What’s the right image to lead off a set of photos of Baltimore’s Green Mount Cemetery, the hilly, grassy resting place for generations of city residents located in a particularly hard-pressed part of our poor, violent and lately very publicly struggling city?

A long-haired angel, arm-raised, giving the town a kind of benediction?

The peacefully-sleeping figure resting atop the grave of W. H. Rinehart, which he sculpted himself?

The stone figure on a child’s grave – a small boy stretched out casually in the grass as if he were sleeping or daydreaming?

After photographer Jennifer Bishop visited Green Mount (she took Wayne Schaumberg’s legendary tour), Bishop sent us a few compelling photos.

There are historic and visually arresting images everywhere in this East Baltimore landmark. Laid out by civil engineer Benjamin Latrobe, dedicated in 1839, Green Mount is renowned for its handsome sculptures and historic headstones.

Among those buried there are the poet Sidney Lanier, businessman and philanthropist Johns Hopkins,  newspaper publisher Arunah Abell, freak show performer Johnny Eck, Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth and many others. (More  than 65,00 individuals, the website says.)

Visitors are free to wander the grounds and can be seen there weekdays and Saturdays, clutching walking tour pamphlets and cameras.

Before the Anger Fades

Among the photos Bishop sent us,  “Angel Watching Over Baltimore” was the other candidate for featured shot. But somehow, it seemed too soon to invoke this healing image, poignant as it is.

Since the protests and rioting that followed the death in police custody of Freddie Gray, people here and across the country have been re-framing these “recent events” in the language of public policy-making, non-profit grant-writing, bureaucratic memo-issuing, academic theorizing and political speechifying.

Needed and (ostensibly) well-meaning as they are, these ways of referencing what has happened in Baltimore recently also distance us from the decades of social injustice and brute violence behind it.

Policies creating a segregated city. Punches that broke bones or made brains bleed, mace that burned eyes, shots that pierced skin.

Before all that built-up anger recedes from memory, somehow “Raging Angel” seemed like the right choice.
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The Cemetery office and grounds are open Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. The office closes at noon on Saturdays; the grounds remain open until 4:00 p.m.. In cases of inclement weather, please call before visiting. Check out the visitors’ page for special holiday closings and other advice.