Rooting For Baltimore

The news out of Baltimore on last Monday afternoon hit me with an eerie feeling of familiarity.  My family had moved to Baltimore in January of 1968.  Just four months later, in April (coincidentally) of that year, the city erupted in riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King.  I was only seven and barely understood what was going on, but I’ve never forgotten that time.  We were home from school for a week while the National Guard rode down our street in big convoy trucks with guns facing out.  My uncle took us up on the roof one night to see the fires that dotted the skyline to our south.  Everyone was very freaked out.

Hearing then that a “mob” of “thugs” was making its way through the city toward downtown, touching many of the places that were hit so hard in ‘68, brought those years back again. It wasn’t a settling feeling.  In the late ‘60s in places like Baltimore, there were adults who truly feared revolution.  They thought that maybe the center wouldn’t hold. They were inordinately fearful of what they perceived as chaos, and certainly the events of that year were chaotic.  I remember hearing my father saying to someone, “if they get to 25th Street, we’re going to have to leave.”    Monday afternoon brought back that scary feeling of chaos to a lot of people old enough to remember.

For me, the Baltimore uprising started a little before 2 o’clock on Monday when a friend, who works in a school not far from Mondawmin Mall, sent me an email to say that there was going to be “a big protest at Mondawmin this afternoon involving two rival gangs, the crips and bloods” who had “united during this crisis.”  It was such a weird message that I hit a search engine looking for some confirmation.  In Baltimore, we all knew Mondawmin Mall.  In my day, there wasn’t much there and was mostly what we thought of as “a black mall” although sometimes we went to the Sears store there.  The DMV was nearby too,  making it all a kind of a transportation wasteland.  But my search online turned up nothing so I decided it must just be some west Baltimore rumor going around, and I went back to work.  Crisis? I thought.  What crisis?

It wasn’t long after that we discovered the Baltimore Sun’s live blog where they were reporting block by block movements of what they were describing as a dangerous mob which was possibly looting along the way and seemingly headed downtown.  My first thought was “This must be some mob for the police to be powerless to stop them.”

It’s still not clear how many people were actually in that Monday afternoon march, or what exactly they did.  Some looting and vandalism certainly occurred.  In the end, the big event was the burning of a CVS on North Avenue, in what used to be a very derelict block back in the day (for me, the late 80s).  At first, it seemed like it might go on, with looting and burning all the way to HarborPlace, which I’m sure is what the authorities feared, but no.  The massive city wide destruction that seemed imminent just didn’t happen this time.  Some stores got looted, the police were disrespected by young black people who are routinely disrespected by the police, and then everyone went seemingly went home.

Nevertheless, I didn’t sleep well Monday night, and Tuesday I waited for news.  I wanted to hear from “the thugs.”  Later that day, they spoke.  Members of three gangs, the Crips, Bloods, and Black Guerilla Family, gave a televised interview to a local reporter in which they wanted it known that they had gotten together not to cause trouble but to seek justice for Freddie Gray.  They said that they were sick of being harassed, beaten, and threatened by police.

Now when I lived in Baltimore, I would have been very surprised to find myself feeling sympathetic to gang members, because they did not have a good rep in the city, at least not among middle class people.  But this group seemed to have a certain moral authority that I wasn’t expecting.  It wasn’t that they expected to be let off for actual law breaking.  They said they were just tired of being subject to law enforcement for doing nothing at all.  Moreover, the brutality of what happened to Freddy Gray struck a nerve with many people who could be one step away from the same fate.  The death of Freddie Gray was just too much.

There was another interview, on Democracy Now, that stuck out from the others.  They had interviewed a string of good, neighborhood-minded folks out doing clean-up at CVS when they ran across someone who was noticeably not participating.  They asked her about it, and she said that she was not going to clean up, because she did not regret what happened Monday.  Her reasoning was straightforward:  Would anyone be listening to these young men today, she asked, if they had not done what they did?  And of course she’s right.  We would not be talking about Baltimore and the plight of low income black people if riots had not happened.

Still, for many people, Monday was painful.  It reminded us how fragile the social balance is.  But then again, maybe it had to be rough to set the stage for the almost miraculous, thoroughly Bmore resurgence of hope, spirit, and pride that has taken place in the days since.

Not everyone gets it of course.  Baltimore’s mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake called the the protesters of that day “thugs” and promised, a la George W. Bush, to hunt down and punish every participant.  She seemed embarrassed about it, and came across as caring more about investment money and development projects than the welfare of her own citizens.  She’s eased up a bit since, in the wake of an unprecedented wave of support from across the country for the people of her city.  Sometimes the moral compass takes a while to settle…

Like most people, I found the spectre of riots scary and disturbing—I was relieved, for instance, when I learned that my friend had gotten a ride home that day—but at the same time the whole thing had that feeling of something that had to happen.  April 1968 was a week of rage but it didn’t lead to the change that people had been hoping for.  White investment in the black neighborhoods was sparce to nonexistent.  The leadership of Baltimore was mesmerized by the mirage of tourism, and preferred ritzy development projects for tourists and conference-goers to any kind of inner city development.  As one young man interviewed on Democracy Now said, they’re doing big projects for tourists but closing youth centers, senior centers, and things the low income neighborhoods need.  The question hangs in the air:  where are our priorities?

Torching the city is not a good idea and anyone who remembers the first  Baltimore riots or lived after them, knows the toll they took on the city.  There were a lot of parts of town that never got rebuilt.  The west end of North Avenue was one.  Gay Street was another.  I used to ride the bus home from work up Gay Street which was block after block of boarded up row houses.  This was true in a patchwork that ran all across the part of town suburbanites called “the inner city.”  As for the burned out CVS, it’s probably the one thing that is going to be truly regretted by more than a few in the community.  Practical stores like that one are few and far between in downtown neighborhoods.

All the same, Baltimoreans black and white are resilient.  You have to be to live there.  And listening to them talk on the news today, I was moved by their commitment to their city and their determination to resolve, once and for all, the problems that have plagued this city since I was a kid if not before.   After ‘68, white people and black people moved apart.  White people moved out in white flight, and didn’t look back.  Many black people sank deeper into poverty.  And nothing got better.  But this time feels different….  This time, maybe black and white people, politicians and people, could talk, agree, and work together to make things better.  I would love that.  But, being a former Baltimorean, I know how vain such hopes can be.

Barack Obama came in promising hope and change, and we wanted it so much, even white people voted for him.  Yet here we are in the last year of his administration, and we have a major civil rights uprising in a city less than 40 miles away from the White House. Clearly, the needed change didn’t happen.   But  here’s the irony:  listening to the citizens of Baltimore in the last few days gave me the first glimmer of real hope I’ve had in years.  These people care.  Even the gang members care.  And that is not something you see every day.

So that’s where I am, a week after the event — rooting hard for the citizens of Baltimore, that they’ll be able to prevail, get some justice, solve some problems, and make some of those changes we were hoping for before.  Can they do it?  I hope they can.  There are people in cities all around the country who hope they can, because Baltimore is not alone, and more importantly, if Baltimore can do it, maybe others can too.