By John Rydell 
I first met Lisa Gladden in January 1999, moments before she was sworn in as a freshman delegate representing Northwest Baltimore.
As a television reporter, I approached her in the huge, historic House of Delegates chamber and asked for her thoughts on the momentous day.
Her reply: “Gee, this is a really big room.”
Veteran journalist John Rydell speaks on his time covering the work of Lisa Gladden, who served in the Maryland state legislature as a member of the senate from Jan. 8, 2003 to Jan. 11, 2017. Credit: Photo courtesy of Facebook / John Rydell
That simple answer would become symbolic of a public official who usually eschewed well-rehearsed sound bites.
Gladden, who was a public defender, said she always wanted to become a lawyer to help those less fortunate. Her parents were both educators. Elzee Gladden was a principal at Dunbar High School, and his wife, Jessie, taught history at the old Pimlico Junior High School.
Gladden, who grew up in Ashburton, says her parents subscribed to three newspapers: the Baltimore AFRO, Baltimore Sun and News American. She recalls they required her and her brother to select one article each day from the newspapers and discuss it during dinner. Although she found it to be a burden at the time, Gladden says it was her parents’ way of keeping their kids up to date with current events and focused on their education.
After graduating from Western High School, Gladden attended Duke University, where she received a Bachelor’s Degree in history. She later graduated from the University of Maryland School of Law.
After serving one term in the House, Gladden was elected to the Maryland Senate in 2002. She eventually was appointed vice chair of the Judicial Proceedings Committee, which debates hundreds of criminal justice bills each year.
By 2009, the U.S. was still recovering from the worst recession since the Great Depression. Maryland was facing a huge budget deficit for the next fiscal year. But Senator Gladden was still celebrating the historic win of Barack Obama, who would become the nation’s first African-American president.
She became an Obama delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 2008. During the campaign, she traveled to Ohio, South Carolina and Pennsylvania, stumping for the future president. Just days before his inauguration, Senator Gladden told me on camera “I don’t care if Maryland is broke as long as Barack Obama is president.” But her spontaneous declaration quickly sparked controversy.
WBAL Radio’s Conservative Talk Show Host Ron Smith caught wind of Gladden’s comments and spent his show condemning her remarks as inappropriate for an elected official. Several callers to Smith’s show that day also voiced their disapproval with the senator’s comment.
When I saw Gladden the next day in Annapolis, she jokingly told me her mother saw my report and subsequent fallout and suggested she never speak to me again. I reminded the senator that she willingly spoke to me on-the-record, which she acknowledged. But she still voiced no regrets about what she said. The controversy quickly subsided as Gladden focused on more pressing issues like trying to repeal Maryland’s death penalty. For decades, legislation to abolish capital punishment failed in the General Assembly.
But Gladden was determined to lobby her Senate colleagues to reconsider the bill. She told me she was motivated by what she called “racial disparities” in how the death penalty was applied.
“The deck was stacked against poor, Black people,” she said. “Those were my clients, those were my relatives, those were my people.”
Despite continued opposition from longtime Senate President Thomas V. “Mike” Miller, the Senate finally approved the measure to repeal Maryland’s death penalty. The bill was signed into law in 2013 by Governor Martin O’Malley. Gladden calls it the highlight of her political career.
But for years, she kept a tightly guarded secret– a secret about her health. In 1995, Gladden was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS). She chose to keep it private because she did not want sympathy or as she put it, to “become a poster child for MS.”
Medication kept her MS under control. But growing mobility problems made it virtually impossible for Gladden to continue the rigorous schedule of a legislator: long hours in Annapolis during the 90-day session, attending civic meetings in her district and properly addressing constituent complaints. So in January, 2017, the veteran legislator resigned.
While she has been forced to watch politics from the sidelines ever since, Gladden’s mind is remarkably sharp. During our recent conversation, she was eager to discuss local, state and national politics. She declined to comment publicly on the Baltimore mayor’s race as well as the presidential showdown between President Joe Biden and Former President Donald Trump. But she says given the two “aging candidates” competing in this year’s campaign has given her a new appreciation that Americans elected an African-American President for two terms.
Shortly after being inaugurated in 2009, President Obama invited Senator Gladden and hundreds of other campaign volunteers to the White House for a special dinner in the State Dining Room. She got to meet the new president that night and revel in what she calls being a small part of history.
