Marian Glustrom

News Obituary Article

ATLANTA: Marian Glustrom, 90, professor who fought to end segregation

By KAY POWELL

A cross burning in her Morningside yard and telephone calls threatening her life could not deter Marian Glustrom in her stand against segregation.

Along with her husband, John Glustrom of Atlanta, she helped integrate a veterans' organization and the library, police and fire departments in Atlanta, said her son, Robert Glustrom of Atlanta.

"My mom, being from the North, the South was new to her," he said. "It was after my dad helped integrate the library that the cross was burned in our yard. She got threatening phone calls. That was when she decided she had to stand up to this."

She was one of five founders of the American Civil Liberties Union chapter in Atlanta, she wrote in her unpublished autobiography.

The memorial service for Marian Brody Glustrom, 90, who died at her Atlanta residence on Monday, is 10 a.m. today at The Temple. The body was cremated. Cremation Society of the South is in charge of arrangements.

Mrs. Glustrom, a social worker who earned her master's degree at Yale University, moved to Atlanta as a newlywed in 1948. She was familiar with the city because she had lived here during the war while supervising the treatment of wounded soldiers at the Veterans Administration Hospital. That experience influenced her lifelong work for social justice, her son said.

"She entertained black people in her home in the 1950s, including Vernon Jordan and early leaders in the movement. She had a salon of black intelligentsia and progressive whites," he said. "She was friends with the lions of the civil rights movement."

Much of her civil rights work was conducted in tandem with her husband. Independently, she wrote grants to fund innovative programs to treat abused children and establish a drug treatment center in the heart of Atlanta's hippie enclave.

She was a professor at Georgia State and Mercer universities. Gainesville State College social science division chairman Chuck Karcher of Marietta was her supervisor at Mercer, which has an award named in her honor.

Mrs. Glustrom, he said, was an excellent instructor and very well read. "She kept you sharp. She had a breadth of interests," he said.

She was astute at identifying a problem, then writing a grant for an innovative program to solve the problem. In the private sector, she was hired to plan all the social areas for the new community of Shenandoah in Coweta County, her son said.

She wrote grants to fund, or was asked to head, multiple programs that benefited children, women and the elderly. In the 1970s, Mrs. Glustrom turned to her friend Rosalyn Epstein of Atlanta for assistance in creating a federal program to help women re-enter the work force. She tutored Garden Hills Elementary School students until a year ago.

Mrs. Epstein was a frequent guest at the gatherings at Mrs. Glustrom's house and considered her a brilliant woman. It was Mrs. Glustrom, she said, who got her involved in the League of Women Voters, the Metropolitan Atlanta Community Council, her book club, tutoring at Garden Hills, even speaking about aging to Mrs. Glustrom's college classes.

"Anything that happened in my life, she got me involved," Mrs. Epstein said. "She could teach a course in friendship."

Survivors include another son, Merrill Glustrom of Boulder, Colo.; and five grandchildren.

© 2007 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution