Danielle Evans was born in 1983 in Alexandria, Virginia, which means she is old enough to appreciate what the integration of the federal government—and the middle-class jobs that came with it—meant for Black families.

It also means the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars instructor is young enough to appreciate the surreal nature of a highway named after Jefferson Davis mere miles from the nation’s capital. Evans lived in several states growing up as she pursued her academic, teaching, and writing careers—all of which informs the short stories in her acclaimed recent collection, The Office of Historical Corrections.

These smart, intimate, unpredictable tales of mostly young Black women seem at once ahead of their time, as if looking back on current moment of racial reckoning, yet plausible enough that they could be headlines in tomorrow’s newspapers. The book’s informed, exquisite writing, however, demands to be read today.

We’re curious where your story ideas come from. A federal agency named The Office of Historical Corrections, which is both the title of the last story and the book, feels like it could almost exist.
Often for me, something goes from random idea to story when I can find a connection between two things that don’t feel connected. Strange things happen in the world all the time, so part of being a writer is just being observant. In the beforetime [pre-COVID], I took a lot of public transit, and I got a lot of my strange ideas—what just happened?—on public transit. The original spark for the novella came years ago when I was on the Metro in D.C. I was overhearing people having a wildly wrong conversation about a historical event.

The ramifications of history, both personal and political, inevitably impact the characters.
Often the story for me is in these strange intersections. The long-term questions I’ve been asking myself are about history, about responsibility, about agency, privilege, and fundamentally how privilege operates. I do think part of the project of this book for me, I realized about halfway through, is how a narrative changes if you just choose differently who the protagonist is. That’s true in a sometimes very personal way. It’s also true in the story we tell about the country or the story of history. If white Americans are the protagonists of the American story, then yeah, maybe we have hundreds of years of building better white Americans.

Other stories are very timely, especially “Boys Go to Jupiter,” which is about youthful transgressions, unintended and otherwise, racism, social media, and grief.
So I’ve been writing about the strangeness of diverse or multicultural spaces that are invested in this iconography for a really long time. In fact, originally, I thought that story was going to be a novel, based on a controversy that happened at a college in the 1990s that brought about a huge public debate. But I think part of what makes that story feel topical is social media. I am interested in social media and interested in social media as a story question because so much [today] is about who we understand ourselves to be and the difference between our public lives and private lives.

Dr. Lisa Cooper wants to make it clear that racism is a public health crisis. The director of Johns Hopkins’ Urban Health Institute and its Center for Health Equity, which both work to document and overcome systemic health disparities, explains that the COVID-19 pandemic and protests surrounding the death of George Floyd are actually related.

“It’s interesting that this epidemic of police brutality against African-American communities is colliding with this health epidemic,” she says. “A lot of people didn’t realize that police brutality is not only a terrible social problem, but it leads to all kinds of other problems.”

Problems like mental health issues, drug addiction, and chronic disease, says Cooper, which begin at a young age.

“It starts with African-American children and the ways that they experience racism in school, that they don’t have opportunities to obtain gainful employment, that they get targeted by law enforcement early in life, which impairs their ability to lead more productive lives,” she says. All of which makes them more likely to get sick.

At this point, it’s well known that both Black and Hispanic people are five times more likely to get COVID-19 than whites, which Cooper largely attributes to systemic racism, with many communities of color lacking necessary social protections, like fresh food access, spacious housing, or paid sick leave.

“And then to top it all off, they have poorer access to healthcare or, in many cases, no health insurance,” she says.

Cooper believes the light being shined on these two crises will ultimately help further her organizations’ missions.

“People are starting to see…it’s all related,” she says. “When you don’t take care of the most vulnerable in your society, you put everyone else at risk.”

In 1891, Harry T. Pratt became the first African-American student granted admission to attend Maryland Institute College of Art. More than 100 years later, MICA still struggles to equitably reflect the demographics of Baltimore City. Blackives, an exhibition and online database curated by senior photography student Deyane Moses archives the portraits and oral histories of black MICA students and alumni.

When Moses’ review of the school’s nearly 300-page autobiography yielded only one page of information about non-white students, Moses decided to create her own archival project. Armed with her camera and a desire to erect a new monument for underrepresented populations, Moses ventured to photograph every black student she saw on campus. Those random and serendipitous encounters rendered a portfolio of beautifully earnest portraits, candid moments that document students who often feel invisible. The gesture offers a vulnerable bridge to connect with others who may feel a kindred kind of isolation. To be a person of color attending a predominately white institution of higher education can be a solitary experience.

Blackives is a living history developed to affirm black students and instigate shifts in MICA’s established diversity and inclusion policies and practices. The popularity of the exhibition triggered a lengthy response from the school’s president, Samuel Hoi. In the memo, President Hoi acknowledged the segregationist history at MICA and vowed to “strive forward to fulfill its diversity, equity, inclusion, and globalization (DEIG) goals.” As a result, the exhibition was extended through March and reinstalled in the atrium of the school’s Main Building.

Shortly before the opening of Blackives, Moses and other black MICA students staged an intervention to memorialize Robert H. Clark, one of the first African-American students denied admittance because of his race. The intervention, Take Back the Steps, successfully blocked the entrance to the building for 63 minutes, one minute for every year black students were denied enrollment to attend. At the event, Moses issued a statement that contextualized a history of omission that few in the MICA community knew about.

We spoke with Moses and Clyde Johnson, associate dean at the Center for Identity & Inclusion about the exhibition, the community’s response, and their hopes for increased diversity on campus.

Blackives is an exhibition, but it is also an online database?

Deyane Moses: Yes. Maryland Institute Black Archives is the database which houses all the articles I found online, but I’m also collecting oral histories from the students who are currently here. The articles that I found from back in the day, the ways that they described black people, our voices were lost. The Afro supplemented for some of those voices, but they were around in the 1890s. So it was important to retrieve those voices now and to also speak to alumni and faculty. That’s how the project is moving forward, by looking at the past present and moving forward into the future. Many students at MICA don’t feel like they have support and mentorship.

What has the response been from black students and alumni about their experiences at MICA?

DM: They feel like they are not supported, especially when it comes to critiques. Classes are not that diverse. A lot of times I am the only black student in my photography classes. For the first time in my senior year, there are three other senior photography students in the same class with me. We talked about that. I also went to the black student union and talked to them about the low retention rate of black students at MICA. The show has been well received and everyone wants MICA to do more for black students and to support them.

Why now is the school and President Hoi speaking up about this issue and how will it effect the school’s approach to increase the diversity of its faculty and student body?

Clyde Johnson: We have just ended a nearly three-year president’s task force on diversity, equity, inclusion, and globalization. It entailed auditors looking over policies and programs regarding students of color, our LGBTQIA communities, and every aspect of diversity. We just did that and we’ve created a hopefully powerful document that should now be in implementation phase. These are new policies, new hiring guidelines. We have heard students say that the school does not have enough faculty members of color. So we have hired trainers to learn about implicit bias in the hiring process. I think we are working in tandem with this conversation. What Deyanne’s exhibition has done is reminded us that the work we are doing is urgent. Here’s the history, let’s do the work.

I love that the exhibition looks like a living room and the wall of student portraits feel like members of your family.

DM: The majority of the portraits are of undergrad and graduates and my mentor, Colette Veasey-Cullors. They are my family. Everyone was really supportive. If they had a second, they let me take their portrait. I just asked that they focus and look at me so that, when others saw the wall, there would be a strong presence—they would know that we are here. The wallpaper is inspired by the 1890s, when the first black graduate, Harry T. Pratt, started. I wanted the feeling of home but also an awareness that you were in a museum.

You received some criticism from some students and staff about covering the statues in the Main Building with black curtains.

DM: I love this building, but I always noticed the white sculptures. Black people are not in those histories. I asked that they be covered, out of respect for black history as important by itself, outside of those histories. Some people are really upset about it.

What are your hopes for the exhibition?

DM: I would like it to be a permanent fixture somewhere in MICA and for the database to continue. I hope this is the beginning of other colleges admitting their histories so they can make change there, as well.

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.

Longtime Baltimore Sun journalist Antero Pietila—who has also covered politics from South Africa to the Soviet Union—focuses his latest book around the central figure of Johns Hopkins. In The Ghosts of Johns Hopkins: The Life and Legacy that Shaped an American City, Pietila examines the life and legacy of the titular developer, as well as digs deep on the impact his institutions have had on the racial patchwork of Baltimore City.

We talked with Pietila about what inspired the book, writing the first real biography of Johns Hopkins, and whether his institutions are doing enough for modern-day Baltimore.

This begins as a prequel to your last work, Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City. Then it becomes a companion.
We are at a very peculiar intersection of history in Baltimore. The names William Donald Schaefer and James Rouse mean less and less. Fewer people remember these individuals who had made a profound impact. These books are sort of designed as introductory assignments for those new to Baltimore. Like David Simon’s The Wire.

No credible biography of Hopkins exists, correct?
He destroyed his papers. Nobody knows why. He was very private in his personal matters and at the same time, had powerful friends, including Arunah Abell, the founder of The Sun. Yes, there were stories about Johns Hopkins in the paper, but nothing personally revealing.

Hopkins grew up on an Anne Arundel plantation and died in 1873. How did he view African-Americans?
He was a Union party member and believed in Lincoln and Reconstruction. But he did not believe in equality by today’s standards. The hospital had a humanitarian mission [to serve black patients], but at the same time, he never expected the University to have black students.

Hopkins was the one of the wealthiest people in the U.S. when he died, and the largest individual B&O Railroad shareholder. How did he make his money?
He started as a dry goods merchant, catering to the needs of Conestoga wagons traveling to the Shenandoah Valley and west to Ohio. He sold whiskey, “Hopkins’ Best,” and was involved in banking, shipping. There wasn’t an enterprise he wasn’t involved in.

During your research, did Hopkins remind you of anyone today?
I never thought of a comparison to someone. But thinking of it now, he was the principal investor in the B&O Railroad, which represented the Silicon Valley of its time.

Hopkins had no children and never married. When did he get interested in philanthropy?
Most likely through George Peabody, who was a close friend. He was also in contact with Enoch Pratt. The turning point seems to be after a brush with death at 37 when he contacted cholera.

What set the course for excellence at the university, medical school, and hospital that bear his name?
The university was modeled after the elite German institutions, and started with very few undergraduate students. It was primarily a graduate university and research institution. Similarly, the hospital was unique in that it began as research hospital.

The “ghosts” of Johns Hopkins refers not so much to various controversies around the University or medical school, for example, the syphilis and lead paint studies, but city’s development, in particular, around the hospital.
Not in My Neighborhood documented the ethnic rotations in West Baltimore, but nobody had outlined what happened in East Baltimore where there had been a strong Czech and Bohemian presence. In Old Town, the ethnic rotations included Germans, Irish, and then German Jews and Russian Jews. I don’t avoid the controversies.

You emigrated from Finland and started as a Sun reporter in 1969. What was your impression of the city?
I thought it was interesting, an ancient-looking city with its rowhouses and an atmosphere that was different than the parts of modern Europe, which I had visited. The extent of the segregation surprised me. I came to Baltimore one year after the riot. Not only was the mood of the city terrible, there were a helluva lot of questions about its future. The situation is tricky today.

And currently?
The mood is again not very good with the level of violent crime, but there are cranes and buildings going up everywhere by the waterfront. It makes you wonder if we are in the middle of a housing bubble.

But you see Hopkins Hospital as a bridge, potentially, spurring redevelopment on the east side from the harbor all the way to its campus.
The Hopkins campus never really brought to fruition the kind of renewal that we were told it would. But I see a lot of promise, particularly in the Broadway corridor. I think there is some kind of possibility for renewal that might connect to Preston Street and Greenmount Avenue. Hopkins has long had a strange, or perhaps stained, is a better word, relationship with the city. Given that this world-class university and medical school and hospital brand that sits in the midst of city with tremendous challenges. It is strange, and strained as well.

There is always the question is Hopkins doing enough for Baltimore? Today, there is the question whether it should have its own police force to set up a perimeter around its campuses. Something like 40 percent of the real estate buildings in the city don’t pay taxes because they belong to nonprofits and are exempt. Eventually that is going to become an issue as well, I imagine.

“Why don’t you sit with us?” asked an unassuming stranger. “We have an extra seat at our table.” I was alone and grateful for the invitation. It was 2011 and I had been nervously looking for a seat in one of Towson University’s largest dining halls, where it seemed like everyone from freshman orientation had made friends and was sitting accordingly. My embarrassment and anxiety compounded as I passed row after row of already-full tables ringing with chatter and laughter. Now I had a seat of my own, and maybe a potential friend.

Across the table, the stranger, a cherubic upperclassman with a black bushy beard and glasses, sat with his smiling girlfriend. They asked what brought me to Maryland from New Jersey, how I liked campus so far, what my plans were for the next four years, taking genuine interest in me as we ate. When I explained that I was moving in with my dad and stepmom, who were both Towson political science professors, they listened attentively.

What I didn’t share were my experiences from four months prior—my mental breakdown, my extended stays in various mental hospitals, my bipolar diagnosis. I omitted that I was taking high doses of strong anti-anxiety medications, and that they weren’t working. I left out that earlier that year, when speaking to my parents, I heard the devil’s voice. I didn’t think it was necessary to mention that they had serious reservations about my ability to function in college, or that I probably had only passed my last high-school classes because my teachers were sympathetic. I wanted to leave my past behind. I was ready to reinvent myself.

Feeling like I was off to a good start, lunch with this couple was the highlight of my day. I felt at ease seeing his wide grin when I described my hobbies—basketball, reading, writing—and I enjoyed talking to his girlfriend, who was warm and welcoming. They seemed like healthy, happy people, and I was grateful to be included.

Halfway through lunch, we transitioned from small talk to him telling me about a club that he wanted to start a chapter of on campus: Youth for Western Civilization. “We need to defend American ideals,” he said. “They’re in danger.” He explained how foreigners were taking over the U.S. economy and that they posed a threat to national security. I then noticed the design on his T-shirt: a flexed arm holding a white hammer, which he enthusiastically stated was going to be the club logo. “Anyway, I need a certain number of signatures to have it legitimized,” he said. “Will you sign and help me get started?”

Something deep in my gut told me that his ideas were misguided, but he seemed like he knew what he was talking about, and I didn’t want him to know that I didn’t. During his pitch, he spoke of the dangers of multiculturalism, a term that I figured one of us must be misunderstanding. Surely it didn’t just mean diversity—he made it sound so dangerous. He seemed nice and spoke with confidence, and I was eager to please. My signature was one of the first for the club.

“Let’s keep in touch,” he said as he shook my hand after lunch. “Add me on Facebook—Matt Heimbach.”

That night, after dinner, I went to my room and opened Facebook, which revealed a different side of the friendly upperclassman. His profile page was full of Confederate flags and political rants. His friends included people who seemed odd, violent, or, in some cases, both, with one even posting about urges to kill people and drink their blood. Why was this seemingly nice guy friends with these kinds of people? Against my better judgment—perhaps out of desperation—I added him as a friend anyway.

Almost immediately, Matt started messaging me about “great opportunities.” When conservative commentator Bay Buchanan spoke on campus, I was one of the first to be invited. I was offered seats at different conventions around the U.S. and the opportunity to travel to Europe. Before college, I had barely left my small, rural hometown, and now I had a chance to see the world. It was tempting, so I told my parents.

“I might have ended up across the Atlantic Ocean with an incipient white nationalist.”

“Why does ‘Western Civilization’ need to be defended?” my dad asked incredulously. It was a weeknight, and we were sitting in his office as he took a break from grading papers. “I don’t think you should go. This sounds like a bad idea.”

I insisted, trying to restate my case with 18-year-old logic: “Europe will be good for me, because it’s fun! It’ll be fun, because it’s good for me!” After all, he had encouraged me to branch out and make friends. But he repeatedly shook his head. “You’re not going,” he said. The case was closed.

Looking back, I realize how this sounds: I had just met Matt, yet I was willing to fly halfway around the world with him just for the opportunity to have a friend. It didn’t take long for me to realize that my dad was right, and that I had been ignoring my own uncomfortable feelings about Matt: the aggressive T-shirt, his intense concern for American ideals, his intolerant views. Seven years later, it is now very clear what picture those details paint, but my naïve, medicated mind did not, perhaps could not, recognize that I was floating into dangerous waters. I was desperately lonely, and Matt was proof that I could make friends. I stuck around only to convince myself (and others) that I was normal, like everyone else. Had I not needed my parents’ permission, I might have ended up across the Atlantic Ocean with an incipient white nationalist.

In the past few years, college campuses have become a hotbed of extremist recruitment, with white supremacist propaganda—flyers, posters, marches, and direct confrontations with students—increasing by 258 percent between 2016 and 2017, according to a recent report by the Anti-Defamation League. “Young college students are perfect targets,” explains Katrina Bell McDonald, associate professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University. “They’re in intellectually vulnerable states, and they’re in environments in which new ideas and different perspectives are encouraged. When older, articulate people speak, students listen. It takes a critical eye to decipher the ambiguous language they sometimes use. They preach to the desperate. They isolate their targets and indoctrinate them into their ideals.”

The internet has played a major role in breeding racist ideologies, too, with extremist groups using social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit to recruit new radicals. Years before the recent rise of white nationalism, the Islamic State, or ISIS, was the pioneer of internet recruitment, using its websites and platforms to lure young jihadists from across the globe. The pre-internet Ku Klux Klan grew out of personal connections and word of mouth, but post-internet white nationalists are now harnessing the web’s ability to mobilize minds, and it seems some young people take these messages to heart. Then-22-year-old Severna Park native Sean Christopher Urbanski, for example, reportedly had ties to the “Alt-Reich” Facebook group before being accused of fatally stabbing Richard Collins III, a young black man, at a University of Maryland bus stop last summer. The web is also used by recruiters to coordinate rallies and events, like those Matt invited me to, which also further energize fledgling supporters. While Matt and I initially met in person, the rest of our correspondence existed in cyberspace, where he attempted to strengthen our bond.

Experts say several factors play roles in indoctrination—instability, lack of social networks, frustration with socioeconomic status—but even people with educations, solid mental health, and secure financial backgrounds are susceptible to recruitment. During Matt’s attempts, I nearly fit the bill for a model recruit: I was alone, unstable, and lacked confidence—plus I was a young white teenage male. But thanks to conversations with my dad, who eagerly supported my growing sense of unease about Matt, I slowly started to pull away. By the end of the semester, I no longer messaged him, but he would still message me—and as he became more comfortable, his sentiments grew darker.

“I hope you have a gun,” Matt said on Facebook one night that fall. “Especially if race riots break out in Baltimore.” He had been warning me about the dangers of a new Black Panther Party, which, he asserted, was calling for a race war against “whites,” especially if Barack Obama lost the 2012 election. I listened to NPR on the drive to campus with my stepmom each morning, but I hadn’t heard anything like this, and I definitely wasn’t interested in buying a weapon. “They allow you to protect yourself,” he insisted. “And as a constitutional member of the unorganized militia, it is your civic duty to own a firearm and be proficient.”

Firearms? Militia? I felt uncomfortable and politely disagreed until we switched topics. Before signing off, I decided to branch out and make some new friends. I had recently learned about the Fall Involvement Fair, which helps students discover activities and organizations around campus, and Matt’s comments inspired me to attend. His messages had started to scare me.

A few days later, I shuffled into Towson’s West Village Commons. Filling the ballroom were aisles and aisles of tables featuring clubs, sports teams, fraternities, and sororities, all led by seemingly confident and bright-eyed students. Amid the youthful buzz, I felt freshly awkward and isolated. It seemed like everyone already knew each other again, and though no one looked at me, all I could feel were eyes on my blushing face. As my thoughts tripped over each other, I heard a familiar voice call my name.

I turned to my right to see Matt’s eager grin. “Hey man, good to see you,” he started. “I’ve got something I wanted to ask you about.” A group of black and Muslim students had started to surround his table, and he seemed unconcerned by the atmosphere’s growing tension over the ideas listed on his posters. Before Matt could ask his question, an angry student interrupted him. “I’ll message you,” he said with a smile. I continued walking around the fair, feeling defeated and more alone than before.

“Hey dude! You like Frisbee?” shouted an unknown voice before I made my way out the double doors. It was the captain of the school’s Ultimate Frisbee team. And, actually, I did.

Ultimate Frisbee practice started the next week, and I was invited to the tryout tournaments. Finally, I felt like I had some potential real friends. As the team finished its first warm-up lap, one player asked the group, “Did you guys hear about that new racist group on campus?” “Yeah, ‘Youth for Western Civilization’—big ol’ bunch of racists,” another player answered before adding sarcastically, “Anyone wanna join with me?” I blushed as everyone laughed; Matt had been my only friend at Towson, and our friendship was a secret that I needed to keep from my new teammates. My willingness to overlook his myopic views and obvious intolerance felt stupid and shameful. I vowed to never talk to him again, and I stopped responding to his Facebook messages.

The next semester, I received a new message—this time from an Ultimate Frisbee teammate who worked for Towson’s student government. “This is just between you and me . . . assuming that’s what you want,” he started. “I was looking through my [student government] binder . . . and under [Youth for Western Civilization], I found your name. Are you in the group?”

It was the end of my freshman year, and I was by then an official Ultimate player. I had more friends now than I had in high school, and I was the most secure I’d ever felt. I explained that I didn’t realize what the club stood for when I signed Matt’s paper. But in order to remove my name from the list, he told me, I had to ask Matt myself.

It was a daunting task—I had just unfriended him on Facebook and had been ignoring his texts—but something I knew I had to do. Never one for confrontation, I ended up sending an impulsive text.

“Can you take me off your club’s list?” I asked. “Ouch,” he responded. “I guess so.”

That was the last time we ever spoke.

“I was alone, unstable, and lacked confidence.”

My sophomore year, I read about his proposed new club, named the White Student Union, in The Towerlight student newspaper and how its members patrolled campus to “protect the community.” Suddenly “White Pride” chalkings started to appear across school grounds, attributed to Matt and members of his club. Before long, Matt was the talk of not only campus but the country, with the subsequent uproar garnering national attention from outlets such as Vice. My classmates spoke out against his organization; we were frustrated and embarrassed that Towson had become home to such apparent bigotry. I felt this weight especially, as the signature I naively scribbled during my first freshman-year lunch helped launch one of the most controversial student groups in campus history.

Five years later, Matt Heimbach is now considered by some to be the next David Duke—the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. He resides in Indiana, where he founded the Traditionalist Worker Party, which is listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In 2016, he pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct after shoving a black woman during a Trump rally in Kentucky. In 2017, he led white nationalist protests over the removal of a Confederate statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, which left one innocent bystander dead. Unafraid of hiding his extremism, he has been photographed at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., holding a sign that said: “6 million? More like 271,301.” After a terrorist attack in Belgium, he reportedly tweeted, “Hey Brussels, how’s that multiculturalism working out for you?” Most recently, Matt was arrested on domestic battery charges for a truly bizarre case: He allegedly slept with his wife’s mother and got into a fight with her husband, his stepfather-in-law.

Back at Towson, talk of his White Student Union is long over, and new students often don’t know the would-be club ever existed. Even now, after everything I’ve learned, I sometimes have trouble connecting the grinning, personable Matt I met in the cafeteria with the views that he espouses today. I certainly could not have imagined the upperclassman who invited me to travel Europe being banned from the United Kingdom for his extremist beliefs. All that seemed to matter back then was that he wanted to get to know me.

Since my brush with Matt, I’ve earned a master’s degree in professional writing, started a career in Hunt Valley, and my Frisbee teammates have become lifelong friends. My life has improved tremendously, and today I am far more confident and clear-thinking. Each day, I continue to develop a better idea of who I am and what I stand for—which, it turns out, is the opposite of Matt. I’m reminded of that notion every time his name resurfaces.

Last fall, after he led the Charlottesville protests to keep Confederate statues up, I marched in the streets of Baltimore to have the city take its statues down. This spring, as he was charged with domestic battery, I marched with hundreds of thousands in Washington, D.C., to protest gun violence. If Matt is outspoken about his intolerance, it is my duty to raise my voice for justice and acceptance, using my uncomfortable past to do right in the present and future. Every time he takes a stand, I plan to take my own.

This article has been edited for clarity from its original print version in the September 2018 issue.