Hoping for change, but finding little, a year after the unrest
At a block party on Pennsylvania Avenue, reflections about Baltimore a year after the protests and riot triggered by Freddie Gray’s fatal arrest
Above: No jobs and people still homeless. That’s how Yvonne Brown (left) and Jacqueline Lancaster see Baltimore a year after the death of Freddie Gray. (Fern Shen)
Yvonne Brown rolled her eyes.
She had just been asked what changes she’s observed in the year since a young black man from her part of Baltimore died in police custody, triggering protests, a riot and an “uprising.”
Brown, who lives in West Baltimore, whipped out a cellphone photo of an African-American woman in the late stages of pregnancy sleeping on a park bench, her swollen midsection exposed.
“This was this morning! In East Baltimore, over by Patterson Park,” Brown said. “One of my homeboys sent it to me. He said, ‘This is the kind of thing I see on my way to work every day.’
“Until they do something for people like her, don’t tell me about things getting better,” said Brown, 38. “These people are everywhere – you didn’t use to see this!”
Asked where in West Baltimore she lives, Brown explained it this way: “Right up the street from where the [vacant] house just fell on that man sitting in his car. He was just sitting in his car listening to music and it killed him.”
Brown was working a table at a street fair last Saturday, signing people up for free government-subsidized cell phones. Beside her was co-worker Jacqueline Lancaster, who also sighed at the question about change.
“I am this close to being just like [the woman in the photo], and sleeping under a bridge or out in that park over there. Thank God I have a husband,” said Lancaster, a 71-year-old former textile worker.
“Nothing’s going to change if there’s no good jobs for people. And there just aren’t any.”
I Changed
The Boundary Block Party, at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Presstman Street, is an annual spring affair. As usual, there was face-painting, music, fresh vegetables for sale, displays on urban gardening and more.
But the event, sponsored by The No Boundaries Coalition, Beats, Rhymes & Relief and Jubilee Arts, had a special resonance this time around, falling as it did near the anniversary of the civil unrest following Freddie Gray’s death.
Blocks away was where the whole scenario had unfolded a year ago. The sidewalk where police officers knelt on Gray’s back before dragging him over to the van. The Western District Police Station where protesters assembled for days as Gray lay in a coma. The intersection of Pennsylvania and North avenues where stores were looted and torched on April 27, the day of Gray’s funeral.
The theme for many at the street party on Saturday was healing.
People with an “I voted today” sticker were given a free meal. (Early voting sites were open throughout the weekend.)
And up on the roof of Newborn Community of Faith Church, Elder Clyde Harris was camped out vowing not to come down until the 21217 zip code doubled the voter turnout from the last election.
A group of musicians who collaborated on #Song4Unity debuted the composition before the crowd.
Black and white and green divide us,
Neighborhoods are turning into war zones,
Feels like my city’s pacing its own cage,
We’re not even safe in our own homes.
Let’s make it better. . .
There is a way: We can unite our hearts with love.
As he steered his two sons to the face-painting, James Washington was asked his thoughts about the unrest anniversary. His face became mottled with emotion.
“We want nice things like everybody else. We want our kids to be safe, to be good, to not end up like Freddie Gray,” he said. “Today is a day to think about that.”
Washington, a 31-year-old truck driver who lives in Edmondson Village and has family members in Sandtown, said he doesn’t think much has changed with the police in the last year.
“I just go to work, do my job and make sure my kids stay the hell out of their way,” he said.
He added, “The city didn’t change, but I changed. I told myself they’re not going to get caught up in all that,” pointing to the rowhouses, many of them boarded up, just beyond the block party.
Does he plan to vote next week?
“Not sure,” he said. “Not sure it makes a difference.”
Good Jobs Gone
Sitting on the fringes of the festival, a retiree working the free cellphone table, Jacqueline Lancaster, talked about why she still works.
“We need the money!” she exclaimed, saying her monthly Social Security benefit is $670, while the rent she and her husband pay for a senior apartment in Harlem Park is $840.
Lancaster said has worked hard, but that good jobs have disappeared.
“I worked as a sewing machine operator. There used to be a lot of plants,” she said, mentioning several where she worked at one time: London Fog, Misty Harbor. “All gone.”
After the demise of the textile mills, she worked in security and for fast-food chains like Popeyes and KFC. “You work a lot, you work minimum wage, you come in late cause your kid is sick, you lose your job,” she said. “Those kinds of jobs.”
Why did West Baltimore explode after Gray’s fatal arrest? The two women said it was so much more than anger over how people are treated by police.
“They don’t see anything getting better. They see kids winding up in jail, the schools no good,” said Yvonne Brown, talking about public schools that have been closed or consolidated, with the remnants of several stuck together in one building.
Lancaster, meanwhile, pointed to a rowhouse that was being demolished behind the two women on a corner. She talked about the landscape vacant houses everywhere, rutted streets and “trash everywhere you look.”
The city, she said, should put homeless people in vacant houses, or knock them down and build new ones.
“A house dies when nobody lives in it,” she said. “Pretty soon we’re going to have a whole city of houses that are dead.”