The Guardians, created by Baltimore artist Whitney Frazier and photographer Kirby Griffin, is a photo, documentary, and storytelling project that includes photo portraits, large-scale banners and digital archives that celebrate unrecognized Black female leaders across Baltimore City neighborhoods. This project provides a platform for women who spend their lives fighting for a better, more equitable Baltimore.

Sharon Snow (00:00): Okay. My name is Sharon Snow and I am president of the Cylburn Community Action Association. I've been the president for the last 15 years, and I actually grew up in the Sandtown-Winchester area of Baltimore city, attended Baltimore city public schools, graduated from Coppin State College back then, worked in the field of education, teaching in the Baltimore city public schools for a few years and then decided to go to graduate school to get a degree in guidance and counseling, but ended up being offered a fellowship in vocational rehab counseling. So it was pretty hard to pass that up when they were paying your tuition and giving you a stipend. So that's ultimately the feel I went into working for the state of Maryland for about 12 years and in private industry for another maybe 10 years and recently retired in 2016, and continued all along to fulfill my responsibilities and my passion for making a difference in the Cylburn community and actually moved into the Cylburn community in 1982.

Thought it was and still think it was a great community. It's pretty stable, it's healthy. Baltimore has these pockets of what I call healthy strong neighborhoods, but you can go two blocks or three blocks in any direction and it's a whole different set of circumstances, but I consider Cylburn to still be a pretty healthy, stable community. It has a large number of homeowners that have been there for quite a while, we have a strong community association and we try to continue to make a difference in the community, it's something as a community leader and advocate, you cannot do by yourself. So it involves a lot of people who want to see and make a difference as well as the young people, have to pass the torch, we have to get them involved because young people are our future. And if we don't invest in them, then we have a lost future. So that's pretty much how I kind of look at my role as a leader in the community.

Speaker 2 (03:06): I thought you can maybe describe a project or an accomplishment or tell a story about something that you were able to make happen in your time in Cylburn.

Asset ID: 2021.09.10

Find a complete transcription on the Peale's website.

Photo by Kirby Griffin