By: Eric Addison
Lavinia Stewart Dorsey, ’51, and Robert Wilson Dorsey, ’50, Found Forever Love at Morgan
The creeks, streams and greenery were more prominent on campus, female students were a minority as male World War II veterans enrolled in large numbers, and the Christian Center (now the University Memorial Chapel) was seven years young, in Fall 1947, when Lavinia Stewart arrived at Morgan State College as a first-year undergraduate. Stewart was a commuter student who traveled by bus from her family’s home in the 2600 block of Boone Street, a mixed-income “Black oasis” in Baltimore City’s Waverly neighborhood. There, she had the benefit of being raised near several African American college graduates who became role models for her.
Stewart says she regretted not being able to reside on campus but still enjoyed her Morgan experience, which was preparation for her chosen career as a dietician.
“I appreciated the professors, because they were always willing to help you, even remaining after classes or coming back after classes,” Stewart recalls, later singling out chemistry professors George Spaulding, Ulysses Stubbs and Cyril Atkins as instructors who were especially helpful. “They were there for you. They were anxious for you to learn, and they would go out of their way to see that you got the right facts.”
Soon inseparable, Lavinia and Robert were fixtures at the midweek services at the Christian Center and became two of the founding members of Morgan’s first Chemistry Club.
A fateful moment in chemistry lab in her junior year placed Morgan forever at center stage of Stewart’s memories. Then and there, she met the love of her life, Robert Wilson Dorsey, a serious young Chemistry major from Anne Arundel County, Maryland, when the two literally bumped into each other and sent a tray of test tubes rolling across the floor of the laboratory. Robert made up his mind that day to marry Lavinia, as he told family and friends for many years after. Lavinia appreciated that he admired her intelligence, and the respect was mutual.
Morgan’s 1950 Chemistry Club
Soon inseparable, Lavinia and Robert were fixtures at the midweek services at the Christian Center and became two of the founding members of Morgan’s first Chemistry Club, an organization launched with the encouragement of Dr. Spaulding, Dr. Atkins and Professor Stubbs. The club became one of the first such HBCU groups certified by the American Chemical Society.
Lavinia and Robert married in 1950 — once in a civil ceremony in October, and again in a religious service in November at the insistence of the bride’s mother — the year Lavinia became a senior and the year Robert graduated from Morgan before being drafted into the U.S. Army.
The strong science education Robert received at Morgan, and his innate intelligence, landed him a post with the First Guided Missile and Radiologic Division at Fort Bliss, Texas, and in Kansas, the first and only African American then in those assignments. His four years in the military were the start of an outstanding professional career for Robert, but the separation was heart-wrenching for the young couple.
“Indeed, it was a difficult time,” recalls Lavinia, who graduated from Morgan while Robert was away in 1951.
A Different World
United long term at last in 1954, the couple settled in Lavinia’s lifelong home city, Baltimore. Lavinia worked intermittently over the first three decades of their nearly 50-year marriage, at the University of Maryland Hospital and the U.S. Public Health Service in Wyman Park as a dietitian; at Bendix – Westinghouse Corporation as a technician; as a teacher in Baltimore City Public Schools at Dunbar High School and Lombard Junior High School; and, for a short time, as a dormitory supervisor in Truth Hall at her alma mater, Morgan.
Lavinia also supported her husband in his career for that nearly half-century, as he became a holder of three U.S. patents and maintained a Top-Secret clearance as a scientist employed by the U.S. Defense Department (DoD) in Maryland and on special projects across the nation. He earned the first of his patents before joining the DoD, while working in water purification at the Montebello Water Filtration Plant, not far from Morgan’s campus, when he was unable to find work as a chemist in the nation’s racially segregated job market. The patent was for a new bubbler system that helped Baltimore gain recognition as having the purest water in the United States, reports Lavinia’s and Robert’s first child, Linda Dorsey-Walker. The position at Montebello was one of two jobs her father held concurrently then, Dorsey-Walker says. The other was a post at the National Bureau of Standards, in Washington, DC.
Robert spent the lion’s share of his career working as an analytical physio-chemist at Edgewood Arsenal and Aberdeen Proving Ground in Harford County, Maryland, and he earned two more U.S. patents for variations of gas masks he invented to be used in combat.
Robert and Lavinia both felt well-prepared by Morgan for their work, and Robert “loved talking about (his Morgan education),” Lavinia says. “Whenever he was around young people, he’d have them sit and listen to him.”
Now 96 years old, Lavinia continues to relish her husband’s expressive love for her in the decades they spent together before his passing in 1999. She and Robert placed great emphasis on religion and education in the raising of their four children: Linda, a retired health care administrator who was among the first women to attend Williams College in Massachusetts, before she earned an MBA from Northwestern University; Keith Dorsey, a University of Maryland, Baltimore County graduate who was Budget and Finance director for Baltimore County for 15 years before retiring; Kevin Dorsey, a Duke University School of Engineering graduate who is a systems engineer and supervisor at CMMS; and Cynthia Dorsey, a disabled U.S. Navy veteran who served with distinction for years in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Puerto Rico.
Robert and Lavinia both felt well-prepared by Morgan for their work, and Robert “loved talking about (his Morgan education),” Lavinia says. “Whenever he was around young people, he’d have them sit and listen to him.”
The young students and the greatly expanded campus Lavinia saw at Morgan during a recent visit, in May, made her aware that, “Everything’s changed,” she says. “I realized this is a different world. The kids were dressed differently…. (We) dressed far more conservatively (in my day), with dresses and suits and skirts and blouses. (We) still wore gloves. But the students today are “still there to learn,” she adds. “That proves you can learn no matter how you look, in what styles, no matter what clothes you have on.”
Not all her memories of Morgan’s bygone years are pleasant, Lavinia reveals, recalling that “classism” and “skin colorism” among the African American students were common then, as was ethnic tension between continental African and U.S.-born students.
At Morgan, Lavinia and Robert were poor kids reaching for a new and different life for themselves. The mutual chemistry they found there empowered them to reach their goal.
“I would love to have the students who are attending or who are planning to attend Morgan appreciate and take advantage of everything that’s offered to them now on the campus,” Dorsey says. “Enjoy Morgan…up to date. We have come a long way.”
