his boss for being late and then begged not to be fired. Snowden said he and the friend, hiding nearby, made eye contact with the sharecropper.

"You could see how humiliated he was to have us witness this," Snowden said. Snowden vowed, he said, never to suffer similar indignities.

That moment was with him in 1970, he said, when the commodore of the Annapolis Yacht Club used a racial epithet in front of him. Snowden, then a busboy at the club, said he quit on the spot -- but only after punching a supervisor who refused to take action.

Later in that decade, he worked as an administrator at a nonprofit agency and became a regular commentator on radio and on "Square Off," a Baltimore-based television program that featured lively debate about affairs of the day.