Marc Steiner is host of "The Marc Steiner Show," which airs weekly on the independent, Baltimore-based Real News Network. He grew up in West Baltimore, where he developed close ties to his Black neighbors, which shaped his worldview. Steiner won a Peabody Award in 2007 for “Just Words,” a series of interviews with 55 marginalized Baltimoreans. Photo by Stefanie Mavroni

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Marc Steiner and his radio show guests discuss a range of topics. Photo by "The Marc Steiner Show"

Marc Steiner, the acclaimed talk-show host, podcaster, writer, teacher and civil rights advocate, says he was just in the right place at the right time. 

“I stumbled into radio,” Steiner said in an interview with the Beacon. In the waiting room of his dentist’s office 31 years ago, Steiner struck up a conversation with the assistant general manager of Johns Hopkins University’s WJHU-FM (now WYPR).  

“I told him I’d love to have a radio show,” Steiner recalled. “He said, ‘You don’t know anything about radio.’ I said, ‘What’s to know? You have a microphone and subject matter. You talk. So?’” 

From that exchange emerged an offer: As an experiment, Steiner would helm a Tuesday evening talk show in the station’s studios on North Charles Street. He proved to be an excellent interviewer, turning the status quo on its head.  

Two years later, he was awarded the weekday noon to 2 p.m. time slot. Steiner would go on to win a Peabody Award, the most prestigious recognition in broadcast media. 

He’s still at it. Since 2018, Steiner has hosted “The Marc Steiner Show” on The Real News Network, a Baltimore-based progressive platform. 

Now 78 and a great-grandfather, Steiner lives in Sparks, Maryland, with his wife, Valerie. Recently he reflected on his life and the unique perspective he gained while growing up in West Baltimore. 

A ‘weird’ start 

“I was a weird little boy,” Steiner said, his raconteur’s voice allotting ample time and space for bursts of hearty, all-encompassing laughter.  

“I couldn’t catch a baseball. I thought about being a guru in India,” he said. He also dreamed of joining the Boy Scouts.  

He begged his mother, a vivacious, British-born woman whose ancestors mined gold and ran rum, to sign him up. She promised to register him for a troop based at Beth Tfiloh, the family’s Orthodox synagogue, where Steiner was bar mitzvahed.  

But Steiner balked. “I didn’t want to be in a troop with all Jewish kids. I wanted to be in a troop with all kinds of kids,” Steiner remembered.  

By coincidence, the family’s Black housekeeper had a nephew who led an all-Black Boy Scout troop, so Steiner joined, “integrating the troop,” he said. “It was the beginning of my lessons about race.” 

Decades before his career as a radio host, the teenage Steiner learned to listen carefully to his friends and neighbors.  

“I wasn’t self-aware that I was listening,” he remembered. “I was the only white kid on the corner, at the pool hall, the bowling alley, and at the parties I went to. A lot of Black kids didn’t like me. But I had my guys — I was really tight with them.” 

His first protest at 13 

When Steiner was 13, he and his mother were strolling the sparkling halls of the new Mondawmin Mall in West Baltimore. He spied a small band of Morgan State students picketing the White Coffee Pot, and his mother let him join the protest. 

“So, on that February day, three months away from my 14th birthday, I walked my first picket line and joined the Civil Rights Movement,” he said.  

As he grew up, Steiner befriended the Black community, “jitterbugging” on street corners with kids. 

He also found himself in the midst of some serious tussles. At one party where he was the only white attendee, a disagreement over money spilled over, and Steiner “knocked out” someone, he said.  

Later, at a pool hall, when rival gangs tangled, “Someone shot at me,” he recalled. Fortunately, allies came to his defense. “They said, ‘Leave the white boy alone!’ They saved my life.”      

When riots broke out in 1963 in Cambridge, Maryland, the teenaged Steiner aligned himself with the Freedom Riders. The group, members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), rode buses to protest segregation on interstate buses and in bus terminals.  

During his time in the Eastern Shore town, Steiner worked alongside Gloria Richardson, the famed Civil Rights activist.  

“I spent years as an organizer, confronted by people’s racism. You don’t react to it. You try to bring people over,” he said. 

Steiner continued speaking out during his days at City College High School, where he was “in the lowest academic class I could be in,” he remembered.  

Steiner’s refusal to recite the Lord’s Prayer in homeroom prompted his exasperated teacher to remind him, “This is no damn stand-in! Sit in your seat!”  

Then the altercation turned violent. The teacher “held a yardstick over my head like he was going to hit me. I slugged him,” Steiner admitted. 

Steiner, who was not charged with assault, transferred to a Massachusetts boarding school (where his roommate was the iconic folk singer and songwriter Arlo Guthrie).  

Later, he graduated from the now-defunct Franconia College, an experimental liberal-arts school in New Hampshire, with a degree in political theory and creative writing.  

From ads to theater to radio 

Steiner returned to Baltimore for a job at an advertising and marketing firm, Trahan, Burden and Charles, producing and directing radio ads.  

He had done a lot of amateur acting as a teenager in his mother’s plays for the PTA, he explained, so he was somewhat familiar with producing and directing.  

Next, he got a teaching job at the Baltimore School for the Arts, part of the city’s public school system. In his 10 years teaching theater there, he established the Family Circle Theater — an improv program that spotlighted psychological and social issues. 

That improv experience came in handy once Steiner landed his first radio job. He quickly discovered a knack for interviewing people on air. 

“You have your own perceptions,” Steiner said. “You can get rid of them. You have to let the conversation flow from there.”  

By fits and starts, Steiner found his sea legs as a radio host. From 1993 to 2008, Steiner hosted the talk show on what was then WJHU.  

When WJHU was up for sale in 2001, Steiner spearheaded the movement to preserve local ownership of the station, raising $750,000 from listeners. 

Next, he emceed a program on Morgan State University-owned WEAA-FM until 2017.  

Meanwhile, Steiner formed a production company, the Center for Emerging Media. It exists to give voice to scholars and intellectuals as well as to those more marginalized.  

The center is perhaps best known for producing a 55-episode radio series called “Just Words” — stories of working-class Baltimoreans that Steiner began airing on his own show in 2003.  

Within a few years, his audience grew, and a four-minute excerpt of his interviews aired every week on NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.” In 2007, the “Just Words” series scored a Peabody Award.  

Guided by unique background 

Steiner’s background growing up in Baltimore and observing the racial injustices of the 1950s and 60s still guides his work today. 

“Marc speaks for an entire generation forced to witness the type of brutality and oppression shown on the evening news,” said Doug Colbert, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law.  

Colbert, 77, grew up with Black friends in New York City, “and we saw how they were treated — as suspected criminals and shoplifters. Marc understood these injustices at a very young age,” Colbert said. 

 “Marc doesn’t do his work out of ego,” maintained Colbert, an expert in areas including criminal law and police misconduct. “He speaks for others and to allow others to speak for themselves. Marc sticks to his primary goal — educating people.”  

After a lifetime on the radio, Steiner still teaches theater classes, sometimes in far-flung locales.  

He traveled to Wyoming to the Wind River Indian Reservation, a two-million-acre reservation that is home to the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho tribes.  

Steiner spent several weeks there helping teach theater and radio production. He felt welcomed into the community, joining sweat ceremonies and elk hunts.  

“They started calling me Rabbi. It was really one of the best moments of my life,” he said. 

In fact, it was a Native American guest of Steiner’s early radio show who Steiner credits for fueling his approach to his career. In their on-air conversation, the author mused about the essence of books, art, media and our connection with others.  

“He asked the question, ‘What is communication?’” Steiner said. “It stuck with me.”

To listen to “The Marc Steiner Show,” visit Steinershow.org or therealnews.com.