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.

Several hundred high school students marched from the Baltimore School for the Arts to the Baltimore City Public Schools headquarters Wednesday afternoon, demanding curriculum changes and full support for the Black Lives Matter movement from local and state school leaders.

Organized by the students—mainly from the city’s acclaimed school for the arts, but also those from other schools—speakers called on the head of city schools, Dr. Sonja Santelises—who was in attendance—and state school superintendent Dr. Karen Salmon to, “outline the ways in which their organizations will work to be anti-racist and pro-black from now on.”

“Our country is in crisis, and it has been for 400 years,” said 16-year-old Mahsati “Sunny” Moorhead, who is finishing her junior year at the Baltimore School for the Arts this spring, reading from a prepared statement. “We implore the leaders of Maryland State Department of Education and Baltimore City Public Schools to be on the right side of history and make the necessary changes to begin to dismantle the long held white supremacist ideology running so rampant within their own organizations.”

Among the specific demands from students was a more inclusive English reading curriculum, including works by Zora Neale Thurston, Toni Morrison, and Malcolm X. They also demanded social studies lessons that cover the history of white supremacy in the United States, as well units on successful black political revolutions and the role of black women in the American civil rights movement.

“The problem is we don’t see African Americans represented in our history classes or in our English classes—people who look like us,” Moorhead, who is black, later told us. “We read The Great Gatsby and The Awakening, but nothing that we can relate to or relates to ur experience.”

Students also seek an increase in mental health awareness and services for students and staff. They also called on the overwhelming black Baltimore school district to employ a higher percentage of black social workers and counselors.

The noon march from the Baltimore School for the Arts took demonstrators through closed city streets in Mount Vernon and Station North before reaching the school headquarters. Protestors gathered at the steps, kneeling for an eight-minute, 46-second period of silence to honor George Floyd, who died while having his neck pinned to the ground for that exact amount of time by Minneapolis police officers last month.

The two-hour march and rally included several musical, singing, and dance performances. But the focus was on the message delivered by several student speakers, notably Moorhead, who presented the students’ list of demands.

Baltimore activist Kwame Rose, 26—who has been present during the recent city protests, as he was in 2015 following the death of Freddie Gray from injuries suffered while in police custody—praised students for pushing for social and educational change.

“I think it’s important for every adult here to listen to their demands,” Rose told the crowd. “I know protesting is important to secure space to highlight the issues.”

It’s also important to work for tangible goals, Rose added, encouraging those in attendance to pay attention to budgets and email the mayor, City Council members, and school officials to advocate for increased funding for schools. Rose noted that, when he went to school, classrooms were often crowded, short of textbooks, and sometimes without air conditioning.

“There is no reason why Baltimore City police officers should make more than Baltimore City schoolteachers,” Rose said.

Santelises said she supported the students and young people advocating for, “the kind of education they want and deserve.”

She also highlighted the city school systems “BMore Me” curriculum designed to increase student engagement by focusing on Baltimore’s current events and history.

“The students are impatient to see change. We’re all impatient to see change,” Santelises said. “But I’m here listening today.”

With tension across the nation continuing to mount—leading in many cases to chaos and violence in major cities—hundreds of Baltimoreans gathered downtown yesterday for a peaceful, youth-led demonstration demanding justice for George Floyd and all victims of police violence.

Beginning at the Baltimore Convention Center, organizers were determined to maintain order, calling upon those in the crowd to stop fellow protestors if they began to exhibit violent behaviors on what would be the third day of protests in the streets of Baltimore City.

From the intersection of Pratt and Sharp streets past City Hall, the Jones Falls Expressway, and the Baltimore City Correctional Center, masked protestors maintained their mission and peacefully expressed their anger and frustration over the lives lost at the hands of the police.

U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, chairman of the House Oversight Committee and a powerful advocate for civil rights and Baltimore, died early Thursday at 68. According to his office, the 12-term Maryland congressman passed away at Gilchrist Hospice Care, a Johns Hopkins affiliate, due to complications concerning longstanding health challenges. Cummings had not gone back to work this week as Congress returned to Capitol Hill.

Over the past year, since the Democrats retook the House of Representatives following the 2018 midterm elections, Cummings had served a key and high-profile role as the myriad of Congressional investigations into President Donald Trump and his administration have unfolded.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, also a Baltimore native, said of Cummings’ unexpected death that “the people of Baltimore, the U.S. Congress, and America have lost a voice of unsurpassed moral clarity and truth.” She described herself as “personally devastated.”

“In the House, Elijah was our North Star,” Pelosi said. “He was a leader of towering character and integrity, whose stirring voice and steadfast values pushed the Congress and country to rise always to a higher purpose.”

“He worked until his last breath because he believed our democracy was the highest and best expression of our collective humanity and that our nation’s diversity was our promise, not our problem,” said Maya Rockeymore Cummings, the congressman’s wife and chair of the Maryland Democratic Party, in a statement.

Cummings, whose district includes parts of Baltimore City, as well as Baltimore and Howard counties, had—along with the city itself—become a target for President Trump’s vitriol earlier this summer. Cummings addressed Trump directly, describing his work ethic and mission as an elected official.

“Mr. President, I go home to my district daily,” Cummings wrote. “Each morning, I wake up, and I go and fight for my neighbors. It is my constitutional duty to conduct oversight of the executive branch. But, it is my moral duty to fight for my constituents.”

In 2015, after the uprising and riot in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody, Cummings was in the streets day and night, playing a key role in diffusing tensions between protestors and police during the week of subsequent curfews.

“With the passing of U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, the city of Baltimore, our country, and people throughout the world have lost a powerful voice and one of the strongest and most gifted crusaders for social justice,” Baltimore Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young said in a statement Thursday morning. “Rep. Cummings, the son of sharecroppers whose ancestors were slaves, wasn’t afraid to use his considerable intellect, booming voice, and poetic oratory to speak out against brutal dictators bent on oppression, unscrupulous business executives who took advantage of unsuspecting customers, or even a U.S. President. He was, put simply, a man of God who never forgot his duty to fight for the rights and dignity of the marginalized and often forgotten.”

Cummings first rose to national prominence five years ago, after Rep. Darrell Issa, then the Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, cut off Cummings’ microphone during a key hearing. As Baltimoreans already knew and the country soon learned, Cummings remained a man who wore his heart on his sleeve.

“It’s not just my voice that was being shut down,” Cummings said at the time, maintaining his composure while passionately trying to make his case. “Remember what I said: ‘I represent, we represent, over 700,000 people.’ What about our voice? ‘Shut it down [Issa said].’ That’s not the Democratic way.”

Raised with six brothers and sisters in South Baltimore’s historically black Sharp-Leadenhall neighborhood, Cummings attended a segregated elementary school and was among the first children to integrate the Riverside Park swimming pool in the summer of 1962. The son of former South Carolina sharecroppers, Cummings was elected to the Maryland House of Delegates in 1982—still on the heels of the civil rights movement and several years before Kurt Schmoke was became the first elected black mayor of Baltimore.

“Of the many things I learned from my father—and neither he nor my mother completed elementary school because they went to work in the fields—was to treat everyone with equal respect and not to speak or act out of anger,” Cummings told us in a 2014 Baltimore profile. “Because when you do, the person only hears your tone, they don’t get the message.

“And,” Cummings added, tapping a finger to the table for emphasis, “you’ll lose sight of the bigger picture. You’ll get so caught up in who you are fighting, you’ll forget what you are fighting for—and it’s the ‘what’ that is important.”

University of Maryland Carey School of Law professor Larry Gibson, Schmoke’s former campaign manager, noted in the same story that Cummings’ rise in congressional stature followed in the footsteps of a number of local African-American leaders who made significant contributions to the city, state, and country. “… look at who held that congressional seat before him—Parren Mitchell and Kweisi Mfume. All became powerhouses in Congress.”

Governor Larry Hogan described Cummings as “a fierce advocate for civil rights and for Maryland for more than three decades.”

“Congressman Cummings leaves behind an incredible legacy of fighting for Baltimore City and working to improve people’s lives,” Hogan said in a statement. “He was a passionate and dedicated public servant whose countless contributions made our state and our country better.”

Cummings was born on January 18, 1951 and was a distinguished student at City College High School, where he graduated in 1969. At Howard University, he majored in political science, served as class president, and became a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

He graduated from the University of Maryland School of Law in 1976 and practiced law before succeeding Lena Lee in the state House of Delegates. He often said her encouragement and support was crucial in launching his political career. In the General Assembly, where he served for 14 years, Cummings became the first African American in Maryland history to be named Speaker Pro Tem.

Among other efforts, up until the time of his death, Cummings also served on the U.S. Naval Academy Board of Visitors, the Morgan State University Board of Regents, the University of Maryland School of Law Board of Advisors, and the SEED School of Maryland Board of Directors.

To fill the Cummings’ seat, by law, Hogan will soon call a special primary election and a special general election will be held to fill the vacancy, according to reporting from The Baltimore Sun. Hogan’s spokesman, Mike Ricci, said Thursday morning that it wasn’t clear yet when the special election would take place.

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.”

DeRay Mckesson is tired. He tweeted he’d been “cursed to sit next to the drunk man” flying back from the West Coast as he wrapped up a five-week, 22-stop, cross-country book tour. Arriving at Ida B’s Table for a morning interview and photo shoot, the 33-year-old activist is punctual and polite, but his distinctive, high-pitched voice is softer than usual. Nonetheless, he’s ready to discuss his role in the Black Lives Matter movement and his recent call-to-action memoir, On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope. Brief recap: Mckesson garnered national attention live-tweeting the Ferguson, Missouri, marches following the killing of Michael Brown Jr. by a white police officer, and he checked in at No. 11 (along with fellow protestor Johnetta Elzie) on Fortune’s list of the “World’s Greatest Leaders” in 2015.

Jet-lagged or not, Mckesson cogently breaks down the structural racism that plagues cities such as Ferguson and Baltimore, as well as the foundational ideas that built and sustained that inequality. That preternatural ability to communicate—with composure and conciseness—is how the Baltimore native became an overnight cable news go-to.

“When we think about white privilege, it is the recognition that people benefit from things that they personally did not work for,” he begins, addressing a subject covered on his book tours. “When we think about white supremacy, it is the idea that white is better, that white is the norm, is the standard, that it is more worthy. And then, we think about ‘whiteness,’ and it is the culture that idea births.”

On the road, Mckesson was interviewed by the likes of MC Hammer, former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau, and The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah. He has a million-plus followers on Twitter, has hosted celebrities from John Legend to Katy Perry on his weekly show, Pod Save the People, and he gets invited to parties by Beyoncé. But here’s the weird thing: While Mckesson was born here and lives here, he draws only a small crowd to his book signing later tonight at Baltimore Soundstage.

“I don’t mean this in a good or bad way, I just don’t come across him,” says Sean Yoes, Baltimore AFRO editor and author of Baltimore After Freddie Gray: Real Stories from One of America’s Great Imperiled Cities. He may be a national civil rights figure, but Mckesson is not a conspicuous presence in Baltimore two years after his bid for the city’s highest office. “Maybe I’m just in my own lane—I hadn’t thought about him in months, at least,” Yoes continues. “He’s kind of in a no-man’s land here.”

The protests in Ferguson after Michael Brown’s death began a little more than four years ago, but it is easy to forget the timeline, the details, and the next 400 days of activism that helped set the stage for the uprising in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray. Several days after officer Darren Wilson’s shooting of Brown in August 2014, Mckesson, then a 29-year-old Minneapolis public school administrator, headed to Missouri to see the unfolding situation for himself. He live-tweeted his mundane drive to his then-modest 800 followers while also seeking a sofa to sleep on once he reached Ferguson. The second night he was there, police tear-gassed demonstrators. “That was the moment I became a protestor,” he says.

In collaboration with Elzie and Brittany Packnett, both St. Louis-area natives, Mckesson took to social media to document the confrontations with the Ferguson police department’s militarized response. They also used their online platforms to launch the Ferguson Protestor Newsletter, which became both a resource for—and an alternative to—the establishment media, which they saw misrepresenting the protests as violent.

Identifiable in his ubiquitous royal blue Patagonia vest, which he basically has not taken it off since, Mckesson became the most recognizable face of the Black Lives Matter movement. In fact, the vest remains so intertwined with his political brand that it has its own Twitter handle.

After Ferguson, Mckesson joined similar protests in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, following the death of Alton Sterling; New York following the death of Eric Garner; North Charleston, South Carolina, following the shooting of Walter Scott; and Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray. (In one memorable interview here, he repeatedly pushed back against CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, who tried to get a patient Mckesson to condemn the behavior of protestors. “You are suggesting this idea that broken windows are worse than broken spines,” Mckesson responded.) Since then, along with Packnett and policy analyst and data scientist Samuel Sinyangwe, Mckesson helped create the police reform initiative Campaign Zero and its associated website, mappingpoliceviolence.org, which tracks the people killed by police in the U.S. “The numbers are flat, not down at all,” he notes, with a mixture of frustration and disbelief.

As he chronicles in some of the best chapters of his book, Mckesson was born in West Baltimore, later moving with his father, a recovering drug addict, and his sister to Catonsville. It was in Catonsville, he says, that he first became aware of poverty and the inequity in education.

After college at Bowdoin in Maine, he taught in New York City through Teach for America before returning to Baltimore for three years to work for a nonprofit after-school educational initiative and the city school system. He then spent 16 months in Minneapolis as senior director of human capital for their school system before leaving for Ferguson. He has received death threats and has been sued by police officers. In turn, he has sued Fox News and commentator Jeanine Pirro for alleging he incited violence. Along the way, the Obama White House invited him to a policy discussion, and he joined the speaking roster at Creative Artists Agency, whose clients include Joe Biden and Will Smith. Oh, and he gave commencement speeches at The New School and the Maryland Institute College of Art. In other words, it has been a roller coaster.

“You are suggesting this idea that broken windows are worse than broken spines.”

As the threats and lawsuits attest, Mckesson has also become a lightning rod. Much of the fire directed his way derives from mere hate from the other side. But there has been—and remains—resentment and criticism among those who normally would be considered allies. Broadly, the accusation is that he raced in front of cameras and put himself forward as a spokesman for a movement he did not begin.

Kaysonya Wise Whitehead, a Loyola University professor who teaches a course on the Black Lives Matter movement and hosts a current events program on WEAA, is not a Mckesson fan. “Black Lives Matter is a social movement, a civil rights movement, and it’s a slogan—it is something to stick on the bumper of car,” Whitehead says. “It’s all those things. But the people who created the hashtag and pushed it forward have been scrambling to get in front of it ever since. The fact that the white media rallies around someone does not make him or her a leader. Has DeRay been a leader on these issues locally? No, it’s The Algebra Project, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, Baltimore Bloc, Pleasant Hope Baptist Church, among many others, that’s been doing the work.”

Mckesson’s last-minute entry into the Baltimore mayoral race in 2016—an announcement made in coordination with The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Guardian—gave detractors additional fuel.

“It’s one thing to be able to show up to an event in a major mainstream media moment,” Dayvon Love, public policy director for Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, told Slate after Mckesson’s announcement. “It’s a different thing to get people from Baltimore to go to Annapolis for a hearing on police reform on a Tuesday at 1 in the afternoon.”

“It was opportunistic,” Anthony McCarthy, a former spokesman for the past three Baltimore mayors, says of Mckesson’s bid. “There was already one of the strongest fields in a long time.” That said, Mckesson did receive support from Morgan State professor Lawrence Brown, who is at work on a book about Baltimore’s history of segregation and housing discrimination. “What have those other establishment candidates accomplished?” Brown argues, suggesting an outsider is needed to bring real change to City Hall.

Mckesson, who received 2 percent of the vote, takes exception to the criticism. He highlights the year he spent opening and overseeing a West Baltimore after-school center with the nonprofit Higher Achievement and leadership roles when he was a Catonsville High School student with the city’s Safe & Sound Campaign and the grant-making nonprofit Youth As Resources. “For all this talk about ‘ending the gatekeepers,’ there are places where people’s identity is rooted in deciding who is and who isn’t able to do [activism] work, and Baltimore is one of those places,” he says.

This past election season, he stirred more controversy by endorsing fellow Teach for America alum J.D. Merrill, son-in-law to former Mayor Martin O’Malley, over longtime Baltimore civil rights leader Jill Carter for a seat in the state Senate (Carter won). Meanwhile, Mckesson says he doesn’t know if he’ll run for office again or how long he’ll stay in Baltimore. Current plans revolve around his national podcast and Campaign Zero, which he says will be publishing new data soon about police complaints and police union contracts.

Erin Hodge-Williams, former executive director of the nonprofit Higher Achievement, has known Mckesson since he was a teenage youth organizer. “He pours himself into everything he does,” Hodge-Williams says. “The traction he got [after Ferguson] surprised me, but I think the blue vest, for example, is ingenious. Is it branding? Yes,” she continues. “But I think it’s brilliant. Trump is on Twitter all the time stirring up nonsense. DeRay strategizes how to make his voice heard, too, but that’s because he wants to talk about policing and prison reform and social justice. He stays true to his message, and that makes all the difference in the world.”

Whether it makes a difference in Baltimore may be another matter.

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.

It’s a tall order—asking a native New Yorker to make a documentary about violence in the streets of Baltimore that doesn’t feel like dilettantism or cultural tourism—but filmmaker Marilyn Ness is more than up to the challenge. Her Charm City, which premieres this Friday at the Parkway Theatre, was filmed over a three-year period in Baltimore just before and after Freddie Gray’s death and the subsequent Uprising, and takes a look at our crime problem from a variety of perspectives—the cops, the lawmakers, and those living the life, every day on the streets.

Charm City manages to feel equal parts authentic, despairing, and open-hearted, and it even leaves some room for hope. I had a chance to talk to Ness about her journey creating the film. About two-thirds through the interview, Clayton “Mr. C” Guyton, the director of the Rose Street Community Center and one of the film’s stars, stops by and joins our conversation.

How did you decide to film in Baltimore?

MN: I had been reading about all the deaths in police custody, you know, these African-American men, these high-profile deaths and I thought, “There’s never context.” So we wondered what would it look like if you went to a city where there was both the police and the policed and tried to see what was happening day in and day out other than just reflecting on the cataclysmic moment that the news tends to focus on. We had called the Department of Justice and said, “Where’s a city you think is trying to find a way forward?” and they were like, “Hands down, Baltimore.” We came down here in December of 2014.

Right before Freddie Gray.
MN: We had been here for four months before Freddie Gray . . . and we stayed and filmed, just sort of staying the course of what we had planned to do. We had two epiphanies. [One] epiphany was this: No matter how [big the cataclysm] and no matter how much leadership changed at the top, what it meant to be a patrol officer on the ground or a community member just trying to get by didn’t change really. It turns out day in day out life is the same. Everyone’s just doing life.

What was the second epiphany?

MN: We wound up being in Baltimore during the three most violent years in recent history and, whether you were with community members or police officers, they all talked about it in the same way. It was like, “What can we be doing as individuals to try to change the equation, how do communities life themselves up?” And we realized there was more similarity than difference as they talked to us. Not to say there wasn’t major tension and anger and years of distrust that had been built, but they were kind of coming at things from the same place. That to us also felt like an epiphany. The media will pit communities of color against police officers and vice-versa. There was a way in which everyone was singing the same song.

The film feels pretty sympathetic toward the police.

MN: These are issues that the communities and cities haven’t been able to solve for years and yet we feel comfortable sending in police officers often very young, 22 to 25 years old, with guns who are looking at this problem day in and day out. And we started to think, maybe we’re asking police to do too much.

Director Marilyn Ness

Did you have concerns about being an outsider who comes into Baltimore? That maybe this wasn’t your story to tell?
MN: So it’s completely a concern I had coming in. The way we tried to deal with it, actually my whole crew was local. My PA [production assistant] wound up being my co-producer, a woman named Meryam Bouadjemi—she knew this town, loves this town, is from this town. I said to her, “We’re not looking to do a slam job. We’re really trying to understand what is the beating heart here.” She threw herself in and was incredibly committed to helping make sure we saw all those sides of Baltimore.

Everyone seems so relaxed in front of the camera. What was that process like?
MN: We spent months without a camera. As soon as you put a camera in the mix, that human interaction ends. And then I slowly added the camera. The first days are useless. Everyone is still uncomfortable and doesn’t even know how to walk through a door with a camera following them. Over time, everyone gets their groove on. And then they kind of forget that we’re there. My scariest moment was when we screened the film for all the subjects. Thankfully, everyone felt that we represented their truth and this was the city they knew and understood and that we captured that.

Mr. C, one thing I sensed watching the documentary, the people in your neighborhood really trust you.

CG: You have to be there for them. No matter what time it is, 1 am, 3 am—if you’re angry and you want somebody to talk to, or you may not even want somebody to talk to, try us. Try us.
That’s a slow process. They have to feel that somebody, not necessarily that they feel your pain, but that you’re willing to walk with them. You got be real about that. . . . And once they know you’re totally committed, that’s half the battle.

MN: You watered the garden no matter which flower it was. And one day they need you and you’ve done the work that lets them come to you. We felt that from the first days we met you. I didn’t understand what I was seeing. But you understood that these guys, who look hard and tough and mad, were here with you and showing up for the [daily Rose Street Community Center] meetings and hearing the word and you could see love.

CG: They give what they get. You love them, they love them back.

Mr. C, tell me your reaction to seeing the film

CG: It’s like looking at a picture of yourself. The first time I looked at the film, I didn’t really feel it. I was distant, for whatever reason. No reaction. The second time, the ice melted a little bit. The third time, there were some parts that made me tear up.

You’ve screened the film at Tribeca and at the Maryland Film Festival. What’s that reaction been?

MN: I will say this about Mr. C, because he’s too humble: People are incredibly moved by him and the power of what he’s doing. They walk away from the film feeling hope, that there are people on the ground trying to stem the tide [of violence] with love.

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.”

Baltimoreans appreciate our beloved hometown for its great neighborhoods, eccentricity, and “Smaltimore” feel, but political disarray, inequality, and violence have also long-plagued the city.

Matthew Crenson, professor emeritus of political science at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of Neighborhood Politics and the co-author of Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public. In his new book, Baltimore: A Political History, he tackles the tangled history of the city’s political and cultural disjointedness, examining the role of race and politics from the 18th-century through to our present circumstances  

Why this book and why now?
Like many Baltimoreans, I was curious about the city’s many curiosities. And it has been a long time since anyone told the city’s story. The second edition of urban geographer Sherry Olson’s book, Baltimore: The Building of an American City, appeared 20 years ago, and it concentrates on the physical development of Baltimore, not its political history.  

One vital research source also became more accessible when the Baltimore City Archives relocated and reorganized in 2010. The Archives are essential for understanding the city’s political past, but only a few authors have relied on these records.   

Of course, I could not have foreseen the death of Freddie Gray or the turmoil that would follow it [when I started working on the book]. Retracing the path by which we got here now seems even more vital than when I began. 

You make the case that Annapolis, the state capital, long held political sway over Baltimore. Do you think that’s still the case?
Because Baltimore was a late-blooming city, there was already an entrenched political establishment in Annapolis at the time of the town’s birth. It cast its shadow over Baltimore from the time it received its town charter in 1729. Even after it became a supposedly self-governing municipality in 1797, the city’s powers were limited by the state. The city, for example, could levy property taxes, but for decades after it became a city, the state legislature decided what the tax rate would be. 

Baltimore can fix its own property tax rate today, but the city’s police department is still technically a state agency, as it has been since just before the Civil War. The Governor’s cancellation of the Red Line reminded Baltimoreans of just how much control the state has over the city’s public transportation system. Then there’s the Maryland Stadium Authority. In 1997, Baltimore’s mayor conceded partial control of the city’s school system to the state in return for increased state funding. Governor Larry Hogan closed the city’s detention center (probably a good decision), but without consulting any city officials in advance. Baltimoreans are reminded of their exposure to state government every time the General Assembly convenes. 

Baltimore was home to the largest number of free African-Americans in the South in the decades before the Civil War—some 92 percent of black Baltimoreans were free at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation. But you conclude white Baltimoreans were always afraid to address the issue of race head on. What drove you to that conclusion? Do you believe that’s still true?
As early as 1817, when prominent Baltimoreans became advocates of the American Colonization Society, the city’s leading whites have repeatedly practiced evasion or equivocation when confronted with issues of race or slavery. The Colonization Society proposed sending African Americans to Liberia. On the one hand, they argued that exporting free black people to Africa would help to preserve slavery in this country, because the presence of free black people made slaves restless.  On the other, they claimed that slave owners would be more likely to manumit their slaves if they could send them to Africa, instead of having to live with them after they were free.  Baltimoreans, in other words, managed to come down on both sides of the slavery question. Colonization would preserve slavery while eroding slavery. 

A long series of similar dodges led me to conclude that the city’s white leadership was leery about confronting the issue of race head-on,  perhaps because Baltimore is a border city where whites are unlikely to be united on issues of race. And then, soon after World War II, many whites abandoned the city for the suburbs. The exodus accelerated after the 1968 riots. Much of Baltimore’s former white population can now avoid the race issue—and practice segregation—without thinking or feeling like racists. 

Can you tell us when the division between Baltimore City and Baltimore County was created and why?
This is complicated. 

The separation was a two-step process—maybe three. In 1850, the General Assembly passed legislation that would enable the residents of Baltimore County to vote on whether to separate from Baltimore City. (The legislators held that this would be advantageous to Baltimore County.) The voters were also to elect a commission whose members would decide where to put “public buildings”—a courthouse, a jail, and a poorhouse—facilities which the County had previously shared with the City. The voters decided to disengage County from City. The Commission was elected, but couldn’t agree on where to put the public buildings. The commission divided down the middle on whether to leave the City.

In the meantime, the voters of the state approved the calling of a constitutional convention. When the convention completed its work in 1851, it placed Baltimore City and Baltimore County in separate judicial districts, requiring them to have separate courts and jails. In 1852, the General Assembly repealed its act of 1850 calling for the election of a commission, thereby depriving the commission of its authority to make decisions for the County.

If we can go back, say, before William Donald Schaefer, what important character, politician or leader should Baltimoreans know about—but probably don’t?
Mayor James H. Preston [in office from 1911-1919] was a creature of the Democratic political machine. But he had vision. He proposed a gradualist alternative to annexation. It would have created four “boroughs” outside Baltimore City, one in each quarter of the compass. The boroughs would be governed by their own councils and could purchase services from the City. As they bought in to more city services, they would eventually become parts of the City, which would achieve annexation, but without suddenly imposing high city taxes on former suburbanites. Unfortunately, politicians from Baltimore and Anne Arundel Counties prevented Preston’s plan from becoming law. If they had agreed to it, we might have a viable metropolitan area government today—like Miami-Dade and Indianapolis.

Who is your favorite historical Baltimore political figure? And why?
This is hard. There’s John Pendleton Kennedy—novelist, politician, and designer of an iron bridge over the Jones Falls that would stand up to floods. Then there’s Samuel Smith—businessman, politician, and military tactician who anticipated every move that the British would make in their 1814 assault on Baltimore. And of course, there’s Frederick Douglass, who learned to read in Baltimore, and became the country’s premier writer and orator in the struggle against slavery. 

But I have a special admiration for Samuel Purviance, a forgotten Baltimore revolutionary. He chaired the city’s Committee of Observation during the Revolutionary War. It functioned as the town’s government, struggling to maintain public order in the face of the city’s anti-British hotheads, one of whom was Samuel’s brother, Robert. He also had to contend with a revolutionary government in Annapolis that was far from revolutionary. As late as January, 1776, the provincial convention declared its “affection for, and loyalty to the house of Hanover” [the British dynasty the produced six monarchs, including George III] and its conviction that to be British subjects “is to be the freest members of any civil society in the known world.” Purviance endured censure by the Annapolis authorities for trying to take the royal governor into custody. (The royal governor had been providing intelligence to the British military about prospects for invading the Chesapeake.) Purviance’s business interests collapsed in the recession that followed the Revolution. He tried to retrieve his fortunes in the West, but was captured by Indians while traveling by boat on the Ohio River, and was never heard from again.  

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.”

Five of the six police officers involved in the 2015 arrest and death of Freddie Gray are facing punishment for violating rules of the Baltimore Police department. According to The Sun, three of the five officers—Officer Caesar Goodson who was driving the van where Gray suffered fatal injuries; and his supervisors Lt. Brian Rice, and Sgt. Alicia White—are also facing termination.

The administrative charges are a result of investigations by Howard and Montgomery County police departments that concluded at the beginning of May. The BPD asked them to review the cases to avoid conflict of interest. 

The officers learned of the charges against them on May 19 according to Michael E. Davey, the attorney representing all five officers during the internal review. The specific charges have not been released, but they are being charged with “violations of policy and procedure.”

BPD spokesman T.J. Smith declined to comment, stating that he is legally unable to comment on personnel matters.

The officers charged have two options: accept the punishment—termination for Goodson, Rice, and White and five-day suspension without pay for officers Edward Nero and Garrett Miller who initially arrested Gray.

The second option is to contest the charges before an interdisciplinary board of other police officers. The board has the power to either acquit or uphold the charges, but Commissioner Kevin Davis has the final say on punishment. The trials are open to the public, however the results are not disclosed.

If the result of the board is to acquit the officers, according to the process, the commissioner cannot impose any punishment. If the board sustains the finding from the internal investigation, punishment can be recommended and Davis can then accept, reduce, or increase it. The officers have not yet decided whether or not to go to the trial board.

Officer William Porter, the first of the six officers to stand trial charged with manslaughter that resulted in a mistrial, will not be facing any interdisciplinary action.

The investigation by Howard and Montgomery County police departments concluded that Porter broke no rules and is now able to return to full duty.

The other officers involved are still suspended with pay working in administrative capacities.

Marilyn Mosby, Baltimore’s State’s Attorney, who originally brought criminal charges against all six officers but failed to convict, issued a statement on May 22 saying, “I am relieved to know that majority of those involved will be held administratively accountable,” she said. “Justice is always worth the price paid for its pursuit. This case has always been about providing justice for an innocent 25-year-old man who was unreasonably taken into police custody.”

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?

Exactly two years ago, Baltimore was in upheaval over the death of Freddie Gray due to spinal cord injuries while in police custody—and there was uncertainty about the state of our city. Streets were closed, looting and violence ensued, and police in riot gear surrounded the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood. Feeling helpless, residents of the city watched as the destruction unfolded.

Ericka Alston-Buck, a public relations specialist for the Penn-North Recovery Center, witnessed her neighborhood in flames and thought of the children in the community. She came up with the idea to create a safe haven for children ages 5 to 17 to play and flourish in the Sandtown community.

Since its humble beginnings on June 1, 2015 in an old laundromat, the organization continues to evolve. Last February, after identifying a void of job placement and housing support resources in the community, a Family Support Center was added as the organization moved into a much larger space next door.

The ultimate goal of these programs is to provide means to a better life for the residents of Sandtown one person at a time. The Kids Safe Zone and Family Support Center are able to provide these resources because of generous donations, but the past two years have taught Alston-Buck to be selective.

“When we received traditional funding [from private sectors], there was an agenda attached to it,” she explains. “One day, we looked up and we didn’t have any kids in the building because of the strict criteria we had to meet.”

But now with the right donors and more inclusive programming, roughly 100 children a day walk through the doors of Kids Safe Zone to learn about computer coding, violence prevention, and substance abuse intervention. Plus, the Family Support Center is helping adults find housing, employment, and continuing education.

Take Kevin Lawson Sr. Two years ago, he was a widower raising his son in Gilmor Homes on the verge of eviction. His son approached the staff at Kids Safe Zone.

“People don’t just decide overnight that they aren’t going to pay their rent,” Alston-Buck said. “He had a high school diploma, no criminal record, and doesn’t use drugs. But he hasn’t had a job in 12 years—what is wrong with that?”

She soon discovered that Lawson was never taught how to apply for jobs online, so he was teamed up with Tonette McFadden, an employee at the Safe Zone, to create a resume. Lawson has been employed as a security guard for the past year.

Kevin Lawson, Jr., who recently turned 18, can attest to how “Mrs. Ericka” and the Kids Safe Zone have helped improve his life and the life of his father since he walked through her doors in June 2015.

Everything is still very surreal for Alston-Buck as she approaches the second anniversary of the opening of the Kids Safe Zone. She attributes her success to the support of her husband, friends, and staff that take the journey with her each day. 

“I still don’t know what I’m doing. I get home everyday and go, ‘Whew, pulled that one off, tricked them again,” she said jokingly. “All I keep doing is giving to brown children what I needed as a brown child. That’s it.”

So these past two years since the Time magazine cover photo have been pretty crazy for you?
Yes! It feels crazy. Just when I think my 15 minutes of fame are over, I get another email or phone call. It’s very surreal. When I meet people they think I’m this well seasoned, proper photographer. Nope! At the time of the Time cover, I had only been doing this for three years.

One of those companies that has approached you is Under Armour. How is it working with them?
I come in the office every single day—it’s my 9-5. I’m the only black photographer at here. [Black people] have to get into these spaces. I want [Under Armour] to think, ‘We hired Devin to go shoot Steph Curry. He’s from the city and has only been doing this for three years. How many other hidden gems does Baltimore have?’ If they can hire me and I can do some amazing work, I think it will push the envelope and make them open up their eyes and say, ‘Hey maybe we can get more people like him.’

You’re going to be featured in a new exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
I was so shocked when I found out. Aaron Bryant is the reason I have 20 images permanently showcased in the Smithsonian. He’s one of the curators at the National Museum of African American History and he’s been a mentor to me. The exhibit opens on May 4 and I’m really excited. I’m the youngest photographer in the whole exhibit and I have work in there next to Gordon Parks—it’s crazy! It’s definitely a dream. 

Has all of this exposure made it easier to get work?
I still have to work twice as hard—even after the Time cover. I’ve been turned down so many times. Even after the announcement that my photos are in the Smithsonian, you would think Apple or somebody like that would reach out to me, but nope. When I reached out to Fuji, they said they didn’t want to support my work because it was negative. They didn’t want that to represent their brand. Another photographer at Magnum told me, ‘You’re young, you’re black, you have no accolades and hold no degree in photography. You’re going to have to work a lot harder than everybody else.’

Where you probably work the hardest is on a local level—especially with kids. Is teaching something you’re interested in doing?
I want to show these kids that there are other ways they can do things to be successful. The more successful I am, the more they listen to me. I just want to teach; to create a bunch of mini-me’s with a story to tell. I’ve just been so busy. It’s just hard trying to work with everybody that you can and still pursue your own goals. I’m figuring it out slowly but surely. Any time I talk to kids, I leave inspired. The best reward is opening up doors and giving back.

You have a new book, A Beautiful Ghetto, coming out on June 13.
That book (laughs). It wasn’t even supposed to be a book. I never had a plan, I never thought about a book. I didn’t plan my life past 21. I hit 21 and was like, ‘Wow I’m still alive? Shit, I need to do something with myself now.’ So no, I didn’t have a plan; I didn’t plan anything, I thought I would be dead right now. The book, it came together so beautifully, it was completely organic. All the images are from around Baltimore.

How did you come up with the name and the concept?
In an interview a while back, someone asked me to describe Baltimore. I didn’t know what to say, I always hated the city growing up and I wanted to leave. I thought I would be moving to Harlem. I started to elevate a little bit and evolve once I got deeper into my art. Then I started to see the things that are considered ‘bad’ in Baltimore as beautiful; but it’s also the hood, it’s the ghetto. It’s a Beautiful Ghetto—it rolls off your tongue. So I started to hashtag it.

A lot of the images in the book are my friends hanging out, images from the street. After the Uprising that really inspired me to push the envelope because people were thinking so negatively about Baltimore. I thought I needed to change that perception. I needed to document everything that was happening in the city, so I shot the block parties and how everything came together after the Uprisings with #ABeautifulGhetto. I get asked all the time to go to Flint or other cities to photograph, but that’s not my story. They need to find their own Devin Allen to tell their story like I told mine.

I was working with this great woman named Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who wrote the book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. She gave me the name of her publisher and said call him so I did. I told them about the book and sent him some photos and they loved it.

So is it just a book of photos?
Originally, I was going to write some poems to include but then I thought; I’m not a writer so I reached out to some dope writers. I got D. Watkins and Wes Moore, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor to contribute. I know people think the book is about Freddie Gray, but it’s not. It’s about Baltimore and how I see it. It’s broken down into three sections. A Beautiful Ghetto—which my mother wrote the intro for. She talks about how Baltimore was in the ’70s up until the ’90s when she had me and how much it’s changed. After that, it goes into the photos of the uprisings. The last section is called ‘Hope’—guys in the hood with their fists up, kids playing, a portrait of a kid with a police hat on. The book is so well rounded. It gives you a full understanding of Baltimore through photos. The plan is to release an extended version that has all of my photos.

The first book signing will be on June 17 at the Reginald F. Lewis museum since that was the first place I displayed my work. I actually donated my Time photo proofs to them.

What would you say is the key to your success?
Being humble and keeping the right people around me. Lord knows that’s the hardest part—realizing who your friends are and who is really there for you. But luckily, the bad people weed themselves out. I have people like D. Watkins, Aaron Bryant, and Wes Moore; people in my corner that are keeping me grounded. 

What’s next for you? Are you going to continue to ride the wave?
After this book, I feel like it’s time for me to move on. I want this to be the last chapter for me with this. I’m leaving the door open for the next person to come in—it’s time for me to move on. I don’t want to oversaturate this. Next I’d love to get more into shooting sports. I work with some amazing photographers here at Under Armour, so I’m learning more all the time. Then, I want to take the fashion world on, I think I have a good eye so that will be my next venture.

Be sure to check out Allen on TNT’s new show American Race which airs on May 11. 

Pill City

By Kevin Deutsch (St. Martin’s Press)

The narcotics trade has been a decades-long scourge on Baltimore’s streets, with overdose deaths and turf wars maintaining a continual presence. But, as Kevin Deutsch details, the epidemic reached new levels following the violence that erupted after the death of Freddie Gray, when two honor-roll teenagers from West Baltimore—in conjunction with a local gang—looted more than a million narcotic pills from pharmacies. Instead of selling on street corners, they built an Uber-like system, using location-based technology and encryption software to distribute along the East Coast. As the teens created scores of new addicts and left law enforcement scrambling, Deutsch—a veteran Newsday crime reporter—got to know the pair. His information is based on 300 interviews with the likes of gang members, social workers, and law enforcement officials, and, since some characters are still at large, he’s changed names and altered locations. It will be interesting to see Baltimore’s reaction to this deep dive into our drug culture, but his book is a reminder of just how serious, and often ignored, this problem is—and how tragic that bright, young people are caught in its web.

Chaos Theories

By Elizabeth Hazen (Alan Squire Publishing)

In her debut collection of poetry, Elizabeth Hazen takes us on a journey through life’s baffling, frustrating, unexplainable moments. As she searches for an understanding of how our best-laid plans can go astray and life can spiral out of control, she turns to scientific theories as a basis for dialogue and explanation. As she writes in “Final Theory,” “Scientists claim universal symmetry,/say a ‘theory of everything’ exists,/order, in spite of evidence, persists:/ . . . Prayer has symmetry, and funeral processions,/blood spatter, scattered ashes, a child’s weeping/ . . . his infinite silence, my unanswered questions.” Hazen—a graduate of The Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University, whose work appeared in the anthology Best American Poetry 2013—has a way of uncovering universal feelings that resonate, even if we haven’t experienced her particular grief or confusion. Each dark, explorative verse seems to prove that science does not always provide consolation, and in the end, sometimes the beauty in life lies in the unknowing.

It’s late August and Dr. Leana Wen is standing underneath the soaring dome of City Hall, a bank of cameras pointed at her as she leads a news conference to mark National Overdose Awareness Day.

As Baltimore’s health commissioner, substance abuse and addiction are among her top priorities, not to mention issues of national importance. Last year, more Baltimoreans died from overdoses (393) than from homicides (344). So she’s here—flanked by Senator Ben Cardin, Congressman John Sarbanes, Police Commissioner Kevin Davis, Fire Chief Niles Ford, and others—to sound the alarm about the nation’s opioid overdose epidemic and tout the city’s innovative response to the crisis.

There’s much to tout. In October 2015, Wen became the first health commissioner in Maryland to issue a blanket prescription allowing all Baltimoreans to obtain naloxone, a medication that can reverse an in-progress opioid overdose. The bold move attracted national attention and helped earn her a spot on a panel with President Barack Obama at the National Rx Drug Abuse and Heroin Summit in March.

The city Health Department is working now to train people to administer the remedy, and Wen makes sure to highlight the initiative’s progress in her remarks.

“We all trained over 14,000 people as of last month. Fourteen thousand people on how to save a life from overdose,” she reiterates, her voice echoing off the marble floors and columns of the chamber.

“Even more exciting than that,” she continues, “we have saved . . . 400 residents and citizens from overdose. Four hundred individuals who, otherwise, would have died.”

After her remarks, Sen. Cardin speaks, then Rep. Sarbanes, Commissioner Davis, and Chief Ford, each one singling out Wen’s leadership for special praise. Finally, as the last speaker—Kathy Westcoat of Behavioral Health System Baltimore—is coming to the microphone, two of Wen’s staffers—public information officer Sean Naron and communications director Michelle Mendes—catch their boss’s eye. She gives them a quizzical look and hurries over to them. After some hushed discussion, Wen and her staff slip away down a hallway, a camera crew trailing behind.

It all looks rather curious. Has she just been warned of a bioterrorism attack? A suspected case of Ebola or Zika? Maybe there has been an emergency and she has to go door-to-door, checking that residents have sufficient supplies of their vital medications, like she did last year after the riots? Wen’s purview as health commissioner is so vast that any of these scenarios are possible.

But it is nothing so dire—in fact, it’s good news. Turns out, the Food and Drug Administration has agreed to put black box warnings on benzodiazepines, a class of drugs commonly used to treat anxiety, and opioid painkillers, warning of the potentially fatal effects of mixing them. Earlier this year, Wen led a coalition of public health officials asking the FDA to add its sternest warning label to the drugs. Now that FDA Commissioner Robert Califf has agreed, he wants Wen to sit in on the conference call to reporters. And the camera crew is catching it all for a documentary about millennials making a difference.

Such is life for the 33-year-old Wen, Baltimore’s youngest-ever health commissioner and perhaps the nation’s brightest light in the field of public health.

“She’s a whippersnapper,” jokes Peter Beilenson, the city’s health commissioner from 1992 to 2005. “She’s very much a go-getter and a dynamo, and the city desperately needs that.”

Even before she was appointed in January 2015 to lead the city’s 1,000-employee-strong Health Department, Wen was something of a media darling. She gave frequent TED Talks. She wrote a critically acclaimed book (When Doctors Don’t Listen: How to Avoid Misdiagnoses and Unnecessary Tests) partly inspired by her time as a caregiver during her mother’s eight-year battle with breast cancer. And she was a regular commentator on medical issues for print, online, radio, and TV outlets.

But after the unrest following the death of Freddie Gray exposed the racial and socio-economic disparities in the city, Wen became—both locally and nationally—an even more influential figure, someone who could explain to believers and skeptics alike why the fissures in our society exist, how they got so big, and what we could do about them.

“After the unrest, we saw [an] opportunity to address these longstanding issues,” Wen says, sitting in her tidy office at the Health Department’s Jonestown headquarters one late summer morning. “It happened because of systemic racism, because of structural inequities, because of our policies of mass incarceration and discrimination—and all of those issues we believe are tied to health.”

This is a central tenant of public health: everything is connected. As the self-described “chief marketer for health in the city,” Wen spends a lot of her time helping people make those connections.

“We can’t talk about health without speaking about education and at the same time we can’t talk about education without speaking about glasses for our children and healthy babies and lead poisoning,” she says, now on a roll. “And then we can’t talk about violence without talking about addiction and mental health. . . . Whatever issue people care about, we then bring it back to why this is a public health issue.”

“She’s very much a go-getter and a dynamo, and the city desperately needs that.”

Wen was born in Shanghai, China, in January 1983. Her parents were political dissidents. She was 8 years old when they were granted political asylum in the U.S., settling first in Utah, and then, later, in a series of low-income communities in Southern California. There, she witnessed firsthand how poverty contributes to poor health.

“I saw neighbors go for years without access to care for their diabetes and then end up dying from it,” she recalls. “I saw children die from asthma, from other preventable illnesses, because they didn’t have access to health care for any number of reasons, whether it was cost or fear or stigma.”

Wen resolved to become a doctor, so she could address these glaring inequities. There was only one problem.

“I just didn’t know that I could make it,” she says. “I mean it sounded totally nuts to want to be a doctor when you don’t even know a doctor!”

In many ways, the deck was stacked against her: She was an immigrant. Her family was poor. And she suffered a severe stutter that still occasionally interrupts her otherwise perfect diction.

But Wen is not one to take no for an answer. Behind her impeccable manners, self-deprecating sense of humor, and sweet, dimpled smile, there is a formidable steeliness.

“I come from a family of fighters,” she says. “My father was imprisoned in China for years for speaking out against the government. . . . My grandparents were also activists. I come from a family that has a tradition of saying we cannot sit back and watch things happen to us. . . . We believe in shaping the course of our own future and of fighting every step of the way—for the right things.”

This being the family’s tradition, Wen applied her considerable intellect and, working longer and harder than most would dare, achieved. In 1996, at age 13, she enrolled at California State University, Los Angeles, graduating five years later with a degree in biochemistry (summa cum laude, thank you very much). From there, she went to med school at Washington University in St. Louis.

Reading Bill Clinton’s autobiography, My Life, helped with her next step.

“I was in medical school and saw these other issues of social determinism—I didn’t even know the term public health at the time. I just knew that I wanted to do something that addressed the root causes of why people got sick,” Wen explains. “So I read Bill Clinton’s book, and I read about his experience as a Rhodes Scholar and how he went to England and met all these other people who got involved with policy and politics. And I was like, ‘Okay! That’s what I should do.’”

So, she did. In 2007, Wen left for a two-year stint as a Rhodes Scholar in Oxford, England. It was as life-changing as she had hoped.

As a discipline, public health bridges the gap between medical science and public policy. For instance, diagnosing and treating cardiovascular disease is the job of doctors, but public health professionals seek to understand why, for instance, African Americans are about 30 percent more likely to die from heart disease than non-Hispanic whites. What are the cultural, societal, and/or biological factors that cause this? And, just as importantly, how can they be addressed? By necessity, it is complex and very challenging. Wen loved it.

“I believe that public health is the best way for us to level the playing field . . . that it’s a powerful social justice tool that allows us to get at all these other issues,” she says.

Wen’s time in England was life-changing for personal reasons, too.

“I met a lot of my mentors through Rhodes,” she notes. These include former Mayor Kurt Schmoke and former NAACP President Ben Jealous. She also met her husband, South African national Sebastian Walker, who was then working in England.

“My life totally changed as a result of reading a book . . . which sounds totally crazy!” she says with a laugh.

Back in the U.S., Wen started a fellowship at Harvard Medical School during which she worked in the ERs at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital. While at Mass General, she treated survivors of the Boston Marathon bombings, which left her with nightmares for weeks.

“I am glad I was able to help,” Wen told USA Today at the time. “I wish I could have helped more. But I wish I hadn’t seen it.”

After Boston, she went to Washington, D.C., where she continued as an emergency physician, this time at The George Washington University Hospital. She says she liked the immediacy of ER work, but yearned to address what she calls “the larger picture.”

“This is the job I’ve always wanted,” she says. “I never could have articulated that this is the job I’ve always wanted, but I love the city, I love the people, I love being hands on. I love seeing the outcome of our work in such a visceral way.”

The Baltimore City Health Department has the distinction of being the oldest continuously operating health department in the country and, since its founding in the 1790s, has accrued an almost laughably disparate slate of responsibilities. These include animal control, restaurant inspections, emergency preparedness and response, STD/HIV testing, mother and infant health, youth violence prevention, and, of course, disease management.

Another interesting feature of the department is its funding structure. In contrast to most municipal agencies, only approximately 20 percent of the Health Department’s budget is supplied by the city. The rest comes from state and federal grants, nonprofits, and support from businesses and individuals. This results in a department that Wen says “functions at the pace, and with the principles, of a startup.”

Despite—or maybe because of—these unusual characteristics, the department has a history of attracting dynamic leaders, many of whom have created influential programs that have become national models.

There’s B’more for Healthy Babies, a motherhood preparedness program that has lowered the city’s infant mortality rate by 38 percent since 2009, when it was the nation’s fourth worst. Then there is Safe Streets, which employs community members—some of them ex-offenders—to walk the streets in volatile neighborhoods and “interrupt” escalating confrontations before they can turn violent.

Wen wants to make her mark, too.

In her first 18 months, her priorities have been addiction/mental health, youth health and wellness, and providing care for the most vulnerable/reducing disparities—worthy initiatives certainly, but perhaps lacking a certain unifying vision.

Then, in late August, Wen announced Healthy Baltimore 2020, an ambitious goal to reduce health disparities in the city by 50 percent over the next 10 years. She calls it Baltimore’s “moon shot,” a reference to John F. Kennedy’s 1961 speech declaring his intention to put an American on the moon by the end of the decade.

Wen certainly has her work cut out for her. Despite improvements in recent years, health disparities in Baltimore remain some of the worst in the nation, often breaking down along racial and economic lines.

“One of my predecessors did say to me when taking this job that the only limit to what you can do is your own ability to stay awake,” she says, not really kidding. “It’s challenging when you know that there are so many issues that need to be addressed, and when you know that there’s so much that can be done immediately.”

Paradoxically, after almost two years, Wen now realizes she can probably accomplish more by driving herself—and her staff—just a little bit less.

“We all need to take care of ourselves first and take care of our families first because, otherwise, we’re not able to care for our city,” she says. “And if we’re trying to have Baltimore City be the model of well-being for the country, maybe it’s an important place to start with well-being for ourselves, too.”

To that end, Wen and her husband, who live in Fells Point, have taken up cooking. A former competitive ballroom dancer, she’s also looking to reincorporate dance into her routine.

“I’m trying to do more fun things, things that I really love,” she says, adding that she rejects the term work-life balance because it sets up what, for her, is a false dichotomy.

“I mean, I love my work, and I also live in the community that I serve,” she explains. “It’s such a fluid and dynamic process that it’s difficult to say, ‘This is where my work ends and my life begins.’ Everywhere I go, I see all the residents in Baltimore as my patients, and so, where do you stop?”

Given Wen’s youth and ambition, it is only natural to wonder what will happen if and when Washington calls.

Beilenson, who meets with Wen for breakfast or lunch every few months, vouches for her commitment—with one caveat.

“I also got asked [if I was going to stay] in the first couple years,” says Beilenson, who now runs Evergreen Health, a health insurance startup headquartered in Hampden. “I stayed because I really grew to care about Baltimore, and it’s a great place to be a health commissioner because, frankly, there are so many issues to work on.

“But you know, I also believe in serendipity,” he continues. “I think, certainly, it’s her intention to stay but, for example, if the Clinton administration came calling to have her be head of [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] or [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]—if I were her, I wouldn’t turn it down.”

Wen doesn’t seem all that interested in talking about hypothetical job offers though.

“I am all in on Baltimore,” she affirms. “My family and I have moved here. We are settling here. I think it would be disingenuous to ask other people to invest in the city if I don’t invest in the city. I want everyone else to be all in on Baltimore, so I’m all in on the city, too.”