When Alex Haley’s novel, Roots: The Saga of an American Family, was published in the fall of 1976—in the midst of America’s Bicentennial, no less—it became an overnight commercial and critical success. The book spent 22 weeks at No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list, earned Haley special citations from both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and was translated into 37 languages.

Fifty years later, whether you’re reading it or are listening in audiobook form, Roots maintains its historical and sociological force—as well the narrative pace of good fiction and the detail and vividness of cinema.

In January 1977, the miniseries based on the book became the most-watched television show ever, transforming the way Americans—Black and white—thought about slavery, family history, and the nation’s past. (Ironically, the previous record holder for largest television show audience had been the two-part airing of Gone with the Wind, just months earlier.)

Already a renowned journalist, writer, and co-author of the acclaimed The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Haley had started his Roots research with little more than the word “Naplis” (which he would learn referred to Annapolis) and a few African pronunciations handed down through his maternal lineage, including a surname, Kinte. He followed language and other clues to West Africa and the Gambian River area where he came to believe his teenaged ancestor Kunta Kinte had been stolen from his farming village and Muslim family.

Ultimately, Haley traced his journey to the port of Annapolis, where an estimated 100,000 Africans were sold into bondage before Maryland ended its participation in the international slave trade in 1774, and then to Spotsylvania County, Virginia, where his family’s oral tradition indicated his ancestors had been forced to work on a tobacco plantation.

The lynchpin of Haley’s research had come during a visit to the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis, which he first visited in 1967. Archivist Phebe Jacobsen, who would become a dedicated collaborator and lifelong friend, located a pivotal 1767 Maryland Gazette shipping advertisement for the slave ship Lord Ligonier. The timing of the Ligonier’s arrival from Gambia and the notice of its “cargo” of 98 individuals essentially corroborated the Haley family’s oral history.

Writing in The New York Times’ Sunday book review section, James Baldwin said of Kunta Kinte: “We are in his skin, and in his darkness, and, presently, we are shackled with him, in his terror, rage, and pain, his stink, and the stink of others, on the ship which brings him here. It can be said that we know the rest of the story—how it turned out, so to speak, but frankly, I don’t think that we do know the rest of the story. It hasn’t turned out yet, which is the rage and pain and danger of this country.”

After initial pushback against the Kunta Kinte-Alex Haley Memorial at the Annapolis City Dock, and years of fits and starts, the final phase of the landmark statue was dedicated in June 2002. Meanwhile, the impact and influence of Roots continues to this day—in both good and controversial ways.

In May, the Knoxville, Tennessee school district briefly banned the book until community backlash and state-wide pressure forced its reinstatement. Locally, for three-plus decades, Alex Haley’s nephew, Chris Haley, has built upon on uncle’s work as the director of the Legacy of Slavery in Maryland initiative at the State Archives.

With the 50th anniversary of Roots: The Saga of an American Family and events like the annual Kunta Kinte Heritage Festival in Annapolis this month, Baltimore caught up with Chris Haley to ask him about Roots, his uncle, and his own work at the Maryland State Archives.

Among the artifacts at the State Archives is an old-fashioned school composition notebook, which you just recently found. It was used as a visitor’s log and on the cover, where it reads “PROPERTY OF,” the word “Searchers” is handwritten. What a great word. Then inside there is a date, Aug. 2, 1967, and your uncle’s name in green ink and his purpose: genealogical research for the forthcoming book, Before This Anger.
l love that archivist Phebe Jacobsen had written in “Searchers.” Yeah, originally, he was calling the book Before This Anger. If we look at that title and say the anger was enslavement, the anger was rape, the anger was race-based brutality, economically reinforced—then what was the before? The before was family, the before was a village, the before was freedom and a sense of purpose—the African portion of the story.

Whether you’re the literary or television audience, these are people like you, or another other family like yours. This is like any other story about a young man who is coming of age.

The original title is revelatory. The book’s first 150 pages are set in and around Kunta Kinte’s village. It’s a wonderful, and then terrifying, read, but the long introduction is necessary in terms of gaining a full understanding of his experience.
Part of the inspiration for Uncle Alex in taking on this book was working with Malcolm X. He begins right after Malcom X is killed and The Autobiography of Malcom X is rushed to print. This might be me hypothesizing because I didn’t speak to my uncle [who died in 1992] directly about the original title, Before This Anger, but there has long been this stereotype, this trope, about any Black man who speaks up about the disenfranchisement, unfair discriminatory practices.

I’ve heard it said about me when I talk about Black history. It is no different in 2026 than it was in 1976 or in the mid-1960s, which is in the heart of the Civil Rights Movement when Malcolm X is very active, the Nation of Islam is very active, when Martin Luther King is very active, when marches are very active. So, Alex Haley said, well, “Okay, let me tell you why. Before this anger, we were not savages. We were not people without languages, without religion. We were not people without families, without love. We were not people without goals and aspirations. That’s why we’re angry now because before this anger, we had all this.”

The research lynchpin was the discovery at the State Archives of the Maryland Gazette advertisement, correct? It’s startling to see in person: “Annapolis, Sept. 29, 1767—JUST IMPORTED—In the ship Lord Lingonier, from the River Gambia—A cargo of choice healthy SLAVES.” As well as the additional note that the ship will return to London with tobacco, which, of course, had been raised and harvested by enslaved individuals.
It was one of the more tangible, evidentiary documents that connected Africa with America. It gave a real sense of that journey and what I think has been the iconic connection between the Gambia and Annapolis and Africa and America. Certainly, for my family, but also, spiritually, for many families whose ancestors from Africa were enslaved in North America.

It’s interesting to see people in Annapolis today engaging with the memorial statue of your uncle reading to children.
I grew up in D.C. and reading the book and then watching the miniseries, I don’t recall Annapolis ringing in my ears. I don’t think now Annapolis comes to mind in other parts of the nation. But for Annapolitans and Marylanders, the memorial has brought reflection about the story of Roots and Kunta Kinte, and has changed the way they understand the city.

It’s the country’s 250th anniversary, but it’s only more recently we’ve truly come to understand the role Annapolis, the state capital and briefly the American capital during the Revolutionary period, played in chattel slavery.
Absolutely. The memorial has become a major symbol in the city, a touchstone for any African-American march or celebration in Annapolis, which did not exist previously. It’s where Gov. Wes Moore started his walk to the State House when he was sworn in.

There was pushback when the memorial was first proposed. The then-Annapolis mayor opposed it. And there was vandalism when just the initial memorial plaque was put in place.
In 1981, when it’s first proposed, Roots was fresh in everyone’s mind, and I think Annapolis wanted to maintain this image of a quaint Colonial town, home to Maryland signers of the Declaration of Independence, etc. The mayor said something like, “Alex Haley isn’t from Annapolis.” An initial idea was to build a statue representing Kunta Kinte in chains, but that was shot down. It’s interesting, too, how history is fought over. There is a larger-than-life statue, Bunyan-esque, of my uncle in Knoxville, which is where he is from and returned to live. Same place that banned Roots earlier this year.

Along those lines, you recently visited Philadelphia to see firsthand where the National Park Service had dismantled slavery memorial plaques at the President’s House following a federal executive order. The exhibit detailed the lives of nine people enslaved by George Washington.
It was discouraging to see what happened. But encouraging to see people were openly fighting back, literally taping up print-out plaques in their place. This attempted erasure is right down from the Liberty Bell.

One impact Roots had was an explosion in Black genealogy. Suddenly, lines wrapped outside the National Archives, where research requests tripled. And now we have the long-running PBS show Finding Your Roots with historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.
It was encouraging that research could be done and it isn’t just about finding out your ancestry was enslaved—and that someone could diminish your existence because your ancestor was enslaved. Like no, “My ancestor was a hunter. My ancestor was a prince. My ancestor lived in this part of Africa.” It’s not just about what he was here in America. And whatever he was here in America, he was also skilled lumberman or skilled cobbler or skilled cook.

Roots reminded Black people that 1) You might be able to learn more about your ancestry than you think and 2) What you find is not something that you should be ashamed by.

We’d be remiss if we didn’t ask about the Legacy of Slavery in Maryland project, which you direct.
Initially, it was all about the Underground Railroad. Beyond that, the mission has become documenting and commemorating the lives of thousands of unknown individuals, both free and enslaved, Blacks and whites who were engaged in—for or against—the institution of slavery in Maryland. They are found in census records, other citations, including Maryland Penitentiary ledgers, but they are otherwise unknown to the world. A few even fought against slavery and went to jail for trying to help someone escape. My hope is to have all of them be identified. We have this database with over 500,000 references to individuals who are a part of this history of slavery in Maryland.

In this work, the tragic story of an enslaved Anne Arundel woman named Cinderella Brogden was uncovered. She was married to Abraham Brogden, a freedman who worked at a nearby plantation. In December 1848, her husband learned she was to be sold out of the area to pay off a debt and so together they fled to Baltimore, home to a large free Black population.

Caught before the runaway-slave ad made the newspaper, Abraham was sentenced to several years in prison for “enticing a slave to run away.” Returned to enslavement and then sold, Cinderella died before his release.
The story of Cinderella Brogden is now memorialized on a plaque outside of the Belvoir plantation. It’s one of my biggest satisfactions of the Legacy of Slavery program. We were mining everyone who was enslaved or was charged with aiding and abetting someone to escape, but not looking for this type of individual or that type of individual. The purpose of documentation is for other researchers to use—though we pick a few out to highlight because they tell a broader story. It’s the details that hit us and make her story universal.

At just 30, Catonsville’s Maeve Dunigan is a humorist, New Yorker contributing writer, and debut author. She majored in multiplatform journalism at the University of Maryland, but jokes that she spent more time than “anyone should” involved with the school’s sketch comedy group—which explains her recently published collection, a mixture of memoir and satire, Read This to Look Cool: Essays and Overthinkings.

Now residing in Brooklyn, New York, her work has also appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Reductress, the Mountain Gazette, and on NPR’s “Selected Shorts.” She co-hosts “Some Fun Lines,” a monthly open mic, and describes herself as a “proud world champion” of the fast-paced, low-stakes, comedy debate show, Abolish Everything.

Ultimately, Read This to Look Cool is an assemblage of coming-of-age stories. And why not? What’s funnier (in hindsight) than the awkward—trying to blend in and get noticed at the same time—years from junior high school to first job? Vulnerable and witty, this entertaining collection is hilarious at times and whimsical at others—and especially relatable for Gen Z and millennial readers.

In your opening essay, the description of the swimming pool where you worked as a lifeguard smelling “like Royal Farms fried chicken platters and Coppertone Sport sunscreen” is so funny and so suburban Maryland. And did moms really sneak airplane bottles of wine into the pool grounds?
[Laughs] I did genuinely find airplane bottles of liquor hidden in the women’s bathroom. You can only draw so many conclusions from that. If it’s children sneaking it in, that’s a bigger problem.

My favorite story is probably “McBurney’s Point,” where you pretend you are not having an appendicitis attack at a McDonald’s in order to project a laidback vibe with a friend who you haven’t seen in a while.
It was such a perfect encapsulation of me being the only person standing in my way, even when the stakes were, I mean, literally life or death. Like I, so stubbornly, wanted to maintain this air of being a girl who’s easygoing, carefree, a good hang, doesn’t flake on plans, that I was gritting my teeth through the worst pain of my life and just assuming things would be okay. Even now describing it, it sounds scary, but there is something funny about what that says about me.

Is there one essay in particular that friends or family have responded to?
Well, the Merriweather piece, “I Did This to Me,” [which chronicles a strangely religious and paranoid perception of Hozier during a concert after ingesting a seriously laced cookie]. The title is from a line in the 8th-grade health-class educational video mentioned in it, “Heroin Kills.” I’ve had a few people message me and say, “Oh my gosh, I completely forgot about that film, you’ve pulled a memory out of the recesses of my brain.” I’m always like, “Yeah, sorry about that.”

Let me ask about one of your New Yorker pieces. “What I Think Will Happen if I Go to a Bar and Order a Whiskey Neat” generated something like 1.5 million views on their website. Where did the inspiration for that spring forth?
I was out to dinner with my fiancé and it just hit me fully formed when I was ordering. It’s not necessarily a novel observation that people who order a whiskey neat seem really cool. But I thought how funny to play out that idea to the most ridiculous things I think could happen to someone who does that. I still think ordering a whiskey neat is cool, but I’ve never done it because I, unfortunately, think it tastes yucky.

You majored in journalism, which is interesting, because that’s essentially a writer pointing their focus outward. With memoir, and a lot of comedy, the focus is in pointing inward—to our often embarrassing internal responses to what is happening around us. Who have been your influences?
I pulled a David Sedaris collection off my parents’ bookshelf when I was 10 maybe, and read “Santaland Diaries.” I did not know writing could be that funny. I discovered and fell in love with the funny, personal essay immediately. Obviously, he’s up there. I think he’d be for any humor writer. One of my favorite all-time actress-comedians is Jenny Slate. She has written two books, and they’re both so funny, so smart, and so unique. Samantha Irby and her collections are so funny as well. I’d say those are three heavy hitters, inspiration-wise.

Your first writing—outside normal K-12 schoolwork—was One Direction fan fiction. In fact, that relates to your next book.
Yes. It’s a novel about a boy band that gets trapped at the top of a hotel by a horde of fans, and they start getting picked off, one by one, by a member who wants to be a solo artist. That’s next. It’s a genre that I’d describe as campy, funny, murder mystery.

Seventy years ago, in time for late back-to-school shoppers and early holiday bargain hunters, the shopping venue billed as the largest on the East Coast opened in Dundalk.

The strategically placed Eastpoint Shopping Center, a portmanteau of the intersecting arteries that distinguish its location (pictured above) opened with more than 60 retail shops, including popular Baltimore chains like Read’s Drug Store, Arundel Ice Cream, and Stieff Silver. Hutzler’s and Hochschild Kohn’s, whose histories on Howard and Lexington streets dated to the 19th century, provided anchor outlets. Spread over 60 acres, the complex included parking spaces for 4,000 automobiles.

Gov. Theodore McKeldin presided over opening ceremonies while 101-year-old Max Hochschild cut the ribbon at Hochschild-Kohn and Max’s 5-year-old grandson, James Hutzler, snipped the ribbon at Hutzler’s (the legendary department store dynasties intermarried). The excitement was such that Baltimore County police were called in to direct traffic and manage the throng of shoppers and sightseers, some of whom came merely to gaze at the modern marketplace.

With the suburbs burgeoning and downtown congestion and parking issues apparently intractable, “new shopping habits” were forming, a representative of developers Joseph and Jack Meyerhoff told The Baltimore Sun. They described the massive complex as an “expression of the continuing revolution in the pattern of daily life.”

In 1972, a roof was placed atop the shopping center and HVAC units, dropped by helicopter, transformed the outdoor site into the climate-controlled and renamed Eastpoint Mall—one more permutation in the pattern of daily life.

This June, however, store owners and vendors at Eastpoint received notice from mall owners MCB Real Estate—the same firm planning to replace the twin Harborplace shopping pavilions with condominiums—that the whole enterprise would be closing August 31.

“I’m surprised it’s lasted this long, to be honest,” says Wayne Laufert, a reporter and then-editor at the The Dundalk Eagle from 1986-2010, who still lives less than two miles away. “But it’s sad at the same time.”

To Laufert’s point, Eastpoint was always more than a shopping destination. From the outset, it also served as both community hub and cultural institution (of sorts). There were car shows; visits from Miss America, Captain Chesapeake, teen TV dance host Buddy Deane, and practically every Oriole and Colt for autograph sessions; and of course the traditional mall drop-ins by the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus.

More remarkably, and somewhat surreal in hindsight, Hochschild-Kohn, for years, featured a live penguin exhibit. Equally curious, Hess Shoes maintained a window display of monkeys. Once, actual reindeer were brought in for a holiday promotion. And, for a brief period, the mall’s indoor pond was stocked with trout for fishing. (Yes, there are photos of boys and dads proudly holding up their catch with the always-popular Great Cookie store in the background.)

By the 1980s, record stores like Sound Waves and fast-food additions like McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A helped make Eastpoint the quintessential teenage hang of the era. On a recent podcast of Nestor Aparicio’s “Baltimore Positive,” former Child’s Play drummer John Allen—both are Dundalk natives—compared his teenage Eastpoint experience to the mall in the movie, Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

“It was our social setting,” Aparicio added. “This was before [cell]phones. It was the only place you could find your friends.”

Laufert doesn’t recall the exhibit known as “Monkeytown” at Hess Shoes. He may have been too young. But he says, “I do remember the penguins at Hochschild’s.” As a teenager, he grew to appreciate the mall’s bookstores (he now sits on the Poe House board). Today, he mostly visits to get his steps in on rainy or hot summer days. Occasionally, he grabs a pretzel from Auntie Anne’s, which remain hard to resist.

In light of its closing, Laufert reflects on what Eastpoint became for him over the years—an adventure as a kid, later a chance to chat up the girl next door who worked at a jewelry counter. Then, a shopping errand with his wife—and now his alternative treadmill.

The inevitability of the last few years, watching stores close and get boarded up, witnessing the decline in foot traffic, never quite set in.

“It’s just something you don’t think about ever going away even as the reality of the last several years should’ve sunk in,” he says. “It’s 70 years old. The metaphor to the human lifespan is pretty direct. Birth, adolescence, middle age, old age, and now death, is it?”

Akio Evans always made things. Not always legal things. In his late teens he made fake checks, drivers’ licenses, fake MTA bus passes, and Department of Motor Vehicles registration stickers. He was already dealing with a state investigation by the time federal agents raided his house and took his computer in 2004. They believed he wanted to print phony money. A false assumption in this instance. The dollar bill images he had downloaded? Only intended to be part of his fashion designs, which he’d iron onto jackets or jeans.

“It was no different than that movie with Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks, Catch Me If You Can,” the irrepressible, now-42-year-old multidisciplinary artist says. “When you’re a young man raised by a single parent, you don’t always have guidance. People that you’re around, they know that you make things, they’re like, ‘Oh, I wonder what else you can do?’ By the time the feds caught up with me, I’d been able to catch on with my clothes, and I only wanted to make clothes.”

Hustling custom T-shirts and hoodies outside storefronts from Baltimore to Phoenix to Spokane while on the run using mall bathroom diaper stations as his studio during a homeless period—Evans jokes he had “warrants, not a peddler’s license.” Eventually, he returned home to face the music when a federal agent told him that he’d cut him a break if he went straight, which he did.

In the meantime, he taught himself how shoot and edit videos before returning to fashion, collage, and painting. In particular, he discovered a medium in high-tops, telling stories with what he calls his “wearable artifacts.”

Ironically, it was Felicia “Snoop” Pearson who helped jump-start his career. He had met her during the filming of The Wire, and she had encouraged him to pursue custom shoe design. When she shared images of his sneakers on her Instagram page, the post went viral. The late Michael K. Williams, aka “Omar,” was the first to insist Evans sign his collectible shoes.

Ever since, he’s remained a highly sought-after “shoe muralist ” among other titles, creating personalized, themed footwear for stars like Spike Lee, Dave Chappelle, Dr. Dre, Kevin Hart, and Carmelo Anthony. If his shoes get worn at all today, it’s on red carpets and for special occasions.

Showcases this year include a pop-up exhibition at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum during Artscape and a dual exhibition with his twin sister, Keila Evans, a Baltimore art teacher, at the Quid Nunc Art Gallery in Mount Vernon.

Both credit their mother, Glorious Taylor, who died of a heart attack in 2012, with introducing them to art and Black history while they were growing up. (Evans’ Station North home is both a studio and mini pop-culture museum today, filled with Isaac Hayes records, memoirs from Black writers, Marvel action figures, and his own work.) In fact, he learned to cut fabric and use his mother’s sewing equipment to craft his own designer clothes when the family couldn’t afford the latest brand names to wear to school.

Of his own paintings, his favorite is a re-creation of a photograph with his mother and two sisters taken at the 1993 AFRAM Expo festival. “It’s the only one I have of all of us,” he says. “When we were young, before my mother started making more money, we got evicted and we moved a lot and when that happens as a kid, you’re told you can only bring what you can carry and you leave a lot behind, including toys and stuff that’s meaningful.”

Learning to make something out of nothing, he says, became second nature.

In recent years, he’s been busy making custom-designed apparel and collectibles for films, television shows, and brands, including Charm City Kings, We Own This City, Ironheart, and Amazon music. This year, he was commissioned to design tote bags for the 50th anniversary of AFRAM.

He’s also working on a film about how Baltimore saved Nike’s Air Force 1s and sells Harriet Tubman-themed prints and apparel via his website. He has received citations from Baltimore City and the Maryland General Assembly for his work with local youth.

“Twenty years ago, I used to sell stuff out of my bag, at yard sales, and I had Dave Chappelle and DMX and images of other celebrities and rappers on my clothes,” Evans says. “And you know what a friend recently asked me? ‘Do you realize that every [celebrity] who you put on your clothes when you were struggling, you later wound up meeting them in person?’ I mean, I’ve been at this a long time and there are a lot of layers in that.”

No one in Baltimore needed an explanation why a teary-eyed and emotional Michael Phelps, who had just won his 20th gold medal, suddenly burst into laughter atop the podium at the 2016 Rio Olympics. But the rest of the world did.

What was so funny? This is how he explained it to NBC afterward: My boys from Baltimore were down on the other end, and back in Maryland, we all say “O!” for the Orioles during that part of the National Anthem. And all of the sudden I hear them roar “O!” and I knew exactly where it came from, and I just lost it…

Anyone who has ever attended Camden Yards or M&T Bank Stadium—or run in the St. Patrick’s Day 5K, for that matter—is familiar with Baltimoreans shouting “O!” at sporting events in tribute to our beloved Birds during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” But most probably do not know the tradition’s origin story.

It dates, not surprisingly, to the rowdy, it’s-not-over-until-it’s-over summer of 1979. Sparked by a league-leading 48 come-from-behind victories, the Orioles topped all of baseball that year with 102 victories. On 11 occasions, they won after trailing by least three runs. Those O’s also delivered five ninth inning rallies, including a special night on June 22 when Doug DeCinces blasted a two-out, two-run, walk-off homer that sent Memorial Stadium into delirium and launched a phenomenon officially coined “Orioles Magic.”

However, the untold story behind shouting “O!” during the National Anthem did not emerge until many years later. Not until Memorial Stadium’s legendary Section 34 diehards gathered for a reunion after superfan Wild Bill Hagy passed away in 2007.

A local reporter began inquiring how it all started and the Section 34ers pointed the finger at a blonde, 5-foot-2, then-24-year-old Northern High School grad who rarely missed a game. Now 70 and still a diehard, Mary Powers spontaneously yelled “O!” during the first word of the second-to-last line—as in, “O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave”—completely upsetting the normally solemn hush of the moment. And literally upsetting some patriotic fans in the upper deck around her.

“It was warm that night and I’m pretty sure it was a Friday because there was a big crowd,” recalls Powers, a retired financial services assistant. “A lot of people turned and shot me dirty looks, you know, they didn’t think it was appropriate.”

A local reporter began inquiring how it all started, and the Section 34ers pointed the finger at a blonde, 5-foot-2, then-24-year-old Northern High School grad who rarely missed a game.

One person who did not shoot Powers a dirty look was Hagy, the beer-guzzling, cowboy-hatted Dundalk cab driver famous for leading the O-R-I-O-L-E-S cheers from his Section 34 perch. He glanced back at Powers and smiled.

So did a crazy, then-26-year-old fan named Marty Bass, who confirmed this account shortly before retiring last month after a singular 48-year Baltimore broadcasting career.

“Mary was standing right behind me when I heard her scream ‘O!,’” reiterates Bass, who remains friends with Powers to this day and eventually got her on camera a few years ago to recount the saga.

“We knew Marty as the morning TV guy, but nobody ever treated him any differently than anyone else,” Powers says. “Just one of the group.”

She adds that before most games, she, Bass, and much of the Section 34 crew would pregame nearby at Waverly’s Olympic Lounge, which put out a big deli buffet, especially for the late 8:05 Friday starts. As The Washington Post once noted, not only Memorial Stadium but Waverly itself was colorful—“an interesting mix of working-class blacks, aging socialists, artists, retirees and renovating couples”—with not one but two sports bars just north of 33rd Street and Greenmount, the Olympic Lounge and the Stadium Lounge.

Powers explains the inspiration behind her now‑iconic slice of Baltimore history wasn’t anything she’d thought about beforehand. That summer, she and her baseball pals had simply gotten into the habit of accentuating the “O” at the start of all kinds of words— “O”-ver, “O”-nly, “O”-lympic Lounge, etc.—a jokey way of celebrating the team’s rebound from fourth place the year prior.

Hagy picked up on it the next night and slowly but surely it moved from section to section to the point where it could be heard during broadcasts that fall of the World Series (the results of which will not be discussed here).

Of course, it’s coincidental the pronunciation of “O” is a signature feature of Bawlmerese and that “The Star-Spangled Banner” was penned under bombardment in the city’s historic harbor.

Over time, yelling “O!” didn’t merely catch on, it morphed into a uniquely Baltimore statement of hometown pride.

“But don’t overthink it,” Bass says, winkingly. “It was, and is, just a little fun thing we do.”

“Oh, as a kid, it was so exciting, with military units, cheerleaders and marching bands, rockets being pulled down the street,” says City archivist Rob Schoeberlein, recalling Baltimore’s long-running “I Am An American Day” parade. “Of course, at 4 or 5 years old, I’m attracted to the vendors and their carts that keep coming by, selling plastic swords, tiny flags, and these balloons that are five- or six-feet high in the air. You never saw so many people as you did at those parades.”

Begun in Baltimore in 1938 with Gen. Douglas MacArthur as the first grand marshall, the “I Am An American Day” parade became an annual celebration of naturalized citizens and the city’s biggest social and political event over the next 50 years. In 1945, a likeness of Hitler was hung in effigy and presented to Mayor Theodore McKeldin. In 1947, some 4,000 newly naturalized refugees, many from war-torn Europe, sat together in Patterson Park as the parade’s guests of honor.

At its height, the four-hour spectacle included more than 25,000 participants and 125 marching bands and drew patriotic crowds estimated at 250,000 and more. Launching from St. Patrick’s Church on East Broadway, the traditional route proceeded down Bank Street to Patterson Park, culminating in a fireworks display and a U.S. citizenship Oath of Allegiance ceremony. In other words, picture lawn chairs, Formstone rowhouses, Old Glory hanging from the windows, and stoops and sidewalks packed six deep with children, parents, and grandparents waving miniature American flags.

Parade marshals read like a “Who’s Who” of 20th-century American pop culture. Milton Berle served as a grand marshal in 1963. Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour, and Fess Parker in 1964. In 1977, Johnny Unitas led a parade that included Sugar Ray Leonard, Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster, Bozo the Clown, and Captain Chesapeake. Brooks Robinson headlined the following year, alongside the Philadelphia Mummers and an Elvis tribute float.

In 1940, at the behest of publishing mogul William Randolph Hearst, Congress had officially named the third Sunday in May “I Am An American Day” to honor immigrants who had received U.S. citizenship. Some 1,600 annual events took place around the country by 1945 but enthusiasm quickly subsided after World War II—except in Baltimore.

From the start, parade participants formed a wide swath of new and longtime residents, including Czech, Lithuanian, Russian, Polish, and Chinese immigrant groups, often in Old World costume, as well as Native American representatives and Black veterans.

Over the years, the parade also became a moving microcosm of personal and global politics. In 1986, a 5-year-old, hearing-impaired boy adopted from Korea and a 6-year-old adopted girl from Colombia became U.S. citizens, doing their best, respectively, to sign and repeat the Oath of Allegiance. Other naturalized citizens that year included immigrants from Pakistan, the Dominican Republic, and a Ukrainian Jewish family, who had fled the Soviet Union a dozen years earlier.

In 1991, the I Am An American Day naturalization ceremony included a 19-year-old Vietnam immigrant, a 22-year-old from El Salvador, and a 69-year-old Jamaican-born woman, among the 19 countries represented. A 21-year-old Palestinian woman, a refugee like her 60-year-old mother, said U.S. citizenship meant they could now “travel freely through the Middle East and cross into the occupied territories of Israel without being strip-searched.”

The same year, Kondi Poulimenakos, a 16-year-old Sparta native and Greektown resident, earned “Loyalty Day Queen” honors by answering 21 questions about the American flag. Three years later, however, city fees and a lack of funding pushed the parade to Dundalk before its ultimate demise.

“My busia lived on Bank Street, the same block as Holy Rosary Church,” says Schoeberlein (see above photo). To this day, Mass is said in Polish and Ostrowski of Bank Street still makes homemade Polish sausage in the neighborhood once known as Little Poland.

“My grandmother’s rowhouse even had a painted screen, the classic cottage and swans,” Schoeberlein says, adding that his maternal grandparents never actually naturalized, but nonetheless got along fine in their unofficially adopted country. “It needs to be refurbished, but I have the slatted wooden bench that sat beneath my grandmother’s window. I also have my grandmother’s knife from when she worked in a cannery. And I have the animal horn she used in her sausage-making process.

“We have home movies of the parade from ’63,” he continues. “It was drizzling that day, and you see a guy wearing a straw hat in a Model-T who looked like but wasn’t Buster Keaton, and ‘Pete the Pirate’ from the WBAL-TV show, which I loved as a kid, and then there’s my grandmother, and my father in a jacket and tie, probably because it was Sunday and he’d come from church, beneath an umbrella.”

The Revolutionary War is remembered as a fight won by Americans who had the nerve to ignore the edicts of King George III, dump British tea into the Boston Harbor, and go toe-to-toe with the world’s greatest military power. But it was larger than just the 13 colonies’ battle for independence. The war was also a full-throttle global conflict, as other European empires, namely France, Spain, and the Dutch Republic, assisted the American cause and challenged British dominance across North America, the Caribbean, and India.

In fact, it is very unlikely the Americans would’ve prevailed without their allies. The French and Spanish, in particular, forced England to divert military resources away from America to defend their empire. They provided foreign financing and credit as well, bankrolling much of the eight-year campaign.

In The American Revolution and the Fate of the World, University of Maryland historian Richard Bell, British-born coincidentally, reevaluates our understanding of the Revolution. Not just the global nature of the conflict, but that here at home it was, in fact, a civil war, with African-Americans and Native Americans fighting on both sides. It’s a must read for those who want to expand and deepen their understanding of American history.

A good place to start is the framing of the Revolution as America’s first civil war. Not just because the Founding Fathers were British citizens, but because most Americans weren’t on board initially.
There wasn’t the polling we do today, but the best estimates are 40 percent of white residents [in America] would’ve been considered patriots, maybe 40 percent neutral—think of them as today’s swing voters—and 20 percent strongly loyal to England.

And there was a great propaganda battle. Today’s conspiracy theories are not exactly a novel political tactic.
There’s a fierce battle waged by patriot writers and loyalist writers to win the hearts and minds of those who are neutral at the start. Writers like Paul Revere and Samuel Adams try to persuade them to adopt George Washington’s side and maybe even pick up arms. Patriots try to convince their fellow colonists that British East India Company tea has been packed down into chests by Chinese warehouse men with filthy feet. . . . [Meanwhile] loyalists are weaponizing their fellow colonists’ fear of foreigners by spreading ugly, untrue rumors that the arriving French Catholic soldiers have orders to persecute American Protestants, steal their lands for King Louis of France, and even ban the speaking of English in America.

Everything considered, Harry Washington might have the most compelling personal saga in the book.
What I like about the remarkable life of Harry Washington, who, at one time, was enslaved to George Washington, is that both have their own way of pursuing ideas of liberty. For George Washington, that means liberty from the control of the British government, and it has to do with land, trade, and political power. For Harry, it’s freedom from slavery, most immediately, and then all that comes after that in terms of seeking self-determination, civil rights, and political power. It’s a journey that takes him from revolutionary America to British Canada, and then to Sierra Leone in West Africa.

We’re also reminded the Revolutionary War, like nearly every war, was not good for the American or British economy.
The war was an economic disaster for almost everyone involved, on every side. The British economy was ruined by the suspension of trade with its biggest customers in America. The economies of the 13 rebel colonies completely collapsed when trade was cut off with their biggest trading partner, the British Empire, including Canada and the Caribbean. It’s calamitous. Shipping is halted, which creates huge shortages, price hikes, and hyperinflation. People lose their jobs. Companies go out of business.

On both sides of the Atlantic, that puts enormous pressure on politicians to end the war. In Britain, those economic concerns drive numerous peace petitions sent to Parliament and to the king by ordinary hard-up British people, who want this economic hardship over as quickly as possible.

What does Thomas Paine mean in 1776 when he declares Americans “have it in our power to begin the world over again?”
He’s encouraging readers to take the leap, to embrace the cause of independence, to fight this war and win it, because as humans we all have extraordinary amounts of political power and agency. When we work together, we can do great things. He’s also noting that for a group of rebel colonies to break away from an empire in the 18th century would be unprecedented and send a signal around the world that the king’s control over his colonies is neither permanent nor invincible. That such an example could reshape the modern world, and it has, right? There have been loads of revolutions in the wake of the American Revolution.

As he did every night, Eddy Crane had called his wife to let her know he was leaving the trucking company that he co-owned in Curtis Bay and would be home soon. But he never did come home that night—and he was never seen again.

Kate Crane had just started eighth grade when her father went missing in 1987. Whether it was intuition or fear, she immediately thought the worst—that her father was gone forever, dead.

In the ensuing years, her mother and family never talked about the police investigation, the unsolved mystery, or her father. Twenty years after his disappearance, and unable to cope with the unresolved trauma any longer, the former journalist went searching for answers and healing.

After nearly two decades of research and writing, Whatever Happened to Eddy Crane? is less a true crime story and more a heart-rending narrative of Crane’s journey into his disappearance, her close relationship with her father, and her unfathomable loss.

There are no easy answers in this elegantly crafted book. It is, however, a memoir that will speak to anyone who has suffered loss and wrestled with grief.

One surreal thing about your father’s disappearance is that it’s mentioned in Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire. David Simon covered the story at The Sun. That he had not forgotten your father, ultimately, meant a lot.
I was so mad when that Homicide episode came out [fictionalizing my father’s story]. But as the years passed, living in New York, I felt very alone with what had happened, even though I knew it was not the most important thing that ever happened in the world. The timing behind The Wire was a totally different reaction. By then, I thought everyone had forgotten my father.

Your father’s name also became a shorthand for Baltimore detectives when they had a strong suspect but couldn’t bring a case because they didn’t have a body.
Yes, in that era…the timing of The Wire episode was in the same two-week period that I had my first conversation on the phone with [detective] Donald Worden. He said, “That’s not a murder [technically], that’s a missing persons case. I just had the folder out the other day.” Between those two things, the Earth shifted.

Setting out, was writing this book an obligation you felt to you father? Were you seeking justice? Or catharsis?
I didn’t know all the things this book would be at the beginning, all I knew was I can’t take this anymore. I had to do something. Well, what can I do? I’m a moderately legitimate writer at this point. I’ve got these Wall Street Journal experiences and with the alt-weekly New York Press. [The podcast] Serial had not come out, but I already had an aversion to the true crime thing. I didn’t want to pretend I’m a detective. I’ll just start down this path and, yes, to the word catharsis. I do think the project has a cathartic quality.

Eighteen years is a long time on one book.
As time passed, what I realized was the book and I were creating each other. It was the center of my life. I became deeply appreciative of the alchemy of it. I took this thing that was too painful to bear, and I turned it into art. The one thing I’d like people to come away with is the idea we all have some creative capacity. Whether it’s music, photography, painting, or writing, it’s a way to work with the things that we’re afraid of, a way to work with pain. From the time I was a teeny-tiny kid, I loved books more than anything.

Your father, we learn, was a complicated guy. He’d been arrested. He was in business with shady characters, but he was also a sensitive man who appreciated music and photography—and loved his family. It’s a difficult story at times, but always artfully told.
I realized if I didn’t have the skills to do it right, I’d have to walk away because there’s so much to this [to tell]. And my family did not want anything to do with it. At the very least, if I was going kick up pain for family members, I wanted it to be a very solid book.

Has your mother read the book?
As far as I know, she has not read it.

Anabel should be more tired than she looks sitting in the former convent that houses the nonprofit Asylee Women Enterprise (AWE). She has not slept since working the night shift at a nearby fast-food restaurant, yet she is composed and pulled together, dressed in a crisp white blouse and black slacks.

She put off sleep this morning to talk about the critical help—“life changing” she has received from the organization. A trans woman in her 30s, she fled her Central American homeland for Mexico and then, in search of safety, health care, and economic opportunity, the United States. (Her legal name and country of origin have been withheld to protect her identity.)

With tías y primos (aunts and cousins) in Maryland, she made her way to Baltimore, which, she’d heard, “had a friendly culture and jobs,” and to AWE, which she’d learned about from a healthcare worker.

One of her primary needs was legal representation. Asylum applications must be submitted to court within the first year of arrival in the U.S. and typically require a lawyer and supporting evidence such as medical reports, which may indicate physical abuse or trauma, to be successful. Other immediate needs included the survival basics like food and housing. Asylum seekers are not eligible for SNAP benefits, public housing, or Medicaid. They also can’t apply for a work permit until six months after receipt of their asylum application. The Asylee Women Enterprise team helped arrange all this and more, including therapy.

“The staff helped me get the health care I needed, and professional psychological help, too,” Anabel says with a smile. “Being psychologically healthy, it’s important for a transgender woman if we are going to work and re-integrate into society.”

Her English is also coming along, with the help of twice-weekly English classes at AWE and the Google Translate app on her phone. With the help of an interpreter, she explains challenges remain, however. Like navigating the city’s disjointed public transportation system and the asylum process, which is becoming more problematic seemingly by the day.

Meanwhile, she closely follows the news around the Trump Administration’s controversial immigration policies and practices—the warrantless searches, the masked ICE street arrests, and the sudden revocations of legal status for asylum seekers like herself.

“The laws,” she says, “should be respected by immigrants, asylum seekers, and the federal government.”

Still, she is grateful for the assistance she has experienced over the past two years, and tries to take things one day at time.

“Baltimore is a welcoming city, and it has given me a life,” she says, welling up a bit while adding how much she enjoys Eastern Avenue’s restaurants and coffee shops, and the city’s parks and book kiosks. “I like to walk and to just sit in Patterson Park and read a free book. I love reading.”

As for long-term plans, those are on hold, she says. The future is too difficult to ponder, given the current level of chaos and uncertainty.

“We do bring goals and we do have big dreams when we come to this country,” Anabel says. “But thinking five years or 10 years ahead, it’s not possible to think like that anymore.”

The Asylee Women Enterprise in northeast Baltimore was founded 15 years ago to support people who have been forced to leave their countries—asylum seekers, foreign-born trafficking survivors, and other forced migrants—as they rebuild their lives in Maryland. The origin story of the nonprofit is almost biblical.

In 2011, just after Christmas, a young Afghan woman, who had been forced to flee her country, was eight months pregnant and homeless, in desperate need of a safe place to stay. Molly Corbett, then a consultant with the Benedictine Sisters of Baltimore County and later the founder of AWE, received a phone call about the situation and reached out to the sisters, who agreed to take the woman in temporarily at their Emmanuel Monastery on West Joppa Road. When she went into early labor on January 6—the traditional feast day of the Epiphany in the Catholic Church—Mercy Hospital took care of her and her baby, and the new family returned to the Benedictines, who re-welcomed the new mom and helped look after her son.

After learning there were more asylum seekers needing help, Corbett began coordinating with other religious communities to offer housing, medical resources, and support.

From that experience, AWE, which still has ties to the Catholic community but operates as a secular 501(c)3 and serves people of all faiths and genders, was born. By 2018, the nonprofit assisted 100 asylum seekers annually. In 2025, more than 325 asylum seekers and trafficking survivors from 40 different countries came through its doors and received intensive case management support.

Through AWE and its partners—including the Intercultural Counseling Connection and HEAL (the refugee health and asylum collaborative), based at Johns Hopkins University—individuals receive holistic services, including legal, medical, and mental health services, often on-site.  Many attend AWE language classes. Nearly 50 youth attend the organization’s peer support groups. AWE also provides transitional housing, a daily food bank, and hosts a Tuesday and Thursday hot lunch program with staff at the former St. Anthony’s Convent in Frankford.

Meanwhile, the organization is still in contact with the young mother and son who inspired its founding. (Note: AWE is searching for a new location. Earlier this year, the Archdiocese of Baltimore sold the former convent they lease to the Baltimore International Academy school.)

Even so, after 15 years, the need far outpaces AWE’s resources. In Maryland, tens of thousands of asylum applications are backlogged, with many Baltimore residents traversing the years-long process without legal representation—a process that has become increasingly fraught since Donald Trump returned to office.

“We have a client who ICE recently contacted and said, ‘We’re going to deport you to Uganda,’” says Laura Brown, AWE’s executive director since 2022. “Normally, you might receive a letter that gives you 30 days to respond [to a request or order]. But they said, ‘You have 10 days to explain why you shouldn’t be deported to Uganda, and then we’ll make a final decision.’ So, we prepared a detailed response explaining her children can’t receive the medical care they need in Uganda. That she’s a single woman. That she’s never been to Uganda, and she doesn’t know anyone in Uganda. Her deportation has since been upheld, which we’re appealing.”

“We have a client who ICE recently contacted and said, ‘We’re going to deport you to Uganda…You have 10 days to explain why you shouldn’t be deported, and then we’ll make a final decision.’

“So, we prepared a detailed response explaining her children can’t receive the medical care they need in Uganda. That she’s a single woman. That she’s never been to Uganda, and she doesn’t know anyone in Uganda. Her deportation has since been upheld, which we’re appealing.”

The aggressive expansion of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—now the highest-funded law-enforcement agency in the U.S. after a $75-billion supplement allocation in the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill”—has been widely reported. So too has the surge in arrests, documented through cell-phone footage and nightly news coverage. Even with a recent slowdown in arrests since immigration agents shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January, the statistics remain staggering. According to Freedom of Information Act documents obtained by the Deportation Data Project, ICE averaged roughly 7,000 arrests a week in the six weeks following Pretti’s death. Roughly 5 to 7 percent have a violent criminal record.

After witnessing the ramped up racial profiling and street arrests in Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, and other cities, the immigrant community and their supporters in Baltimore have been holding their breath in anticipation of an ICE build up here. Those concerns only grew after the Department of Homeland Security purchased an 825,000-square-foot warehouse near Hagerstown with plans to convert it into a detention facility capable of holding up to 1,500 people. It’s part of what acting ICE director Todd Lyons called an attempt to run deportations like “Amazon Prime for human beings.”

Shortly after the $102-million purchase and subsequent $113-million contract to build out and operate that facility, ICE opened a new Hunt Valley office for its attorneys. (The Hagerstown area project is currently on pause after a lawsuit brought by the ACLU of Maryland.) Even without the warehouse, the city and state have already witnessed an exponential jump in immigration arrests. Federal immigration agents made more than 4,800 arrests in Maryland in the first year of Trump’s second term—more than triple the previous year.

Meanwhile, asylum seekers, like those supported by AWE, also face an extraordinary, if quieter, crackdown. The Trump Administration’s overhaul of the immigration courts has been far less public than the deportation raids. More than 100 immigration judges, many with higher asylum approval rates, have been dismissed, an unprecendented purge. Dozens more have retired or resigned. More than 140 new judges have been appointed, many with limited or no immigration law experience and less training than their predecessors. Under a new directive, judges are increasingly denying bond hearings and dismissing cases at the federal government’s request so that defendants can be arrested. Overall, the new judges are granting asylum much more sparingly—in just 6 percent of cases, according to a New York Times report. Even prior to the recent order, asylum rejections doubled from 2024 to 2025.

In other words, immigration courts are now ending some cases before asylum seekers receive a full hearing—as in the sudden deportation threat of the AWE client to Uganda—a policy change known as “pretermission.” Additionally, extended visas and immigration is on pause from nearly 40 countries deemed “high risk,” mostly South American, Caribbean, Middle Eastern, and African nations.

Another new proposed rule would make it impossible for new asylum seekers to apply for a work permit and make work permit renewals more difficult.

“There have been a lot of changes to the asylum legal system and the deportations that go through that system in the last couple of months,” says Brown. “The increased ICE presence, what the country sees in the streets here and elsewhere, what we saw in Minneapolis, is the visible representation of what we are seeing behind the scenes, but the public doesn’t see.”

Acting ICE director Ted Lyons wants to run deportations like “Amazon Prime for human beings.”

For asylum seekers in Baltimore, the result is near-constant anxiety. Most are required to wear ankle monitors and many dread leaving their homes or missing a letter, email, or phone message from ICE, which could be recorded as noncompliance. Showing up for previously routine check-ins at the ICE field office at Hopkins Plaza has become particularly terrifying.

One AWE client, who attends college, says they carry their immigration, personal, and medical documents everywhere, fearing detention at any moment. If they are riding a bus and see someone with their face partially covered, they sometimes get off early, afraid the individual may work for ICE, and wait for the next bus.

Another AWE client describes the toll of lleaving her 5-year-old child behind when she reports to her ICE appointments. “She asks what will happen if I get detained,” the woman recently shared in an AWE blog post. “She asks if she will have to stay with her grandma and she says, ‘I don’t want that! I want to be with you, Mama!’ Five years old is too young. It is too hard for her to bear that she might lose me.”

In this volatile environment, AWE and its partners continue their work. The Intercultural Counseling Connection, for example, provides specialized mental health care to AWE and other Maryland asylum seekers—a significant number of whom have experienced sex and labor trafficking, political persecution, incarceration, torture, and gender-based violence, including genital mutilation.

Regardless of any desire of returning home, it is simply not an option for most, says Caitlin Tromiczak, the program director for the nonprofit. Many clients have left families behind who may be in hiding because the government or another party that was persecuting them may still be looking for the now-asylum seeker.

“We have journalists, religious leaders, and political activists who are clients and others who may be leaving an abusive situation, which could be in their own family, due to their sexual orientation or something else,” Tromiczak says. “Some people come on a temporary visa and maybe flew in a plane and were greeted by family or friends. But other people crossed borders on foot, and there’s trauma that can happen on that journey, including getting detained. Just going through the legal process and restarting your life, that can also bring up deep trauma.”

Individual and group therapy sessions often focus on immediate struggles, such as eating, anxiety, and sleeping issues, as well as man- aging emotions, nightmares, flashbacks, and memories. Often there is difficulty in building trust after experiencing something like torture.

“We do a lot of deep trauma processing, but then with other people, they’ll say, ‘I just want to talk about how I can sleep better,’” Tromiczak says. “Or, ‘I don’t have the capacity to go through all of my traumatic memories—what I need to be able to do is sit down with my lawyer and recount my story, or I need to focus at work without getting lost in my memories.’”

HEAL, meanwhile, provides primary care, mental health, women’s health, and pro bono forensic medical evaluations to AWE clients. Such evaluations, which include physical and psychological components, can objectively document a client’s torture, persecution, or other ill treatment and corroborate their claim for legal protection. Afterward, HEAL generates a legal affidavit, which outlines the findings from the interview and examination. Forensic reports hold great weight in court and clients who submit them are more likely to be granted asylum or other types of immigration relief. HEAL also works with interpreters, who provide additional cultural understanding around basic care and health norms, notes Dr. C. Nicholas Cuneo, HEAL’s executive director.

“The last thing you want is to do is pigeonhole clients or bring bias into the interaction, he says. “The adjudication process is more adversarial across all elements of the asylum process, and we’ve encountered that,” he adds. “The affidavits we produce employ international consensus guidelines and we know that they are still having an impact even as the legal process gets more challenging.”

Rasha Elmahdi (pictured in the opening photo above) serves as the Asylee Women Enterprise’s policy, advocacy, and health specialist. One of her roles is to coordinate between AWE clients and HEAL and their JHU-based medical staff and volunteer medical students. A former asylum seeker herself, originally from Sudan, and a naturalized citizen, she arrived in the U.S. with more than 15 years of experience in international development, including leading global initiatives around population and development with a focus on peace and democracy, public health, gender inequality, and migration.

“Coming to the U.S. was a difficult situation [in terms of work]—organizations here wouldn’t accept me,” Elmahdi says. “I was not getting offered entry-level positions because I was 40, and they were not offering more senior positions because they’re not recognizing my credentials. It is preconceptions you’re up against, sometimes because of your accent. I’d been to the U.S. many times previously, but then I was here 10 years [after seeking asylum] before I got anything in my field. I was substitute teaching.”

Though her background in Sudan was in policy, she has come to appreciate her more hands-on work with asylum seekers. As a Muslim and mother of a U.S.-born teenager, her own daily  experience can still be difficult even as a U.S. citizen. She and her son are often treated as outsiders, she says. Seven years after taking the oath of citizenship, and after earning two more degrees in the U.S., she still carries her naturalization certificate in her purse.

“I do see myself in our clients,” she says, adding that AWE feels more like a community than a job. “Just yesterday, I received a text message from my first client here, a Spanish-speaking woman, about getting something to eat together. We are just friends now.”

Elmahdi notes that her role has changed since she started at AWE, when she served in a more housing-focused capacity, but not her purpose.

“Whatever your role is here, a case manager or not,” she says, “if there is a need, you do whatever you can because we are working with human beings.”

The story of the Civil Rights Movement has centered around the struggle to end legal segregation, voter suppression, and housing discrimination. For good reason, of course. That long fight culminated in landmark victories in the Supreme Court and legislation in Congress ended the system of laws, social practices, and economic restrictions that enforced an apartheid system in the United States.

The Civil Rights Movement’s battle against police abuse, however, has been largely overlooked. Often, we think of those in the Civil Rights Movement as victims of law enforcement misconduct and violence. But in Police Against the Movement, University of Baltimore history professor Joshua Clark Davis reframes that narrative, presenting evidence that the movement tackled police injustice head-on, offering insight into the power of political resistance in the face of government and law enforcement attacks on protest.

Police Against the Movement shows how early civil rights activists set the stage for the Black Lives Matter movement and adds important context to the intimidation, violence, and tragic recent events involving ICE’s ongoing treatment of U.S. residents and activists today.

What prompted you to revisit the Civil Rights era?
I started in 2017 when Black Lives Matter was on the rise. In my previous book, From Head Shops to Whole Foods, I had researched FBI surveillance of Black-owned bookstores. The other thing was, many journalists and commentators were describing BLM as something completely new. Or they’d say BLM [picks up] where the Civil Rights Movement ended or this is the Civil Rights Movement 2.0.

And in Police Against the Movement, you document how the Civil Rights Movement was also calling out and fighting police violence and injustice.
We’ve all seen the horrific footage from Selma, from Birmingham. Those [violent] images are some of the most prominent images of the Civil Rights Movement. The question to me was, “How did the Civil Rights Movement respond to police violence?” You can point back to the Black Panther Party [as far as standing up to police abuse], but what about before the Black Panthers? I learned there was this incredible record of protests and demonstrations at precinct stations, inside police headquarters, campaigns against surveillance, campaigns to monitor and observe the police even before the Black Panther Party had started doing that.

One incredible anecdote about Baltimore, is that police here trained the police attack dogs used in Birmingham.
Yes, and I also wrote a whole side piece for Slate on that a few years ago. Basically, Baltimore’s police department pioneered the canine unit and were evangelical in their zeal to spread the idea to other departments.

Can you explain what you mean by the term “slow violence?”
Slow violence describes non-physical forms of harm carried out by the state that are slow in their execution and their effect. When we think of violence against the movement, we think of billy clubs, beatings, and attack dogs. But we are missing a big piece of the picture because we haven’t adequately considered that local police all over the country, not just the FBI, were inflicting surveillance on civil rights activists, bringing fabricated charges, and specious, trumped-up felony indictments that not only put them in jail, but carried the threat of prison. They carried out forms of character assassination that got people fired from jobs. These things were geared toward political intimidation and chilling political speech. So, slow violence is this umbrella term that covers more sophisticated trickery.

One of the more interesting things you document is these police behaviors against political activists predates the FBI. It begins with local detective “Red Squads” surveilling Socialists, unionists, and Communists in the early 1900s.
Baltimore had one called the Inspectional Services Division. Part of why there isn’t more Baltimore in this book is that it appears the vast majority of records from Baltimore’s Red Squad don’t exist or have been lost or have been destroyed. The only copies I’ve seen show up in an FBI file. So, Baltimore was no exception to this. Every single city had a Red Squad. Some people thought of them as little FBIs. They were political intelligence units designed to ferret out political radicals, though they rarely admitted that out loud after the 1950s. They often said they were concerned with organized crime, but political radicals were their focus.

Part of why they are so important to the story is that they’re the main way police attack civil rights activists, especially outside of the Deep South. Most police departments in the United States realized by the mid-1960s that it was not really going to work to flagrantly, unapologetically brutalize civil rights protesters on camera. They thought, “We’re going have to come up with more sophisticated ways to undermine them and sabotage them.”

Photojournalist Martha Cooper has always been fearless, indefatigable, and intuitive. Now in her 80s, she is best known for her documentation of New York City’s graffiti culture of the 1970s and 1980s and, specifically, the 1984 book she co-authored, Subway Art, which became a foundational text for street art globally.

Twenty years ago, casting about for a project, she came home to Baltimore. She knew the city well. Growing up, she had been influenced by her father, who ran Cooper’s Camera Mart on Harford Road with his brother, and her mother, a Western High School English and journalism teacher. Initially, she considered the rowhouse communities of East Baltimore for her project, partly because she was taken with screen painting. (With degrees in art and anthropology, documenting subgroups has been a lifelong interest.)

Her cousin Sally, however, suggested the neighborhood where their great-grandmother and great-grandfather, rabbi Benjamin Szold, settled after emigrating from Austria-Hungary in the 1850s. In her ancestors’ once-upon-a-time stomping grounds in Southwest Baltimore—aka Sowebo—she found inspiration in children jumping up and down on a discarded mattress and kids kicking around a tin can on the streets of the struggling community.

“I thought, ‘Yeah, right, that’s the kind of place I’m looking for,’” recalls Cooper before a recent showing of some of that work from 2006-2016 at Zella’s Pizzeria on Hollins Street. “I didn’t spend much time looking elsewhere and then I went to this real estate agent who showed me [former City Paper photographer] John Ellsberry’s tiny little rowhouse on South Carrollton Avenue, which he had renovated nicely. I’m like, ‘Great. I’m going to buy this house and I’m going to do this project.’”

She introduced herself and her intentions at the annual Sowebo Arts & Musical Festival by offering free portraits in front of a public mural painted by artist Adam Stab (see above). And soon she began carrying her camera everywhere.

The working-class, ethnically diverse neighborhood surrounding historic Hollins Market has been targeted by real estate speculators for decades. But gentrification has yet to take a firm hold. Cooper notes she never had an incident in her years prowling for pictures, but she did lose money when she resold her home.

Baltimore author and Hollins Market resident Baynard Woods curated the new exhibition at Zella’s, titled “Sowebo Streets,” which also includes neighborhood portraits from an array of local photographers like Shae McCoy, Wendel Patrick, Christian Thomas, Josh Sisk, Myles Michelin, Joshua Kittle, Cheryl Kinion, Jack Radcliffe, Mark Stephen Bugnaski, Patrick Harnett, Bridget Cimino, Dan Van Allen, and Woods.

“I live down the street and get my packages delivered here, everyone does,” Woods says. The exhibition closes April 30. (Hopes to bring the show to this year’s Sowebo Art and Music Festival in late May did not pan out.) “Zella’s owners are great. They’re immigrants. I wanted to do it for the neighborhood.”

It’s a show in a pizzeria and not Paris, which someone else of her stature might dismiss, but not Cooper, adds Woods. “Martha? Right away, she said, ‘Yes.’”

Cooper is also the subject of the 2019 award-winning documentary Martha: A Picture Story, which is available to stream and includes her Sowebo experience and work.

“It was hard to describe immediately, but I what I was getting was pictures of everyday life in the streets,” Cooper says. “Simple things. Card playing. There was graffiti, a skate park, and an arabbers’ stable in the neighborhood, which was always good to photograph. Somebody kept pigeons and pigeon flying has been another interest.

“I also have a bunch of sidewalk pool scenes, one with a big inflatable sliding board in a tight alley,” she adds with a contagious smile. “I mean, I could do a whole zine of sidewalk pools.”

After a 2012 artist residency in South Africa, Cooper paired some Sowebo images with uncannily similar photos taken in the Soweto township, one of the centers of the anti-apartheid movement. The resulting photo essay, “Soweto/Sowebo,” features almost interchangeable images of cookouts, storefronts, children playing, rolling tires down the street, beat-up cars—even vegetables and fruits being sold from horse-drawn carts.

“There is a picture that I never thought was particularly anything, Baltimore kids riding in the back of a pickup truck, and it was in this small show I had in Johannesburg,” Cooper recalls. “And that was the picture people commented on because they were so surprised that white people would ride in the back of a pickup truck.

“To me, it was just two [similar] pictures. But a friend overheard those comments from the groups of Black South Africans standing around and talking about the photos. It was just the similarities of everyday life. But maybe when you put those two photos together, you find something universal. People overcoming their circumstances.”

This article first appeared in our May 2026 issue. If you connected with it, consider becoming a print subscriber. 

After placing Harry Houdini in a straitjacket, binding his legs, and hanging him upside down from a cornice of the old Sun Building, the Baltimore Police Department boasted that their handiwork would be the first to hold the cagey escape artist. Officers George Baudel and James Moncks had pulled the straitjacket extra tight, tugging it twice before fastening its leather strap. From there, they buckled the sleeves of the suit, securing his sheathed arms across his chest.

“Run me up as high as you want,” Houdini told the officers, dismissing their braggadocio. “It’s immaterial to me.”

The legendary performer’s famous 1916 appearance in Baltimore, 110 years ago this month, drew an estimated 50,000 people to one of downtown’s busiest intersections. The crowd, which began arriving two hours before the lunchtime show, crammed the streets, windows, and rooftops, bringing traffic to a halt.

To the onlookers’ delight and BPD’s dismay, Houdini—wriggling like a hooked marlin—contorted himself from the confinement in little more than three minutes. He tossed the straitjacket to his fans below and took a dangling bow, while still strung high above the crush of spectators.

Ever the promoter, Houdini’s public exploit was intended to hype his appearance that week in the city. At West Franklin Street’s Maryland Theatre, Houdini promised to unveil his famous “Chinese Water Torture Cell.” He also challenged carpenters, locksmiths, and craftsmen to construct something from which he could not extricate himself.

Houdini’s greatest trick may have been his own reinvention, however. He was born Erik Weisz in Budapest. Not, as he often claimed, in Appleton, Wisconsin, where his father briefly served as rabbi to a local congregation before losing his appointment and falling into poverty. Harry Handcuff Houdini—the name he used when registering for the draft in 1918—was inspired by French magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, whom he admired.

Though he rarely attended synagogue and his wife, Bess, was Catholic (“I am always afraid,” she said, explaining why she never watched him perform), he never tried to escape his Jewish heritage. During World War I, he formed the Rabbis’ Sons Theatrical Benevolent Association with Irving Berlin and Al Jolson.

Houdini’s last performance in Baltimore took place on Nov. 9, 1925. At the Academy of Music on Howard Street, he once again thrilled audiences with his water-torture escape as well as his career-capping “Three Shows in One” exhibition, which included illusions, more escape acts, and the exposure of fraudulent psychics—a personal crusade. The show’s equipment filled a 60-foot railcar.

Symbolically, Houdini’s performances represented self-liberation in a country of immigrants, many of whom had also changed their names to assimilate and sought freedom of one type or another—political, economic, psychological—from their past.

The most enduring stage performer of his time, Houdini died on Halloween 1926—from an inflammation of his abdomen lining following an appendectomy. (He did not die in his wife’s arms after nearly drowning during an underwater escape, as portrayed in the 1953 Tony Curtis film.) He was also no stranger to Baltimore or Maryland, appearing nearly 100 times in the state during his career.

“Houdini’s own story, combined with his public persona, embodied the ability to escape from individual limits, limits of all kinds,” says Spencer Horsman, the magician/owner of Illusions Magic Bar, who recreated Houdini’s famous straitjacket escape high above the Federal Hill venue at its opening 20 years ago. “What’s his quote? ‘My brain is the key that sets me free.’ He was an artist, a storyteller, a powerful imaginative force who transcended confinement. That’s why we remember him.”

This article first appeared in our April 2026 issue. If you connected with it, consider becoming a print subscriber. 

Fifteen-year-old Mike Sparaco and his buddy, Bill Wheatley, had made plans to meet two girls for miniature golf on Sunday, May 8, 1966. Instead, they got stood up. Not a great feeling, but it happens. On the teenagers’ dejected walk home, however, a greater fate—there is no other word for it—intervened.

While cutting through the parking lot at Memorial Stadium, a roar erupted, causing them both to glance up. Suddenly, fans in the top row of the bleachers began yelling and gesturing toward them.

“We thought, ‘What’s going on?’” Sparaco recalled in a 2016 interview with The Sun. “Bill said, ‘Maybe somebody hit one out.’ I said, ‘Great, maybe we’ll get a new baseball and play with it.’”

The first car he peaked under was a white Cadillac and there was the ball, almost but not quite in reach. “No sooner had I crawled under to get it than all these people came running over. A guy with a transistor radio shouted, ‘Frank Robinson just hit that!’”

Robinson’s blast, off Cleveland’s Louis Tiant, who had tossed three straight shutouts to start the season, was like a scene from The Natural. Departing Memorial Stadium high above the leftfield line, the tiny sphere cleared the Colts’ press box before bouncing over a fence and rolling to a stop 540 feet from home plate.

The Orioles needed to sweep that day’s twin bill to vault into a first-place tie with Cleveland. Buoyed by 11,000 youngsters on hand for Safety Patrol Day, a record crowd of 49,516 watched the O’s take the opener, 8-2, behind Robinson’s first home run of the day.

Paced by his epic first-inning salvo off Tiant, they won again, 8-3, in the second contest. The feat so inspired the city that the team’s booster club, the Orioles Advocates, commemorated it. During a pregame ceremony a week later, they raised an orange flag with black lettering at the spot where the ball exited the park. It simply read “HERE” and flew until the O’s final season on 33rd Street.

More importantly, the moonshot put the American League—and Baltimore, then a Colts town—on notice that the O’s, known for their pitching and defense, were now a potent offensive force as well.

The O’s had acquired the veteran slugger in the offseason from Cincinnati, where Reds’ owner Bill DeWitt described Robinson as “not a young 30” after the deal. The words haunted DeWitt, who would sell the team at year’s end, and lit a fire in Robinson. He smashed a home run in each of his first three games in his new uniform. Still, this one was different.

As Robinson jogged to right field to start the next inning, public-address man Bill LeFevre announced the HR was the first ever hit completely out of Memorial Stadium. During a nearly minute-long standing ovation, Robinson tipped his cap several times.

The moment went beyond baseball. Not only had he spent a decade in Cincinnati before being told to pack his bags, he and his wife, Barbara, had confronted prejudice in buying a house in Baltimore, their adopted, racially diverse, but segregated city.

On the 50th anniversary of the mythic blast, Robinson called the ovation a seminal moment in his career. Hearing the cheering, the slugger told The Sun, “I felt like I really belonged in Baltimore.”

Jackie Robinson was venerated for the abuse he silently withstood while breaking baseball’s color line. Frank Robinson, whose rookie year overlapped Jackie Robinson’s last season, was not a turn-the-other-cheek ballplayer.

“Bad trades are part of baseball—now who can forget Frank Robinson for Milt Pappas, for God’s sake?”—Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon’s character) in Bull Durham.

In early December 1965, when baseball news typically sprinkled the sports section like light snow, the Orioles and Reds announced a swap that would rank among the most consequential in the history of professional sports. So much so that, like Boston’s short-sighted sale of a certain larger-than-life Pigtown native to the Yankees, it became a part of baseball lore.

In Cincinnati, DeWitt framed it as forward-looking. Milt Pappas had won 16 games in ’63 and ’64 for the O’s. He was 26 and the team’s all-time winningest pitcher. The Orioles threw in Jack Baldschun, a solid reliever, and untested outfielder Dick Simpson. Suffice to say, none played up to the Reds’ hopes.

Robinson belonged in another class altogether. With guys named Mays, Mantle, Aaron, and Clemente. He had won Rookie-of-the-Year honors, an MVP trophy, and carried Cincinnati to the ’61 pennant. The year prior to the trade, in an era dominated by pitching, he mashed 33 homers and drove in 113 runs. DeWitt, however, a devotee of former Brooklyn Dodger GM Branch Rickey, believed “it was better to trade a player a year early than a year late.” He also maintained his club needed pitching, which was true. Left unmentioned was DeWitt’s contentious relationship with his star.

In Baltimore, the reaction was jubilation.

“Cannons at the four corners!” Harry Dalton, the O’s director of player personnel, shouted upon completing the deal, referring to the power-packed foursome of first baseman Boog Powell, third baseman Brooks Robinson, left fielder Curt Blefary, and the new slugger in right.

Considered one of the sharpest baseball executives ever, Dalton understood how Robinson would impact the O’s lineup. Batting behind him, Brooks and Boog drove in 209 runs. Behind them, Blefary added 23 home runs and another 64 RBIs. Frank? He won the Triple Crown (.316, 49 HRs, 122 RBI) and the MVP—the only player to win the award in both leagues until Shohei Ohtani accomplished the feat in 2024.

The Orioles took the pennant by a landslide nine games. Then, in one of the most dominating World Series performances ever, the O’s swept the favored Los Angeles Dodgers. Robinson drilled a first-inning HR in the opener out west. Then another in the series-clincher here.

“Sometimes, you can point to one incident in a season as a big one,” veteran O’s reliever Moe Drabowsky recalled  to longtime Sun sportswriter John Eisenberg. “To me, when Frank hit that ball out of the stadium off Tiant, it galvanized the whole team. It was like, ‘We’re going to be tough to beat this year.’”

Jackie Robinson was venerated for the abuse he silently withstood while breaking baseball’s color line. Frank Robinson, whose rookie year overlapped Jackie Robinson’s last season, was not a turn-the-other-cheek ballplayer. He leaned over home plate and defied pitchers to throw inside. Hit 198 times in his career, he gained a reputation for dusting himself off and getting his revenge with a retaliatory home run. (Don Drysdale, who Robinson homered off in his first at bat of the ’66 Series, was a familiar nemesis.)

Even at 51 in an old-timers’ game, after being accidentally knocked down by former big-league pitcher Jim Bibby, Robinson dug back in and put one over the fence. Similarly, Robinson was a menace on the basepaths, breaking up double plays like a linebacker. Early in his career, a hard, spikes-up slide into third base led to a scrap with Braves’ Hall of Famer Eddie Matthews, who blackened his eye with a right cross. Robinson had to leave the field, but, true to form, returned for the second game of the doubleheader and responded with a home run and decisive catch.

He had played in segregated environments in Utah and South Carolina in the minor leagues, places where he wasn’t allowed to eat in the same restaurants or stay in the same hotels as his white teammates. Those experiences and others may have hardened his exterior as a young ballplayer.

But, raised in hardscrabble Oakland, California, he was never a go-along-to-get-along type. Neither, coincidentally, were two guys he played ball with growing up—Bill Russell, who became the first Black head coach in the NBA in 1966—and Curt Flood, the Black centerfielder who challenged baseball’s reserve clause and set the stage for free agency in the 1970s.

Robinson, of course, would become baseball’s first Black manager with Cleveland in 1975—and win AL manager of the year honors for helming the O’s 1989 “Why Not?” run. One thing Robinson let his new teammates know was that he didn’t believe in fraternizing with the enemy. The O’s were a little too congenial for his liking.

“If somebody was talking on the field with one of the opposing players, Frank would say, ‘Why do you go out and talk to those guys when in five minutes, you’re going want to kick their butt?’” Powell says. “‘Take them out for dinner after the game. They’re not your friends on the field.’ And he was right and we stuck to that.”

Robinson, who did not lack for a sense of humor despite his fierceness between the lines, also instituted and served as the presiding judge of the team’s Kangaroo Court. With a mop over his head and a broom handle as his gavel, Robinson dispensed fines for mental errors and botched routine plays.

“We only did it after games we won so there’d be no hard feelings. If you threw to the wrong base, it cost you a dollar,” Powell says. “It wasn’t the dollar. It was that someone was paying attention [to your mistake] and you knew it. That was the edge Frank brought to the team.”

“What did Frank mean to the Baltimore Orioles franchise?” Jim Palmer mused, phoning into a MASN show shortly after his ex-teammate passed in 2019. “He put us on the map.”

In fact, Drabowsky’s prediction that the O’s would be “tough to beat” in ’66 after Robinson’s parking lot shot proved an understatement. During Frank Robinson’s playing career in Baltimore, the O’s were the best team in pro sports and maybe the best baseball club ever.

From 1966 to 1971, they won 100 games three times, captured four pennants, and took a second World Series in 1970. (Not incidentally, Drabowsky, who tossed 6-plus innings of scoreless relief in Game 1 of the ’66 Series, played a significant role on several of those clubs.)

To be clear, the Orioles were a very good baseball team before Robinson came over. They finished third in the 10 team AL in ’64 and ’65. And they didn’t just have “cannons at the corners” in ’66. They had Hall of Famers at third in Brooks and at short in Luis Aparicio. And future All-Stars Paul Blair and Davey Johnson stepping into full-time roles in center and at second.

The O’s themselves weren’t sure they needed Frank Robinson. A fourth future Hall of Famer, 20-year-old Jim Palmer, was set to join 23-year-old standout Dave McNally in the rotation.

“When the trade was announced, I was sorry to see Milt go,” Powell recalls from Florida as the 2026 preseason gets underway. “He was a friend, teammate, and a genuinely good pitcher.”

Indeed, Pappas finished with 209 career victories. “I respected Frank, we all did,” Powell says. “But we didn’t know Frank.”

The devotion the team receives today can be traced back to the heyday of Frank and Brooks and that first, unlikely championship 60 years ago.

Robinson had carried a rep in Cincinnati as a difficult guy. That changed quickly. As far as his new teammates were concerned, it was love at first sight. Robinson later commented the city might not have been ready for him, a reference to the housing bias, “but the Orioles were.”

“The day he arrived at spring training, he hit one after another into the palm trees,” Powell says. “I still remember telling Etch [catcher Andy Etchebarren], standing next to me, ‘We’ve taken a step up.’ Frank fit in right from the start. We liked the way he was and didn’t want him to be anyone other than who he was.”

Robinson’s issues with the Reds management stemmed from racial prejudice, salary disputes, and his outspoken personality. Pete Rose later said the club gave him grief for becoming too friendly with Robinson and Vada Pinson, another Black ballplayer. When fans and the Cincinnati media gave Robinson a hard time during the ’65 slump, it convinced DeWitt he could move him without too much blowback.

Meanwhile, Baltimore Afro-American Hall of Fame baseball writer Sam Lacy, civil rights groups, and Black fans had pushed the O’s for years to sign Black players. For their part, the Orioles acknowledged they hoped Robinson would appeal to the city’s “Negro” community.

The team’s leader when he arrived was the guy whose last name he shared. Brooks Robinson’s soft-spoken modesty and civility endeared him to everyone—never more so than when Frank Robinson joined the club.

A six-time All-Star, Brooks had earned his own MVP in 1964. The addition of another superstar, a Black slugger who’d been labeled “a troublemaker” by his previous club, could’ve potentially disrupted the team’s chemistry. But while Frank dealt with remnants of legal segregation in Baltimore, his acceptance in the O’s clubhouse was a non issue. (On the cusp of the World Series, Mayor Theodore McKeldin appealed to bar owners to ignore state law allowing them to ban Black residents: “I find it a distasteful piece of irony that I must make this plea in light of the fact that without Frank Robinson, a person who could be excluded by such business, we would probably have no World Series.”)

In his 1988 autobiography, Extra Innings, Frank said race relations on those Orioles teams were unlike any other club he played for. Brooks and Frank dressed next to each other for the entirety of their six years together in Baltimore, setting the tone for the team. The pair became known as the “Robinson Brothers” and after their playing careers, made a Lite Beer commercial playing off their names and similarities, clarifying, however, “we are not identical twins.”

The images of Brooks and Frank—one from Little Rock, Arkansas, the site of pitched segregation battles, the other from the birthplace of the Black Panthers—standing shoulder to shoulder, hitting in tandem in the heart of O’s batting order spoke volumes during the Civil Rights era.

“I suspect Brooks was the key reason why, for the first time in my 14 years of professional baseball, Black players and white players had drinks together and meals together when we were on the road,” he wrote. “Not every single night, but two or three times on most road trips. None of the players really invited me, Paul Blair, or Sam Bowens to join them. But Brooks might ask me where I was going after a game, and not knowing the restaurants in most American cities, I might say I wasn’t sure. Then Brooks would say something like, ‘Well, Boog, Jerry [Adair], Curt, and I are going over to this restaurant.’”

Winning helps, and Orioles fans responded in kind, embracing the club as never before. The devotion the team receives today can be traced back to the heyday of Frank and Brooks and that first, unlikely championship 60 years ago.

Jim Melonas, whose son, Mark, raised a replica HERE flag at the old Memorial Stadium site—now a recreational field—on the 50th anniversary of Robinson’s home run, grew up in Hamilton. He had started his freshman year at the University of Maryland when the O’s met the Dodgers. He and his friends squeezed into a VW Beetle to greet the team at then-Friendship Airport after they won the first two games in L.A. Then they followed the team to Memorial Stadium.

“Somehow, we got stuck between two of their buses, and were waved into the team parking lot,” Melonas, who went on to a career in business, enthusiastically recalls. “We ended up helping carry some of the players’ bags. It was one of the best moments of my life.”

Though there was an encore. Days later, a girlfriend invited him to Game Four. Her father had an extra ticket. “Frank Robinson’s home run sailed two rows over our heads in left field.”

“Do I remember Frank Robinson coming to Baltimore?” asks Rev. Alvin Hathaway, who grew up with Elijah Cummings in West Baltimore and recently led the restoration of Thurgood Marshall’s elementary school. “I was at City College High School from 1966 to 1969. Those were the Orioles’ hottest years. I worked at Memorial Stadium part-time. Not only do I remember Frank Robinson, I was selling popcorn when Louis Tiant threw that ball that he knocked out of the park.”

Hathaway highlights how accessible Robinson was, as well as the city’s other pro athletes. “You’d see him and his wife, Barbara, at Cross Keys, around town. They were a regal couple. That era of sports figures were community-minded people. He embodied it.”

Hathaway also notes Baltimore was a Colts’ town prior to ’66 in the city’s white—and Black communities. For good reason. “They won championships, and had personalities like Lenny Moore, Jim Parker, Willie Richardson, John Mackey, Lenny Lyles. When Frank came in, this was a homerun guy, and you coupled him with Paul Blair, and things started to shift in terms of African Americans being attentive to the team.”

Academics were important at City College, but so were sports, Hathaway continues, adding he worked 15 to 20 ballgames at Memorial Stadium a year. He carried popcorn because it was light.

“I wanted to see the game,” he says. “I was on left field side when Frank stepped in against Tiant, who came up with that big windup. It was tense already when he threw that pitch, and man, and the next thing, all you heard was ‘pop!’ Everybody turned their head. I dropped my tray. I couldn’t believe how hard he had hit that ball. I still can’t.”

This article first appeared in our April 2026 issue. If you connected with it, consider becoming a print subscriber. 

When Jill Orlov was a University of Virginia student, a friend randomly asked one day if she’d accompany her to the architectural school. Not for any academic purpose. Her friend hoped to set up a guy she knew in the architecture program with their suitemate.

“So, she’s talking to him about fixing him up with our girlfriend, and meanwhile I’m fascinated by these meticulously built models and miniature fragments of buildings,” Orlov recalls. “I am in heaven.”

She soon switched her major to architecture. It just turned out, many years later, it wasn’t architecture that was calling. It was those meticulous miniature models.

Orlov worked as a “real architect” at small firms for a decade. Then she left that job and moved on to a property conditions company where she spent nearly another 10 years inspecting the structure of buildings and their various systems—electrical, plumbing, heating and air, et al. “Both were kind of soul-sucking jobs,” she admits.

Finally, after years of casting about for a creative outlet, a Maryland Institute College of Art welding class provided a needed spark.

“I had taken glassblowing, pottery, woodworking classes, furniture making, I tried everything,” she says. “None of them were something I wanted to stay with, like when you fall in love with a certain art. It wasn’t until I took welding that that happened.”

Specifically, that certain art became metal sculpture. Very small metal sculpture. Now based out of Hampden’s Mill Centre—their next open studio tour is April 11—Orlov builds tiny spaces, both real and imaginary, often incorporating cinematic or literary backstories. Her materials are found objects made of steel, brass, and sterling silver and she employs classic welding and silver soldering techniques.

Her solo exhibition at the Museum of Miniatures in Tucson, Arizona—“Borrowed Time/Borrowed Books”—reinterpreted libraries, yes, actual libraries, from the classic films Wings of Desire, Fahrenheit 451, All the President’s Men, The Time Machine, and The Breakfast Club—plus a memorable episode from The Twilight Zone, “Time Enough at Last.” She has also reimagined Julia Child’s TV kitchen, The Brady Bunch’s living room and staircase, and Archie and Edith’s sitting room from All in the Family.

“The museum invited me to put together an exhibit, and I started thinking of things that meant a lot to me,” recalls Orlov amid the blowtorches, gas tanks, ban saw, and drill press in her first-floor studio. “I’ve always loved the texture of books. To me, in making those library spaces and the tiny books, there was something both visual, that was related to the films, and literary.”

Other pieces have been shown at The National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.—as part of a group exhibition titled “Small Stories”—as well as the American Visionary Art Museum, the New York Studio School, the Fuller Craft Museum, Towson University’s Center for the Arts Gallery, and School 33 and the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower.

In December, she was also one of 70 artists working in miniature from around the world profiled for the fine art hardcover, “L’art du minuscule,” from the esteemed French publisher, Gallimard. One current project is a collaboration with several incarcerated artists who she has connected with in recent years. Another is a work commissioned by painter Michael Owen, who created Baltimore’s ubiquitous L-O-V-E murals several years ago. He has since moved to California and asked Orlov to recreate his old Highlandtown studio here.

Her most memorable commission, however, came via Benny Blanco, the 11-time Grammy Award-nominated music producer, who might be best known as Selena Gomez’s husband. Rather than have the Recording Industry Association of America present the standard, full-scale gold and platinum album awards in recognition of his work, Blanco thought it would be fun and subversive to have them made in miniature and give them to his collaborators. Now, superstars such as Halsey, Ed Sheeran, and DJ Khalid each own one of her tiny, framed album awards—small enough to present in an ALTOIDS tin—complete with attached magnifying glass for reading the inscription.

“We are so used to being the scale against which we measure everything else,” Orlov says. “I like playing with confusion of that scale.”

That Orlov loved making dollhouses as a girl is not surprising. And often there is a sense of nostalgia or whimsy with miniatures. Her metal sculptures are a bit edgier, however, glancing backward through a more dystopian lens. They also possess an interactive dimension, inevitably inviting greater scrutiny from the viewer.

“Because I use found objects, I like when people look at things and they have to push their minds to think, ‘Where did that object come from?’” Orlov says with a hint of a mischievousness. “The objects look familiar, but they’re used differently, and that becomes another way to engage people. I think people like that puzzle.”

As a teenager, Cory McCray’s life was on a trajectory familiar to far too many Baltimore young men. Expelled from several city schools, he twice faced adult gun and drug distribution charges before he turned 18—eventually resulting in a 10-month confinement at the Victor Cullen Center juvenile facility in Western Maryland.

McCray’s mother worked multiple jobs, trying to distance her son and family from the pitfalls of the inner city. But when he was sentenced to detention, he was unable to envision a different path for himself, only seeing the streets  and increasingly long prison terms in his future. He told his mother to give him up on him. (She did not.)

Now 43, a married father of four, and northeast Baltimore’s elected representative in the state senate, McCray shares his journey in The Apprenticeship That Saved My Life. In this candid and engaging memoir, McCray recounts how a phone call from his mother to the Maryland Department of Labor—requesting a list of every licensed apprenticeship in the state—unexpectedly changed his course.

Violent crime, thankfully, has taken a sharp downturn over the past three years. But there’s still a lack of economic opportunity for young men, particularly young Black men. Was that the prompt for this book?
I visit schools once or twice a week…so they can meet someone who looks like them and can speak to their [circumstances] and their potential. But as you get older, you think, “How can I add value? How can I scale impact?” I thought this book was the appropriate next step to lean in on this apprenticeship conversation. It’s something that I can leave with them.

At 18, you were accepted into a five-year apprenticeship program with the International Brotherhood of Electricians. It quickly proved life-changing because it paid solid wages while you learned on the job. You bought a house two years later.
When I found out about the apprenticeship, I was blown away. How did I live in this city all my life and no one told me about this opportunity? The other thing is, if you don’t see it, you can’t believe it. I didn’t have electricians in my universe.

One thing that comes across is there are steps for acceptance into an internship program that those born in upper middle class ZIP codes may take for granted.
I still remember being in a school and asking, “If you were senator for a day, what’s one thing you would change about your school?” A young man gets up and says he would have driver’s ed at his school. I just stood for a second and thought about everything it took me to even apply for the apprenticeship. I had to be at least 18, have a high school diploma or GED, one year of algebra—and a driver’s license.

We took those same young people to Annapolis, put together a bill, testified before the House, testified before the Senate, watched the governor sign that bill, and now there is a $2-million appropriation inside of the State Department of Education for high schools with a poverty level of at least 40 percent for a [driver’s ed] grant they can apply for.

It could go without saying your backstory is different than most in the General Assembly.
I do see through a different lens. When I looked at [ex-offender] voting rights, and I’m a data person, I looked at two ZIP codes when we were debating the issue where only 10 people were on parole or probation. In the ZIP code I represent, there are 937. When you look at that correlation or that disparity from one ZIP code to another—it makes a difference in how you view other pressing issues—food security, housing, vacancies. Also, having bookstores and things of that nature because the buying power isn’t in that neighborhood.

Did you ever feel hesitant about sharing your story?
So, not all my colleagues know my background. When we were debating juvenile justice, one colleague said to me young people in the juvenile system didn’t grow up like me or don’t get see the world the way my son does. I wanted to say I’m probably the most qualified person to be in this conversation, but people who’ve only seen me in the last 10-15 years assume that to get to this position, you had to go a certain direction or go a certain pathway.

But I need to have transparent conversations with young people…I was at Jessup [Correctional Institution] and Cheltenham [Youth Detention Center] recently. Adults also need understanding and to feel like they have a chance. I have to let people know I’ve been at the bottom, too.

“Both of my parents were eclectic music lovers, but my father really loved all kinds of music, from boleros to all the famous salseros—Willie Colón, Héctor Lavoe, El Gran Combo—to Michael Jackson, Rick Astley, and Hall and Oates,” says Christina Delgado, the founder of Tola’s Room, the northeastern Baltimore rowhouse museum dedicated to her Puerto Rican heritage.

“My dad was born in New York in 1954 to Puerto Rican-native parents and he came of age in the 1970s when salsa became a thing. Music has always been a connective thing in our family and to our heritage, like food, like language,” she continues. “When he died, he had all this stuff, including his vinyl records, which meant so much to him and so to me, too. But dealing with the trauma, I paid for an additional year of storage until I could handle going through it.”

In the years following her father’s 2013 death, Delgado began creating Tola’s Room as an art therapy project out of her Belair-Edison home. Named for her now-14-year-old daughter, the three-story space pays homage to their shared Puerto Rican and Nuyorican roots through family photographs and artifacts—including her father’s record collection—plus exhibitions, workshops, and collaborations that foster connection and understanding of the Puerto Rican diaspora.

An educator and community organizer by profession, Delgado has curated parties like a Sangria Sunday brunch, a La Bodega vendor event, a Noche Buena Night Market, a summer En Verano party, and a Navidad Borikén holiday celebration—all tied to personally or traditionally significant dates. (Borikén is the indigenous Taino name for Puerto Rico.)

A January exhibition timed to close out the Christmas season and Día de los Reyes (Three Kings Day), was scheduled to feature art and film installations, and musical performances. Booked for February is a Bad Bunny Super Bowl half-time party at Baltimore Soundstage.

The NFL’s selection of the Puerto Rican superstar, an outspoken critic of Donald Trump’s ICE policies, irritated the president, but Delgado notes Bad Bunny is a cultural icon—and a resource.

“He educates people, including myself, about the island’s musical legacy and history, and through his music keeps it alive.”

On most Sundays, the museum is open for guided tours, with Delgado highlighting the history and untold stories of Puerto Rico and its diaspora. Her ongoing Bmore Boricuas Project gathers local stories and documents Baltimore’s often-overlooked Puerto Rican community, which dates to the 1800s.

Delgado herself arrived here after growing up in New York, attending Virginia Commonwealth University, and then briefly living in D.C. With its tight-knit, distinct neighborhoods, Baltimore reminded her more of her New York upbringing than Washington.

On the museum’s second floor, through newspapers and other accounts, Delgado highlights some of the first examples of Puerto Rican migration to Baltimore, including an influx of medical students to the city and the creation of a Latino club at the University of Maryland and then-Baltimore Medical College in the mid-19th and early-20th centuries.

Also chronicled, the signing of Puerto Rican baseball players by the Baltimore Elite Giants—the city’s Negro League team—and the story of longtime Puerto Rican activist Jose Ruiz. Former Mayor William Donald Schaefer appointed Ruiz the city’s first Hispanic liaison in 1979, a decade that witnessed an influx of Latino migrants into southeast Baltimore that continues to this day.

The museum highlights, too, the 2020 election of the city’s first council person of Latin descent, Puerto Rican native Odette Ramos, coincidentally two years after Tola’s Room opened. In recent years, several Puerto Rican eateries have opened as well—The Empanada Lady downtown, Owls Corner Café in Mount Vernon, the food truck Lote 787 in Old Goucher, and Bodega & Vino in Locust Point.

The nod to her daughter in naming the museum is more than a mere sweet gesture for Delgado. Her beloved father, Edwin, who suffered from alcohol abuse, spent his career as a computer programmer for the City of New York after a proud stint in the U.S. Army. (Her mother also served and is pictured in uniform in the museum.) He died unexpectedly in Baltimore, in front of Delgado, after coming to town for his granddaughter’s first birthday.

She says the work she’s done in developing the museum has helped her to get past that grief. Asking her mother, aunts, cousins, and friends about her father, and about their own lives and Puerto Rican heritage, has built a sustaining community.

“We have similar stories as the diaspora of the archipelago,” she says. “I’m learning things in this journey, in this shared history, and in other narratives, that enable me to understand my dad better.

“I came to see it like he chose to die with me,” she continues, pausing to wipe away a tear in her living room near some photographs of her and her father. “That weighs on me, in a loving way, but it also weighs in a heavy way.”

“When John asked me to play Jesus, I was taking so much acid at the time, I thought I was Jesus,” George Figgs, with a mischievous grin, tells the audience after a recent Maryland Film Festival showing of Multiple Maniacs, John Waters’ first talking feature.

Screened in its original 16mm format, the 1970 black comedy holds up surprisingly well. An irreverent, profane commentary on the hippies vs. straights battles of its day—think Woke Left vs. MAGA—the guerrilla film satirizes middlebrow suburbia, sanctimonious politics, and, especially, the sexual mores of the Catholic Church. (“I thank God I was raised Catholic,” Waters once said, “so sex will always be dirty.”)

Figgs, now 78 and pictured above at Beyond Video, actually attended seminary for a year before finding his calling as a Waters’ ensemble Dreamlander.

“Multiple Maniacs is my favorite of John’s films and not because I’m Jesus,” continues Figgs, who acted in 10 of Waters’ movies. “It’s because I participated [while dying on the cross] in one of high-water marks of blasphemy in cinema history.” For those who have not had the pleasure, that “high-water mark” would be Mink Stole’s notorious “rosary job” on Divine in a church pew.

Figgs first met Waters and the other future Dreamlanders, including Susan Lowe and Mary Vivian Pierce—also on hand after the Maniacs screening—at Martick’s restaurant and downtown art-house theaters. They soon shifted to Pete’s Bar in Fells Point, described as “a wino bar” by Waters, with several Dreamlanders moving into a co-op known as the Hollywood Bakery next door.

For his part, Figgs maintained a 20-year, psychedelic folk career amid his Dreamlander roles, cutting a record and touring with T-Bone Walker. He performed at venues like Greenwich Village’s Cafe Wha? while residing at the artist-haven Hotel Albert—where The Mamas & the Papas penned “California Dreamin’.” In fact, we have Figgs to thank for singing and playing “The Streets of Baltimore”—possibly the best song ever about the city—to Gram Parsons, who helped make it famous.

Movies, however, remained Figgs’ first love, if not as an actor, as a curator. In the 1980s, he became a projectionist, handling the rushes for several Hollywood films shot here (see our January cover story, on newsstands now). In 1991, he returned to Fells Point and opened the beloved Orpheum Cinema on the second floor of a converted stable, screening an eclectic mix of noir, B-films, and foreign, cult, and underground classics. For a period, he drove a cab to support the theater, a 10-year mission he calls “the best thing I did in my life.”

To this day, he still helps curate a film series at Motor House. La Strada, All About Eve, On the Waterfront, El Topo, The King of Marvin Gardens, Nostalgia, and The Wizard of Oz, which he first saw in its Technicolor re-release as a kid in Hampden, are on his all-time personal best list.

“My backstory is my mother had a nervous breakdown, and the babysitter next door took me to the movies and left me there,” explains Figgs of his lifelong obsession with film.

“I was in the movies daily at the tender age of 6. It was ‘Lorenzian imprinting,’” he says, referencing scientist Konrad Lorenz’s discovery that geese would bond with and follow the first thing they saw after hatching, often him. “It became my mother. At The Hampden and The Ideal in the ’50s, I saw all the westerns, all the gangster pictures, all the film noirs. It was the regular fare for neighborhood theaters then.

“For that feeling of being enveloped, that transcendent experience, you have to be in a theater,” Figgs says. “It has to be bigger than you, and you have to share that experience with other people.”

First Day Hikes began on a hunch by a Massachusetts park ranger back in 1992 that a New Year’s Day renewal stroll might just draw a few visitors to his park in the winter. Some 380 people showed up at Blue Hills State Reservation for the inaugural First Day Hikes—an annual walk in the woods now held in all 50 states.

The First Day Hikes movement reached Maryland on New Year’s Day 2012, with 560 people participating at 17 state parks that winter. It proved to be just the beginning.

Today, with New Year’s Day events at more than 30 state parks, Maryland’s First Day Hikes—both ranger-led and self-guided—attract almost 5,000 people each year.

Such is their popularity that First Day Hikes aren’t limited to hikes anymore. In 2023, Rosaryville State Park in Prince George’s County hosted a ranger-guided, three-mile BYOH (Bring Your Own Horse) trail ride.

There’s also more to First Day Hikes than a little exercise and communion with nature—local history-focused walks are offered, as well. Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park, one of the smallest parks in the state system, has in the past partnered with Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge on a history hike. Cunningham Falls State Park has offered a self-guided hike to the Catoctin Furnace and the African-American cemetery there, the final resting place of many of the former enslaved and free Black furnace workers between the 1770s and 1840s.

Another hike, at Gathland State Park, has traversed the Appalachian Trail from Crampton’s Gap to Brownsville Pass, a location that played a major role in the 1862 Civil War Battle of South Mountain.

The coffee, hot cocoa, s’mores, and post-hike campfires offered at some of the venues organized by local volunteers—the various park “friends” groups—are an attraction all their own. Specific kid- and dog-friendly hiking options have been added at many state parks, too.

In other words, whether it’s a trek to see the wild horses on the beach at Assateague or a sunset hike at Washington Monument State Park in Washington County, there is something for everyone, including those with strollers or accessibility concerns.

Close to home, check out North Point State Park, which typically offers two First Day Hikes; Gunpowder Falls State Park and Patapsco Valley State Park, which host several events; and the Soldiers Delight Natural Environmental Area in Owings Mills.

But don’t be afraid to venture farther afield. Elk Neck State Park in North East offers spectacular views of the upper Chesapeake Bay and winter wildlife, including songbirds, hawks, and geese. Though perhaps not quite as early as January 1, when it really gets cold in the region, enormous blocks of ice form in the Bay beneath Elk Neck lighthouse. Similarly, the massive icicles that dangle alongside the tumbling water at Cunningham Falls and Swallow Falls state parks are worth a winter’s drive.

“One of the great things about the First Day Hikes is that we get new visitors, old visitors, and everything in between,” says Ranger Melissa Boyle Acuti, chief of interpretation for the Maryland Park Service, who happily received snowshoes as a gift one year to enable her winter hikes during visits to Western Maryland’s state parks. “We get people who say, ‘I just heard about it this year,’ and then with others it’s, ‘We do this hike every year.’ But we also get people that say, ‘I try to find a new one to hike every year.’”

Check the Maryland Department of Natural Resources website for the complete list of this year’s Last Day and First Day Hikes, but here are a few nearby highlights.

North Point State Park
What better way to greet the first sunrise of the year than with a walk past North Point’s ancient Black Marsh and views of the Chesapeake Bay? This flat 2.5-mile trail follows an old trolley line through the woods and past the remnants of a small power station, but the trail can also get wet—so appropriate hiking shoes or boots are recommended.  North Point offers excellent opportunities for bird-watching and leashed pets are welcome, too. Parking Lot A. 8400 North Point Rd., Edgemere. 11 a.m. $3-5 park admission. 

Patapsco Valley State Park: Avalon Area Adaptive Hike
If you sleep in New Year’s Day, don’t worry. Embark on this two-mile trek that steps off at 1 p.m. Hikers of all skillsets (including little ones in strollers and leashed furry friends) are invited to explore the beauty of the River Road Trail in the Orange Grove Area. Shelter 106. 5120 South St., Halethorpe. 1 p.m. 

Sandy Point State Park
Join rangers for a two-mile loop along the Sandy Point’s Chesapeake Bay coastline and through the park’s Blue Crab trail. This hike is mostly flat and includes sidewalks, gravel roads, and dirt paths. Participants are encouraged to wear weather-appropriate footwear and clothing and to bring water. Leashed dogs are welcome, but the trail is not recommended for mobility chairs or strollers. 1100 E. College Pkwy., Annapolis. 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. $3 park admission. 

Fair Hill Natural Resources Management Area
One of the more vigorous First Day Hikes (five miles with the option to take a three-mile shortcut), this ranger-led walk will take hikers along Fair Hill’s historic green trail and part of the blue trail, traversing hayfields and upland and bottomland hardwood forests along Christiana Creek. There are some steeper sections, so expect a roughly two-and-a-half-hour trek on this healthy hike. Upper Covered Bridge Lot, Black Bridge Road. 300 Tawes Drive, Elkton. 10 a.m. 

Gunpowder Falls State Park: Torrey C. Brown Rail Trail
The NCR-Hereford Volunteer Association will lead a guided, 15.5-mile round trip bicycle ride from Monkton along the historic route of the Northern Central Railway. Take in views of the Little Falls, Beetree Run, and local geological formations as you pedal the well-maintained trail’s gentle grade. Bring your own bike, helmet, water, and snacks. 1820 Monkton Rd, Monkton. 1:30 p.m. 

Baltimore-based journalist Osita Nwanevu, a contributing editor at The New Republic and a columnist at The Guardian, has spent the past decade covering national politics. Just 32 years old, his work has always transcended traditional political journalism, combining history, theory, reporting, and analysis to unpack the issues of the day.

His first book, The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding, published by Penguin Random House, makes a bold assertion. On the cusp of the country’s 250th anniversary, Nwanevu examines and reframes the institutions and practices that, in theory, are upholding American democracy, and argues that the U.S. Constitution is not the solution to our dysfunction, but its cause.

He notes that, at the time of its drafting, critics of the Constitution argued the Founders had created a president akin to an elected king. And since then, the president’s powers have only increased—right up to the exponential expansion undertaken by the current occupant of the White House.

Here, Nwanevu sits down with us to explore the book’s research and analysis.

You highlight that Thomas Jefferson himself believed that even the best constitution was likely only good for about 20 years. Essentially, it was up to each generation or two to reform their government as new challenges and better ideas emerged.
So, I think there’s something odd about our relationship with the founders in this respect, people like Jefferson. We revere their wisdom and insight, they’re very intelligent people, but they also made mistakes in creating the institutions that they did. They had very different ideas, of course, about who belongs to this country and who deserves political rights than we do. To change the system that they set up, that’s our right, it’s our prerogative.

Certainly, we know more about how to govern than they did. They were just starting out the government in this country. We’ve now had over two centuries of experience. We’ve also seen democratic governments around the world pop up that we can draw from. We have political science as a discipline that was not around in 1787 in any kind of serious form.

Most are familiar with our antidemocratic issues—the Electoral College, gerrymandering, the disproportionate representation in the U.S. Senate, the lifetime-termed Supreme Court, etc. When did you conclude these aren’t bugs, but features of the Constitution?
I remember the 2000 election, Bush winning despite losing the popular vote, and I sort of absorbed this vicarious anger and retained a basic sense of unfairness. Then, that’s how Trump wins in 2016 and it many ways it became more difficult to ignore.

He stayed in office despite U.S. senators representing the majority of the American population voting to remove him from office at both impeachment trials. He was able to build the conservative majority on the court that’s going to be in place for perhaps many, many years…If you can win power despite most Americans not supporting your candidates or your agenda, I think that creates an incentive to move further to the political extremes.

You point to three pillars of a functioning democracy—political equality, responsiveness, and majority rule—all places where we are currently failing. You also touch on the amount of money in politics and the growing wealth inequality gap—not as separate concerns, but issues that compound this dysfunction.
That’s right. I mean, there are certain parts of the country, because of the Electoral College, that matter more in federal politics than others. How often do presidential candidates come to Baltimore or Maryland? Look at how many parts of this country are ignored or marginalized or abused, as we see in Los Angeles, as we see in Chicago [with ICE raids and sending in of National Guard units from other states]. That’s all a function of the fact that some places, and their voters, matter much more than others. If we care about democracy, that’s not tenable.

I think people who read this book will see our government in a different light and maybe embrace the idea that an effective democracy doesn’t end division. It provides an equitable means of resolving conflict.
America is a large and diverse country, and this naturally produces a lot of differences. This is why it is necessary to have to a good political system. People think the political environment is difficult now; I promise you, it was not better in 1925 or 1825. We had race riots and political violence that far outstrip what we’re facing now. The Ku Klux Klan was lynching people. Union members were getting shot. We have had a chaotic political history.

Do you have a favorite quote from a Founding Father?
Thomas Paine certainly had a way of cutting through the noise. My favorite from Thomas Paine is the one that I end the book with. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

Chris Singleton’s career in radio got its accidental start in 1983, during his junior year at Kent County High School. He was in class when the school’s radio station, on air at the time, began having issues with the intercom system between its studios and put out an SOS, asking if anyone in the vo-tech electronics program could come to the rescue.

“Today, they call it the ‘Digital Electronics,’ but then they referred to it as Radio and TV Repair. You graduate, and you’re expected to work in a TV repair shop, back when they had those things,” recalls Singleton, Kent County High class of ’84, with a smile, sitting in WKHS’s main studio.

“A component in the power supply, a thing called a diode, which converts AC to DC voltage, went bad. I still remember. And I robbed one out of a television set, because we had tons of TV sets. I said, ‘I think this will work,’ and I popped it in and sure enough, it came right on. Once I fixed the intercom, I was like, ‘Oh, this is a real radio station.’”

Singleton, pictured above with students Lynden Saunders and Adrean Johnson, was, is, right. WKHS, 90.5 on your FM dial, is not just some small, in-house-only school station. Founded in 1974—Elton John’s “Rocket Man” was the first song they ever played—it remains one of the most powerful high school stations in the country and the only high school station in the state.

For those unfamiliar, its 17,500-watt signal stretches from the Eastern Shore to Southern Maryland to Baltimore and Wilmington. For his part, Singleton did not take a job at a radio and TV repair shop after graduation, instead earning a degree in Electronics Engineering Technology from the University of Maryland Eastern Shore.

In the middle of a successful career, mostly in Washington, D.C. commercial radio, he took on the duties of station engineer three decades ago, a part-time role. He became WKHS’s full-time station manager and student instructor in 2008.

The facilities, which include a greeting area and multiple production rooms, are almost entirely supported by donations, local business sponsorships, and spring and fall fundraising drives. A secondary studio, it’s hoped, will soon start hosting musicians and bands—think NPR’s Tiny Desk concerts or World Café out of Philadelphia’s WXPN, whose 24-hour programming WKHS sometimes shares to fill out its eclectic mix of student-read news, student-led music hours, and evening DJ shows, hosted by volunteer adults in the community.

“Oh my God, I loved being a DJ when I was a student,” says alum Sam Sessa, the director of events and community engagement for WTMD and WYPR, and former host of “Baltimore Hit Parade.” “I had the cringiest host name. I was ‘DJ Sam the Man, on the air on WKHS.’ I was so full of myself. My intro song was Eminem’s ‘My Name Is.’”

Cringy alias or not, the experience got Sessa his first professional gig and changed his career when WTMD called and asked the former Baltimore Sun music and features reporter if he’d be interested in hosting a show.

Of course, he also still tunes in to his alma mater’s signal. “Have you listened when the kids are reading the news?” he asks. “It’s really hard to read the news out loud, and getting that experience is something you keep your whole life, but it’s tough, man. It’s really tough. They’re so endearing. You’re listening to them read the latest sports and news and you’re rooting for them.”

Singleton notes the station receives more emails and phone calls from the Baltimore area, Harford County, and Western Shore than from the Eastern Shore because of the higher population density on this side of the Bay. But he adds WKHS is more tight-knit family than corporate media entity. (Sometimes even a literal family; Sessa’s mother preceded him as a WKHS DJ and Singleton’s son currently has a show.)

The broader station community includes not just past and present students, but the local adult DJs and longtime listeners, most of whom reside relatively close to its powerful signal.

“One listener in Caroline County, which is south of us, not too far down the road, called in about a year ago and said, ‘I want a portion of my estate in my will to go toward the station because that’s how committed I am to it,’” Singleton shares, adding the man has been tuning in since WKHS’s infancy. “He said, ‘Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a terminal disease or anything. It may not happen right away, but I’m meeting with my lawyer to do this, and I’d like to know, are there any legal issues on your end to consider?’

“We talked through that, and I thought it was just a wonderful gesture. And, I’m genuinely happy to report, he still calls in from time to time with song requests.”

Born in part from the climate-change protests at museums here and abroad, the Baltimore Museum of Art launched an ambitious collection of environmentally driven initiatives in 2024. Taking its title, Turn Again to the Earth, from the writing of environmental activist Rachel Carson, the ongoing series finds it themes in “the realities and repercussions of climate change [that] have become part of our daily discourse and experiences,” as BMA director Asma Naeem explained in announcing the effort.

Among the highlights to date was The New York Times-acclaimed Black Earth Rising exhibition, guest curated by London-born writer Ekow Eshun, which explored the relationship between race, colonialism, and the climate crisis.

Opening recently and running through early 2026 are three new exhibitions that are a part of the Turn Again to the Earth series— “Deconstructing Nature: Environmental Transformation in the Lucas Collection,” “Engaging the Elements: Poetry in Nature,” and “The Way of Nature: Art from Japan, China, and Korea.”

As Carson writes in her titular work: “In these troubled times it is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility.”

We recently caught up with BMA chief curator Kevin Tervala to explore the series’ highlights and its overall mission.

One thing I’ve come to appreciate over the past year is the challenging nature of these exhibitions—and the realization that art can be beautiful, powerful, and disconcerting at the same time.
There is an experience [of art] that is just beauty. There is so much depth in Matisse when we look for it, but his work is also pleasing to the eye. Beautiful colors. A great sense of composition. You may find his work rich and beautiful and stunning, but his paintings are not meant to make you a bit “scared,” which is what [you’re talking about].

There is this concept art historians talk about regarding landscape and nature representations called “the sublime,” which is that feeling you get when you stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon, and it’s beautiful, it’s awe-inspiring, and it’s a little terrifying.

That’s a perfect description of the wheatfield burn photograph (above) by Larry Schwarm in the “Engaging the Elements: Poetry in Nature” exhibition.
I think that photo is so alluring precisely because it hits that right note of beauty and terror at the same time.

Somewhat similarly, I like Richard Misrach’s stunning, all-blue image of California’s strange Salton Sea, which went from resort area to health hazard to ghost town. What is one of your highlights?
I love the pairing of contemporary artist Stacy Lynn Waddell, whose work we acquired for the collection, and an artist’s work who inspired her, Winslow Homer. They’re both depicting, separated by a century, the after-effect of a hurricane. This beautiful watercolor from Homer is showing the brilliance you get after a storm goes through, the sun is shining. But there’s destruction. She’s thinking about the perspective of enslaved folks living in the Caribbean during this time, the impact of the hurricane [on their lives], and the transformation of the land. They’re thinking about the same things and depicting them in very different ways.

On a different note, the renderings of the Seine River and River Thames at the start of 19th-century industrialization in the accompanying “Deconstructing Nature” show are timely. Those long-polluted waterways are now being reclaimed and made possible for swimming.
In every chart about pollution or the Industrial Revolution, you have a line on a graph that’s hovering toward the bottom and then, at the late part of the 19th century, spikes up. So do urban populations. It’s the rise of cities. It’s a pivotal moment in European history, in world history, and artists are capturing that.

Let’s discuss the third, new show, “The Way of Nature: Art from Japan, China, and Korea.” It’s a centuries-spanning exhibition of ceramics, textiles, wood-cuts, watercolors—even large-scale photographs—but everything seems to communicate an intrinsically human, one might say spiritual, connection to the earth.
The intro text for the exhibition starts, if I’m remembering correctly, with a quote from a 4th-century landscape painter from China who is saying, to understand and to depict the natural world, you must fuse your mind into it. You must become one with the landscape you’re representing.

It’s what we wanted to do with this exhibition. We wanted to showcase other alternatives, ways of being [in the world]. The society we live in right now, it doesn’t have to be the world we live in, in the future. You can imagine new possibilities or you can look elsewhere and see how other places and other people have done it.

The Nov. 1, 1965 issue of I.F. Stone’s Weekly, an influential Washington newsletter of the period, carried a story headlined, “A Priest Tells How Our Bombers Razed His Church and Killed His People.”

From a Saigon hospital bed, a French priest recounted U.S. planes destroying his Vietnam village in devastating detail. Fleeing with surviving women and children, Father Currien “buried as best I could the bodies of my faithful…seven of them completely torn to bits. I had to abandon some wounded and dying.”

Sitting in their Govans kitchen the next day, Norman Morrison and his wife, Anne, read the interview with the priest. Quakers troubled by the war’s atrocities, both were already active in the nascent anti-war movement, demonstrating, writing letters, and refusing to pay federal taxes.

Norman, a former seminarian with a deep social conscience, hadn’t been feeling well that morning as it was. He had slept in before informing the Stony Run Friends Meeting where he served as executive secretary that he wouldn’t be in that day. Instead, he spent the hours before lunch with Anne preparing notes for a New Testament class he was to present the following week.

“What can we do that we haven’t done,” he asked his wife over French onion soup and grilled cheese sandwiches.

The conversation turned to more pleasant topics, including plans for Christmas. Then, out of the blue, Anne Morrison Welsh would recall in her memoir, Held in the Light: Norman Morrison’s Sacrifice for Peace and His Family’s Journey of Healing, he asked what she’d do if anything happened to him.

That afternoon, she picked up the couple’s two oldest children at school. When she left, her husband’s head was buried in his class notes while their 11-month-old, Emily, napped. By the time she had returned home and began making dinner, Norman was dead.

The 31-year-old father of three had driven to The Pentagon, poured kerosene over himself, and lit himself on fire—beneath Secretary of Defense John McNamara’s window, it turned out. Only at the last minute, according to eyewitnesses, had her husband safely set his baby daughter aside.

Accompanied by two friends, Anne drove to the Fort Myer clinic that served The Pentagon. She gathered the unharmed Emily (Norman had left extra bottles, diapers, and a blanket in the car he borrowed). She declined speak to the press, but released a statement expressing her husband’s concern over the suffering caused by the war and that his action was a protest against U.S. involvement.

Inside Norman’s clothing, investigators discovered an invitation to a Quaker meeting with “How Can We Prevent World War III” handwritten on the back and a second note to himself: “As we go stronger materially, we get weaker morally. Few would disagree.”

Norman’s self-immolation echoed those of Buddhist monks in Vietnam and 82-year-old peace activist Alice Herz’s similar sacrifice in Detroit nine months earlier.

The startling action by someone who seemed like an average American made international news and shook the consciousness of the country. It also vexed those who knew him, caused others to question its morality and efficacy—and shattered his family.

The day after her husband died, Anne received a letter which he had mailed en route to D.C.

Dearest Anne, please don’t condemn me…I have been praying only that I be shown what I must do. This morning with no warning I was shown, as clearly as I was shown that Friday night in August 1955, that you would be my wife…

The letter did not help Anne, who described a curtain of grief descending around her. Politically, she would learn many years later, the protest had made a profound impact on at least one person at The Pentagon.

“I reacted to the horror of his action by bottling up my emotions and avoided talking about them with anyone—even my family. I knew [they] shared many of Morrison’s feelings about the war,” McNamara admitted in his book, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. He also acknowledged his doubts about the war began that same month.

Healing for Anne and their daughters (their son died of cancer at 16) did not come until 1999, when they accepted an invitation to Vietnam. The unimaginable protest had been a beacon of hope for the North Vietnamese, who issued a stamp and named a street in her husband’s honor after his sacrifice. Poets penned works in commemoration and schoolchildren learned his name, which remained alive in Vietnamese hearts decades after his passing.

“I was in my bunker in the jungle that night when news of Morrison’s death in America came over Liberation Radio,” a former North Vietnamese soldier turned Hanoi University linguistics professor told Anne, after quietly approaching her during her visit. “I just sat there and cried. That someone in America cared enough about us that he would give up his life…”

“We’re joined at the hip at this point,” says John Heyn, referring to Jeff Krulik, co-director of Heavy Metal Parking Lot, the definitive document of ’80s teen metal culture—big hair, spandex, mullets, V-8 engines, cheap beer, and homegrown weed.

Celebrating its 40th anniversary next year and recently screened as part of the Motor House’s “Movie Monday” programming, Heavy Metal Parking Lot’s legion of admirers have included Nirvana, Cameron Crowe, and Sofia Coppola. After receiving an early copy of the videotape, John Waters sent Heyn and Krulik a postcard with a cheeky compliment, writing, “Thanks for letting me see it. It gave me the creeps.”

For anyone unfamiliar with the cult classic, the entire 16-minute doc was shot in the parking lot, as the title suggests, of the old Capital Centre in Landover before a Judas Priest concert in 1986.

Part cinema vérité, part guerrilla filmmaking, the origin story goes like this: The two aspiring directors had been spitballing short documentary ideas around subcultures for about a year when Heyn pitched shooting the local metal fandom.

“We were into punk and new wave, and 10 years older than most of the people who ended up in the film, but I’d been to Hammerjacks once or twice and at least knew something about the scene,” says Heyn, a Pikesville native, name-checking Baltimore’s legendary hard rock venue.  “I heard the show announced on the radio and circled the date.”

Krulik, who worked at a cable-access station in Bowie, brought the equipment. The result was a raw, pre-smartphone moment in time capturing wasted fans expressing their enthusiasm for sex, drugs, domestic beer, and heavy metal.

The film’s “characters,” an apt description of the tailgating ensemble cast, included a young lady yelling “Party!” who became known as “Glen Burnie Girl”; the “DC 101 guy,” Graham “Like a Gram of Dope” Owens; and the black-and-white-Spandex-clad “Zebraman,” whose rant against punk, Madonna, and pop became something of a metal manifesto.

What else Heavy Metal Parking Lot was, or is, remains difficult to elucidate. It’s been referred to as both the “seminal anthropological study of beer-swilling teenage metalheads” and “one of the greatest rock documentaries ever,” but it was edited from only two hours of shooting.

Basically, Heyn and Krulik lugged their camera around the Cap Centre parking lot until the doors opened, and recorded whatever looked interesting and whomever engaged them. They did not go to the show. Nor did they prepare any type of questions or script, which turned out to be unnecessary. Their subjects saw the big camera and naturally responded with, disconcerting at times, revelry.

The film eventually found cult fame after a worn copy unexpectedly landed in a bin at the influential L.A. video store, Mondo A-Go-Go. From there, old-school word-of-mouth made it go viral.

Heyn and Krulik went on to careers in the audio-visual world and continued to make docs—including Neil Diamond Parking Lot in 1998. After HMPL was posted to YouTube, they also got to know their “stars” through social media and anniversary events, typically organized by DJs and music festivals. That proved rewarding—and a relief—in that the kids for the most part had turned out just fine, becoming office managers, contractors, parents, etc. and in one case, a Hasidic luthier.

“It’s been a roller-coaster ride,” Krulik says. And still, they don’t want to get off. The two men hold out hope Heavy Metal Parking Lot’s legacy will not just continue, but expand into new arenas.

“It could be a Broadway musical,” Heyn says. “We got a script together. Why not?”

“We had a hammerhead shark on the rod and we’re fighting it, and it’s toward the end of the day and I’m thinking once we get him in, we’re going home,” recalls Capt. Mark Sampson, who has run a charter fishing service out of Ocean City for four decades, of a particularly memorable 2020 boat trip. “And then I look across water on the other side of the boat, and I see this dark shadow and it’s trucking. I said, ‘Hey guys, I think we got a mako coming in.’ It kept coming and coming and I was like, ‘Man, it looks really big.’ Suddenly, I realize it’s no mako. It is a huge shark.”

A shark so big, in fact, that Sampson and the crew scurried to pull in the boat’s fishing lines and chum—the tuna carcasses hanging over the side.

“It’s a great white and we don’t want to accidentally hook it. We’d never get it onboard.”

Naturally, just as the tuna is getting hoisted from the water, the great white—at 15 feet, still one of two biggest Sampson has seen in his nearly half-century career—opened its massive jaws and attempted to take a chomp. The great white’s teeth grazed the tuna, and in the iPhone video that later went viral, it also appeared interested in taking a chunk out of the vessel.

“It did give us this wonderful photo op,” Sampson continues with a chuckle. “Whites can get curious around a boat, more than other sharks, and it circled us a few times. In the video, you can hear one of our crew saying, ‘Don’t take a bite out of the boat. Don’t take a bite out of the boat.’ It swam so close to the bow, it allowed us to reach over and stick it with a tag.”

A U.S. Coast Guard licensed captain and fishing guide since 1986, Sampson is also an instructor, marine animal rescue volunteer, outdoors writer, author (Modern Sharking), and longtime participant in NOAA’s Cooperative Shark Tagging Program, which utilizes citizen scientists to track the highly migratory and, in some cases, endangered species.

For several years, he also worked with Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources on a hook study—with the idea, ultimately successful, of identifying safer hooks for catching and releasing sharks.

Growing up in Northern Virginia, Sampson caught the fishing bug during summers at his parents’ place in Ocean City and began working at local marinas in high school. Not surprisingly, he chose to attend nearby Salisbury University.

By coincidence, he was working on a charter boat between his sophomore and junior years at Salisbury when a fellow crew member told him about a new, bestselling novel called Jaws, which Sampson, already fascinated by the large sea creatures, immediately bought and devoured.

The next year—exactly 50 summers ago—he saw the blockbuster movie when it hit O.C.’s big screens.

“I still remember the eerie, weird feeling when I walked out on the dock that night afterwards,” he says while bringing back a recent Ocean City charter outing on his boat, Fish Finder. “Not fear exactly, but the water suddenly seemed much more mysterious and sinister.”

While the book and movie launched the careers of Peter Benchley and Steven Spielberg, it also launched a national shark obsession and sport fishing frenzy, which led to the decimation of shark populations. Both the author and director have since expressed regret about their misleading portrayals of sharks—they don’t target human beings, for example.

Benchley eventually became involved in shark conservation efforts,
telling the Los Angeles Times, “Knowing what I know now, I could never write that book today.”

Sampson also admits regrets about his participation in the trophy hunting culture of the ’70s and early ’80s. He notes sharks have existed for 400 million years, surviving mass extinctions, and we are their biggest threat—not the other way around. And they remain overfished
for their dorsal fins. (Shark fin soup is a traditional Chinese delicacy.)

Like Bentley, his focus in recent decades has been on conservation and sustainable fishing, including his advocacy of catch-and-release best practices.

Like most fishing tales, many of Sampson’s memorable experiences revolve around the ones that got away. As if it happened yesterday, he recalls fishing out from Ocean City in the 1980s with a friend, Dick Arnold, who’d hooked what they estimated was a 350-pound mako shark on a light 16-pound test line.

At the time, it would’ve been a world record. Arnold fought the fish for 11 hours—no one else could touch the rod—as Sampson manuevered the boat, chasing after the elusive mako. Then the line finally broke.

“People always ask what was the longest you ever fought a fish and that was it,” Sampson says. “And I remember when the line broke. Of course, I thought Dick was going be disappointed, cussing and swearing, and blaming this or that, and the first words out of his mouth were, ‘I’m just glad it’s over.’”

“Today, we get a chance to be absolutely still for a half-hour,” meditation leader Maria Broom says softly as she purifies the ritual homa fire offerings—dried cow dung, ghee, herbs—sending up gentle gray smoke from a copper vessel. “We’re going to go inside ourselves.”

As an older man in dreadlocks plays a flute, Broom repeats a simple mantra. Eventually, she asks the two dozen or so people seated on yoga mats inside a circle of stones at Leakin Park to think of one thing that has been bothering them lately.

“Now, as you take a deep breath in, think about that one thing that’s been on your mind,” she says, “and when you slowly exhale, let it leave your body with your breath.”

Closer to Leakin Park’s entrance, parents and kids wait their turn for a ride on miniature replica trains. A decades long tradition, it’s the biggest attraction at the park’s Second Sunday celebrations. There are also activities sponsored by the Natural History Society of Maryland and the Carrie Murray Nature Center here. But the vibe is quieter down the hill, beneath the old-growth trees.

After the 30-minute meditation session ends, most people don’t seem ready to leave, instead chatting with each other or approaching Broom, a Baltimore actress best known for her role as Marla Daniels, the ambitious, political spouse of a high-ranking police department official in The Wire.

Later, Broom sighs when asked about those who only know Leakin Park through its Wire or Serial podcast reputation—as a place where bodies get dumped. Would they be surprised if they visited in person on this sunny afternoon?

“Oh, that’s the past,” she responds with a smile. “Not on anyone’s mind today.”

Often misrepresented and chronically underfunded, the Gwynns Falls/Leakin Park area, which stretches along the West Baltimore city line, is the second-largest urban woodland park in the country. At the moment, there is a study underway to designate the more than 1,200 contiguous acres a city-state “partnership park” to empower appropriate stewardship, ranger staffing, trail maintenance, and the like.

Legislation signed by Gov. Wes Moore created an advisory committee, which has until Dec. 1 to compile a report on the viability of adding the park to the state Department of Natural Resources umbrella. Currently, Baltimore City remains the only Maryland jurisdiction without a state park.

“It becomes a destination with proper oversight and development,” says Michael CrossBarnet, executive director of Friends of Gwynns Falls/Leakin Park. “It’s touching Baltimore County. It’s within 20 minutes of where 1.5 million people live, and it could be an engine for growth in West Baltimore, the way Patterson Park has been for Southeast Baltimore.”

Historically, Leakin Park and Gwynns Falls—a 25-mile stream flowing from Reisterstown into the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River—has been underappreciated even by many in the surrounding community. But certainly not all.

“I grew up nearby, in a multi-generational household, which means it was a bit crowded,” ElaSita Carpenter says with a laugh. “Some of my earliest memories are at the park with my late father, Antonio, one of the first naturalists at the City Department of Parks and Recreation. I used to run through the fields with my brother, up the big hill at Winans Meadow, and then back through the woods.”

Her father would later design and build a Hopi labyrinth at the park, while Carpenter (pictured right, with her mother, above) went on to earn a PhD at the University of Missouri’s School of Natural Resources. (Her dissertation focused on bat activity in Baltimore, and yes, there’s quite a bit of it—six different species in Leakin Park alone.)

Not only does the labyrinth remain in great shape, so does a nearby magnolia grove that Carpenter’s father, a former Friends board member, recalled to life.

“When my husband discovered the magnolias, about 10 years ago, that was it for me, because once they bloom, it’s magical,” says Brenda Pinckney-Carpenter, sitting near the labyrinth’s entrance following the meditation session. “He rescued them from these overgrown vines; they were petering out. The following spring, however, the buds popped. If we get a warm April now, they burst and it’s the flowers that come out first, before the leaves are on the trees. In a good year, you can see them from the road, and if you step off the road for a minute, you can smell them coming up from their tiny valley. It’s intoxicating.

“Now, when I see vines growing, I go snatch them up,” she continues. “I think, ‘No, we’re not having that. We’re preserving the magnolias.’ So, it’s my job now. I’m the protector of the trees.

The sheer expanse of Murray Kempton’s career is difficult to wrap one’s head around. A former H.L. Mencken copyboy and Johns Hopkins News-Letter editor-in-chief, he eventually plied his trade as a columnist in New York. Writing from the 1930s through the 1990s, Kempton chronicled Roosevelt and the New Deal, the Big Apple of Trump and Giuliani, and seemingly everything in-between.

And now his columns are assembled in a new anthology. In Going Around: Selected Journalism, Maryland native, writer, and historical researcher Andrew Holter brings forth an edited collection of the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist’s work that feels as vital as the day it was written.

The epitome of a shoe-leather reporter, Kempton never learned to drive, typically moving from self-assignment to self-assignment by bicycle. But what he also brought was observation, perspective, moral clarity, and a literary eye to topics that remain as relevant as ever—subjects including white nationalism, police brutality, free speech, and the all-too-recognizable traits of authoritarians and their sycophantic enablers. Interested in some of the source material for recent films like The Trial of the Chicago 7, Oppenheimer, The Apprentice, and Conclave? It’s in this collection.

Below, we chat with Holter about Kempton’s upbringing in Baltimore, coverage of noteworthy Baltimoreans (from H.L Mencken to Tupac Shakur), and his unique writing style.

Granted, Kempton spent his career in New York. At the same time, he’s Baltimore born and raised—and completely forgotten here.
I found him while searching the 1930s and Nazi sympathy in Baltimore, particularly among German-American gentiles, for a City Paper piece in 2017. I’m a German American gentile from Maryland, so I was interested in that cultural history. I started looking into the atmosphere at Johns Hopkins in the ’30s, where Kempton went, and discovered his childhood home at Preston and Guilford was on my block. His family had been Confederate exiles, the people who were supposed to have run the Confederate States of America, and came to Baltimore after the Civil War. It was that cohort, that milieu in Mount Vernon, who were responsible for the Confederate statues that were taken down.

Kempton makes a name covering the Civil Rights movement. Coming from Baltimore provided a perspective his Northern colleagues didn’t possess, correct?
He [grew] up in this bizarre, hermetic world of privilege in Mount Vernon, but it was a privilege he called “shabby gentility.” Not true upper crust, but part of that society. His mother was a widow, and she was the only one of his school friends’ mothers who had a job. She worked at Hutzler’s. His family had a Black servant, and it was the Jim Crow era in Baltimore, but at Hopkins he fell in love with jazz and that world on Pennsylvania Avenue. He absorbs all of that and the quite radical ideas [percolating] on college campuses in the ’30s, and that gave him this different consciousness about social and racial inequality that he maintained for the rest of his life.

The breadth and depth of his experience, knowledge, and writing just staggers.
He’s the only writer who could write about H.L. Mencken and write about Tupac Shakur with first-hand insight, which is insane. He didn’t know Tupac personally, but he knew Afeni Shakur, Tupac’s mother [and former Black Panther], who lived on Greenmount Avenue briefly.

There’s an old line that I like about journalism being the first draft of history. This is the experience reading this book.
It feels like he knew everybody. One way to read this book is as an alternate history of the 20th century, through this particular path that Kempton took through it.

He obviously grew up reading Mencken, this towering newspaper columnist and national figure.
Mencken was the example of the shoe-leather reporter who becomes the brilliant cultural critic. He’s out reporting when he’s like 16, looking at murders every day, cutting his teeth, and then he also edited a literary magazine, publishing Theodore Dreiser, Zora Neale Hurston, and these people. That model, of the reporter who is also an intellectual, was really important. And then also Mencken’s sense of humor, which is totally there in Kempton.

There is also a dedication to craft.
I think he is one of the great unsung stylists. The most common criticism, from Tom Wolfe, was that he was “baroque.” His sentences could be challenging, but they were also entertaining. Personally, I would rather read something like that than something very plain, and it’s part of what makes Kempton worth reading. People don’t really write like he did anymore.