Baltimore civil rights leader Annie Chambers, a champion of the city’s poor, working class families and those experiencing homelessness, has died.

“She was a soldier for God, justice and for all that’s good in this world,” said Ian Schlakman, who announced that Chambers had passed last Thursday at age 84.

“She leaves behind an unparalleled legacy of grassroots activism and unconditional love for her people, her family, her community and all those that struggle to survive.”

In 2018, Chambers ran unsuccessfully for Lt. Governor of Maryland on the Green Party ticket with gubernatorial candidate Schlakman.

It was just one of the many milestones for a woman who came up from a traumatic childhood in Richmond, Va., giving birth to her first child at the age of 12, as she explained in a 2020 interview.

Her brother James inspired her, in her teens, to join the Black Panthers.

“He was one of Malcolm X’s men. He would come home and talk about the struggle,” Chambers told her interviewers. “I was amazed that people were fighting back. I had a lot of anger in me.”

As a Black Panther, Chambers came north, organized the Baltimore Welfare Rights Organization in the early 1970s and later became a tenant leader at the Douglass Homes public housing complex.

She was elected to Resident Advisory Board at the Housing Authority of Baltimore City (HABC) and continued her advocacy for affordable housing and against privatization of the city’s public housing complexes.

“They are destroying Douglass Homes. The city doesn’t want to actually fix the doors and the roofs and the plumbing in public housing,” she declared, in the 2020 interview. “We are fighting to keep Douglas. We want it to be a historic development here. It has been here since the 1930s. It was one of the first public housing developments.”

She Never Backed Down

“From her early days with the Black Panther Party, Malcolm X, and the original 1960’s Poor People’s Campaign, to her foundational work with the Baltimore and National Welfare Rights Organization, she never backed down from a fight for justice,” Schlakman said.

Chambers worked with hundreds of organizations over her lifetime in Baltimore and beyond. Schlakman cites a few of them: People’s Power Assembly, Struggle La Lucha, Ujima People’s Progress Party and New Harvest Ministries.

In addition, Chambers and Schlakman set up their own organization, We Stand Up For All, in the months before she died.

“Whether she was organizing food giveaways for her neighbors, ministering to the incarcerated, fighting against the privatization of public housing, or fighting to keep the electricity on for struggling families illegitimately being billed by public housing,” Schlakman wrote, “she firmly believed that the basic necessities of life belonged to the people.”

• Fears of displacement and gentrification undergird day care battle (8/1/17)

• Housing official blocks volunteers from distributing food to public housing residents (4/2/20)

• Baltimore public housing tenants decry crackdown on “excess” electricity usage and threats of eviction (5/19/25)

Linnell Fall, tri-chair of the Maryland Poor People’s Campaign, added on social media that “Rev. Chambers led with fortitude, holy strength and moral courage in Baltimore City.”

Outspoken on the topic of class as well as race, Chambers was in classic form during that 2020 interview, describing capitalists as “upper-class people” who are “greedy as hell.”

“People want to say that we don’t have a king and queen system, but we do! It is just the few at the top with the wealth, and they won’t even let crumbs drop off the table,” she said. “When people tell me they are in the middle, I say, ‘No you aren’t. You are just one or two lost paychecks away from being me, from being poor!’”

An ordained minister as well as a radio show host, Rev. Chambers is survived by her 25 children.

Details regarding a memorial service and ways the public can support her ongoing community initiatives will be announced in the coming days, Schlakman said.