Hard-Nosed Champion of Montgomery School Integration, Managed Growth

Blair G. Ewing, who was regarded as the longtime liberal conscience of the Montgomery County school board and County Council, and who championed school desegregation efforts and controlled growth in the county, died Monday at the Casey House hospice in Rockville. His wife said he had a malignant carcinoid tumor. He was 75.

Ewing's 22 years on the Montgomery Board of Education, from 1976 to 1998, gave him a longer tenure than anyone else in the county's history. At the beginning, the Silver Spring Democrat was something of a lone voice as he spoke out for desegregating the schools and improving services for poorer students.

He served two terms as board president and helped lead the sprawling school system through a period of dramatic growth while tirelessly advocating efforts to equalize opportunities for students throughout the county.

"His impact on public education in Montgomery County was greater than that of any other single person," said County Council President Phil Andrews (D-Gaithersburg-Rockville).

Ewing, who spent much of his professional career as a senior executive with federal agencies and was serving on the Maryland State Board of Education at the time of his death, was a hard-nosed elected official who reveled in political combat.

"Some people are conflict-averse," he told The Washington Post in 1989. "I am not. The notion I have an obligation to agree with everyone or be nice for niceness' sake is something I don't accept."

He engaged in some of his fiercest battles in the early 1980s when he opposed an entrenched conservative coalition on the school board. That faction aimed to reverse a 1976 busing plan that sent affluent, predominantly white students from Chevy Chase to the heavily black Rosemary Hills Elementary School in Silver Spring. It was the county's first busing program to achieve racial balance.

In 1981, over Ewing's strenuous objections, the school board voted to close Rosemary Hills.

"Frankly, this board doesn't give a damn about minorities," an exasperated Ewing said. "The evidence of worsening race relations in Montgomery County is clear for all to see. It is clear to me that the majority members of the board appeal, in steadily less subtle ways, to the worst instincts of some of their fellow citizens."

A year later, in an unprecedented action, the state school board overturned the county's decision as "arbitrary and unreasonable" and ordered the school to remain open. Voters cast the conservative board members out of office, and within two years Rosemary Hills had achieved record enrollments and was recognized nationwide as a successful example of voluntary integration.

"Blair Ewing was responsible for bringing the board into the modern age," Roscoe Nix, a former school board member and onetime president of the Montgomery County NAACP, said yesterday. "Montgomery County has lost a giant."

Blair Gordon Ewing was born Dec. 3, 1933, in Kansas City, Mo., and grew up in the southwestern Missouri town of Nevada, where his father was mayor and a member of the school board. An uncle was a Missouri governor, and his grandfather was chief justice of the state Supreme Court.