In his landmark book entitled “Why We Can’t Wait,” Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. recounted the 1963 events of the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama, and beyond. The book’s title is fashioned as a response to criticism that King received for helping to lead such efforts at a time when racial strife and resistance to civil rights was high. White moderates (and even many members of the Black community) were urging King to slow down, wait for a later time to address the grievances of the African American community and consider more accommodating avenues for bringing about change in society. The then-34-year-old, young adult Baptist preacher would have none of it. 

In response to warnings that it was not the right time to advocate for justice for the African American community, King said, “For years now, I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

These wise words from Dr. King should help the African American community at this moment as it relates to the struggle for reparations.

Maryland residents are justifiably disappointed by Governor Wes Moore’s decision to veto a crucial reparations bill that was passed in April. I strongly urge the governor and those who supported his decision to rethink this stance. This bill is not merely important; it is a necessary next step toward justice and equality that our state desperately needs.

Gov. Moore vetoed the bill because he believed we’d already had enough studies; it was time for action. However, Senate Bill 587 does provide the steps that could be viewed as the next building block in this generations-long fight for what’s right.

In explaining his veto, Governor Moore cited two commissions by name. 

The Commission to Coordinate the Study, Commemoration, and Impact of Slavery’s History and Legacy in Maryland, formed in 2001, worked to preserve, catalog and make available cultural resources about the history and legacy of slavery in Maryland. That commission last met fourteen years ago and was formally abolished in 2019. Much of their work is filed away in the Maryland State Archives.

The other group that the Governor cited — Maryland Truth and Reconciliation Commission — released its interim report in 2020. They were tasked to uncover lynchings in Maryland between 1854 and 1933. Its final report is expected to be released later this year.

I support both of these efforts, as they contribute to the historical context needed to help people understand why we need reparations. But as the governor states, we need action. That’s exactly what the current bill offers.

If signed into law, the bill would establish a commission to examine inequitable government policies toward African Americans in Maryland, how public and private institutions have benefited from them, and the number of individuals whose ancestors were enslaved in our state. It would look into the feasibility of administering a reparations fund. The commission would also evaluate eligibility for potential recipients of benefits.

Gov. Moore noted that he’s worked legislatively to close wealth gaps and other disparities. He has indeed increased opportunities for historically Black colleges and universities, Black-owned businesses and Black first-time homeowners. This is commendable and timely. I am among the many that appreciate Governor Moore’s leadership in these valuable ways. 

However, we must be careful not to confuse the laudable initiatives of one administration with this bill that would codify a more intentional effort to reverse the harm caused by centuries of racist laws and policies. If reparations is codified in state law, it will matter less who the governor is or what political party is in power. Reparations would be the law of the land in the Free State.

Despite having African Americans in the position of Governor, Attorney General, and Speaker of the House, there are clergy members, politicians and community leaders who are saying that though they support reparations, now is not the right time to take the next steps to pursue it. Though the Democratic Party is in control of Maryland’s House and Senate, these leaders express concern that if we make progress on reparations right now it will provoke the ire of President Trump and will bring us greater trouble from this federal administration. Their concerns are genuine and have some validity.

However, I believe that the trouble that they fear is already here. The masses of African Americans in this country and in our state have been and are already suffering under horrific realities in various ways that are rippling through the generations of our families. The quality of life of our descendants and those yet unborn would be adversely affected by our decision to shrink back at this moment. We cannot surrender hard earned gains in the struggle for reparations made by those on whose shoulders we stand. We must gain ground in both good and tough times; not retreat from it.

No matter what administration is in power, there will always be reasons to put reparations on hold. All eyes are on Maryland, the only state with a Black governor, to see if we can take steps to effectively deliver meaningful change that honors the legacies of our Black families and addresses the harm that has led to current state-sanctioned inequities.

If a state with so many democratic African Africans in political leadership from the top down cannot deliver on taking this sensible step for reparations; I shudder to think about the message that it will send across the nation in our community and beyond. What would it say about the Democratic party if they can’t deliver for the Black community even when they have all of the cards in their hands?

We can’t wait because Black people are suffering economically, socially and physically. We can’t wait because our people don’t have access to land for homes and farming. We can’t wait because laws continue to disproportionately criminalize and incarcerate Black people. Reparations is a political and economic solution that will drastically reduce the negative effects of the racist, discriminatory policies that have haunted us for centuries.

In his book, “Should America Pay? Slavery And The Raging Debate On Reparations,” Dr. Raymond Winbush lists other communities that have already received reparations in the United States. From Jewish Holocaust survivors to Indigenous communities to Japanese Americans and more. These groups have already received (and some are still receiving) reparations in the form of cash payments, land and more. In fact, Abraham Lincoln signed an 1862 bill that even paid slaveowners $300 for each enslaved African freed while our ancestors received nothing.

Why should African Americans wait a second longer for something that others have already received?

As we approach Juneteenth – a national holiday that celebrates liberation for African Americans – I urge Gov. Moore to reverse course and honor the wishes of the elected members of the Maryland General Assembly and many of the citizens of this state. I encourage my colleagues in the clergy to embrace a boldness not based on political calculations, but rather one rooted in the liberatory gospel that’s rich in stories that spotlight saints who stood up in difficult times.

Let us remember the wisdom of our ancestors who struggled for freedom, whose invaluable lessons can guide us as we move forward today. Now is the critical moment to prioritize reparations. We cannot wait a second longer.

We still have the opportunity to come together, take a stand and do what’s right by our ancestors, ourselves and our descendants.

The Rev. Dr. Heber Brown, III is the executive director of the Black Church Food Security Network.

The post Opinion: Why we can’t wait for reparations appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Over ten years ago, I launched the Maryland Justice Project to ensure that women leaving prison had the tools they needed to succeed as they reentered their communities. MJP is just one of many nonprofit organizations in Maryland that are the backbone of safety in our community — organizations working every day to interrupt cycles of harm, support successful reentry, and meet people where they are. But instead of expanding access to proven safety strategies including mental health care, housing, job support, and evidence-based safety solutions, the Trump administration is threatening to gut critical reentry resources in favor of more punishment, incarceration, and criminalization.

This would take us backward, just as Maryland is beginning to confront how mass incarceration has torn apart families and disproportionately harmed women and communities of color.

According to The Sentencing Project, Maryland has the highest racial disparity in life sentences in the country: 76% of people serving life sentences here are Black. For those sentenced before the age of 25, that number climbs to 82%. Women are being swept into this crisis, too. The Prison Policy Initiative reports that Maryland incarcerates women at a rate of 76 per 100,000 residents — far higher than almost any other democratic country.

Behind every number is a person. One woman we worked with had done everything right after coming home — searching for work and caring for her children — but she still couldn’t secure safe housing and struggled to make ends meet. With nowhere else for her to turn, MJP stepped in with emergency assistance so she could get back on her feet and provide for her and her children. Sadly, we hear stories like hers all the time. And it reminds us that the everyday struggles of reentry too often go unseen and unsupported.

Despite the barriers, we’ve made progress. In 2013 and 2014, MJP led the successful campaign for Ban the Box legislation in Baltimore, removing questions about criminal history from private employment applications. That law removed an enormous barrier to employment for the city’s returning population and meant a fairer shot at jobs for a large portion of Baltimore’s unemployed workforce.

Still, we have more work ahead. Maryland operates multiple prerelease centers for men, but few exist for women — even though we know these centers are essential to helping people find jobs, treatment services, and housing. Without them, women are set up to fail. Having access to resources and funds as soon as they come home often means the difference between going hungry and putting food on the table for themselves and their children.

When reentry services are defunded, the consequences ripple outward: mental health clinics close, homeless shelters lose funding, and job training programs disappear. Women in crisis wind up in emergency rooms, in overcrowded jails, and in rising desperation instead of getting help. But when we invest in housing, job training, addiction recovery, and trauma-informed care, they stabilize — and so do their families and communities.

Most people understand that family stability creates community safety. Research shows that Americans across the political spectrum support increasing access to mental health and addiction care, and they understand that addressing poverty and lack of opportunities would help improve safety in their communities. It’s time for our elected leaders to catch up to that consensus.

We’re calling on Congress, and Maryland’s state and federal policymakers to fund the services that keep people out of the system, not trapped inside it. State leaders in the Governor’s Office of Crime Prevention and Policy and the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services must prioritize funding for commonsense programs that create safety and stability. Create a centralized reentry support directory. Expand access to pre-release programs for women. The current plan to build a women’s pre-release center is ill-considered and does not meet the requirement outlined in the statute. Invest in communities, not cages. Doing so will transform our state’s approach to safety for the better — preventing crime in the first place, advancing justice, and helping our communities thrive.

Monica Cooper is the founder of the Maryland Justice Project and a distinguished member of the Maryland Democratic State Central Committee for Baltimore’s 40th Legislative District.

The post OP-ED: Community Support Increases Community Safety, Not Incarceration appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

It’s a bit of a full circle moment to hear this statement come from my father 10 years after I witnessed him pulling up outside our house, looking dazed and half-asleep. I was eight years old and just getting ready to start the day; it was 8:30 am.

There was a reason for his all-nighter. He was a journalist, and Baltimore was reacting to the death of Freddie Gray.

This was the morning of April 28, 2015. My dad — Evan Serpick, then editor-in-chief of the Baltimore City Paper — and the staff of reporters, editors, fact-checkers, and designers had been working hard. They were primarily fueled by one commonality: a longing to understand the story, not simply to observe it.

Baltimore City Paper was a free, alternative weekly newspaper published here from 1977 to 2017. Following the tradition of alt-weeklies in cities around the country, the news outlet regularly featured in-depth news features, edgy arts and culture content, and a more opinionated style than the mainstream press. 

“I think we all felt a particular responsibility to try and do the story justice,” my dad says now. “We knew early on that this was an important story for Baltimore — particularly for Baltimore communities that weren’t often heard from — and we believed strongly that most other media outlets wouldn’t do it justice.”

Baynard Woods, City Paper’s managing editor at the time, remembers the first few days following Gray’s arrest: “I remember very well. We’d gone out to a protest one night before he died, but I remember the following Sunday, the 19th, when people called and told me that Freddie Gray had died of the injuries that the police gave. … And then we just went every day and then it got bigger and bigger and bigger.”

As the Uprising grew, distinctions between City Paper’s coverage and the Baltimore Sun’s coverage became apparent; while the City Paper tried to focus on the people’s story, the Sun focused on the police’s story.

Woods explains that “the Sun saw itself as a major institution in the city — and institutions favor institutions, so they were always going to trust the document more than a person, right? And police produce documents, whereas victims of police don’t produce documents. And so they are always going to trust the police more than they trust the victim of police… We felt like the Sun was embedded with the police and we were embedded with the community.”

The team worked to connect with the protesters, to understand their story. This attitude progressed to physical violence, when the police beat City Paper photo editor J.M. (Joe) Giordano. 

Woods recounts: “I was screaming ‘He’s a photographer, he’s a photographer,’ which I’m ashamed of now, because I don’t think the press deserves special First Amendment rights. Everyone has First Amendment rights and you shouldn’t be kicking anybody’s ass. But my loud voice, I think, did keep them from kicking Joe’s ass worse, so I’m glad I said something.”

Giordano, himself, explains the incident in a more untroubled manner: “I was doing my job. They were doing their job. I was photographing. They jumped on me. So … yeah.”

His sangfroid continues, “I didn’t have any head injuries. I had some, you know, like a lot of bruising on my arms and stuff but, because I was a military police in the army, I knew how to defend myself against batons.”

Baltimore journalist and author D. Watkins, who was a freelancer for a range of media outlets at the time, worked from the City Paper office during the Uprising. “What City Paper did was different,” he said. “They walked into the situation with an openness to consider how people in the community felt at that particular time. … I know for sure I saw Baynard and Joe at pretty much everything and I was like, wow … I just felt like I saw those guys at everything. I think Baynard might’ve let me hold his press pass or somebody’s press pass to be out past curfew and, you know, I took it.”

As the Uprising turned violent, on April 25 and 27, national media swarmed; they were not met warmly.

“Once the national press came in, they’re all surrounded by fucking bodyguards,” Woods says. “When you come in with bodyguards into the community, what the hell do you think is gonna happen? Do you think anyone’s going to trust you? It was somewhat disgusting to see all of that happen too.”

Charlie Herrick, City Paper’s web editor at the time, expands, “I remember hearing a lot of misinformation, especially on Fox News, how it’s like, ‘Oh, the city is in flames’ and blah, blah.”

He continues, “There were protests going on around City Hall and Fox News had come in and Geraldo Rivera was standing right there, talking to the camera about what’s going on and it’s, you know, bullshit. And of course, everyone’s standing around him yelling, ‘That’s not true,’ you know. It was just weird because he was trying his best to do whatever Fox wanted him to and you could tell he just wanted to get the hell out of there. It was like, ‘Wow, you’re really an on-the-ground reporter and just want to come in, say a bunch of bullshit and then get out.’”

The City Paper’s contrary attitude was not only a moral necessity. It allowed the team to tell a wildly different story, one that was closer to the truth.

Woods exemplifies, “Bloods were there and were escorting press, making sure people were staying safe. At some point, people came up to take mine and Joe’s phone and they were like, ‘No, no, they’re City Paper. It’s cool.’”

Remembering the City Paper’s approach, D. Watkins says, “I think they were some of the most passionate articles. I think they were some of the most meaningful articles. I think they were, truly. Yeah, you know, no one covered it better. I think they should’ve won awards for the coverage.”

In fact, the City Paper actually did win several awards from the MDDC Press Association, including the top prize — Best Of Show — for the staff’s stories on the death of Freddie Gray and the protests and trials that followed.

But City Paper staff are open about their limitations. The coverage made the City Paper’s lack of diversity exceedingly apparent.

Rebekah Kirkman, a City Paper editor at the time, says, “It’s not like [the lack of diversity] was unknown to us before all this happened, but it threw into sharp relief the limitations and what we can do or what perspectives we could provide.”

Lawrence Burney, a Black journalist who grew up in Baltimore and reported on the Uprising for City Paper and other media outlets, including Vice, was directly connected to communities affected by Freddie Gray’s death in ways the overwhelmingly white City Paper staff wasn’t. 

“I was kind of making my rounds just based off this local knowledge,” he says. “For instance, my stepfather has a shop on Monument Street. One day the riots were really popping off and me and my grandfather just rolled down to his store to make sure he was good because a lot of establishments were getting broken into and looted. While that was happening, we saw a church on fire in East Baltimore and we couldn’t even turn onto his street on foot because there was a literal line of cops and military gear. We had to essentially ask for their permission to walk down the street that I walked down so many times in my life. … I was more driven by how it affected people in my life, personally.”

He adds, “Just being a Black person that grew up in the city, in this country, given the history of police and any authority figure under a white power structure, that’s all the urgency I really needed.”

While acknowledging their limitations, the City Paper staff remains proud of its coverage: “The work is important,” Giordano says. “I feel that being on the ground, being accepted in those spaces, it really made for good storytelling.”

My dad expands, “The City Paper provided an alternative to the mainstream media that was really focused on institutions. Though we were limited by the lack of diversity, we were much more focused on representing the community than other local or national media.”

Characterizing the City Paper, Woods states, “Some people would write letters and complain, saying ‘you guys suck because of this’ or ‘you guys suck because of that.’ But however much we sucked, and we did, we weren’t a suck-up.” 

Just like myself, Kirkman and Woods remember the morning of the 28th, after the City Paper staff had stayed up all night to meet its deadline.

“It was really surreal, walking out of the building at seven in the morning after we’d finished the paper,” says Kirkman. “Your dad drove me and my roommate home and it was a quiet morning in Charles Village, you know, the day after all that had happened and after I’m like reading through all these stories from our reporters on the ground in West Baltimore and around downtown, talking about what’s going on. It was really strange, actually, to go back to my own neighborhood and see how nothing had changed.”

But the quiet wouldn’t last. The National Guard and the national media had descended on Baltimore and City Paper staff would soon be back at work.

“As we’re putting the paper to bed, looking out the windows, the sun is rising and all the national guard trucks started rolling in,” Woods recalls. “So then it was like, okay, no sleep again. We walked out and I had to go do an interview with someone for TV or radio or HuffPost or something pretty much right when I got home. Then I think I napped for maybe 30 minutes and then was back on the street for the rest of the day.”

(Note: The Baltimore Sun, which bought City Paper in 2014 and shut it down in 2017, has removed much of City Paper’s Freddie Gray coverage from its website, but many stories are accessible via archive websites like the Wayback Machine.)

Jack Serpick is a senior in high school at the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, where he plays tennis and is a founder of the Jewish Student Union. He grew up in Baltimore and is interested in music, politics, and culture. He will be studying at Columbia University this fall.

The post ‘A particular responsibility’: What it was like to cover the 2015 Baltimore Uprising appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

On March 20, Donald Trump signed an executive order venturing to end the United States Department of Education. At a press conference, reasoning through his administration’s hostility towards public schools, he had grievances with one city in particular that needed urgent spelling out — Baltimore. The president stated: “In Baltimore, 40% of high schools have zero students who can do basic mathematics. Not even the very simplest of mathematics.” 

Indeed, the alarming “40% of high schools” line has become a widely accepted right-wing talking point pushed by former congressional candidate Kim Klacik and TV news station Fox45’s Project Baltimore. During her 2020 campaign to succeed the late Congressman Elijah Cummings, Klacik took aim at Baltimore City Public Schools and called for school choice. Since its establishment in 2017, Project Baltimore and Fox45 have also pushed partisan calls for the resignation of City Schools Superintendent Sonja Santelises.

The news organization alleges that in 13 city high schools where the Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program (MCAP) Algebra I exam was administered, not a single student scored proficiently. Any Baltimore City Schools graduate, myself included, can testify that, contrary to the president’s insistence that “even the very simplest of mathematics” like “adding a few numbers together” is too difficult for Baltimore teenagers, the MCAP covers material more difficult than mere basic addition.

And in any event, the statistic misses the full picture. In 2023, Project Baltimore reported that fewer than one in five students at the top five Baltimore high schools (including my alma mater, the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute) scored proficiently on the MCAP. But as Baltimore Polytechnic Intitute teacher Josh Headley pointed out in a piece published to his personal social media, students already enrolled in a math course beyond Algebra I, such as geometry or calculus, are not tested on the MCAP. So many students test out of the MCAP, and in many schools (BPI included), these students are the majority. 

It is self-evidently untrue that some of the best public high schools in Maryland, BPI amongst them, are somehow full of students unable to do basic math. And yet this has been a recurring red herring used by Project Baltimore and its Republican allies for years as a political bludgeon against the public school system.

And while the number of students passing the MCAP is absolutely inadequate and an ample cause for serious urgency within Baltimore City Schools, it is important to contextualize the relative achievement of city students. Only about a quarter of peer students nationwide are proficient in Algebra I topics. Childhood math proficiency is not a problem unique to Baltimore, it is a nationwide challenge compounded by decades of disinvestment in urban public schools, championed historically by conservative Republicans. In Baltimore and across the country, academic performance is largely a function of wealth and access to resources.

It is noteworthy that Trump and his bedfellows are now attempting to single out Baltimore as a case study for failing public education in their quest to delegitimize public schools and cull the Department of Education. But how does scaling back the supportive services of government improve academic performance in public schools? The research is clear: state support strengthens rather than weakens academic performance.

Though the argument itself is patently disingenuous, is it hardly surprising. Project Baltimore, which produced the lines of inquest used in Trump’s press conference word for word, is an initiative of Fox45, which is itself controlled by Sinclair Broadcast Group. Sinclair’s executive chairman is David Smith, a Cockeysville business mogul whose long personal association with officials in both the first and second Trump administrations is well documented.

The multimillionaire, who has donated extensively to groups such as Turning Point USA, Moms for Liberty, and Project Veritas, simultaneously owns the Baltimore Sun, the city’s well-circulated paper of record, in addition to Fox45, one of the city’s influential TV news channels. At Smith’s direction, these media groups have been publicizing conservative framing against public schools for years, uncontested on the airwaves in a city where 87.9 percent of voters cast ballots for someone other than Donald Trump.

Instead of contributing to ongoing efforts to improve academic performance in City Schools, these influential suburban Republicans have succeeded in accomplishing their true goal — empowering Donald Trump to weaponize Baltimore’s equity crisis against public schools across the country. As people sincerely committed to strong public schools, we must be vocal in calling out this pattern of media manipulation for what it is: a partisan attempt to reconfigure urban American communities, and a disturbing obsession with using hard-working Baltimoreans to do it.

Ethan Eblaghie is a former Student Commissioner of Baltimore City Public Schools and current student at Columbia University.

The post Opinion: Don’t Listen to Donald Trump’s Insult Against City Schools appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Maryland voters have long been ready to move forward in building a democracy that ensures that every Marylander has the right to cast a ballot – without a state voting rights act, that right is in jeopardy. The Maryland Voting Rights Act is critical legislation that would increase voter access, expansion and protection among Maryland’s most vulnerable communities under the Trump Administration. 

In November, Maryland elected its first Black U.S. senator and has made significant progress towards building an inclusive democracy in recent years. The expansion of the hours and number of early voting locations available in each jurisdiction is an example of this progression.  

Yet, Maryland is not immune to the attacks on voting rights we’ve seen across the country. This past election saw bomb threats at several local boards of elections’ offices, significant disparities in voter participation by race, and in several communities across the state, no person of color has ever been elected to public office, despite growing Black and Latino populations. 

This included the town of Federalsburg in Caroline County, until a recent federal lawsuit. 

 “I’ve been here all my life, 68 years. I haven’t seen no African American on the board.” Said lifelong resident Roberta Butler. “But we’re not going back. We’re going forward. It’s time for a change and getting young African Americans on that board.” 

The town operated an “at-large” election system where candidates were elected by the whole town rather than running in specific districts. This allowed the white majority to choose every officeholder—and completely block out the voices of their Black neighbors even though Black residents make up half the town’s population.   

A federal lawsuit filed by seven Black Federalsburg women finally led to a more equitable system. After a court ordered the town to shift to a district-based system, two Black women were elected to the town council on September 23, 2023, for the first time ever in the town’s 200-year history.  

Unfortunately, Federalsburg is not an anomaly. 

Black voters and other voters of color are significantly under-represented in local government. More than half of the state’s cities and towns have substantial populations of people of color, yet nearly two-thirds of those communities use at-large elections like Federalsburg, and one-quarter of the governments in these diverse communities have no elected officials of color. Underrepresentation is worse at the county level where one-third of the counties with substantial populations of color have all-white government representation.  

Maryland shouldn’t need expensive, cumbersome federal lawsuits to solve our state’s problems. The United States Supreme Court has chipped away at the federal Voting Rights Act over the past decade, and the newly elected Congress will not act to restore its full strength. 

In the most diverse state on the East Coast, Black voters and other voters of color need more protections. Maryland can address this critical need and cement its status as a national leader on voting rights by enacting the Maryland Voting Rights Act (MDVRA), a package of bills that includes provisions that would expand language access, prevent vote dilution and voter suppression, boost election transparency, stop voter intimidation, and prevent discrimination before it happens. This session, the Maryland General Assembly has an opportunity to advance critical bills in the package: S.B. 342, H.B. 1043, S.B. 685, and H.B. 983, which address language access and fair representation.

The MDVRA protects against racially discriminatory at-large elections or local voting districts, prevents discriminatory election practices and voter intimidation, and improves public notice of changes to election rules. The legislation ensures that eligible voters who don’t speak English comfortably can participate in our democracy; and it can stop discrimination before it occurs in certain jurisdictions that present a high risk of discriminatory voting policies – at a time when voting rights will be under threat again under a new Trump Presidency.  

During his first term, the Trump Administration used its authority to further suppress expansion of voter rights by spreading voter misinformation, denying unfavorable election results, and inciting violence towards election workers, the state capitol and our democratic system. This includes opposing H.R. 4, more commonly known as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2021, which would have strengthened legal protections against discriminatory election practices. 

The Trump Administration has already shown how far its willing to go to make it harder for Americans to vote — particularly voters of color by exercising his executive power to further disenfranchise voters. This includes voters with limited English proficiency, voters with disabilities and other marginalized communities. There is no doubt the second Trump Presidency will finish what the first term started.  

Maryland cannot afford to sit idle while this occurs. By securing state voting rights, the MDVRA would help ensure that all voters are able to cast ballots and participate freely and fairly in the state’s democratic process – particularly those voters who have historically been denied equal opportunity and access.

81% of Maryland voters support a MDVRA and 80% of Maryland voters would like their state representative to prioritize passing a MDVRA. The MDVRA is extremely popular across race and party lines, making the 2025 legislative session a perfect time to pass the portions currently in front of the legislature. 

Seven states, including Virginia, have passed a state VRA as critical legislation to protect voters and increase fairness and transparency in the voting process.   Maryland should be next. These innovative statutes will remain important tools for fighting discrimination even after Congress restores the VRA to its full strength.  

The right to vote is the cornerstone of democracy, and turnout for the 2024 election proves just that. With the election now in the past, it’s time for us to secure the future. The work is not done. Now is the time to pass the Maryland Voting Rights Act. 

Editor’s Note: This is an updated version of a piece that ran in Maryland Matters last year.

Nehemiah Bester is a communications strategist for the ACLU of Maryland. He has produced documentaries for PBS, including “The Riot Report,” directed the Life After A Second Chance docuseries, and is the author of a state archive highlighting Black Civil Rights Leaders in Maryland.

The post Opinion: The Time is Now to Make Maryland a National Leader on State Voting Rights appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Earlier this month, Baltimore City Public Schools leadership announced their recommendation to the Board of School Commissioners that Creative City Public Charter School and Southwest Baltimore Charter School close their doors at the end of this school year. Combined with the closure of Steuart Hill Academic Academy and Eutaw-Marshburn Elementary School last spring, the closure of these schools would mark the loss of four elementary schools in West Baltimore in half as many years.

These closures are the manifestation of an amputation policy that is a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the district’s effort to consolidate resources and slow the exodus of working families that is damaging every institution in Baltimore, including our school system, it is shuttering schools that cannot keep pace with enrollment and academic performance. Doing this forces even more families to educate their children elsewhere and facilitates further exodus.

As a proud City Schools graduate, I urge, in the strongest possible terms, that the School Board reject leadership’s recommendation and keep these schools open. As a former Student Commissioner on the school board, I know how difficult these votes are, and I want to offer three points of consideration for my former colleagues.

Closing Charter Schools Isn’t Equity

According to City Schools, “the guiding principles of the Annual Review process” include the notion that “communities that have experienced the most disinvestment and have the most need should be the first communities in which we focus investments.”

Baltimore’s demographic collapse has been concentrated in the poorest and least white neighborhoods. Reversing these trends depends, as the Annual Review guidelines correctly assert, on concentrating our resources in communities that already have less.

Per the city’s Community Conditions Index (CCI), all four of these West Baltimore closures are at orange or red zone schools. If our goal is to facilitate further investment in disinvested neighborhoods, these closures are antithetical to that goal.

Much of the closure process rests on academic performance. For charter school closures, called “operator non-renewals”, City Schools outlines its criteria: “operators are expected to accelerate improvement in student achievement in exchange for higher levels of school autonomy and flexibility.”

For charter schools to receive public funding but operate privately, they are rightfully expected to excel. Make no mistake: I am unapologetically a champion of public education and an advocate for traditional schools first. But the rise of charter schools in Baltimore, unideal as it is, has in large part been a rallying of our city’s nonprofit community to patch in gaps where our school district has lacked coverage. That’s most prevalent on the west side, where charter elementary schools dot the city blocks.

If City Schools’ intention is to walk back the advance of charter schools, they should move towards the restoration of traditional school programming in these neighborhoods. But closing these schools altogether helps no one, and comes at a greater expense to working families than to charter school operators.

Education is our Collective Responsibility

When we over-formulize the process of school closures, we put ourselves in a box and prevent leaders from solving policy problems creatively.

Too often, the conversation in the Board room on operator non-renewal revolves around where school leadership has fallen short, where staff have been unable to meet district standards, and what needs to change at the executive level of a school is granted a conditional or partial renewal.

But this sort of top-down reform in schools obfuscates a big component of what allows wealthier and better resourced schools to thrive.

Elementary schools like Roland Park benefit immensely from alumni foundations that organize annual delegations to the Running Festival, host multiple fundraisers throughout the year, and provide critical materials to patch in the school’s gaps where needed. These well-connected and well-resourced networks have become a feature of the city’s better off neighborhoods.

But for schools facing closure, the community is often treated as a passive bystander: a stakeholder whose opinion should be taken into account, but ultimately not a party to what changes within the school’s walls.

With every new proposed closure, a new wave of public outrage begins. Teachers and parents showed up in numbers to ask the School Board not to close Steuart Hill and Eutaw-Marshburn. Our neighbors care about their schools. Baltimoreans care. The extent to which residents are involved in these neighborhood fights to keep schools open is one of our school system’s greatest assets.

If a school appears hopelessly behind in academic performance or facility standards, why is little attention ever paid to channeling the community’s passion about keeping the school open into actually helping the school stay open?

The school board should make it its business to meet with neighborhood leaders and evaluate how residents can address district concerns. If parents are organized enough to pack the Board room, they are organized enough to be involved in whatever is needed to keep a school open, whether it’s supply shortages or staffing support.

For all of the district’s shortcomings, Youthworks and City Schools are the two most important vehicles for social mobility in Baltimore City. Every year, we funnel thousands of students into post-graduate education or directly into the workplace. Each flower in the City Schools garden, no matter how small or struggling, should be nurtured before being pruned.

The School Board’s Job is to Govern

Unfortunately, one reason why the Board has largely declined to modify staff recommendations on closures is due to a pattern of deference politics on North Ave. Here, there is an understandable impulse. School closures and operator non-renewals are recommended by the Office of New Initiatives (ONI), whose staff carry significant administrative expertise and are integral to the central function of City Schools. The predecessor to Angela Alvarez, current head of the ONI, is Alison Perkins-Cohen, who is now chief of staff to district superintendent Sonja Santelises. 

Staff expertise is critical to informed school board decision-making. In the face of sustained population loss in Baltimore, the ONI team has consistently applied a cutting formula that balances utilization rates and test scores to determine which schools should close.

Even when there is an overwhelming community consensus against a decision, the Board often feels compelled to vote for a staff recommendation on the basis of deference to expertise. Charm City Virtual was closed by a 7-2 vote despite a packed public comment period and a sustained letter writing campaign to Board members.

Deference politics dominates an array of Board votes, not just school closures. I distinctly recall an instance where Commissioner Andrew Coy, someone definitively within the Board’s progressive bloc (and a man that I consider respect deeply), voted in favor of funding for new metal detectors in schools. In rationalizing his vote, he said “I appreciate the process. I appreciate the work that has gone into and is going to go into this.”

While well-intentioned, Board members are appointed on the basis of criteria that emphasizes their expertise in various areas, from business administration to classroom experience. There should never be an instance where school board members feel that they cannot back up a staff recommendation they are voting to adopt with their own rationale.

Staff makes recommendations to Board members. The school board is the political leadership, and must make political decisions. Community engagement is not just the work of staff, it is the responsibility of the Board, and Board members can and indeed must vote their conscience when the evidence requires it.

We have access to an abundance of research on this: school closures lead to worse academic outcomes for students. Within Baltimore, our empirical evidence is unambiguous: our amputation policy has not stopped population loss in City Schools.

Staff exist to assess decisions on metrics set by political leaders. Metrics are central to the decision-making process, but they are not decisions alone. 

As a former Board member, I hope to offer my experience and words of encouragement: we each have a commitment to the collective responsibility of educating Baltimore’s kids. We must build the strongest possible public school system for their sake.

Ethan Eblaghie is a former Student Commissioner on the Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners and a student at Columbia University.

The post Op-Ed: Keep Creative City and Southwest Open appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

I wrote A Pair of Wings, a historical fiction about the original Hidden Figure, pioneer aviatrix Bessie Coleman, whose story has waited one hundred years to be told.

On a snowy evening one week before Christmas, the Wright Brothers flung themselves into history and gave the world quite possibly the greatest Christmas gift of all time – the gift of flight. An unlikely spectator, 11-year-old Bessie Coleman, a Texas cotton laborer and chambermaid, was watching. 

Coleman would go on to become the first of her eight living siblings to go to college, live as a single woman in Chicago and work as a manicurist. While a dozen or so stoic photos seal our image of her as exquisite and poised, what we don’t get a sense for in vintage sepia is her ability to strategize, and to solve the seemingly unresolvable. Coleman was coming of age in an America where women were just gaining the right to vote, lynchings went unprosecuted and Jim Crow was the law.

When access is denied to her because she is both female and Black, and it becomes clear that she will not be able to train in the U.S.; Coleman is undaunted. France appears to be her only option, but first she must learn how to speak French. At age 26, Coleman enrolled in Berlitz night classes. After working all day as a men’s manicurist, and later, a restaurant manager, she becomes fluent within three years. Indomitable, peerless, tough, charismatic, funny, gorgeous, resilient, resourceful, and Black––there are not enough adjectives to describe her. And at thirty-four, when I first learned who Coleman was, it seemed impossible that the world did not already know her, let alone celebrate her. It was unthinkable that this woman, who had done so much for aviation, civil rights, and gender rights wasn’t a name that rolled easily from people’s lips. 

I came to learn of Bessie’s life when I began pursuing my own lifelong dream of becoming a pilot. In an effort to find out how one would go about doing this, I went to a Women in Aviation Conference, as well as to an Organization of Black Aerospace Professionals (OBAP) convention. At the former, I met a beautiful woman named Captain Jenny Beatty, picture Winona Rider, in Black Swan. And once I met Jenny, I believed that I could make my own dream a reality. When the three-day affair of seminars and job expo wound to a close, Jenny gave me a gift. It was a coffee mug. On one side was a picture of Bessie Coleman, on the other was a two-paragraph story about Coleman’s life. In a convention hall crowded with colorful displays, I stood turning the mug over in my hands. A cacophony of five thousand voices swelled, yet I heard nothing other than Coleman’s story in my head. 

My sense of outrage that I, and most people I knew, had never come across Bessie Coleman in a history book, began to grow. That needed to change, and so I decided to write a book. 

I knew this book had to appeal to a wide audience. I wanted a single woman on a beach vacation to be so enthralled that she had to be reminded to put down her book and tan on the other side. I wanted the business executive flying on a transcon to sink into Coleman’s story. I wanted a married woman with children to take a peek before putting away toys or packing tomorrow’s lunches and find that she was still reading in her kitchen chair when the sun came up. I knew each of these audiences intimately, as I had been each of these women  – a human resources executive, a scuba diving, upper East Side single woman, as well as a busy suburban boy Mom, who was in charge of exploding volcanoes for the science fair. Coleman, too, had been multifaceted. She flew loops over Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Potsdam Palace, and she could explain the physics of lift to a fifth grader. I wanted young women everywhere to let Coleman show them that pursuing their dreams, no matter how unlikely the dream seemed to others, was both worthwhile and possible.

Armed with only a handful of black and white photos, in which a stoic, self-possessed and self-assured woman peered back at me, I desperately wanted to explore who this sepia bombshell really was? How in three years did she learn to be fluent, not merely conversational, in French so that she could learn the complexities and nuances of flying these warbirds? How did she find, cultivate and convince allies to support her efforts to accomplish the impossible? How did she restore her soul when her detractors cut her to ribbons? What did her career choices cost her in sacrifice–both in her love life and her ability to bear children? And what was it like to fly one of these delicate, finicky crafts that weighed less than a modern-day minivan, yet had the tensile strength to carry bombs, fighter pilots, and machine guns? 

To answer this last question, I went to a 2,700 foot-long, grass strip on Martha’s Vineyard. Mike Creato, who runs Classic Aviators and sells biplane rides to tourists, let me fly with him. His 1941 WACO was constructed two decades later than Coleman’s Curtiss Jenny, but the two handled similarly enough so that I could get the hang of flying an open-air, cloth and wood biplane.

So that I could understand the type of flying that Bessie performed, we flew some of the same stunts—barrel rolls, loops, spins, and hammerheads. Later, I’d fly with Eric Campbell. I would arrive at sunrise to warm up the planes with Eric, then I’d leave before the first paying customers arrived, taking Eric’s two young sons with me to care for along with my own two boys. The experience this time brought with it a host of revelations.  

The biplane was a baby carriage to fly, light and easy in the air, yet it could be gnarly to land. There were other details — I was accustomed to a yoke, but in the biplane there was just a stick, as if a car’s steering wheel had been replaced by a gaming joystick. If the biplane was a two-seater, with a bucket seat in the front and rear, the flying pilot operated the stick and rudder from the rear seat. On a takeoff roll, the rear-seated pilot gauges how straight the path is only by peripheral objects on either side of the grass strip, a parallel row of pine trees, a fence or a stone wall for example. Meanwhile, the reconnaissance spy, or shooter, sat up front to operate the machine gun. It’s only when the plane is going fast enough that the rudder becomes effective, and the tail flies up from the ground, allowing the pilot in the rear to see in front. This happens right before launch at about the same time that the sharp shooter takes aim.

While I could have taken lessons from a tailwheel instructor, what made flying with Mike and Eric special was that each was an expert stick who could offer me, a tailwheel novice, insights into aerobatic flying with a confidence that one acquires only through experience and sheer love of a thing. I grew to understand the joy of flying a plane so agile that I thought of turning and the rudder had already complied. I gained a deep appreciation for the skill and patience that flying these warbirds demanded. 

This led me to consider the post-war environment in which women were trying to enter this field. Days before Coleman  arrived in Paris in the fall of 1920, a fatal crash took the lives of two female students at the school where she planned to study. As a result of the accident, the school had closed its doors to women: to paraphrase the school’s owners, France could not lose its mothers and daughters to this game. So even though Bessie had her acceptance letter in hand, she nevertheless, was turned away. 

Forced to find an alternative or go home, she packed up her few belongings and made her way to the coast of France, more than a hundred miles north of Paris. There, Coleman convinced René Caudron to admit her to his school. Like the Wrights, the Caudrons were brothers who designed, built, fixed, and flew airplanes, and at the time, the school was the most famous in all of France. On the beaches of Le Crotoy in the Bretagne region of northern France, Coleman learned how to fly from some of the most experienced airplane designers of the day. Beach flying demanded an understanding of the moon and its tides, as landings had to be made when there was enough of a sand strip to put a plane safely down. On my own trip to Le Crotoy, I gained a whole new level of respect and understanding for the expertise needed to do such a thing. And then there was the persistent threat–money–or more accurately, the lack thereof. 

In the 1920s, there was little extra. While Coleman convinced two wealthy, powerful Black Chicago men – one a publisher, the other a banker, to back her financially, they helped pay for two ocean liner journeys to Europe, but to finance her lessons and to eat and sleep, she would have been left to her own devices.

The publisher becomes her mentor and chronicles her adventures, while the other gun-toting mogul becomes her lover. Thus begins a two-continent quest, defying the odds and even gravity itself, to become this country’s first international civilian pilot. Coleman returns to the States after her first trip with bragging rights and history in her hand – the first civilian to earn a French brevet, with international privileges – yet she is still unable to find a job – flying the mail and barnstorming were the most common opportunities and so she returns to learn how to become the latter. She manages to turn war maneuvers into death defying stunts, worthy of barnstorming shows where tens of thousands look up into the sky and at her in awe. While I learned in the comfort of a fully-restored plane, Coleman flew warbirds, relics of the Great War, that still had Hotchkiss machine gun mounts. While the crosshairs were frozen on a phantom enemy, her very present foe – poverty, racism, sexism and circumstance remained both real, virulent and omnipresent.

Coleman chose a path that was full of risk. Her instructors were soldier aviators, straight out of the film 1917. They had been dog fighters from the Great War and in the air over battlefields these grizzled combat pilots were once mortal enemies, yet somehow Coleman convinced both enemy and ally to teach her daredevil stunts. They taught her the art of war in the airplane, and quite possibly she taught them the art of endurance in life. Born in 1892, Coleman was the daughter of a slave, yet she would rise in prominence to be called a Queen in the country of her birth that first rejected her efforts to learn to fly. In five short years in the U.S. press, Coleman would become known as Queen Bess. 

Two years ahead of Amelia, Coleman is molded by battle-hardened French and German combat fighters, their death-defying bold fearlessness can be seen in her majestic loops, spiky barrel rolls and hairpin turns, all of which resemble the twists and turns of her own hardscrabble journey to learn to fly. Often her journey was splashed on the front pages of newspapers that trumped lynchings. Yet, Coleman even designs her own uniform, strapping up her knee-high lace-up boots with a moxie that leaves us breathless in a time that stole the very lives of people who loved her.

Just as Margot Shetterly’s remarkable Hidden Figures is fundamentally a story about Black women who force unlikely parallels to intersect – the civil rights movement and the space age – A Pair of Wings is about how Bessie Coleman is the only woman in the world who stood at the nexus of the dawn of aviation, as well as the dawn of the Great Migration – the movement of six million African Americans from the agricultural South to the industrial North. When Coleman moved to Chicago, from Waxahachie, TX in 1915, she rode the crest of the very first wave.

My name is Carole Hopson and I am a Captain at United Airlines. I fly a Boeing 737 and my base is in Newark, NJ. Coleman cut a path in the sky and I am profoundly grateful to roam in the firmament that she once called home. I feel so strongly about the legacy that Coleman left, that I founded the Jet Black Foundation, with a mission to send 100 Black women to flight school by the year 2035. 

Carole Hopson is a wife and mother of two college-aged sons. A captain for United Airlines, she founded the Jet Black Foundation, dedicated to sending 100 Black women to flight school by the year 2035. A Pair of Wings, a novel based on the life of pioneer aviatrix Bessie Coleman, is Carole’s debut novel.

The post Op-Ed: Her First Show appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Baltimore has always been a city with soul. A city with grit. But lately, it feels like we’re constantly being pushed aside by wealthy outsiders who treat our home like a personal experiment for their own political and financial gains. We’ve seen it with gentrification that pushes families out of neighborhoods they’ve called home for generations. We’ve seen it with corporations that take over vital community resources, leaving us with food deserts and polluted air. And now, David Smith, a far-right multi-millionaire and owner of Sinclair Media, wants to put the final nail in the coffin.

It’s not enough that he already owns several major local news organizations, including The Baltimore Sun. He still wants more control, more power and more opportunities to strip away what makes Baltimore, Baltimore. And this November, he’s banking on us not paying attention so he can change our city outright. 

I am a Baltimore City native, a Black woman, and I know what it feels like to come from a struggling working family. I’ve always felt proud and safe knowing that our city council has majority Black representation that aligns with the population of our city. It’s a rare thing for a city like ours to have such a strong voice that represents the people. Growing up, I saw firsthand how gentrification projects and displacement affected my classmates in high school. Some of them were pushed to move out of their homes, and I watched them take two or three buses, even a train, just to make it to school. It was heartbreaking. And now, there’s another attack on the culture of our city — this time, politically. It’s not a good feeling.

Earlier this year, Smith and his allies tried to push a referendum that would have cut Baltimore City property taxes in half. Their proposal would have required a drastic reduction in city services, affecting our most vulnerable citizens the most. Thankfully, it was stopped before it could be placed on the ballot, but it shows us the type of people we’re dealing with. They don’t care about the well-being of Baltimoreans; they only care about what they can gain from us. And now, they’re coming after our political representation.

Now they are pushing a referendum to cut city council seats, and make no mistake, this isn’t about efficiency or good governance. It’s about silencing us. It’s about reducing the power and influence of Black and brown communities by cramming them into larger districts where they’ll be overshadowed by wealthier, whiter areas, making it easier for those areas to dominate decision-making in our city. It would leave our poorest, most marginalized residents fighting for scraps when it comes to representation. This is personal to me. Our city council is one of the few places where ordinary Baltimoreans like my family and I still have a voice. Cutting those seats takes that power away from us and puts it in the hands of those who don’t care about our struggles or our future. When you slash representation, you undermine democracy. 

Baltimore’s Black residents deserve to be fully represented. The thought of cutting council seats means candidates from less advantaged parts of the districts would struggle to raise money to compete with more affluent candidates. That would reduce representation for the very people who need it most. Office-holders would likely cater their policies to the wealthier communities, shifting their focus away from the needs of struggling working-class families. This isn’t just a political issue; it’s an attack on the soul of our city.

I am fed up with outsiders and wealthy entities coming in to take things from us. They’ve already messed with our neighborhoods and displaced our families. Now, they’re messing with our political system, and that’s where I draw the line. Baltimore is Black, and yet they want to cut seats, which means cutting representation from the majority. Our city is not a lab for right-wing social experiments. We won’t stand by while billionaires like David Smith manipulate our city’s politics and strip away our rights to fund their personal agendas. This is our city. It belongs to us, the people who live here, work here, and raise families here.

We’ve been used, neglected, and mistreated for too long by outsiders who swoop in to profit off our struggles. We won’t let them take from us, and we won’t let them destroy what makes Baltimore special.

Baltimore is not for sale. And this November, every single true Baltimorean — no matter your race, age, or wealth — needs to rise up and vote NO on this ballot question. They think they can take Baltimore away from us. We need to show them that they’re wrong.

Janay Fenner is the Communications Coordinator at Progressive Maryland, a statewide nonprofit advocating for racial, social, economic, and environmental justice. Progressive Maryland leads grassroots organizing, public education, and legislative efforts to create progressive change and empower working-class communities across the state.

The post OP-ED: Baltimore City Is Not for Sale appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Poppleton residents miss their neighbors.

Ms. James was a retiree who lived alone on the 1100 block of West Fayette Street. She rarely left her home. If she saw neighbors she knew, she would peek her head out and ask them to pick something up for her from the store. The houses that surrounded her were vacant, the residents displaced. She was the last one left on her block. 

She worried about fires from the panhandlers who had moved into her neighbors’ vacant rowhouses. Progress was supposed to be coming to Poppleton, but the progress was not designed for Ms. James. She died in her home long before any new development would appear and the block was cleared.

Nearly 20 years later her neighbors are still waiting for that progress.

On August 20, 2024, six legacy residents of Poppleton and the Poppleton Now Community Association filed a lawsuit against Baltimore City and the developer–La Cité of New York City–claiming the development deal they signed in 2006 is unconstitutional. However the legal case plays out, the stories of Poppleton residents should be heard. What happened to them and their neighborhood is a miscarriage of justice, one that happens in Black and Brown neighborhoods across the U.S.

Sonia Eaddy and her family have been fighting the displacement of residents in Poppleton since they learned about this development scheme back in 2004. Baltimore City devised a plan to give 526 properties of “vacant land” to a private developer. However, the land was not vacant. More than 150 homes were occupied with families and taken using eminent domain–the power to take private properties for a “public use.”

The people and the homes in Poppleton matter. Their history and their stories matter.

The Eaddy family’s three-story brick rowhouse on the 300-block of North Carrollton Avenue was built in 1871 and has been owned by two Black families since 1928. The Sewell family sold the home to Eaddy’s father Donald Waugh, who was an arabber at the Carlton Street stable for many years, in 1992. He grew up in Poppleton and still lives around the corner on Carey Street. He sold the home to his daughter to accommodate her growing family. The Eaddys raised five children and today host many of their 13 grandchildren and four great grandchildren in their family home. 

In 2022, as the result of residents’ organizing and a public outreach campaign, Mayor Brandon Scott’s administration negotiated an amendment to the development agreement. Along with the 11 alleyhouses on Sarah Ann Street, the Eaddy home is now part of a CHAP local historic district that residents fought to establish. Shelley Halstead of Black Women Build is redeveloping the Sarah Ann street homes for affordable homeownership. 

In order to remove the Eaddy family home from the development footprint, the City paid  $260,000, the “just compensation” the Eaddy family was owed from their eminent domain case against the City, to La Cité. Nothing was ever paid to the Eaddy family for all they suffered in their fight for their home and the decades of living in a neighborhood that was condemned. Throughout the ordeal the Eaddys paid their mortgage and their taxes every month. The two “luxury apartments”–all La Cité has built in nearly 20 years–currently have an outstanding water bill of over $648,000 due to Baltimore City, according to the city’s water bill website. 

The homes of the other plaintiffs, the Walkers and the Gunns, are in the shadow of those luxury apartments and surrounded by the vacant land of progress deferred. They have been affected by the condemnation of their neighbors even though their homes were never actually condemned.

Yvonne Gunn’s grandparents came to Baltimore from Columbia, South Carolina in 1925 and moved to Poppleton. Her grandparents began renting 1056 West Fayette Street in Poppleton in the 1930s. Her grandparents rented the home for many years. All four of their sons served in World War II. One son was able to save and purchase the home for his parents. 

In 1985, when that uncle was retiring and moving out of 1056 West Fayette, he sold the house to Mrs. Gunn and her husband William to keep it in the family. Mrs. Gunn says, “The family house is open to everyone in the family.”

The Gunns were initially supportive of the development project, but over the past decade the displacement and abandonment created a sense of fear as the Gunns lost their neighbors, endured uncertainty, and became embarrassed when family and friends would come visit and  ask, “Why are you still here?”

Since 1985 when they became homeowners, the Gunn family has invested in and restored their historic home. “I have a three-story rowhouse with a full basement. There were maybe 70-80 houses just like mine in Poppleton. Some right on Fayette Street,” Mrs. Gunn explains. “They were wiped off the face of the earth. If my house was in Federal Hill or Canton in today’s market it would be worth a half-million dollars.” 

The development project haunts the Gunns. Mrs. Gunn says there were many close-knit families like hers throughout the Poppleton community before this project. The Gunns remember numerous promises made by the La Cité developer regarding investments in the community, such as a promised tennis academy for local kids and 1% of the total development cost being reinvested back in the community. As a past president of the community association, Mrs. Gunn says all these broken promises, including that her home value would increase, caused great harm.  

Sterling and Francina Walker live at 1020 West Vine Street, one block north of the Gunns. Mr. Walker was born in Poppleton on 938 West Saratoga Street by a midwife. He remembers when Poppleton was a beautiful and walkable neighborhood before the Highway to Nowhere, MLK Boulevard, and all the demolition and destruction of the historic homes of Black families. 

“Back then we did not have a big voice of what was going on in the neighborhood. So, things were changing, and people accepted it,” Mr. Walker explains. “There was a whole lot that this neighborhood had that was taken away from it.” 

Mr. Walker would pick up his mother Gloria Beverly from church in Poppleton. She wanted him to drive her around so she could show him all the places where she grew up in West Baltimore. Today she is 96 and closely follows all the news on the Poppleton redevelopment. 

After he returned from serving in Vietnam, Mr. Walker worked at the Baltimore City jail for 41 years. On his way to work one day, he saw that they were building new brick rowhouses in Poppleton. He convinced his wife Francina, who is a health care worker, to move back to Poppleton and become homeowners.

They bought their home at 1020 West Vine Street in 1986. They only had to put down $526 and paid around $370 per month on their mortgage, which included a $37,000 loan from HUD–which was forgiven if they lived in their home for 10 years–and a $25,000 loan from Mercantile Bank. They now have paid off their home, which is how public funds for affordable housing are supposed to work–for the public good of the city’s hard-working residents.

The Walkers also host many family events and holidays in their home. When Mr. Walker heard about the development coming to the neighborhood, he worked to form a neighborhood association to fight to keep his and his neighbors’ homes. 

Baltimore City and the developer promised rowhouses, homeownership, and that displaced residents could move back. There have been so many broken promises in Poppleton and so much harm to those who have fought to remain.

The Poppleton Now Community Association board, which includes all the plaintiffs along with more recent residents and a local pastor (and for which I have been acting secretary), all approved this statement in support of the lawsuit:

We have lost family, friends, and neighbors during the traumatic period of this failed redevelopment plan. Homes and businesses have left our neighborhood and various promises of community benefits have been broken. 

We want to work with the City and any future developers to make sure we have a thriving neighborhood that welcomes various income levels, invests in current homeowners and tenants, provides affordable housing, and welcomes back our displaced neighbors who would like to return. We want investment in our community and community-led planning moving forward. We ask the City and any developers to work with the Poppleton Plan, our requests for greenspace, and established community assets. 

Invest in us and Poppleton and Baltimore city will thrive.

Poppleton residents continue the fight for their neighborhood and for past neighbors, like Ms. James–who can no longer continue the fight.

Nicole King is an associate professor in the Department of American Studies at UMBC, where she has worked with residents on the A Place Called Poppleton project since 2020. She was acting volunteer secretary of the Poppleton Now Community Association from 2021 to 2022. She is a pro bono consultant on the Poppleton lawsuit. 

The post Op-Ed: Profiles of Poppleton Residents appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Governor Moore,

When we last spoke, you said you’d do what you could to help my son Donnell Rochester. You posed with me for an Instagram photo op. Now I’m asking you to follow through with what you said you would do by ordering the Maryland Attorney General to prosecute the officers that killed my son. 

To remind you, on February 19, 2022, my son Donnell Rochester was killed by Baltimore City Police Officer Connor Murray. Since then, the Maryland Attorney General and Baltimore Civilian Review Board have found the officers at fault. 

In October 2023, the Maryland legislature granted the Attorney General sole authority to prosecute cases where police kill people. This law was passed explicitly to address the obvious conflict of interest inherent to allowing local State’s Attorney offices to investigate and prosecute the police forces that they work with and rely on day in and day out. 

You may also recall that in 2020, Minnesota Governor and now vice presidential nominee Tim Walz intervened to change the jurisdiction so that his state’s  Attorney General could prosecute George Floyd’s killers instead of the local prosecutor because of concerns about a conflict of interest.

Officers Murray and Robert Mauri shot at Donnell multiple times with the fatal shot going through his passenger-side window. They cruelly let him bleed out on the street instead of taking him to a hospital. His last words were “help me, I can’t breathe.” He was only 18 years old and was a senior in high school. He was a vibrant, funny, loving young gay man and he should still be here. It has been almost two years and we still have received no justice.

Unfortunately, in the State of Maryland the AG’s office will not prosecute cases of police killings that took place before October 2023 and instead relies on kicking it back to the local State’s Attorney’s Office.

This means that Donnell’s case is frozen in limbo because he was killed before the legislature addressed this obvious conflict of interest. The Maryland Attorney General’s Independent Investigative Division found probable cause for voluntary manslaughter charges to be brought against at least one of the officers involved in Donnell’s death, but the Baltimore City State’s Attorney refuses to prosecute the case. This is the conflict of interest in action, and our demand is that you intervene to make it right. 

The Governor has clear authority, pursuant to Article V Sec. 3(a)(2) of the Maryland Constitution to order the Maryland Attorney General to “Investigate, commence, and prosecute or defend any civil or criminal suit or action or category of such suits or actions in any of the Federal Courts or in any Court of this State.” This is what we’re asking you to do. 

Governor Wes Moore, please confirm receipt of our letter and order the Maryland Attorney General to prosecute those involved in the killing of Donnell. That office already found probable cause to do so; the only reason it hasn’t been done is because the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office has a conflict of interest in prosecuting the police department it relies on to make cases. We have already attempted and been denied on this urgent matter by the legislative process. Please change the jurisdiction of Donnell Rochester’s case from the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office to the Office of the Attorney General, and let’s get Donnell Rochester some justice!

We look forward to receiving your confirmation of receipt and next steps from your office, and we thank you in advance for acting on your responsibility to address this.

Sincerely,

Danielle Brown

Mother of Donnell Rochester

The post Frozen in Limbo: Donnell Rochester’s Mother Writes An Open Letter to Governor Wes Moore appeared first on Baltimore Beat.