Abandoned. Abandoned. Abandoned. Occupied. Abandoned. Occupied (I think).
If you want to understand the violence engulfing Baltimore, you have to start on the street where Freddie Gray was taken into police custody and died a week later. It is a blighted, joyless place of boarded up buildings in one of Baltimore’s poorest communities. The sidewalks of Sandtown-Winchester are strewn with trash, and the signs on a tiny strip of scraggly grass deliver a dispiriting warning: “No Pets Allowed. No Ball Playing.”
Gray’s death represents yet another terrible incident of police violence during the arrest of a black man for a petty (or non-existent, as may be the case here) reason. But it also raises questions about the state of Baltimore, Maryland’s largest city.
It was here, in West Baltimore, that Gray lived all of his 25 years, and where his body was broken while he was in police custody on April 12. Candles had been burned in a sawed-off Pringles can and pink mums had wilted in a broken bottle on the corner where he was cuffed and dragged into a police wagon.
“His legs were dragging behind him. He was limp,” said Charles Thomas, 63, who has lived in Sandtown for nine years and was outside when he heard Gray screaming. He died from a severe spinal injury.
“It’s like we live under martial law,” said Thomas, a former prison guard. “I understand that police have a job to do. I did a job like that for years. But here, the police don’t know us. They don’t know the neighbours.”
But now, the whole world is watching as the city erupts in ugly violence.
“Looks like people might pay attention to what’s really going on in this city,” Thomas said. As he spoke, Gray’s funeral was being held a few blocks away at New Shiloh Baptist Church.
It was a scene with rows of television trucks, hundreds of mourners and three officials from the White House. It was followed by confrontations between police and angry protesters a few kilometres away at Mondawmin Mall, where officers were pelted with rocks, bricks and other objects, and seven were injured before a police car was set on fire and a pharmacy was looted.
I wanted to ask the protesting people what they were feeling. I got my answer when one of them knocked into me and took my phone and as I chased after him, others knocked me to the ground. Some of them had rocks and bricks in their hands. But one came with an outstretched hand and picked me up, trying to get me somewhere safe. That was their message. Anger and confusion.
It was a scary, sobering moment. And it made me wonder: Will the reaction to Freddie Gray’s death change anything in Sandtown?
“I’ve been here since 1971 and I don’t think all this is going to make any difference,” said Sarah Chestnut, 71, much earlier in the day on her way to a doctor’s appointment. She stopped to chat with her neighbours, who have a makeshift convenience store set up on their stoop, selling bags of chips and single diapers for 50 cents a piece from a folding table because nearby “all we have are liquor stores and funeral homes”.
“I brought my nephew from Detroit to live here. I thought it would be better. He was shot eight times in the back right there,” she said, pointing to a corner not far from Gray’s home. “Right now, Detroit’s better than this place.”
The crushing poverty and decay here stand as a stark contrast to the tourist attractions of the Inner Harbour — a revitalisation project that was hailed in 1984 by the American Institute of Architects as “one of the supreme achievements of large-scale urban design and development in US history”.
The National Aquarium, the Maryland Science Centre and the waterfront mall made Baltimore a vanguard of the country’s urban renaissance movement. But Sandtown feels like a world away instead of just a few kilometres. Its poverty is more visually jarring than even the poorest neighbourhoods in the District of Columbia.
“There’s a lot of hopelessness here now, and that’s changed since I lived here,” said John Jones, 49, who put down his trash bag and rake for a moment. He grew up in West Baltimore but now works and lives on the other side of the city.
His group, Living Classrooms Foundation, came in to clean the empty lots and alleyways that have been on display in the national media since Gray’s death.
Is this a huge moment in America’s consciousness, where one is about to finally acknowledge the country’s forgotten neighbourhoods and their desperate residents?
“Yes. And I think change starts right here,” said Jones, who is a case manager with the group. “We’re making a statement that we care.”
And crossing those lines into other neighbourhoods may be the key. Baltimore has long been “the city of neighbourhoods”, said Meg Ward, executive director of the Patrick Allison House, which helps ex-offenders transition back into their communities. She was in the group picking up trash in Sandtown. “We all need to be part of a whole city, not just be in our own, little neighbourhoods.”
We all need to care.
— Washington Post
Dvorak is a columnist for the Washington Post’s Metro section.
