Goucher Honors Margaret King’s Years of Dedicated Service

Release date: April 13, 2009 |

In 1968, racial tension in the United States was running high, and the nationwide riots that broke out following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. resulted in eight deaths, 5,500 arrests, and more than $12 million worth of damage in Baltimore.

That was the year Margaret King, a young African-American woman, made the “taboo” trip from inner Baltimore City to Baltimore County to begin work at Goucher College. She had dropped out of high school her senior year to have a baby. She’d spent the next year-and-a-half on public assistance but decided she “didn’t want welfare taking care of me and my family.”

A woman, Mrs. Thelma Smallwood, who lived in King’s East Baltimore neighborhood, was running the laundry at Goucher, and she got King a job at the college washing and mending students’ clothes. The job was a nine-month position, and by the end of the semester, King knew she wanted to stay on at Goucher. She switched over to the full-time housekeeping division and has been at the college ever since.

This year marks her 41st year at Goucher. She went from working as a “maid,” which was her actual job title back then, to now serving a managerial role as the college’s housekeeping administrative coordinator.     

In this position, King does all the attendance and tracking for her 32-person staff; she orders all of the supplies, including cleaning products and machines, and she does all of the department’s  bookwork. “I do everything, everything that needs to be done,” she says. “There are no big jobs or little jobs or any jobs that I think I am too important to do.”

This means that if one of her staff needed her to leave her desk and demonstrate how to clean an area, she would be up and ready to help.

King knows housekeeping’s duties through and through. She has, literally, cleaned this entire campus at some point during her long tenure at Goucher. She started working in Heubeck Hall cleaning the public areas (including the “day parlors” where the still-all-women student population entertained their male visitors), the bathrooms, stairwells, recreational rooms, and trash rooms. During the breaks, she also helped tidy up individual dorm rooms.

Since then, she has worked in every building on campus.

And though, perhaps, King and the other women and men who work in housekeeping at Goucher don’t get the appreciation and recognition they rightfully deserve, they work diligently. She says a sort of unofficial departmental motto is: You do what you have to do, and you get it done.

To that she adds some advice her mother gave her, “I don’t care what kind of work you do, you give it your best. Whatever you do, it represents you.”

King says she has found all of the jobs she’s held here at Goucher to be interesting because she was able to learn something from all of them. “I love cleaning, and I love learning,” she says.

Her biggest accomplishment meant learning and re-learning the subjects she was studying before quitting high school. When Goucher started a GED program on campus for employees, King decided to sign up.

“After all those years, you think you’ve lost that information, and you have a bit of fear in you. I started to study, and when I started studying, it just got good to me,” she says.

She knew she could get her GED, but she wanted to earn her diploma. She joined a program at her former high school, the Fairmont Hill trade school, and she studied both there and here at Goucher, with support from Baltimore County Public Schools educators. Within a year, she was graduated from the school she attended 30 years prior.

King says she is grateful for these kinds of opportunities that are available at Goucher.

“I only came here because I needed a job, but once I got here and began to do what I did, I gained my independence; I started to see things change. I never thought that I would be in the position that I’m in today. Goucher has been a very, very good place for me. I’ve accomplished quite at bit,” she says.

King is also quick to stress the ways in which the Goucher community has helped to ballast her during tough times.

In 2001, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her older son had died the year before, and her sister was also diagnosed with breast cancer around that same time.

“Everything was falling in on itself. Had I not had Goucher, I don’t think I would’ve made it,” she says.  

King also is fortunate to have the love and support of her two surviving children, Sonji Douglas and Kareem Singleton, four sisters, one brother, and six grandchildren (a great-grandchild will arrive this August.)

She had a lumpectomy and underwent three treatments of chemo and 36 radiation treatments. Though she wasn’t supposed to drive, King drove herself to work, then to treatments, then back home, and back to work the next day. Through all of this, she was only out three days due to nausea relating to the chemo.

“In my heart of hearts, I believe, had I stopped, I wouldn’t still be here. It wasn’t to prove anything to anyone, but it was for me. I had to do it. I believe if I had stopped, I would have died,” she says.

Sally Baum—Goucher’s associate director of athletics who became friends with King when King was working in the Sports and Recreation Center years ago—says “Margaret can overcome obstacles and keep rolling with whatever she is dealt. She is a constant encourager of better things. I am so proud of her.”

With her typical measured but straightforward perspective, King says she believes “Life is hard, but it isn’t as hard as some people make it.”