The demonstration at City Hall overflowed its expansive grass plaza. Protestors wearing hoodies in honor of Trayvon Martin and carrying signs that read “I Can’t Breathe”—the last words of Eric Garner—stretched to the War Memorial Building. Some of the crowd, which had marched from Gilmor Homes, dispersed after the planned rally. Others headed to Camden Yards.

“That’s where all the police were stationed to make sure we didn’t mess up the game,” recalls Devin Allen, then just a year older than Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old from West Baltimore who had succumbed to injuries suffered in police custody six days earlier.

A self-taught, independent photographer still new to documenting protests, Allen had friends who, like Gray, lived in the sprawling Gilmor public-housing complex. He, too, had once been arrested and been given a so-called “rough ride,” and he knew one of young women screaming out in the viral video of Gray’s arrest.

As protestors pushed past the ballpark’s outdoor bars, both Orioles and visiting Red Sox fans began taunting them—laughing, and throwing food and drinks.

“It became this clash of Black protestors, 17, 18 years old, early 20s, and fans calling us the N-word and monkeys—stuff these young guys never  heard directed at them from white lips,” Allen says. “It was like the last drop in a bucket that overflows. Fights break out. Windows are smashed. The police cars blocking everyone in get stomped.”

To save space on the small 8-gigabyte memory cards he could afford, Allen picked his shots. At one point, he saw a young man with a red bandana covering his face throw something at a line of riot gear-clad police.

“I was about to take a picture right then, but let him run toward me instead,” Allen says. “I’m thinking in that moment, and I’m not thinking. It’s muscle memory. It’s instinct. I snap the picture. I look down at the image and now I’ve got to go—the police are charging, and I hop over this gate.”

He’d been documenting and uploading to social media all day and posted the image to Twitter and Instagram. While everything was still unfolding, he wrote, “We are sick & tired.”

He shot until the sun went down and woke up with more than 10,000 new followers. The BBC called the next morning to interview him about police brutality and the city’s protests. Allen had been covering all the events following Gray’s arrest and subsequent death for a week. However, he chose not to photograph Gray’s funeral two days after the confrontation at Camden Yards.

“I’d lost too many friends. To me, it would’ve been disrespectful.”

Nor did Allen shoot the destruction that followed. “Photographers, TV cameras were coming to Baltimore, with everyone focused on the CVS that was burning” at the busy intersection of Pennsylvania and North avenues, he says. “I knew people in that area, and in the Mondawmin community where things started when Frederick Douglass High students got out of school that day and the system shut down their buses. I lived, and still live, five minutes away. I needed to check on my friends. I tell people I mentor that being a good photographer is sometimes about the pictures you don’t take.”

That night, Allen went to work at the group home where he helped supervise individuals with developmental disabilities. The next morning, his phone blew up with calls from a blocked number, which turned out to be Time magazine.

His photo of the young guy in the red bandana would soon be on its the cover.

“I think people forget that the protests began before Freddie Gray passed,” says Allen, reflecting on one of the most momentous events in the city’s history after a recent discussion of Black voices in the media at the Baltimore Museum of Industry. He notes that the initial demonstrations were not that large. Mostly, they involved Gray’s family and friends, people from his Sandtown-Winchester community, and others from the People’s Power Assembly gathering in front of the Western District Police Station.

“The week he died, they started getting bigger and bigger,” Allen continues. “That whole of 2015 and into the summer of 2016 was a depressing period in a lot of ways, but activists, people in the community, we dubbed it the Baltimore Uprising. That wasn’t outsiders. That was us. It didn’t become ‘the riots.’ We in the city, we wanted to shape and own our narrative and not have others do that for us, or to us.”

In fact, what made Allen most proud of his Time cover was not the affirmation of his budding talent. He was only the third amateur photographer to ever land the then-92-year-old magazine’s front page. Nor was it the money. He admittedly knew nothing of copyrights and fee scales. What mattered was that his pictures, which were also featured inside the magazine, had not been reframed to fit some pre-existing reputation of his hometown. (See: The Wire.)

“I only wanted the work­—real imagery from real Baltimore, from the ground up—to get out into the world and it did.”

At the same time, as soon as the news broke on social media that an amateur West Baltimore photographer had snagged the cover of Time, professional documentary photographers and journalists started posting things like “you’ll never hear from him again” and “he’s going to disappear.” Some shared the sentiment to him face to face.

Instead, the magazine interviewed him and shared more of his photos for its LightBox blog. Allen followed that up with a Time photo essay called “The Heart of the City,” which put flesh on the Baltimore that he knew with intimate portraits from Gilmor Homes, Sandtown-Winchester, and Pennsylvania Avenue.

In July 2015, the Reginald F. Lewis Museum hosted his first solo exhibition. In August 2015, Under Armour hired him to shoot NBA star and brand ambassador Steph Curry on a trip to Asia—Allen’s first trip outside the U.S. Though he normally shoots in black-and-white, Allen switched to color for that campaign as opportunities and his photography continued to evolve. He visited Japan, China, and the Philippines, and Austria, as well, where he shot a Syrian refugee camp filled with families trying to get to Germany.

“I ONLY WANTED REAL IMAGERY FROM REAL BALTIMORE TO GET OUT INTO THE WORLD AND IT DID.”

By the end of the whirlwind year, his work had been featured in The Washington Post and The New York Times, and acquired by the National Museum of African American History and Culture, with additional exhibitions in Washington, D.C., and New York.

Along the way, he also managed to launch a youth program, giving out free cameras and teaching photography to city kids with little connection to art. And when Def Jam Recordings co-founder Russell Simmons learned of the GoFundMe page that Allen had put together to support the project, he wrote him a check for $20,000.

A singular Baltimore career was just getting started.

In 2017, Allen’s first hardcover book, A Beautiful Ghetto, with an introduction from his close friend, the Baltimore writer D. Watkins, was published and subsequently nominated for an NAACP Image Award. His third hardcover book, Devin Allen: Baltimore, supported through the Gordon Parks Foundation and a Steidl Book Prize grant, is due out this spring, coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the Uprising.

The collection is essentially an early retrospective of Allen’s career from Steidl, one of the most prestigious publishers of fine-art photobooks in the world. The book includes portraits, images of protests, and scenes of city street life from 2014 to 2023, including a few from Allen’s January show at Charles Street’s Galerie Myrtis, which represents him, and many never published before.

“There’s a trust and there’s a collaboration going on between Devin and his subjects,” says Peter Kunhardt Jr., executive director of the Gordon Parks Foundation, which made Allen its inaugural fellow in 2017. A self-taught photographer whose career continues to inspire Allen, Parks is considered perhaps the greatest Black photographer of the 20th century. “That’s also why Gordon Parks was so successful, because he was able to capture moments that were quite personal and complicated, and he was able to make sure that his subjects trusted him, and it’s very clear that Devin has that same skill.”

One of the projects Allen is currently working on is a series around his maternal grandmother, Doris, who let him put his first camera on her Best Buy credit card. She was, coincidentally, his first introduction into photography. The family’s informal documentarian, his grandmother had been snapping photos on Christmas morning, at Easter, during July 4th cookouts, for his entire life, always keeping a camera in her vicinity. Allen’s mother, Gail, typically wrote the captions.

Now suffering from dementia, Doris attended every show and gallery talk when his career took off. Allen, who has been renovating her home, has since come across dozens of his grandmother’s pictures, including some from her Douglass High graduation and wedding. She kept everything, he learned, including magazine and newspaper clippings of all of his work, which he found in a large Ziploc bag.

Baltimore, Allen says, is a city that can be beautiful, big-hearted, and close-knit, i.e. “Smalltimore,” and he considers himself fortunate to grow up where and when he did, and certainly with the family he had. He rode bikes as a kid, took karate lessons to be like a Ninja Turtle, and played Little League baseball.

But it’s also a city that leaves scars, and he witnessed and experienced plenty of pain and trauma as a child growing up through Baltimore’s AIDS and crack epidemics.

“I was blessed where I had a good mom, a good grandmother, an active uncle, and I had aunts in my life,” says Allen, whose disarming smile and affable nature belie the seriousness and intentionality of his work. “But that’s not the same for a lot of my peers growing up.”

He mentions a friend who lost both parents to heroin overdoses. Another who had to raise his little brothers and sisters. He estimates he’s lost 20 friends to gun violence, adding he’s had friends who have killed other friends.

“Baltimore is one of those places where sometimes you grow up with a chip on your shoulder from going through so much pain and so many trials and tribulations,” he says. People will be like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe a person did this and did that.’ But you don’t know what that person might have been through. That’s one of the things when you’re dealing with people like Freddie Gray [who suffered lead paint poisoning as a child] and others in the community. They got their own traumas, and during the Uprising, all that pain was released at one time.”

When he says that photography saved his life, he means it literally. Two years before the events of 2015, Allen lost his two of his closest friends to gun violence over the same weekend. One was shot seven times in front of a family member’s home. The other was killed outside of a store the next day. If Allen, who had hustled and sold drugs as a teenager and knew his way around the city’s street corners, hadn’t been shooting photographs that afternoon, he most likely would’ve been with him.

He had been shot at himself before, but after the birth of his daughter, recognized he needed to change. His mother helped him get him a job “pushing paper” at Transamerica. Not surprisingly, he found it boring, and when the life insurance company laid him off after three years, it proved a turning point.

A self-described “follower” in school, he first tried expressing himself through poetry (“I was terrible”) and spoken-word (“I hated performing”), but nonetheless found a supportive arts community in the Hollins Market district. When he later borrowed a buddy’s Nikon Coolpix point-and-shoot, he realized he’d finally found his medium (“he had to ask for it back”).

Many of the friends he grew up with didn’t understand his passion for art and dismissed his efforts to become a photographer. They told him he was too old, the window for getting into an art institute or a school like Maryland Institute College of Art had closed. Not his grandmother, however.

“The name of her series is, She Saw Me Coming,” Allen says.

ALLEN’S WORK GOES AGAINST STEREOTYPES AND CELEBRATES THE DAY-TO-DAY BLACK EXPERIENCE, AND ITS TRADITIONS AND CULTURE.

D. Watkins, the Baltimore native and New York Times bestselling author of books like The Cook Up, The Beast Side, and Black Boy Smile, knew Allen before he became a photographer, when Allen and his crew were known for throwing popular parties on the city’s west side. He says one thing that people often forget is that Allen had begun garnering social media attention in Baltimore’s Black community for his photos and portraits before the Freddie Gray protests and Time cover.

“That photograph was not some lucky, random shot,” Watkins says. “A rank amateur could not have done that. He just wasn’t published.”

Allen had sent samples of his work to The Baltimore Sun and had never gotten as much as a reply. The former City Paper had at least sent a note back when they turned his work down.

“Devin will say, ‘My career was built on the broken back of Freddie Gray.’” Watkins says. “I challenge him on that. I don’t believe that.”

To Watkins, his longtime friend’s decade-long rise in the art world has been unique and sustained, because Allen, who admittedly considered moving to New York to further his career early on, remained committed to his community.

“He’s a success in the art world, but he’s not a guy from the art world, he’s a guy from the street,” Watkins says. “He moves like how we move outside. He talks to people, he asks questions, he doesn’t project any pretension. He doesn’t think he invented the camera—he loves the skill set and he loves what he’s able to do, but he respects people more.”

Watkins adds that when an artist, filmmaker, writer, or journalist is telling stories of places of struggle or people dealing with hardship, it is always a delicate matter. Many writers and artists don’t have any accountability to those people, and some get locked into the accolades or awards they want to win.

“I’ve been to galas with Devin where you look left and you see Usher, you look right and see Chelsea Clinton, you turn around and you bump into Gayle King,” he says. “That’s not who he is or why he does what he does. I’ve seen Devin at one of the New York events on Tuesday, and Thursday he’s back in Park Heights, at Gilmor Homes, over Whitelock, in those spaces shooting pictures or talking at a middle school.”

Myrtis Bedolla is the founder of Galerie Myrtis in Station North, which has represented Allen since 2022. The mission of her gallery supports the subjects and themes of his work, she says, providing a space and platform for its social, cultural, and political concerns. In turn, his work serves as a vehicle for discourse and discussions in the Black community.

She still remembers “the rawness” of Allen’s Time cover the first time she saw it. “I think we all felt the weight of what that image portrayed given Freddie Gray’s death,” says Bedolla. “But his photography was never solely about the Uprising and protest. Sometimes we need to look through his lens and voice for things, experiences, that are a bit more complicated.”

Allen’s work goes against stereotypes and celebrates the day-to-day Black experience, and its traditions and culture, she continues.

“Those stories and that imagery are also important,” says Bedolla. “It’s also important for Black children to see themselves portrayed in those positive images, too.”

To his credit, Allen has had the city’s youth in mind since he first had the opportunity to make an impact in their lives. Over the past decade, he’s given away more than 500 cameras and has visited more schools, taught more workshops, and mentored more students than can be counted. He says most people would be surprised by the number of kids who grow up in the inner city who have few photographs, unlike he did, simply of themselves and their families.

For his exhibition titled The Textures of Us at Galerie Myrtis earlier this year, Allen invited two of his mentees to participate with him, gladly yielding the stage to them during the show’s closing reception.

Photographer Joe Giordano, a Baltimore contributor and instructor at the Baltimore School for the Arts, says he’s taught several students who received their first camera from Allen. (Giordano, who shot the Uprising for the City Paper, shares an exhibition with Allen this month at the Creative Alliance.)

“Some kids are more comfortable with their phones,” Allen says. “So, when I give them a camera, it’s just like, all right, let me show you. But what I am trying to do is help them tell their story and own their truth.

“Everything that was happening in Baltimore 10 years ago, I was able to show the honest story. When I look back at some of the headlines or how they talked about Freddie Gray or how people were calling us thugs and these other things—through my imagery, you see it in a different light. It’s about speaking up for yourself. When I’m teaching, it’s more the history of photography, the importance of Black photographers and telling Black stories, and why we need to tell these stories. The technical stuff comes on the back end.”

“It’s funny,” Watkins says of Allen and his journey. “These kids, many people in the city, they know Devin because he has been in their neighborhood, to their school. And so, when he is on television, or they follow his Instagram and see good things happen for him or the awards he receives, they root for him.

“To me, that’s the part that is special. He’s not a politician, or a bigwig businessman, or even an NBA star, and I can name 10 of those from Baltimore. His story is powerful for people. He’s the guy from the trenches that picked up a camera and made it big.”

This year we celebrate our 50th Best of Baltimore issue—our biggest and boldest yet. Subscribe before 6/20 to guarantee your copy commemorating this milestone anniversary. 

The uprising after Freddie Gray’s death put a spotlight on the racialized history and lack of accountability around police brutality in Baltimore. The scrutiny only intensified when Gray’s death was ruled a homicide and now-former City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby responded by indicting six police officers on charges, including one for second-degree murder, related to Gray’s broken neck. Ultimately, of course, prosecutors failed to win a single conviction.

Afterward, Mosby blamed the police department, alleging a cover-up. But what if that were true and the narrative Mosby and her prosecutors laid out was flawed from the start? What if Gray wasn’t fatally injured during a “rough ride,” as we were told? The speculative cause by the medical examiner was partially based on information brought forward by the defendants themselves. What if a shackled Gray was thrown into the police van headfirst, as eyewitnesses attest, breaking his neck?

In They Killed Freddie Gray: The Anatomy of a Police Brutality Cover-Up, independent journalist Justine Barron analyzes, with new information, problems with the established narrative. In over 300 meticulously reported pages, Barron presents the fullest story to date of Gray’s death and the failure to hold the BPD accountable.

Your reexamination of Gray’s death comes after widespread documented corruption and the Gun Trace Task Force scandal. Maybe people are willing to take a second look at the story we were told about how he died?
I think that’s partly true. I also think something about the Freddie Gray case has remained fixed in people’s minds. For many, it was about cops, and in their minds, the very worst thing they could have possibly done is not call for a medic on time. But they definitely didn’t kill him with their hands.

Hospital records state Gray’s neck injury was a jumped facet and there’s only one mechanism that could’ve caused it, which is going headfirst into a hard surface. Why did the medical examiner and then prosecutors discount the testimony of eyewitnesses?
Within days of Gray’s death, they do an autopsy and confirm what the hospital records show. But medical examiner Dr. Carol Allan is not told by police, or anyone, that he was thrown in the van. She’s told that he was handled fine. She is even asked in one meeting, “Could it happen from Freddie Gray being shoved in the van?” She says, yes—she just didn’t know [that]. So, she comes to this conclusion that it likely happened while the van was moving and that’s really good for the police department and the prosecutors went along with that, too.

Years earlier, Jeffrey Alston suffered a broken neck while shackled in a police van in Baltimore. As with Gray, the police tried to claim he’d injured himself. Alston, however, survived—as a paraplegic—and said he was injured getting tossed into the van. Yet, without direct evidence, the “rough ride” narrative becomes gospel.
I think the big thing was Marilyn Mosby prosecuting these cops with such serious charges. Her stance, her statements about the police and on policing, and the level of charges were in some ways unprecedented. What happened was that even the witnesses thought, “Well, maybe he was killed in a rough ride.” Why? Because people thought if Marilyn Mosby is taking on the police and she’s saying this, she must know something we don’t know. After [the first trial] was such a dud, the eyewitnesses started to feel like, “Wait, I should go back to what I originally felt.”

It takes someone on a mission to do this amount of investigative work. What drove you?
A few missions, I guess. Certainly one was to correct the historical record. It’s enormously aggravating to see Wikipedia have it wrong, and then also see people tweet about [Gray’s death] every year on the anniversary and have it wrong. It’s also frustrating to see certain people held up as heroes that actually were helping lead the cover-up. I don’t know what you call that motivation, but it feels like gaslighting.

You also reflect on systemic problems highlighted by the Gray case—the relationships between police, prosecutors, crime labs, and medical examiners—and the media’s approach to reporting on crime and criminal justice issues.
There are potential conflicts of interest that I didn’t see being discussed, including the enormous protection racket around police brutality. We’re also still talking about autopsy reports as if these are scientific documents. But it’s also the way that the media and the public takes things at face value—video evidence, autopsy reports, statements from officials, and who they’re told are the heroes and the villains. The need to deconstruct and undo these myths comes from a deep place for me.

Since 2008, Justin Fenton has covered cops and courts for the Sun, earning multiple kudos from this magazine as the city’s best reporter. He contributed to the paper’s Pulitzer-finalist coverage of the death of Freddie Gray, as well the Healthy Holly series that won the prize last year.

His first book, We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption, follows up his prolific reporting on the explosive indictments and convictions of members of the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force. For Baltimoreans, some of the most compelling parts of the book will be the chapters in which Fenton chronicles rogue GTTF activities even as the city convulses from the 2015 Uprising. It’s a startling look inside the city’s police department that local readers shouldn’t miss.

What did you learn in reporting this book that you hadn’t picked up in your Sun coverage?
There were many people who, for whatever reason, wanted to speak only for the book, so there are quite a few crucial perspectives that appear only in the book. Another was gaining more insight into how Sergeant Wayne Jenkins operated within the BPD and gained cover for his bad behavior.

You highlight how the criminally charged GTTF cops were corrupt, previously and separately, before they joined forces in that unit. Is the underlying story that BPD dysfunction goes much deeper than one bad unit?
Yes, these officers were operating in different pockets of the [police department] before…an FBI wiretap investigation of two of them [revealed their corruption]. The feds couldn’t have scripted it any better, and yet it also shows they might not have detected the others if not for that serendipitous development. At the same time, I wanted to explore the extent to which others are not engaged in similar behavior, and what they knew or didn’t know, because that haze [of working in a large police department] is a big part of understanding why stuff like this can go on like it did.

You write that some BPD commanders had to have known what was going on with the GTTF. But no police brass has ever been held accountable, correct?
All of the supervisors remain in leadership. The highest-ranking officer was demoted to lieutenant, which is still a crucial oversight rank. Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Jones oversaw two of the officers directly for years and later had oversight of the GTTF, and neither he nor the department would talk about why we shouldn’t be troubled by that.

The BPD’s low closure rate in homicide cases has been well documented. How much of the blame for that do you think is related to community distrust of the police based on the department’s own bad behavior?
I think it’s certainly part of it, as is the fear of being a witness in general and lack of confidence in court outcomes. It’s cyclical—I think the agency has relied on more aggressive policing in part because of fewer people cooperating, which itself is in part a result of bad policing.

Regarding the death of former GTTF officer Sean Suiter, which officially remains an unresolved homicide, you present a lot of facts that he most likely took his own life.
I did not want to be definitive, because so much is unclear, but there were additional facts and details I was able to gather that do point to that conclusion. Yet it remains hard to believe that someone would try to pull that off, in a public place, with another detective present.

What can you say about your upcoming HBO series with David Simon?
[That], as you would expect from the writers and producers of The Wire, they are exploring the complex issues that lead to a scandal like this.

Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

By Ruth Franklin (Liveright Publishing Corporation)

History doesn’t always celebrate the literary figures who weren’t award winners or bestsellers. But a lack of renown doesn’t mean that those writers weren’t experts of their craft. Take, for example, Shirley Jackson, a master of suspense and psychological horror who is perhaps best known for the short story “The Lottery.” Baltimore native Ruth Franklin—a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and Harper’s—gives Jackson her due in this new biography, detailing how Jackson used her own experiences to expose the isolation and exploitation of women in postwar America, decades before the 1960s women’s movement dawned. Franklin’s book is an expansive look into a woman ahead of her time.

Uprising In the City

By Kevin Shird (self-published)

In many ways, Baltimore is still grappling with issues that were highlighted after the death of Freddie Gray—poverty, racism, and police brutality among them. Nearly two years later, Kevin Shird thoughtfully considers these issues in his latest book. The West Baltimore native is the right person to take on this topic—he worked as a drug dealer, attended college in prison, and, since his release, has become an acclaimed writer and youth advocate. He raises important points about our city, and shows us that, while we may not have all the parts assembled yet, we are capable of building a brighter future.

For those of us who are residents of, working in, or certainly covering the city of Baltimore, there is a dangerous notion of existing in a bubble. Of course, we are well-aware of the city’s exponential violence since the death of Freddie Gray in 2015, but a recent article in The New York Times Magazine that’s been making its rounds on social media forces us to take a step back, seeing the events of the past four years in succession—rather than one at a time.

Of course, little of ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis well-reported findings are exactly news to us. But what he’s done in his recent piece, entitled “The Tragedy of Baltimore,” is put things into clear context, both setting up the framework that led to the events of April 2015 and its devastation aftermath. No matter what you choose to call the Uprising (which, MacGillis points out, reveals “a lot about the politics of the person”), there is an undeniable fact: the events surrounding it have been exponentially more damaging than the thing itself.

This aftermath has been widely reported before in many local outlets, as we reflected one year out, took a close examination into how the Baltimore Police Department is trying to recruit and retain officers, and done consistent reporting on the Gun Trace Task Force. But MacGillis’ synopsis of the past four years chronicles this unraveling in one scrolling, long-form piece that details the city’s mayoral policy changes, string of police commissioners, and unimaginable corruption.

“It may come up as a surprise for some to see my name on an article that puts the city in such a stark light, given what a notorious booster I’ve been for Baltimore,” MacGillis wrote in a statement. “But I love the city, and I believe that its recovery—which I still think is possible—will require honesty and accountability. The city deserves better than it’s had.”

The story certainly doesn’t wrap up these deep-seated, systemic issues in one neat package or solution, but instead pits two perspectives against each other through the lens of distinct characters. On the one end is Tony Barksdale, former deputy police commissioner in Baltimore, who advocates for tougher police tactics and argues that the consent decree has left officers powerless. Then there is Shantay Guy, whose stepson Da’mon was wounded in a shooting in October, and believes policing in Baltimore is broken and the solutions lie in responding to community needs first.

While there is no definitive right or wrong answer, the perspectives of both Barksdale and Guy reflect conversations being had all over the city, both inside and outside government headquarters. This most recent piece, and the continued dialogue that it will inspire, does implore an important message to its readers, one that is echoed by Erricka Bridgeford in a recent Baltimore Ceasefire slogan: “Don’t be numb.”

Baltimore After Freddie Gray

Sean Yoes (self-published)

Sean Yoes hits on some heavy subject matter in his recent book: the death of Freddie Gray, the Baltimore Uprising, the mysterious shooting of Detective Sean Suiter, and the widening, mutual distrust between the black community and the Baltimore Police Department. But he also writes about efforts that are being made to heal. In this collection of some 50 pieces originally published in the Baltimore Afro-American, he shares stories of those whose lives have been affected by violence in the city such as the Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle and other groups who are rising above the cacophony to pave the way toward a brighter future.

At the Far End of Nowhere

Christine Davis Merriman (Green Writers Press)

This debut novel by Baltimore County’s Christine Davis Merriman is a first-person coming-
of-age story told by the introspective Lissa, who grows up in Baltimore during the ’50s through ’70s. We’re engaged as the chapters unfold against a backdrop of the Vietnam War, women’s lib, and the Civil Rights Movement. The historical elements of the book run even deeper, as Lissa recounts anecdotes told to her by her father—who has a sort of mad-scientist charm—and pulls stories from the diary of her mother, a nurse during World War II. At its heart, this is a moving story of a parent-child relationship that changes over time, as Lissa eventually becomes her father’s caretaker and long-held family traumas are resolved together.

A placard hangs in the foyer of the historic Arch Social Club that reads: “We are strong, moral men who believe in service to our community, preservation of our culture, friendship, and brotherly love.” Founded in 1905 by African-American professionals Raymond Coates, Samuel Barney, and Jeremiah S. Hill, the club is one of the oldest b men’s social clubs in the U.S., and one of the few remaining black-owned organizations to have operated while Pennsylvania Avenue was still nationally recognized as a hub for arts, culture, and entrepreneurship.

The club—which continues to serve as a cornerstone of culture, civics, and commerce for African-American communities in Baltimore City—recently won a $118,000 financial award from the National Trust for Historic Preservation to restore parts of the building back to its original grandeur.

Kaleb Tshamba, chairman of the Board of Trustees, gave me a tour of the club, which he hopes the city will support more in the future. “We’ve always been a part of the community, never left the community,” Tshamba said. “That’s why during the Uprising, we stayed open.”

The foyer also features a small exhibit of archival prints and articles about historic achievements made by black Baltimoreans. “They were doctors, lawyers, organizers, activists, Arabbers, carpenters—we had all of them,” Tshamba shared about club membership. “A lot of [us] were in the military,” he points to several pictures of young servicemen in their uniforms. “That’s me there!” he beams at a handsome image of himself in his early 20s. “We are warriors.”

Many of the portraits displayed are of founders and early members of the club who were prominent leaders in Baltimore City. Well known figures include Harry Syth Cummings, Baltimore’s first black City Councilman who was instrumental in getting segregated African-American K-12 schools renamed after prominent figures, and raising awareness about the importance of black voters. Then there was A. Philip Randolph, a civil rights activist, organizer of the March on Washington Movement, and founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

Of course, Paul Coates, founder of the Black Classic Press publishing company and father of scholar Ta-Nehisi Coates, is among the many important figures recognized. “To be a member of our club you could be a Democrat, Republican, atheist, Black Nationalist, we didn’t discriminate,” Tshamba continues, “As long as you were about community building, uplifting our community, that is what we all had in common.” That the 113-year-old institution survived Jim Crow, redlining, the Baltimore riot of 1968, or contemporary gentrification, is nothing short of miraculous.

Tshamba points to a portrait of John Kier, another early member of the club, who was the conductor of the big band, the Melody Boys. “Cab Calloway played with the Melody Boys before he went to New York and became famous,” he notes. We walk through the Raymond Coates Lounge and enter the Billie Holiday Room, a small ballroom with tables, seating and a large stage, a larger ballroom on the second floor is named for Calloway.

“Bands would be playing right here,” Tshamba points towards the stage in the Billie Holiday Room where legends like Holiday, Calloway, and Duke Ellington once performed. “Every time Duke Ellington would come to town, they would come here to play. All the black entertainers from all over the United States came here to Baltimore.” he continued. “All the black movie stars came here to Baltimore [and] to the Royal Theater. All of that is torn down now. It should have never been torn down.”

There is an old West African Proverb that notes, paraphrasing here, when an old man dies, a library burns to the ground. The Arch Social Club is one of the last standing archives dedicated to the preservation of critical local histories about early affluent African Americans. The club is part of an on-going initiative, led by “Lady” Brion Gill, cultural curator for Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle (LBS), to reestablish an African-American Arts and Entertainment District on Pennsylvania Avenue. “To lift up a nation,” Tshamba said, “you have to lift up your people.”

It’s been almost three years since your last record, Parts & Labor, in 2015. What have you been up to between then and now? 
Shortly after I released that album, I had some things happen with my family that made me realize I want to spend my time differently. I left my full-time job in D.C. and moved back up to Baltimore. For a while, I lived at the H&H Building with my fiancé, and then he ended up buying a house in Mayfield that needed a whole lot of work. So around that same time that I was going through a lot of change, we were literally knocking down walls and dealing with holes in the roof. That was a big part of where the inspiration for the title came from.

Did those parallels reveal themselves immediately?
I can’t actually figure out when I wrote “Gut It to the Studs.” Sometimes I write a song and a couple months later I realize the messages it has. When I first wrote it, I meant it as more of a political song, and then later realized the personal notions it had. 

You’ve had political undertones to your songs for years now. Was there a new emphasis on that for you with this new record, also named Gut It to the Studs, because of the current political climate?
I recorded this album last November, and I wrote a lot of these songs well before the election but many of the same messages are still relevant today. I believe that, for many of us, what’s going on inside has big implications for who we are as people and how we choose to operate in the world, which brings a lot to bear on what happens politically. 

For myself, I felt for a long time that I needed to get somewhere in my career—that I really wanted to have something to show for myself. I didn’t even know what ladder I wanted to climb, or who I was trying to prove something to, but that’s kind of just baked into our culture. Our sense of self-worth is tied to something external. D.C. culture has this inherent competitiveness and insecurity, so when I left, it was partly me being like, ‘Okay, screw that!’ I’m not going to base my sense of self on where I am in my career. There are lots of ways to look at life. 

Was it scary to let go and give up those ghosts?
Yes. I turned to music, and in my mind, it was this place that was free of all those things. And then I discovered that music also has competitiveness and insecurity. At its best, there’s a lot of camaraderie, mutual support, and inspiration. At its worst, there’s some of the opposite. So I learned that those feelings just follow people wherever they go. It’s an unseen hand and it’s really easy to go through your whole life without really realizing that you’re trying to prove something to somebody who doesn’t exist. For me, I didn’t want those things to be the factors driving me forward.

Is writing music cathartic for you? How do you use your art form to process emotions?
I often write songs from a purely creative standpoint, just to see what phrases and words come out and what concepts emerge. Later on, I can take a look and see it was trying to say. There are some strands of indie-folk that have a lot of abstraction, but I kind of follow the country vein in that you know exactly what that song is about. It’s clear what the point is. 

What is the point of this new album?
If I had to put it in one sentence, let’s get our priorities straight. 

Is there a seminal song on the album for you? 
I’d say the first track, “Where I’m Bound.” That originally came out of learning about an early abolitionist, John Woolman, who went around asking people to free those that they were enslaving. In his journal, there were times where he expressed real doubt, because it was difficult for him to see that things were changing, and he didn’t know if he was doing the best he could. It’s easy for us to look at the leaders of the past and think that they were very certain and surefooted, but leadership is terrifying and uncertain. That’s a big spiritual hurdle for any of us to contend with—not really knowing what the right way forward is but proceeding with faith, in spite of those things.

There’s a cover of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What it’s Worth.” What’s inspired you to include this 1966 song in 2018?  
The people who were part of the civil rights movement in the ’60s and ’70s are huge inspirations for me. I so admire what those folks were doing, and specifically in Baltimore, there’s this woman named Betty Robinson who is kind of a mentor for me here. It is just as important for us to be really active in this moment in time. I wanted to bring up that the same struggles continue today.

You also have a very important song about Baltimore called “Sundown Town.” Tell us a little bit about its inspiration.
It’s about segregation in Baltimore. In 2008, I was in Detroit canvassing for the Obama campaign, and I was paired up with an older black man. One day we were canvassing in a white suburb that to me kind of typified what I grew up to feel like was a safe place. It started to get dark, and I was having trouble finding my canvassing partner, and then when I found him, he was visibly shaken. He said that when he was growing up, that neighborhood was a “sundown town.” I had never heard that term before, but it basically meant that black people were not allowed to be there after dark, and if they were, they might get picked up by police or beat up—whatever it was, it would be bad. After that, I read this book called Not in My Neighborhood and discovered that this wasn’t just small rural towns that had that policies of segregation, but also a lot of urban neighborhoods, like in Baltimore. Some of the suburbs where I grew up still had these racist housing covenants on the books. That was when I first got the idea for the song.

Then during the Baltimore Uprising, I went to some of the protests and I remember a lot of my white friends being afraid to go and using phrases like “stay safe.” But there are some people in this city who don’t ever have the luxury of feeling safe. Growing up in the suburbs, it’s really easy for white people like me to live pretty obliviously to some of the problems that low-income black communities face. If we’re only thinking about our own safety, it’s really a hindrance to the whole movement going forward. And what I hope that we move towards is really seeing that no one is safe until everyone is safe. That’s one of the big messages that I felt the Uprising was trying to tell us: If we want peace, we have to work towards justice—for everyone.

I would also add that, of course, in this conversation, the people who should be at the center of it are the people who are most directly affected by it, like artists who are people of color. But I also think it shouldn’t always be entirely up to them to raise these issues. White communities need to be talking about it, and I do have a platform that reaches, well, a lot of white people. And I don’t think it’s right for a white person to make a profit about any song about oppression, so any proceeds that I make from this song will be donated to people-of-color-led organizations that are working on these issues in Baltimore.

Why now for this nationally distributed debut?
When I left and started really looking at what it takes to be a more serious musician, this was what I decided was the next move. I’m a little old to be doing my first one, but I’m not getting any younger. I write a lot and have a lot of material I hope to release in the future.

Is your old house finished in Mayfield?
Pretty much! Old houses are never done, but we’re very happily settled in.

Most notably known as Detective Kima Greggs on HBO’s hit series The Wire, Sonja Sohn couldn’t leave Baltimore behind when the show ended in 2008. Her deep connection to the community led her to begin her nonprofit, reWIRED For Change in 2009 to help at risk youth and families and now she’s poised to debut her documentary Baltimore Rising on HBO on November 20.

The 90-minute documentary follows eight local figures—activists Kwame Rose, Dayvon Love, Adam Jackson, Makayla Gilliam-Price, community leader Genard “Shadow” Barr, Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis, Lt. Colonel Melvin Russell, and police detective Dawnyell Taylor—in the aftermath of the April 2015 riots following the death of Freddie Gray in police custody.   

Filming for Baltimore Rising began in September 2015 and chronicles everything from the first day of trials for the officers charged in Freddie Gray’s death to the release of the Department of Justice’s scathing report of the Baltimore Police Department a year later.

In April 2015, Sohn was in Los Angeles working on a project when she heard what was happening in Baltimore. She wasted no time getting back to the place that held a special place in her heart to help pick up the pieces in any way she could.

“I was moved just like everybody else in the middle of everything happening,” she said. “Any time I can find myself in a position to be useful, I try to do so.”

She met with a few local activists and began discussing the possibility of creating a documentary that would provide an in-depth look into the work being done in the community. Just four months later, Sohn pitched the idea to HBO, and the rest is history.

“I really wanted to highlight the indomitable spirit and intelligence of the Baltimore grassroots community,” Sohn told Baltimore. “You don’t really see all the work that goes into the change they are trying to make—I wanted to make sure the world could see that.”

Rose is a central figure of the documentary, which we got to preview in an advanced screener, following him from his first arrest through his trials and his relationship with his family. Viewers will also get to know young activist Gilliam-Price, who struggles with what her future should look like. Another memorable scene is Davis addressing a room full of community leaders to combat the recent violence as a result of the riots. (Noticeably absent in the documentary is any mention of former BPD Commissioner Anthony Batts). 

“There’s the artist activist, there’s the policy activist, there’s the protester, and there’s the police all trying to fight for change,” Sohn said. “That’s the story we wanted to tell—a more detailed story about how we got here. The Freddie Gray situation is a part of that, but we all understand that it was a part of something even bigger.”

When Single Carrot Theatre artistic director Genevieve de Mahy was in Budapest in March of 2015, she saw an unforgettable performance that deeply connected her to the city.

She returned home where, a month later, Freddie Gray’s death lead to the city’s Uprising and de Mahy thought it was more crucial than ever to bring the performance to Baltimore. 

“Freddie Gray’s death forced our city to take a good hard look at itself and confront its deep divides,” she said. “Our hope is that Promenade can deepen our connections to one another while questioning, challenging, and confronting the complex.”

Promenade puts its audience on a bus and has them travel around the city while listening to audio narration from both actors and city residents. When the audio tour starts out, the narrator proclaims: “Your city will never be the same as it is on this night” and reminds the audience to always be looking around.

While traversing the neighborhoods, Single Carrot actors play out scenes on the street. There are some subtle plotlines, but the performances act more like vignettes of typical city scenes: a woman sweeping her front walk, a postal worker delivering mail, a medical resident leaving work, or a reporter photographing a street performer.

The 95-minute show took passengers through Remington, Reservoir Hill, Bolton Hill, Greenmount, Waverly, Charles Village, Guilford, and back again. All the while, stories from Baltimoreans were playing through headphones—all of which rang true in one form or another. (“Some days Baltimore gives you a hug and others it punches you in the stomach.”)

“I interviewed nearly 40 Baltimore residents, attended community meetings, church services, and got walking tours of these neighborhoods,” de Mahy said. “We have had discussions as a group of artists and Baltimoreans sharing our own stories and perspectives.”

There was some chronology to the tour, as it started out by recounting the jazz age on Pennsylvania Avenue. A particularly poignant moment came when a resident talked about the glory days of the Royal Theater as the bus passed a mural depicting the theater alongside legendary musicians. 

The music was another key element to the audio portion of the performance with selections from The Orioles, Wilson Pickett, Beach House, Future Islands, Matmos, and Lake Trout. Each song was perfectly curated for the atmosphere of the scenes just outside the bus windows.

Promenade perfected the art of timing, too, as the audience would hear a car horn play just as a near-crash happened outside or the bus would turn out of Guilford onto Greenmount Avenue as a local resident chimed in: “Baltimore can change on a dime.”

As the bus weaved its way up North Avenue past the Howard Street bridge, the story turned to the 2015 Uprising and how some residents were shocked by what happened in their city, while others were less surprised that it had come to a head. “People said they couldn’t believe communities were destroying their own property,” one man said. “But they never owned anything in the first place.”

It should be noted that there were certainly moments of discomfort viewing the city on a bus while wearing headphones that could have veered toward the exploitative. But, in contrast to the shameless Wire tours that went on a decade ago, Promenade provides context and relevance for those complex feelings, which results in a genuine appreciation of Baltimore—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

And while the Promenade: Baltimore production, actors, and audio were all stunning (and an incredible logistical feat), the most brilliant part was perhaps just observing the city with new eyes. On a pleasant summer night, plenty of people were out on the stoop, running on the playground, playing on the basketball court, or hula-hooping in the park. There was nothing incredible going on outside the bus windows, but that was just it.

The entire performance reminded the audience of the beauty—and the occasional heartache—of the ordinary.

On April 25, 2015, a young photographer from West Baltimore clicked the shutter of his camera as a crowd of riot gear-clad police officers dashed in front of Camden Yards, chasing a man with a kerchief obscuring his face. The photographer, Devin Allen, uploaded the photo to social media, and the rest is history. 

Within a few days, his image graced the cover of Time magazine, and Allen has since traveled the world on assignment. But he returns to some of his original subjects—the people and streets
of Baltimore—in his first book, A Beautiful Ghetto, reminding us where his heart lies. Here, he reflects on some of his
favorite photographs from the book.

“This is one of the images that made me want to start my youth program. These boys are only 8 or 9 years old, but there’s resilience and fearlessness to them. What sparked the Uprising was the fire from the youth. What’s changing Baltimore for the better is their desire for something better.”

“This photograph speaks about motherhood to me. A lot of the press about my community is negative. We never celebrate the positive. These mothers work so hard. This woman might be a single mom, working several jobs to provide for her kids, which is a beautiful thing. I’m a mama’s boy. My mom left my father and busted her ass to take such good care of me.”

“This was a couple of days after Freddie Gray’s funeral. This woman stood up at a rally and said, ‘As a woman, as a mother, I see only men talking here.’ She was so passionate, and it made me think that we are always talking about black men and we forget about our women sometimes.”

“In the days after the Baltimore Uprising, the schools were closed and everyone was out and about. This building was used on [TV]. It had been neglected for a while, but the report claimed incorrectly that it had been burned during the unrest. I feel like this image froze a moment in time, and shows the poverty we live in. But I also get a sense of peace and community.”

Last night TNT aired the Baltimore-themed episode of Charles Barkley’s four-part series, American Race (formerly The Race Card). The episode drew some headlines and controversy before it aired after Barkley’s town hall on the relationship between cops and citizens dissolved into something of a shouting match. To Barkley’s credit, he stayed and listened, even when one Baltimore resident accused Barkley of “hiding behind a wall” and being “sick.” Barkley’s intentions may be good, but his approach to race relations is naïve and not nuanced—it basically boils down to, “Why can’t we all just get along?”

As for his views on Baltimore, let’s just say that some of his insights—that Baltimore is a “very divided city” or that our inner cities are lined with boarded up or unlivable rowhomes—aren’t exactly revelatory to those of us who live here.

At least Barkley had the good sense to use Devin Allen, the local photographer whose image of a black man retreating from a line of heavily armed cops made the cover of Time magazine, as his guide.

Allen takes Barkley to his house, where his mom makes her famous crab dip (Barkley approves) and Barkley and Allen’s family discuss whether the events in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death at the hands of the police was an “uprising” or a “riot.”

Allen feels strongly that it was an uprising—an expression of righteous rage and an attempt to finally be seen and heard; Barkley, who famously called the Ferguson protesters “scumbags,” thinks it’s dumb for people to destroy their own property. Later it’s Allen who is able to calm inflamed tempers at the town hall, essentially vouching for Barkley as someone who is on their side, or at least trying to be.

Barkley also tours the Sandtown neighborhood where Freddie Gray lived. In a humorous moment, Gray’s lawyer, Billy Murphy, accuses Barkley of voting for Donald Trump. Barkley shakes his head but doesn’t quite deny it, either.

At one point, Barkley goes to the Baltimore Police Station and talks to some cops who seem genuinely distressed over the unrest and Baltimore’s deeply entrenched problems. This is good. Less good is a scene where Barkley partakes in a simulated police training exercise. With his “gun” at the ready, Barkley is instructed to figure out whether or not deadly force is required. In each scenario—or at least the ones TNT chose to air—it was kill or be killed for the cop. In one scenario, a man with a knife approaches Barkley in a stairwell. Barkley doesn’t shoot. The screen goes blank.

“You’re dead,” the cop supervising the exercise tells him. 

Barkley’s heart is definitely in the right place and this country does need to have a more open dialogue about race. (Subsequent episodes look at Muslim Americans, immigration, and Hollywood stereotyping.) Still, for a more thoughtful reflection on race, I’d recommend Ava DuVernay’s 13th, Theo Anthony’s Rat Film (which just played at the Maryland Film Festival), or—if I might be so bold—two of our feature stories: A Tale of Two Cities (on Freddie Gray’s Baltimore) and Who Wants To Be a Cop Now?

April will mark the the one-year anniversary of the Baltimore Uprising. In that moment and the months that followed, our city was in a state of turmoil, but we came together to clean up, rebuild, and reconnect our communities, though we still have a long way to go. Get involved, starting with these events.

PAUL’S PLACE SERVICE OUTING
April 2: Paul’s Place, 1118 Ward St. 8:30 a.m. Free. 410-357-6242. Participate in the Sierra Club’s Baltimore Inspiring Connections Outdoors community outreach program, which introduces urban youth to nature through exploration, lessons, and community service.

TORREY SMITH CHARITY BASKETBALL GAME
April 2: Royal Farms Arena, 201 W. Baltimore St., 3 p.m. $17-80. 410-347-2020. Meet former Raven Torrey Smith at his annual charity basketball game for the Torrey Smith Foundation, which supports Baltimore City youth.

BALTIMORE STORIES
April 3: Red Emma’s, 30 W. North Ave. 8:30 p.m. Free. 443-602-7611. Local activist, author, and Loyola professor Kaye Whitehead hosts an evening of storytelling where community members can share recollections of the Uprising.

COMMUNITY LOT CLEANUP
April 6-27: Locations vary. 9 a.m. Free. 410-366-8533. Every Wednesday throughout the month, join AmeriCorps members as they work to transform vacant lots into beautiful community gardens and green spaces in neighborhoods across Baltimore.

CONVERSATION THREAD
April 7: Locations vary. 6:30 p.m. 410-660-8343. This local community organization brings 1,000 people together at 100 dinners across Baltimore, where attendees will gather, eat, and connect to help support young people in the local community.

URBAN ALLIANCE MOCK NETWORKING EVENT
April 8: The Urban Alliance, 1500 Union Ave., Ste. 2100. 3:30 p.m. Free. 410-366-5780. All professional are welcome to this mock networking event to help under-resourced students sharpen their interpersonal skills and prepare for interviews.

BOUNDARY BLOCK PARTY
April 16: Pennsylvania Ave. & Presstman St. 12-4 p.m. Free. 410-728-1199. This large community festival will feature live entertainment, art activities, and a “Get out the vote” campaign in Upton.

BMORE THAN THE STORY
April 16-Aug. 28: Reginald F. Lewis Museum, 830 E. Pratt St. 1 p.m. Free. 443-263-1800. Local students have collaborated to present powerful narratives and a series of visual performing arts to show different perspectives of the Baltimore riots.

SBLC CELEBRATION GALA
April 16: Horseshoe Casino, 1525 Baltimore St. 6:30 p.m. $125. 410-625-4215. For the 25th year, this cocktail party benefits the South Baltimore Learning Center, which helps provide life-skills training and career preparation to Baltimoreans in need.

BALTIMORE CLEANUP
April 27: 316 S. Caroline St. 5 p.m. Free. 410-685-0295. Join kids from the POWER House Community Center and members of the Living Classrooms Foundation in this new neighborhood cleanup series, conceived last summer after the Baltimore Uprising.

QUESTION BRIDGE: BLACK MALES
April 28-Aug. 30: Reginald F. Lewis Museum, 830 E. Pratt St. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. $8. 443-263-1800. This video installation offers a glance into the perspective of 150 black men living in cities throughout the U.S. to deconstruct stereotypes and build a constructive dialogue.