Even as the Foxwell Apartments moved further away from its original intent as a deaf community, he remained there. At one point, he refused to go to church with his parents any more because there wasn't a sign interpreter.Īnd, he lived independently, taking buses rather than asking for rides and working at a job rather than relying solely on Social Security.
While Charlie didn't attend Gallaudet, in his own way, he seemed to be fighting some of the same battles. By the time the Gallaudet students won their battle in 1988, for example, Charlie was already in his 30s. He was both too old to be entirely of the era when good-works types defined for deaf people what they needed - and what they would get - but too young to fully benefit from the emerging deaf-rights movement. Deafness is not a medical condition to be "fixed," the activists argue, but something more akin to being an ethnic minority, with its own language and identity and culture.īorn in 1954, Charlie Christensen was caught somewhere in the middle of this shift in attitude. Today, the movement has grown to the point that it defines deafness not as a disability, but as a culture. Their stirring message was as simple as it was convincing: Gallaudet should be run for and by the deaf. This new attitude drew worldwide attention in 1988 when students at Gallaudet University in Washington, shut down the campus until officials finally named a deaf person as president of the school.
Even as it was being built, the thrust of deaf activism was moving in a different direction: away from the paternalism of the past, when hearing people took it on themselves to care for their less fortunate deaf brethren, and toward more of a civil-rights stance of self-determination and full access to what everyone else enjoyed. With hearing people making up the majority of its tenants and usually all of its staff, the Foxwell had become an anachronism. Today, the deaf don't even comprise the majority at Foxwell Apartments, just 43 percent. "The deaf population dwindled, and there were more hearing people." "The hearing people came in and they ruined it," says Bob Greenlow, a deaf friend of Charlie Christensen who moved into Foxwell with him in 1982 but no longer lives there. The apartments never became the deaf community that he envisioned: There simply weren't enough deaf persons to fill the 154 units, Foxwell's management said, so within the first year it began allowing elderly and handicapped people who qualified for HUD's Section 8 low-income housing subsidies to move in. He agrees, though, that the apartments have woefully failed to live up to the original vision. Foxwell still denies misusing public funds, but ultimately abandoned his deaf-services organization, resigned the ministry and moved to Florida, where he publishes a magazine. was accused of failing to provide the counseling and vocational services to tenants that the state was paying him for. Foxwell's son and namesake, also a minister, ultimately succeeded in getting the monument to his father built, but, within a year of its opening, it was already in trouble: Rev. Numerous deaf activists fought plans to build the apartment complex, predicting it would become a "ghetto" and "dumping ground." But surely he would have hoped for something better for the deaf than a building that has been beset with controversy from the start. Foxwell would think today of the building that bears his name and is meant to honor his memory.
Foxwell himself was shot and killed outside his home by two youths who also fled without taking his wallet. He became pastor of Christ United Methodist Church of the Deaf in Baltimore and once successfully assisted police in a stand-off with a deaf man.īut on April 2, 1974, Rev. Foxwell, a minister, was born to deaf parents and learned sign language early on. The 154-unit building is named after a hearing man who devoted his life to working with the deaf. "Hearing I just don't understand," Charlie was quoted as saying, through a sign interpreter, in a story about the Foxwell Apartments in The Evening Sun on Dec. The apartments were designed specially for deaf people, with flashing lights as doorbells and with television monitors to let residents visually communicate with the front desk and security guards downstairs, as well as with other tenants.įor Charlie, it seemed ideal, a place to live independently in his own apartment but in a building filled with other people who spoke the same language and shared the same experiences. Memorial Apartments opened in 1982, rising eight stories high atop a hill on Greenspring Avenue. He was among the first tenants when the Louis W. "He had to feel so scared and so alone," his youngest sister, Catherine, says.Ĭharlie was shot within blocks of the place he had moved to precisely because it promised the opposite: safety and a sense of community for deaf people.