By third grade, St. Ann Church on Greenmount Avenue became a “savior” and “shelter” for Mary Sewell, who was part of the generation of Black kids bused to white public schools in the 1960s.

Sewell felt like an outsider faced with an “us” and “them” demeanor at these schools. Then her mother enrolled her and her siblings in the parish school at St. Ann in East Baltimore and she felt accepted by the other students and the nuns in their habits.