Welcome to the fourth annual 25 Black Marylanders to Watch. Each Sunday in the month of February, The Baltimore Sun will showcase a selection of winners and their stories. This year’s honorees include up-and-comers, established voices and people making marks in new careers. Each of them brings something special to the conversation.

The honorees were chosen by The Sun’s editors and reporters who cover these topics and communities, and see the progress these individuals are making in their fields.

Dena Freeman-Patton Athletic director, Morgan State University

As athletic director at Morgan State University since June 2022, Dena Freeman-Patton continues to receive well wishes from others. “People are still congratulating me for getting the job,” she said.

Freeman-Patton has been busy. She shepherded the additions of wrestling as well as acrobatics and tumbling, raising the number of sports programs to 16 and student-athletes to 400, and hired coaches in football, wrestling, acrobatics and tumbling, and bowling.

Freeman-Patton said the athletics department enjoyed its highest graduation rates and highest Academic Progress Rate scores (a measure to determine eligibility and retention of student-athletes), although the latter won’t be made public until May. She is a member of the National Invitation Tournament men’s basketball committee and the NCAA Division I Football Championship Subdivision Oversight Committee.

As pleased as she is with the school’s progress, Freeman-Patton is working with other university leaders on a facilities master plan for athletics and exploring name, image and likeness opportunities for athletes. “I’m not settled by any means,” she said.

— Edward Lee

Sister Rita Michelle ProctorSuperior general of Oblate Sisters of Providence

When Sister Rita Michelle Proctor joined the Oblate Sisters of Providence more than 50 years ago, her idea was to follow in the footsteps of the order’s founder, Mother Mary Lange, the Black woman who founded a school for girls in the slave state of Maryland in 1828.

Proctor admired Lange’s courage, vision and faith that God will find a way to educate and bless all his children, whatever the prejudices of the day.

She has made a life expanding on that vision.

Proctor has challenged and improved generations of children in her roles as everything from a basketball coach and classroom teacher to a hard-driving principal in the city’s Catholic school system.

Eight years ago, she was elected superior general of the Oblate Sisters, the order of African American nuns Lange established in 1828. The school Lange created became St. Frances Academy, now the longest continuously operating Catholic school in America. That alone, Proctor says, suggests Lange is responsible for miracles — a prerequisite for anyone being considered for sainthood in Catholicism.

Proctor and the sisters are helping propel a global campaign to have their founder canonized. The case has even reached the Vatican, which has declared Lange “venerable,” a key step along a complicated road.

Proctor believes it will happen; she just doesn’t know when. And with her tenure as Oblates leader set to expire later this year, she’s awaiting her next call. “It’s in God’s hands,” she says.

— Jonathan M. Pitts

Zarena SitaAssistant state’s attorney, Baltimore County State’s Attorney’s Office

As a student at the University of Baltimore School of Law, more than a decade ago, Zarena Sita dreamed of joining the Innocence Project.

When she didn’t get an internship at the nonprofit, thinking she’d lost the opportunity to fight wrongful convictions, she said, “My adviser said, ‘Why not prevent them from happening in the first place?'”

Sita got an internship with the prosecutor’s office in her native Montgomery County and never looked back. After finishing school, she joined the Baltimore County State’s Attorney’s Office where, over the past 10 years, she went from prosecuting traffic offenses to some of the county’s most high-profile cases, like the Cockeysville man convicted of shooting two police officers.

Being a prosecutor in the office’s Child Abuse and Sex Offense Division “really affords me the opportunity to be a voice for children and victims of sex offense and physical child abuse,” Sita said. “I certainly like that I get to be that person for them.”

— Alex Mann

Chad WilliamsExecutive director, West North Avenue Development Authority

Some could say Chad Williams got his inspiration for urban planning and economic development from his childhood.

He grew up in public housing in Washington, D.C.

Today, Williams is the executive director of the West North Avenue Development Authority — a new, independent economic development agency in Maryland that coordinates state and city planning.

The authority provides grants and loans for housing, economic and transportation activities in Baltimore City and works with neighborhood associations on community design plans. Williams reports to the governor, state lawmakers and a board of appointed officials. Before that, he was a member of the National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board and co-chaired a Maryland National Capital Park and Planning Commission committee.

Williams has degrees from the University of the District of Columbia in political science with concentrations in philosophy, urban policy and community planning, and from Rutgers University Center for Government Services in public housing and municipal redevelopment.

— Glynis Kazanjian

Jeanette J. EppsAstronaut, NASA

Jeanette J. Epps has been a trailblazer for NASA, setting an agency record with her crew in October for the most time in space — 235 days in low-Earth orbit — on the SpaceX Crew-8 mission.

Epps was a mission specialist on SpaceX Crew-8, which launched to the International Space Station on March 4. The spacecraft returned to Pensacola, Florida, in October, concluding a nearly eight-month science mission and the agency’s eighth commercial crew rotation mission to the International Space Station.

In June 2009, Epps was selected as an astronaut candidate for the 20th class of NASA astronauts and later qualified in 2011. She served as an aquanaut aboard the Aquarius underwater laboratory during the NEEMO 18 undersea exploration mission for nine days in June 2014.

Epps received both her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in aerospace engineering from the University of Maryland, where she was inducted into the school’s Department of Aerospace Engineering, Academy of Distinguished Alumni in 2012.

In addition, Epps won the NASA Exceptional Performance Award in 2003, 2004 and 2008.

— Todd Karpovich

Billy Lyve Founder, Find Your Purpose

Billy Lyve is a force to be reckoned with. He is well known in Carroll County for his Westminster-based nonprofit Find Your Purpose.

Movers and Shakers Enterprises, a nonprofit connected to Find Your Purpose, won the $2,000 United Way of Central Maryland Changemaker Challenge Award in the 2024 Carroll Biz Challenge for addressing a pressing issue in his community. Lyve said Movers and Shakers helps young people learn about business by involving them in the moving and junk removal business.

“We’re going to keep fighting and fighting until people start paying more attention to us,” Lyve said. “We’re definitely an organization that’s making a crazy impact in the Carroll County area.”

Lyve said growing up in a household with alcoholism and violence has motivated him to be there for kids without a father.

“I can be a victim of my circumstances, or I can become a victor,” Lyve said. “I chose to fight through it, and I ended up using all of the negative things that I went through in my life.”

— Thomas Goodwin Smith