Inside the long, bright, shared workspace of Bmore Kitchen in Mid-Govans, Sue May is standing like a daffodil in a snowstorm. With her sleeves rolled up, she shifts a box of organic lettuce across a stainless-steel table as dozens of other business owners rush between their own tasks.

Her head chef, Kiara Young, aka “Kyeez,” has unloaded cartons of milk in the walk-in cooler and now turns her attention to a surplus of broccoli. In a few hours, when a half-dozen volunteers show up, they’ll whip it into cheddar soup—just one part of the 400-some meals to be made for their community this week.

“Do you like granola?” asks Young, before setting off in search of a to-go container studded with oats and pumpkin seeds.

“You can’t stop her from feeding people,” says May, with a shrug and smile.

In truth, those words could be a motto for Love & Cornbread, the small-but-mighty food-equity nonprofit founded by May in 2020. That August, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and a nationwide racial reckoning, the Mount Washington resident felt an urge to give back.

The home cook made a large batch of macaroni-and-cheese and headed to the busy corner of Pennsylvania and North Avenues in what could’ve been a bold move—this middle-aged white lady showing up in a notoriously under-resourced Black crossroads of Baltimore, near a site of protest following the murder of Freddie Gray. But all 35 servings disappeared quickly, and conversations with strangers about food and family inspired her to return. Nearly four years later, she hasn’t missed a Saturday since.

“West Baltimore gets such a bad rap, but if you show up, and are doing service to the community, and are doing it respectfully, people are going to recognize that, and jump right in to help you,” says May matter-of-factly, noting that many resources, like Health Care for the Homeless and Our Daily Bread, are located on the city’s east side. “At least that’s what my experience has been.”

In fact, in her second week serving in Penn North, Brandon “Coach” Campbell popped his head out of the Phase 2 Barbershop and offered exactly that. May calls him her co-founder, and the two hit it off immediately, with “Coach” educating her about the neighborhood, introducing her to community members, and always encouraging her to keep going.

Soon, she added volunteers, moved to a commercial kitchen, and eventually met “Kyeez,” a Crust by Mack alum and multi-generation Baltimorean with family in nearby Sandtown-Winchester, who joined the nonprofit last fall.

“Saturdays?” poses Young. “It’s a vibe.”

On that day, every week, just before noon, rain or shine, the Love & Cornbread crew sets up outside of Phase 2, where hugs, high-fives, and how-are-yous are exchanged as they hand out hundreds of soups, sandwiches, and, of course, cornbread, all scratch-made with quality ingredients—including produce from the So What Else regional food redistribution nonprofit and local growers like the Rock Rose Food Justice Project and First Fruits Farm.

“This is my most prized possession,” says Young, holding her cell phone close to chest, then pulling up a photograph of an elderly woman, standing in the sun on the city street, eyes closed, savoring that namesake treat. “It felt like feeding my grandmother. This is our corner, you know what I mean?”

Over time, some of those same folks in line have also started volunteering to serve, which May calls “the greatest compliment.” Beyond food, the nonprofit offers other essentials, too, such as hand warmers in the winter and cool rags in the summer. And in a neighborhood hit by the opioid epidemic, they also partner with the state of Maryland to provide Narcan overdose treatment, as well as information about the nearby Tuerk House for recovery.

“It’s a natural extension of our work,” says May, who retired as an education consultant last summer to focus full-time on Love & Cornbread. “Food is harm reduction.”

This spring, they hope to add a lunch catering service to the nonprofit’s offerings—with proceeds allowing them to hire more kitchen support, produce more food, and make a greater impact—while also partnering with the Franciscan Center for culinary externships. A retail cornbread mix might be in the works as well.

But why cornbread, of all things?

“It’s always been a comfort food for me—it’s warm, buttery, salty, sweet,” says May, whose mother grew up in Tennessee and made it regularly. “It’s not your entrée. It’s not your vegetable. Maybe it’s your dessert. But it’s just that little something extra that someone does to make you feel loved. And I think that’s pretty universal.”

This piece appeared in our April 2024 issue. For more great Baltimore stories, consider becoming a subscriber.

On a Monday afternoon, it’s difficult to find Donald Owens. With a yellow highlighter and black pen tucked into his shirt pocket, he’s rarely in his office, instead shuffling throughout the Arena Players building, meeting with members of his cast and crew or planning out the theater’s upcoming season schedule. It’s not uncommon for the artistic director to work until close to midnight.

It’s been more than 50 years for Owens, pictured above, but he still remembers the day he first learned about this theater, now located on McCulloh Street in West Baltimore. He was a student at Coppin State College when a professor named Samuel Wilson Jr. took him under his wing. Wilson had heard that the young man was an aspiring thespian and he thought he might like to join his community theater troupe.

“At first, I acted, and then I would direct,” says Owens, looking back over the decades, “and then I would teach.”

It was the 1970s, and after a nomadic first decade, the Arena Players had finally found a permanent home. During this time, the cast and crew grew rapidly, and before long, word of mouth had spread through the city and neighboring counties, with Black spectators flocking to the box office. It was normal to sell out their 300 tickets on any given night.

“The audience was huge then,” says Owens. “They had no place else to go.”

Arena Players will begin its 70th season this September, cementing its status as the nation’s oldest continuously operating Black theater company. But when it debuted in Baltimore in 1953, it was uncertain if it would survive a single season.

Even with free admission, the first few shows were more cast members than ticket-holders. Back then, an ensemble of seven to 12 actors, from local college students to community residents, would be lucky to perform for an audience of four. At the time, this small group of Black actors couldn’t watch—let alone participate in—performances at big-name theater houses, be it on Broadway or in Baltimore.

“Unless you were playing a maid or a butler, there was no need for you in white theaters,” says Owens, referring to the Jim Crow prejudices that kept cultural institutions racially segregated well into the 20th century.

But this was also an era of civil rights resistance. From fine art to photography, the Black community was leading a wave of artistic movements across the country, fighting back by creating their own representation, with community theaters emerging as creative refuges in cities like New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.

“Theater has always been a political movement,” says Owens, noting that some of the earliest plays, from Greek tragedies to Shakespeare, dealt with some form of protest.

In Harlem, the pioneering American Negro Theatre opened in 1940, followed by the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School in 1965 and the New Federal Theatre in 1970. Black community theaters were places where Black thespians could write, perform, and direct works by Black artists, including luminaries like Lorraine Hansberry, Ossie Davis, and James Baldwin.

“Everybody just assumed there were no Black playwrights,” says Owens. “Black playwrights did not begin with August Wilson [in the 1980s]. Black playwrights have been around for centuries.”

Meanwhile, historically Black colleges became another respite for Black theater. In Baltimore, Arena Players got its start on campus at what is now Coppin State University in 1953. Its theater-in-the-round playhouse soon became a hub where aspiring actors and other community members—from lawyers, doctors, and teachers to housewives and retirees—could regularly partake in the theatrical world.

At this time in Baltimore, venues for the Black arts scene were few and far between, despite a large Black population. Pennsylvania Avenue was one of the few hubs, with the Royal Theatre being a premiere venue for iconic musicians like Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. Further along the avenue, other spots like the Sphinx Club, Club Casino, and Club Tijuana hosted the likes of Billie Holiday and Miles Davis.

And though it took a while to find an audience, the word eventually got out about Arena Players, with coverage of its early seasons appearing increasingly in The Sun. The company’s first production was the one-act Hello Out There! by Armenian-American playwright William Saroyan, and within a few years, their performance of the musical Simply Heavenly brought its author, Langston Hughes, to the front row.

Their repertoire ranged from one-act plays to full-scale productions across a variety of genres, such as comedy, drama, and mystery, which also included famous works by white playwrights, such as Alfred Hitchcock, Arthur Miller, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Tennessee Williams. Similarly, audiences were predominantly Black, but there were white attendees, too, and groups like sororities, fraternities, church congregations, and other social clubs regularly sponsored private viewings. Tickets hovered around $1, and at times they sold out.

Still, the Black theater company was a small operation. Troupe members had to bring in furniture from their own homes to use as props, and while Coppin was their launchpad, throughout that first decade, Arena Players moved between multiple venues. They put on shows at the Great Hall Theater of St. Mary’s Church in Walbrook, at Morgan State University’s Carl J. Murphy Auditorium, and at the YMCA in Madison Park, where crew members would build intricate sets on Friday, just to tear the whole thing down by Sunday night.

“Though the beginning was not easy, the sense of commitment was great, and individuals gave liberally of their time and resources to bring their dreams to reality,” wrote then-artistic director Ed Terry in a 50th anniversary booklet in 2003. “Through the first decade, the names of the Players were well known, and the actors constituted a kind of resident company as they wandered from one venue to another in search of a permanent home.”

They finally moved to their McCulloh Street home in 1969—a curved brick building in the Seton Hill neighborhood between Mt. Vernon and West Baltimore. And what was once a coffin warehouse for a local mortuary became the permanent home of a historic Black theater.

Two silver plaques greet you when you step through the front door of Arena Players. One is dedicated to Irvin Turner, who founded Arena’s “Youtheatre” program in 1974. The other is for Sam Wilson, Owens’ former mentor, who died in 1996. On his, there’s a quote: “I do not believe anyone is supposed to leave this earth having held on to his or her talent. You’ve got to share it. You’ve got to hand it to somebody else.”

Today, Arena Players has 45 cast and crew, with performers ranging in age from toddlers to octogenarians. For about 10 years in the 1980s, ticket sales and grants for the youth theater were what kept Arena Players open and operating—and some of those performers are still with the troupe today.

In her own way, Catherine Orange is an Arena Players lifer. The youth program director was also encouraged by Wilson to join the troupe while a Coppin State student in 1972, but by that time, she already knew the theater well, having visited since childhood with her grandmother. Over the years, she’s had her hand in everything from hair-and-makeup to stage managing, and eventually she got her own children and then grandchildren involved. Her son, Rodney, was the theater’s managing director until his death in 2019. Her grandson, Dana, now a professional performer, got his start at Arena Players when he was just four years old.

“For kids who want to grow and to develop their creativity, this is a great place to start,” says Orange, noting that some young troupe members continued their interest at the Baltimore School for the Arts and Peabody Institute.

In fact, Arena Players has many notable alumni, including those who have worked on Broadway or in the film industry. Actress Tracie Thoms, who starred in Rent and The Devil Wears Prada, got her start on the Arena Players stage. And Tony Award-winning actor, singer, dancer, and director André De Shields has often praised Arena Players for being one of the few places where he could explore the arts as a young boy growing up in Baltimore.

Owens is a D.C. native but started acting at age six. Now at 76, he’s the glue that holds the theater together, responsible for handling everything from the building’s maintenance to the season’s lineup. This past November, three of the four walls in his office were covered in dry-erase calendars marked with the troupe’s performance dates through 2023.

When selecting which plays to perform, Owens tries to prioritize what he calls “entertainment teaching,” rooted in a founding philosophy of bringing underrepresented works with historical significance to the forefront. To that end, the players recently mounted a production of The Face of Emmett Till, the true story chronicling of the life, death, and aftermath of a 14-year-old Black boy who was murdered by two white men for allegedly whistling at a white woman in 1955 Mississippi. In many ways, says Owens, this follows the great tradition of Black performing arts venues.

“Black theaters allowed Black people to perform, they allowed them to write and direct, and they allowed their work to be seen,” he says, with other now-classic Black works such as The Wiz fantasy musical and the tragic for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf having premiered here over the years. “That was really important.”

It meant their stories would be told.

For Arena Players, it’s a legacy that’s made an impact. Alongside actor portraits and framed newspaper clippings, the theater’s walls are decorated with official recognition. In 2018, a signed letter from late Congressman Elijah E. Cummings called the theater a “lasting cultural icon.” In more recent years, they’ve also caught the attention of historians, with Morgan State University currently working with the theater’s archives in hopes of creating a future digital exhibition.

“The Arena Players’ archives demonstrate African-American agency [in] Baltimore during the early civil rights era,” says Morgan State archivist Ida E. Jones. “This community space provided room to nurture positive Black images, cultivate innate talent, and expose Black Baltimore to the mechanics of theater work.”

That sort of preservation project is vital for a nonprofit theater with limited staff and resources. Over the years, they have experienced their fair share of financial ups and downs, and today, they primarily rely on grants and community donations to stay afloat.

“We’re beginning to see some daylight,” says board chair Larry Cook, a West Baltimore native and former state senator who has been involved with the theater for over two decades, with much of his efforts focused on lobbying support from city and state government. “It’s been a task, but we’ve stayed persistent.”

Cook points to the forthcoming renovations to the building, which hasn’t had any major upgrades since the ’70s, with the third floor, currently used as a rehearsal space, being transformed into a black-box theater, in order to have multiple shows taking place at once. Other plans include modernizing the light fixtures and seating to improve the audience’s experience and accessibility.

The Arena Players audience looks different now than when it first started. While still majority Black, the crowd is often representative of a variety of races, reflective of the Baltimore theater scene’s diversification, as mainstream venues like Center Stage and Everyman Theatre cultivate more inclusive casts and repertoires.

This could explain why they’re not seeing nearly as many full houses these days, but the theater continues to put on up to seven shows per season. This year’s first performance will not premiere until September, but right before Christmas, they were gearing up for a performance of Langston Hughes’ Black Nativity.

For Owens, though, even in changing times, the Arena Players mission is just as important as it ever was—some 70 years and counting—and will continue to be in the future.

“The energy here is powerful, even to this day,” he says. “It has such a history, and it has such a dedicated set of people, and that keeps the fire burning.”

When Tameeka Randall arrives home after a long day making Southern food at her family’s downtown restaurant, Next Phaze Cafe, she’d rather eat out than cook an entire meal. But the options are limited when it comes to sit-down restaurants in Southwest and West Baltimore, says Randall, who lives near Edmondson Village and co-runs Next Phaze with her father, Tony, pictured: “There’s really not many places to eat at all.”

But early next year, the father-daughter duo and a roster of six other food businesses will help address that dining dearth with the launch of The Mill on North, a 7,800-square-foot food hall at Walbrook Mill at West North and Braddish avenues.

Ground broke on the project in June and construction is projected to finish in the spring, with development partners including Coppin Heights Community Development Corporation, Timonium’s Osprey Property Co., and the nonprofit Neighborhood Housing Services. So far, the partnership has enjoyed success with its $25-million mixed-use transformation of the former Walbrook Mill & Lumber Co. yard, which opened in 2020.

This next phase, which will cost an additional $3.9 million, adds the new food-centric Mill on North to cater to the surrounding neighborhoods, as well as an eager audience of students and staff from Coppin State University next door. Each component adds momentum in breathing life into a long-underinvested section at the western end of North Avenue, says Dan Ellis, executive director of Neighborhood Housing Services.

“Does building a food hall solve the problems of West Baltimore? No,” says Ellis. “But if you build the housing and the food hall and you do economic development, each of these investments cumulatively makes an impact.”

Plans call for incorporating many of the classic elements—cafeteria-style seating and a sleek aesthetic, for instance—found in other popular local food halls like Remington’s R. House or the Mount Vernon Marketplace downtown. But Gary Rodwell, executive director of Coppin Heights CDC, said The Mill on North will stand apart with its all-Black vendor lineup, as well as by catering directly to both westside neighborhoods and one of the city’s two prized historically Black colleges.

“You’re going to have the intersection of the college community, with Coppin State University students and faculty being a part of it; you’re going to have a unique food hall situated in an African-American community; and you’re going to have a neighborhood institution that has the flavor of the [project’s] leadership and of West North Avenue in it,” says Rodwell. “It’s not replicated throughout Baltimore City, those three dynamics.”

The Mill on North’s vendor roster includes Next Phaze’s soul food, a baked potato project called Dancing Potatoes, a burger joint called The Blissful Burger Bar, sandwich purveyor D&B Deli, baked confections from Cupsey Cakesy, seafood specialist Dream St. Cuisine, and Caribbean-style brunch from 3 Chefs, plus a yet-to-be-named full-service bar.

April Richardson, a management consultant who formerly operated Savor food hall in Prince George’s County, says it’s been a careful process to assemble vendors through community outreach, noting that all seven tenants have some connection to West Baltimore.

“It wasn’t a short vetting process,” she says. “We met with them, interviewed them, tasted their food, listened to their story to figure out if they were a fit.”

After encountering years of delays, all parties are anxious to see the food hall launch in 2023. Randall’s father, Tony, emphasized the importance of working together to serve Greater Mondawmin and draw more visitors to the neighborhood.

“I’m looking forward to not just offering our food but being part of something to improve the economic state of the community,” he says. “This project offers that, and we’re just blessed to be a part of it.”

Nneka N’Namdi wants Baltimore to see the bigger picture.

By Grace Hebron

Photography by Schaun Champion

Five years ago, Nneka N’Namdi watched as children rode their bikes along a demolition site. As they crossed Fremont Avenue to Lafayette Street, where four large brownstones were being razed, the bikers rode past hazardous debris and gaping, six-foot holes in the ground.

The urban decay she witnessed that day—it happened to be Mother’s Day weekend—inspired N’namdi to launch Fight Blight Bmore (FBB), an advocacy group aimed at eradicating blight by creating safer spaces for Baltimore residents. More recently, these efforts have included a push for more equitable housing practices, with focuses on community development, estate planning advocacy, and dismantling the city’s ties to systemic racism.

“Being a port city where you have all the different geographical types—except for frozen tundra—Baltimore could really live up to its natural promise,” says N’namdi, who lives in old West Baltimore, one of Baltimore City’s most run-down areas. “But it will never be what it could be, due to the displacement and the genocide of indigenous Americans, and the enslavement and oppression of Africa-descended people. Until those things are dealt with, we can forget it.”

Her first goal on this quest was just wrapping her head around the scope of the problem. And her track record in multiple fields helped: She’s COO of systems engineering firm N’namdi Consulting, an entrepreneur with more than 15 years of experience in community arts and wellness program development, and also a licensed real estate agent.

“In 2019, I estimated that Baltimore City had three times the reported number of blighted properties,” she says. “Things are much the same today as they were two years ago. I think the most significant change has been the ramping up of the governor’s program, Project CORE, which really seeks to use demolition as a primary strategy for remediation. Unfortunately, this doesn’t really fix the problem. It just creates a new version of it. What needs to change is that there has to be a more holistic focus on community development, which effectively means investing in people and community in ways that will enable them to create the community that they want.”

The pandemic certainly didn’t help, either, upending the priorities and finances of the city. But N’Namdi has a few strategies in mind.

“Being a port city where you have all the different geographical types—except for frozen tundra—Baltimore could really live up to its natural promise.

“But it will never be what it could be, due to the displacement and the genocide of indigenous Americans, and the enslavement and oppression of Africa-descended people. Until those things are dealt with, we can forget it.”

“One of the things that we’re really focused on is continuing the call to the mayor and local elected officials, as well as state elected officials, to do away with the tax sale [the forced sale of property for unpaid taxes], and to create a more equitable collection system for property taxes,” she says. “This will help to stabilize the community, stabilize families, and make people less housing-insecure.”

Equitable appraisals would help, too, she says.

“We’ve seen the devaluing of property, which makes people housing insecure.” Low appraisals also make it hard for developers to borrow rehab money against the value of a property, she says.

But she’s seeing some progress, especially when it comes to public awareness of the long-term negative consequences of urban decay and neglect.

“People are really starting to make the connection between what a neighborhood looks like, and public policy priorities,” she says. “More people are reaching out to us. And some of the language that we are hearing folks use really focuses on blight in the same realm as other social determinants of health.”

The radical inequalities between neighborhoods also affects things like life expectancy: In neighborhoods like Sandtown-Winchester, it’s 10-20 years less than in some of the city’s stable neighborhoods, according to FBB.

“Let’s start with water,” she says. “Because Baltimore is under consent decree with the EPA, the cost of water is high,” she says. “That’s limiting folks’ access to this resource that we all need to live. But if you look at Sandtown-Winchester, people live under food apartheid, meaning that there’s no accessible grocery store within a quarter mile of that neighborhood.

Your water costs are high. Your access to nutritious food is low. And then, because of poor transportation infrastructure, you have to travel farther for school. If you can’t bathe or drink water, if you can’t eat nutritious food, if you have challenges getting to school and work, what quality of life are you going to have?”

And the list goes on: “Many of these blighted neighborhoods are also heat islands,” N’Namdi says, “which means because there’s a lack of tree canopy, and because we have tar roofs, these neighborhoods have temperatures that are six degrees higher. So when you compare Sandtown-Winchester to Roland Park, you see starkly different physical conditions. The outcome is lower life expectancies.”

All of those obstacles can also contribute to mental-health problems, she says.

“Your community is a reflection, oftentimes, of how you see yourself. By allowing these communities to look this way, we’re teaching people that there’s something wrong with them, and that is not correct. There’s some- thing wrong instead with the conditions in which people find themselves living. And it is extremely traumatic to have to navigate these spaces, to walk past buildings that look like they might fall down if the wind blows too hard. Or to walk past grass that’s taller than you in a city where we have three times the national average of childhood asthma. That makes navigating the school, navigating home, and going outside traumatic. It damages people’s ability to feel and to think, and therefore, to have a good, healthy and whole life.”

Despite all the challenges, N’Namdi has remained remarkably hopeful there will be progress.

“My hope is that Baltimore takes a good, hard look. This is an opportunity for Baltimore, to be one of the first major American cities to come out of that process with some reparative policy so that we don’t continue taking these complex and compound traumas forward. I do hope that we begin to see this come to fruition in the next several years. It can be done.”

In 2018, as an associate public health professor at Morgan State University, Lawrence Brown was honored with the Open Society Institute-Baltimore’s “Bold Thinker” award for sparking discussion around the city’s racial segregation. The same year, The Root named him to its annual list of the most influential African Americans ages 25 to 45.

After serving as a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the West Memphis native returns to Morgan this year to launch the school’s Center for Urban Health Equity. Brown’s new role coincides with the release of The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America. It’s a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the political and economic forces behind Baltimore’s bifurcated white and Black neighborhoods, and the modern-day segregation at the center of so much of the city’s inequity.

In 2015, you coined the term “The Black Butterfly” to describe the geography of East and West Baltimore. How did that term originate?
I had been teaching undergraduates about the segregation of space in the city and was trying to think of ways to get people to understand the concept. It was something the undergraduates—18, 19, 20 years old—could hang their hat on. The Black Butterfly is half a term of art and half of social science. [The street artist] Nether picked up on it and used it in a mural and [painter] Chris Wilson has used it in his work. The research in the book kind of came later, after others had already run with it.

This book is not directly focused on the struggle for voting rights or even of-the-moment concerns about the need for police reform. It’s a story of systemic racism in the built environment—infrastructure, housing, and neighborhoods.
I sum up the book in one sentence—you can’t make Black lives matter if you don’t make Black neighborhoods matter. There is a lot of activism and advocacy around Black lives and police violence. I wanted to expand the scope and say we shouldn’t just care about Black lives when they die at the hands of police, but we should care about all of the factors that lead up to early Black deaths . . . [including] health inequality. For every one of those [violent incidents], there’s 10,000 children, like Freddie Gray and Korryn Gaines, who are poisoned by lead. There’s people who die of asthma, HIV, or now COVID. If we’re saying Black Lives Matter, we have to care about Black neighborhoods, because that’s where Black people live.

In Baltimore, it seems the protests around the Port Covington tax increment financing (TIF) plan signaled a breakthrough moment in terms of how city government and public dollars foster segregation and inequality.
Port Covington was a turning point, in terms of organizing. There were marches and protests around the death of Freddie Gray. Now, there was organizing over a TIF. We had like 800 people come out to City Council work-group meetings at the War Memorial building that summer. It was 2016, the year after the Uprising, and here the city was giving a massive $660-million TIF to this billionaire at the corner of the “White L.” The public awareness [and outcry] was a tremendous step forward.

One of the most enlightening parts of the book is the look back at The Sun’s vociferous support of housing segregation.
The impetus for many white homeowner’s associations was the “Negro Invasion” [a characterization in the Baltimore Sun]. That was the rhetoric that was weaponized.

West Baltimore native Tariq Touré grew up in awe of the businesses in his community—from streetwear designers to eateries like Shareef’s Grill, a takeout restaurant that serves Halal meats and now has multiple locations in Baltimore. “We would come out from Juma [Friday prayer] and everybody would buy his wraps religiously,” recalls Touré, a Muslim husband, father, and award-winning writer.

So when he wrote a poem nearly four years ago describing the story of how the dollar flows through a community, he was drawing from a personal desire to explain that process. Years later, he realized the poem was something he wished he’d had growing up, so he turned it into a children’s book.

David’s Dollar follows the story of David Kareem, a Muslim kid who expresses curiosity about what happens to a dollar after it’s spent. “He’s happy to have his candy, but he’s sad to see his dollar be spent,” says Touré, who has three children himself. “So his father says, ‘Well, let me show you,’ and then takes him around the neighborhood and shows him all the different businesses, and the dollar happens to keep popping up.”

Slated for a September release (pre-orders are currently sold out), David’s Dollar follows Touré’s two other self-published poetry books. After struggles with publishers who wanted to make fundamental changes, Touré took matters into his own hands. In May, he launched a fundraiser for the illustration costs, which far surpassed its $7,000 goal. The crowdfunding campaign followed his philosophy of “do it for self,” a concept he learned more about through his community, which also happens to be a recurring message in the book.

Despite all of the research, Touré doesn’t plan to sit his kids down and talk about the meaning of the dollar until the book is out. He wants to let them read it and have their curiosity guide a discussion.

“Right now, they know nothing about it,” he says. “I just want them to walk into a room full of books and be like, ‘What’s this?’”

Here’s what the author had to say about his upcoming book, the value of the Black dollar, and Baltimore’s tight-knit Muslim community:

What was your inspiration for David’s Dollar?
Maybe three or four years ago, I wrote a poem that described how a young boy would ask his father how money passes through a community in the realm of [I guess you would say] futurism, because it doesn’t really happen like that right now. [Laughs] Basically, if this was a community where people spent money with each other, how would a young child be able to see that?

So, what prompted you to turn it into a book?
When I was done with it, I thought it’d be something cool to share with my kids at some point in time when they were ready to digest that information. Then I realized, well, I already wrote two poetry books, what would it look like if I were to write a children’s poetry book that tells a really dynamic story that I think people would rally behind?

On the cover, you have David and his father dressed in Muslim garb. Is it important for you that you remain as authentic as possible in your writing?
Building it out autobiographically, it’s important for me to make the way it feels and looks there authentic. [For] Black Muslims, a lot of us dress this way on the regular. A lot of our parents make sure we shop Black on the regular anyway. We get so caught up into representation that we forget we have a dope story that carries with it anyway.

Growing up, were you aware of the disparities in the Black community in Baltimore?

I grew up around a lot of hustlers, some entrepreneurs, but very little actual business owners. Sometimes as writers we write for wishful thinking, and it’s like, this is what could possibly be if we spend more money with each other.

When you were younger, do you remember having an understanding of financial literacy?
Not really. The one thing that I feel like was preached in my community was, you know, different income and stuff like that. But as far as walking somebody through it? No, that wasn’t a thing. So it will be good to have literal depictions of how these things work.

What do you think are some of the reasons behind the failure to keep the Black dollar in some communities?
Well, number one, we lack patience sometimes. Papa John’s pizza probably wasn’t fire when he first made it. [Laughs]. We have to believe in the seed that people are planting and understand that it goes through stages, and that people don’t reach perfection off the jump. For whatever reason, we’ve been indoctrinated to believe that, if there are two lemonade stands and one is a white-owned lemonade stand, business there is going to be at a heightened level and [they] therefore deserve that money

What do you think about the timing of the release of this children’s book aligning with everything that’s going on in the world with the youth-led Black Lives Matter movement?
Well, since it’s something that I wrote three or four years ago, it was going to get written regardless—there was a need regardless. It isn’t a “strike while the iron’s hot” decision or something like that. If anybody knows me, they know that I write religiously, so I don’t need a specific moment to spur me to write what I feel is necessary. David’s Dollar was going to be David’s Dollar with or without any sort of a climax of injustice because I believe this is something that is going to need to be revisited constantly by the community. And if it adds to what people are trying to fight for, then, you know, that’s a blessing, too. But I don’t want to get pigeonholed into a “Hey, I’m writing this for this exact thing.” I wrote David’s Dollar because I felt like this story would be useful in the hands of kids like myself who needed it spelled out for them in interesting ways.

What do you hope that people take away from this book?
My goal is for Black children to walk into a store with their parents, see them spend their money, and maybe they don’t even ask the question. In the back of their head, they just say to themselves, “Where did my dollar go? Where did mommy’s dollar go? Where did daddy’s dollar go?”

Gervonta Davis wore the victory spoils: his typical, bright post-fight smile and a freshly-accurate, pre-printed black t-shirt that read his nickname, “Tank,” and his new record as a pro, “23-0,” in white lettering. But this bout wasn’t as straightforward and clean as the previous 22. The uncommon dark bruises near his eyes afterward told the story, as did the final box score.

In the longest fight of his young pro career, West Baltimore’s own boxing champion added another bulky world title belt to his waist—but not without a test. Davis, who moved up to the 135-pound division for the first time to fight for the WBA Lightweight title, outlasted a defiant 38-year-old former champion Yuriorkis Gamboa—winning with a 12th-round knockout in front of 14,129 spectators Saturday night at State Farm Arena in Atlanta.

It was the first time that Davis fought past nine rounds since he turned pro in 2013. Usually his fights have ended with a powerful left-handed punch much earlier. But Gamboa, a veteran opponent, was game to go long despite early injury at Davis’ hand. In a second-round exchange, the Cuban boxer partially ruptured his Achilles’ tendon and went down to the canvas, but he kept fighting. (Apparently, that’s possible to do even with bad Achilles, but doctors don’t recommend it.)

Davis knocked Gamboa, who was 30-2 in his career before the match, down again in the eighth round before landing a late uppercut that ended things for good. Warning: The slow-motion replay of the knockout at the end of this video can be difficult to watch; we wouldn’t wish the head injury on our worst enemy.

In an interview in the ring afterward, Davis, an Upton Boxing Center product with a gold key to the city who is arguably Baltimore’s biggest sports headliner this side of Lamar Jackson, graded his performance as a “C-plus”—an honest assessment. In a press conference after the fight he said he should have hit his opponent in the body more and earlier to weaken him. But he also maintained perspective as he fielded a series of questions about why the fight went as long as it did.

“It was a great experience. I’m only 25 years old. I’m learning each and every day,” Davis said. “Leading into the fight, the media was writing [Gamboa] off. But in my heart, I knew that he was a good fighter. I wasn’t trying to go out there and rush it, and then get caught with a clean shot. Because I knew he had power, he was fast, and he got timing. My thing was go out there, touch him up, and not get hit.”

Davis got hit more than usual, but Gamboa still only connected on just 13 percent of his punches, compared to Davis’ 48-percent performance. Still, it was enough to leave a mark. On social media, Davis later wrote, “Wear my war wounds proudly,” in a caption of a photo of him showing off a black eye.

As has been the case during Davis’ entry and ascent in the highly promotional pro boxing world, a journey born from his hardscrabble Sandtown childhood, the post-fight conversation quickly turned to what’s next, as he enters the prime fighting and money-making days of his career. “2020 will be a big year. I believe I’m the top dog at 135/130 [pounds],” he said, before making a gun analogy that drew a few laughs. “Ain’t no safety on this glock. I’m willing to fight anybody.”

The discussion about his future begins with the fact that pro boxing has a kind of convoluted championship system, with different classifications within four world-recognized boxing organizations. The 5-foot-6 fire-hydrant-like Davis has won three world title belts—the World Boxing Association (WBA) regular lightweight title he won Saturday, and the WBA super featherweight (130-pound) title and the International Boxing Federation super featherweight titles he previously held but gave up with his move up in weight.

Many boxing observers have long pined for a meeting between Davis and 31-year-old, two-time former Olympic gold medalist and undefeated pro, Ukrainian Vasyl Lomachenko (oh, the politics that would be involved). Lomachenko is considered right now to be the “unified” lightweight world champion at 135 pounds, because he holds belts across several organizations. That matchup would theoretically decide the best lightweight fighter in the world, hands down, clear as crystal in a Drago vs. Apollo style confrontation.

But Davis could also go back down to 130 pounds to fight challengers such as Leo Santa Cruz, who’s publicly called for a matchup with Davis. (That’s how these guys do things and how matchups are sometimes made.) “Line them up,” Davis said.

Leonard Ellerbe, CEO of Davis’ representation Mayweather Promotions, says he has eyes next on what would be the young Davis’ first pay-per-view fight, though he couldn’t say where a fight would be or who it would be against. Formal discussions haven’t happened yet.

Davis sold out Royal Farms Arena in July in the first world championship boxing fight in Baltimore in nearly 50 years. He thrilled the hometown crowd with a second-round knockout against Ricardo Nunez. Saturday’s matchup in Atlanta, a city which Davis considers a second home, was also a sellout and drew a peak of 600,000 viewers on Showtime.

“He has star power,” Ellerbe said. “He puts behinds in the seats. And they tune in, because they want to see excitement. That’s what he brings to the table.”

He also brings his local brethren with him. Fellow Upton Boxing product Malik Hawkins fought on Saturday’s undercard, earning the biggest win of his undefeated pro career. He beat previously unbeaten Darwin Price, who injured his right leg in the fifth round and couldn’t continue. Hawkins, a super lightweight (135 to 140 pounds) who we first wrote about back in 2016, is now 18-0 with 11 knockouts in his pro career. (You can watch the entirety of Hawkins’ fight starting here around the 1:08:00 mark.)

Looking at the bigger picture, Davis has put Baltimore boxing back in the discussion for elite-level boxing matches for the first time since Hasim Rahman was on his way to becoming a world heavyweight champion. Gamboa’s trainer, Stacey McKinley, for instance, said after Saturday’s main event that he’d like to “come to Maryland and do something. I got other fighters.”

In any case, Davis might want to stay at his higher, 135-pound weight class. Before Saturday’s fight, he had trouble making weight, as has happened before several fights in his career. During what should have been an uneventful media weigh-in event (except for the promotional face-to-face photos), Davis was 136.2 pounds, but was given two hours by the WBA officials, who obviously wanted the title to be contested, to get under the mandated 135 pounds for lightweights.

We’re not sure exactly what Davis did to lose just over a pound that quick—though we suspect it included a lot of running, workouts and sweating in a hot room—but he eventually made weight before much less fanfare, dropping his pants to make it happen on the scale. Chalk it up as more experience, outside and inside the ring, and another plot point in the story of Tank Davis, Baltimore’s undisputed and still rising boxing star.

“This fight did a lot for Tank’s career,” Ellerbe said. “The train is going to keep on moving.”

David Mackall’s mother stood over her son’s open casket last Saturday morning, sobbing inconsolably, her back turned to a standing-room-only crowd gathered at Wylie Funeral Home on Liberty Road. She was mourning her child, the former University of Maryland football player gone way too soon at the age of 28, leaving two young children of his own behind.

Heartbreaking might be the only way to describe it. Indeed, as Ava Mackall cried over her son, a singer a few feet away, as if on cue, bellowed as part of his song, “Why . . . why so much pain?” The rest of the family, his father and cousins, sisters and nieces eventually got up from their seats to offer support and grieve themselves. “There’s so many wonderful things I could say about him,” his niece, Shawnaya Cawthorn, said. “I called him about anything. I don’t know who I’m going to call anymore.”

The headline that brought us to his funeral has since filtered out of most minds, as they often do: Former Maryland football player David Mackall Jr. identified as victim of fatal shooting in West Baltimore. But, like the others who were compelled to come Saturday (and the parking lot was full; some people parked their cars on the adjacent grass), we knew there was more to the story, one that you know the man wanted to be told.

I actually had a chance to meet Mackall last year. It wasn’t much in the grand scheme of things, a chance encounter as random as your location, but I’d sat in the backseat of his car one Saturday afternoon in January, as he drove me home from the Baltimore Museum of Industry in his Uber-commissioned black sedan. Unprovoked, he quickly started talking about how proud he was of his son playing sports, the things he was teaching him, the joy it gave him. And with a part-time sportswriter as the one-man audience, we went on to talk for the entirety of the ride.

He spoke, with a humble sincerity and endearing upbeat attitude, about how he got here. How a former four-star football recruit from Edmondson-Westside High—who played before thousands of paying fans as a linebacker and defensive end at Maryland and later at the University of Delaware; who once tried out for the Baltimore Ravens—was now making ends meet by driving strangers around the city. It wasn’t what he wanted to be doing, of course, but it was what he needed to do to support his growing family, his longtime girlfriend, Jarenae, and his young son, Jacoby, now 6. Their second, Dylan, was soon to come. Mackall had plans for the future, he said, to apply for a college program, maybe in IT.

It turns out he was often proactive. “I recruited a lot of players, but he’s the only young man who recruited me,” former Edmondson football coach Dante Jones said, remembers when years ago Mackall, in 10th grade but already “looking like a grown man,” approached him in line at a local Sam’s Club and told him he wanted to play football for him. He would grow to be 6-foot-3 and 240 pounds. “He was special.”

That was the start of Mackall’s journey from the city to College Park, which included a year at Fork Union Military Academy to boost his grades, and eventually a full scholarship to play for the Terps under former football coach Ralph Friedgen. Mackall played one season for Maryland, one of only five true freshman to see playing time that year, before Friedgen was fired and Randy Edsall was hired, which resulted in 13 players bolting from the program and Mackall suspended for the final four games of his sophomore season amid a clash with the new coach. (In the car that day, Mackall told me that, in order to speak with Edsall, he needed to make an appointment with his secretary.)

Mackall was granted his release, chose to stay close to home, and transferred to Delaware. After sitting out the 2012 season with an injury, he played all 12 games for the Blue Hens at outside linebacker, and started at middle linebacker his senior season, leading the team with 84 tackles in 2014. In the summer, he worked at popular Newark restaurant Klondike Kate’s, and Mackall graduated in May 2015 with a bachelor’s degree in sociology and a minor in criminal justice. Then he started working as a truck driver for Coastal Sunbelt Produce.

We do not yet know the exact circumstances of his death, but two weeks ago, on May 29, Mackall was shot and killed in broad daylight, gunshot wounds to the head and torso, in Walbrook, a neighborhood in West Baltimore where he grew up. He passed away at a local hospital. Police haven’t named a suspect or anyone arrested in his death, an all-too-familiar refrain attached to many of the 300-plus homicides in each of the last four years in the city. “Baltimore people, God’s people, wake up. Get your community back,” Cynthia Bruce, a representative from Mothers of Murdered Sons and Daughters, said at Mackall’s funeral on Saturday. Her son, Marcus Downer, 23, was shot 19 times and killed in the city in July 2015.

I thought about the injustices—of a city where gun-related murders are as common as a football game, of a college athletics and university system that makes so much money from its players and too often doesn’t really care what happens afterward—when I first met Mackall, and I think about it now. He’d “made it,” but not far enough. That much we know from his death.

“He was a wonderful man. He touched a lot of us,” pastor Steven Hinnant, Mackall’s cousin and a teacher at Edmondson-Westside, said Saturday. “The thing that really struck my heart was that he was an overcomer. I saw him face things in life. Sports is wonderful because it’s a microcosm of life. He had some challenges, because of the system, before he could go to the University of Maryland. He tackled his grades, and accepted that scholarship. Some other challenges came. He had to tackle that situation and moved on to the University of Delaware. I’d never been so proud that he persevered through those situations.”

That’s a story worth telling, which is what we’d discussed near the end of our delightful conversation in his car. We exchanged contact information, and I sincerely wanted to speak with him again. “I’d really like that,” he said. He said he’d thought about speaking at city schools, to inspire other kids to try to get to college, to make something of themselves. He even said he’d written out some of his story, hoping to one day share it.

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.

What began as a film about arts education in the country being under-appreciated and under-funded turned into a documentary about a Baltimore native with a remarkable story. As a child living on the streets in West Baltimore, Richard Antoine White defied the odds and became the first African American to earn a doctorate in music for tuba performance.

Local filmmakers David Larson and Darren Durlach, of the Baltimore-based production company Early Light Media, found White during research for their original film and felt that White’s story was just too good to not share. R.A.W. Tuba is a documentary detailing White’s life will be screening it at the Baltimore School for the Arts (BSA) on February 8.

“During the first minute of conversation, we knew Richard was special,” Durlach recalled. “The very simple, non-nuanced story about Richard is his educational journey. That’s what initially drew us in. When you hear that a kid was basically eating out of trash cans in Sandtown and has gone on to become a professor at a university and is well-respected in a symphony orchestra, there’s something there.”

White’s story begins like most young, black men in Baltimore—he grew up in poverty with a parent that suffered with addiction and was had to survive a life unsuitable for a small child. He was found at the tender age of four, shivering in the vestibule of an apartment building and was taken his grandparents. After that day, he took hold of his destiny and did all he could to make sure that he succeeded in life. But his dreams weren’t exactly what he planned.

“I was planning to go to Carver Vo-tech and to be a carpenter and a football player,” he said. “I broke my hip, so that was the end of Carver and being a carpenter. I thought, well I have this tuba, so I picked up the sousaphone and went to the school for the arts—I had no research and no knowledge.”

Chris Ford, a teacher at the time and is now the director of BSA, recalls a big kid on crutches with a plastic tuba coming into the school demanding to audition on the wrong day.

“He was not the normal sort of person to walk in the door,” Ford recalled. “My reaction was, ‘What is this story here?’ I’m glad I took the time to find out because look what happened. I’m really grateful that he had that insight. It showed that he really wanted it.”

The thing that really attracted Ford to White was his determination—it was like none he’d ever seen. After learning more about White’s background, he knew that the transition to BSA would not be an easy one, but was very impressed by the student’s will to succeed.

“When he got here, he was actually behind the curve on a number of levels,” Ford said. “The thing that was remarkable about Richard was that he was able to say, ‘Here I am, here’s where I want to go, tell me how to get there, and I’ll do the work.’ He threw himself into the work in a really remarkable way.”

That drive propelled White to earn a scholarship to the Peabody Institute and later pursue his doctorate and join the New Mexico Philharmonic Orchestra as a principal tuba player. The documentary goes into the ups and downs of White’s journey, even allowing viewers to catch a glimpse of him revisiting his childhood memories in West Baltimore..

“I was remembering where people lived, I saw a fountain that I used to bathe in, and what stores used to be there,” he said. “We randomly see this lady and she says, ‘How do you know that’s a shoe store? That hasn’t been a shoe store in 30 years, who are you?’ I told her who I was and she verified everything that I remembered as a child growing up on the streets.”

Durlach says that this film is not just about White’s specific journey as a tuba player, but it emphasizes the importance of mentorship and cultivation.

“There were moments that he wanted to quit,” he said. “And at each of those moments, he had a mentor that would not give up on him, and it pushed him. I think the real story here is not necessarily that through sheer will and determination this kid forcibly changes his life circumstances, I think it’s really a perfect case study of ‘it takes a village.’”

On the first Thursday in January, Aaron Maybin emerges from a bitter, blustery afternoon into the calm and warmth of Teavolve, a spacious, low-key cafe in Harbor East. He settles into a corner table in the restaurant’s rear, the effect of his lean, but imposing, 6-foot-4-inch frame softened by his casual manner. A three-hour conversation over tea and sandwiches offers a respite from the Arctic blast, but not from the storm of attention that Maybin has recently helped create.

Barely 24 hours earlier, he had tweeted a 45-second video in which he’s seated in front of a gaggle of grade-school kids. What’s the day been like today? he asks the room. The answer is an immediate, echoing chorus of young voices: Cold. Cold! Very very very very very very cold.

The setting was the library at Matthew A. Henson Elementary School in West Baltimore, one of many rooms at Henson that had no heat on a day when temperatures in the city topped out at 30 degrees. “It’s the same school Freddie Gray went to,” Maybin says, “which gives some context to what the dynamics are.” Thanks to Maybin’s nearly 27,000 Twitter followers, the video—along with a GoFundMe page he promoted that raised more than $80,000 to purchase space heaters for the school and winter gear and other much-needed items for its students—quickly went viral. Over the coming days, similar heating issues were reported at as many as 60 city schools. “Baltimore teachers have been talking about these issues for years,” Maybin says, “but it took somebody that used to play in the NFL to put a video out there of kids sharing how they feel.”

Maybin’s perspective resonates because he is both—a former first-round NFL draft pick and a teacher, among a handful of other identifiers. Those kids at Matthew A. Henson were his kids, students in the art classes he teaches three days a week. He is unique in having the platform of a celebrity and the insight of an insider; on that frigid January day, he felt compelled to use both. “I don’t think he came to work that day to make a statement,” says G. Travis Miller, the school’s principal. “He’s from this area, so he has a connection to this school. He’s a guy that is successful, and he’s part of this community. It makes him much more of an asset.”

Maybin might not quibble with the word asset, but the self-described “art-activist” is generally leery of any title placed on him by others. The new year already figured to be a busy one for the 29 year old, whose book, Art-Activism, a self-published collection of his visual art and writing, was released in November.  “I’m not a politician, I’m not a preacher. I’m one of the people,” he says. “I don’t want to be a leader. I just want to be an example that we should all be doing something.”

It’s a fitting declaration for someone who has never been very good at sitting still.

As a child, Aaron Maybin was so active that “people didn’t like babysitting me.” His father says he can’t remember a photo in which his son is sitting still. “He was very busy,” Michael Maybin says—busy enough that by the time Aaron reached grade school, doctors wanted to prescribe him Ritalin. Michael decided against it.

“My argument, and resistance, was based on their argument that he [apparently] wasn’t able to concentrate on anything,” his father says. “That wasn’t the case with him.” Maybin grew up in West Baltimore, where his father worked as an inspector and spokesman for the Baltimore Fire Department, and his mother, Constance, worked in insurance. Before he excelled on the playing field, Aaron was drawing and sculpting, immersing himself in the act of creation. His parents would buy 500-sheet reams of oversize drawing paper from a neighborhood store that sold surplus school supplies. Aaron made short work of them. (He says his father’s longtime friend, acclaimed Baltimore artist Larry “Poncho” Brown, was one of the few babysitters he’d behave for because he had access to a treasure trove of art supplies.)

“We’d be sitting watching TV,” his father says, “and all of a sudden Aaron would just erupt—jump up, run someplace, and come back with pencil and paper. You couldn’t even keep aluminum foil in the house, because he would take it and make sculptures.”

Long a way to channel his energy, art for Maybin became therapy in 1995, when his mother, pregnant with his younger sister, died in childbirth. Aaron was six. Later that same year, Michael Maybin moved his young son and newborn daughter out of the city to Howard County, where they essentially integrated their neighborhood. Michael remembers Klan literature appearing in mailboxes on their street, and Aaron says there were certain houses where he quickly learned he wasn’t welcome. It was, Michael Maybin says, “a year of tremendous transition for us.”

Throughout, Aaron painted and sculpted and drew. When he was 11, he completed a 40-by-50-foot wall mural in Southwest Baltimore, a drawing of three hands of different hues placing bricks in a wall. He won a number of art competitions. But around that time, his size and athleticism began to set him apart: he excelled in baseball and basketball, ran track, and, when he was a high school sophomore, nearly made the state final in wrestling. But it was on the football field that he dominated, developing into one of the state’s best prep players as a defensive end at Mount Hebron High School. Coveted by many of the nation’s top college programs, he ended up at Penn State, the school his father had briefly attended years earlier.

He spent three years in State College, double majoring in communications and integrative arts and, by his junior year, developing into an All-American pass rusher. He left Penn State a year early, and in 2009 he was a first-round draft pick of the Buffalo Bills. But his pro career never blossomed as expected, and after just four NFL seasons (plus a single game in the Canadian Football League), Maybin announced his retirement in May 2014. He was 26 years old. Suddenly, he had the means and the time to turn his lifelong passion, the thing that had sustained him through childhood tumult and professional disappointment, into a career. The football player with the interesting hobby could finally be what he’d really been all along—an artist, with ample motivation, and without constraints.

Aaron Maybin never really left Baltimore. From his art to Project Mayhem, the nonprofit foundation he started during his playing days, he has always remained rooted in, and inspired by, his hometown. His interest in education, and in the inequity inherent in the system, stems from his own transition from the city to the suburbs. “When I got to Howard County, it was like, ‘Oh my god, I’ve been treated bad my whole life,’” he says. “To go from having 10-year-old textbooks, no computers, classes of 30, 40 kids. . . . When you actually see how other people grow up, what they have access to and what you were forced to endure, it’s like a slap in the face.”

And so, while he poured himself into his painting—creating bold, colorful portraits of black revolutionary leaders, memorializing the likes of Freddie Gray and Sandra Bland, or commemorating the 2015 Uprising—he ensured his impact would be more than symbolic. Today, he teaches those art classes at Henson Elementary; he also works part time at The Children’s Home, a juvenile facility in Catonsville, where he runs art therapy sessions with girls and young women, many of whom are survivors of abuse and trafficking.

Those are only the scheduled gigs. With Maybin, so much of his work seems to be in response to the challenges that arise within and around his community. He was on the streets during the riots that followed Gray’s death, documenting the anger with interviews and photos. He was in that classroom in January, using his social media platform to illuminate the struggle of his students as they shivered through a school day. And over the next two weeks, he helped coordinate and pick up donations, organized a packing event at the Downtown Cultural Arts Center, and ended up at Wal-Mart with those GoFundMe organizers buying carts full of supplies. (Given the surplus from the GoFundMe, which was initially set for $20,000, Maybin and the other organizers expanded their shopping list to address needs throughout the city school system. He tweeted videos from the shopping trip, including one in which his fellow organizers, both women, giggle as he loads a cart full of feminine pads.)

It’s the sort of work a guy who was making NFL millions just a few years ago could probably pawn off on others. But that’s not Maybin’s way. “To have staff members who go above and beyond, any principal loves to have that, so he was already a top-shelf guy to me,” says Miller, the principal at Henson Elementary. “This just puts an exclamation point on it.”

It’s worth noting that none of this—the pesky details of organizing, of loading up shopping carts, all the relentless “above and beyond” that his principal so appreciates—seems to bother Maybin. Which is not to say he’s unaffected: You can see and hear the frustration as he talks about the root causes, be they political or cultural, of the poverty, violence, and lack of resources endemic to so much of the city, its schools in particular. But while he is well-versed in the causes, he is more interested in solutions, in whatever form they might take: from collecting and distributing space heaters and winter coats to addressing issues through his art.

And his book: Art Activism mixes dozens of Maybin’s paintings and drawings with his poetry and prose, both reflections on injustice and exhortations for his brothers and sisters to lift themselves up. It’s years in the making, and he’s proud of it. 

“The hood loves this right now,” he says of his book. “The people that I see everyday, they’re not gonna read Ta-Nehisi Coates. They’re not gonna read Frantz Fanon or James Baldwin. But they’re gonna read that.”

BeLeaf 

In our city’s ever-evolving effort to become a “cleaner, greener” version of itself, the Flowering Tree Trails of Baltimore initiative is the beautiful, fragrant next step. The effort—organized by a coalition of city governmental departments, environmental groups, and volunteers—aims to plant 6,000 flowering ornamental trees along 39 miles of Baltimore trails. In the spring, when they flower, the trails will be visually connected and become a source of splendor for residents and tourists alike. 

“In time, our city could be as famous for its Flowering Tree Trails as Washington, D.C., is for its cherry blossoms and New York is for the High Line,” says the initiative’s website. The plantings, which can range from—crabapples and cherry trees to dogwoods and silverbells—will contribute to the city’s goal of increasing its tree canopy from 28 percent to 40 percent by 2037. That is the level of coverage the U.S. Forest Service recommends if Baltimore wants to improve its air quality. The first trees went into the ground on November 11, during a ceremony in Druid Hill Park. Organizers estimate that, when all is said and planted, the initiative will cost somewhere in the low seven figures. Fundraising efforts are underway.

Bay Watch

Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen has introduced legislation to increase funding for a program that helps farmers prevent agricultural runoff from entering the bay. According to the Chesapeake Bay Program “agriculture is the single largest source of nutrient and sediment pollution entering the Chesapeake Bay.” The bill, officially titled the Chesapeake Bay Farm Bill Enhancements Act of 2017, would triple funding—from $100 million to $300 million—available to farmers for mitigating practices such as constructing secure manure storage, installing cover crops, practicing no-till farming, and maintaining forested stream buffers. 

Van Hollen’s bill has already garnered multiple sponsors, including one Republican, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia. According to The Washington Post, Congressman Robert C. “Bobby” Scott of Virginia’s 3rd District will introduce an identical bill in the House, but is still gathering support. Separately, Congress continues to debate 2018 funding levels for the Chesapeake Bay cleanup program—a six-state, $73 million agreement to curb pollution that President Trump has proposed eliminating.   

Sewer Followup

When last we checked in with Baltimore City’s $1.6 billion plan to upgrade its failing sewer system, the city was locked in a dispute with water quality advocacy group Blue Water Baltimore over the scope of the federally mandated consent decree. Blue Water Baltimore wanted the work to continue until water quality met a certain benchmark, even if that meant performing repairs and upgrades outside the purview of the initial agreement. The city—and the federal government—argued that this was not feasible or necessary. In October, a federal judge sided with the city and federal government. The first phase of the project, which will address 83% of sewer overflows, is supposed to be completed by January 1, 2021. All remaining work is to be completed by 2030. The consent decree can be viewed in full here.  

Park Places

• The ribbon cutting of a redeveloped baseball field in West Baltimore provided the setting for a classic Orioles reunion last week as Cal Ripken Jr., Eddie Murray, and Brooks Robinson gathered at the newly dedicated Eddie Murray Field at BGE Park. The park, a project of the Cal Ripken Sr. Foundation, now features a synthetic turf baseball diamond, dugouts, a backstop, and a digital scoreboard. The field is located behind James Mosher Elementary School and will host after- school programming in addition to James Mosher Baseball—the oldest continuously operating African-American youth baseball league in the country.
• Users of the Stony Run trail that snakes through many of North Baltimore’s most coveted neighborhoods had cause for celebration in early October. After nearly 10 years and $1 million in investment, two footbridges opened creating the final linkages in the trail that runs between Roland Avenue and North Charles Street from just below Northern Parkway to Remington.  
• In October, the state announced it will allocate $23 million to protect parcels of farmland, forest, and open space in 17 conservation districts around the state. The funds are part of the Rural Legacy Program, a program of the state Department of Natural Resources, that works “to preserve large, contiguous tracts of land and to enhance natural resource, agricultural, forestry and environmental protection while supporting a sustainable land base for natural resource based industries.” This year’s recipients include the Manor and Piney Run areas in Baltimore County, and the Deer Creek area of Harford County. 

Babies in a Half Shell: Turtle Power!

In late September, the National Park Service announced that a nest of loggerhead sea turtles successfully hatched on Assateague Island National Seashore. The approximately 100 hatchlings emerged from one nest site in the Maryland Over Sand Vehicle zone and successfully made their way out to sea. This is the first successful hatch of loggerhead sea turtles on Assateague, though other attempts have been noted in recent years. The species generally does not nest north of North Carolina. Bill Hulslander, chief of resource management for the National Seashore says, the hatch “underscores the increasing importance of undeveloped beaches along Assateague Island to sea turtles and other federally threatened and endangered species.”

Early last week, rumors swirled around the possible closure of the iconic West Baltimore gathering place Shake and Bake Family Fun Center. A disconnected phone number and inactive website added to public speculation that the doors would be shuttered forever.

The rumors were confirmed when Mayor Catherine Pugh announced earlier this month that Shake and Bake would be closing temporarily on September 1.

“After a preliminary engineering report, we discovered several dysfunctional health and safety conditions including core systems such as heating and cooling, roofing, and plumbing,” Mayor Pugh said in a statement. “With the support of the community, when it reopens, our goal is to re-launch with sound and infrastructure and robust recreational programming for all ages.”

The scheduled renovations include replacing the HVAC system, bringing the facility up to safety codes required by the state, and improving infrastructure like the bathrooms and sound system. Although the closure is temporary, the city is not yet able to provide an estimated reopen date.

“In order for us to do this right, we’ve got to fix the building,” said Paul Taylor, director of the mayor’s office of minority and women-owned business development. “We have to make sure that the building is safe for the community and make some adjustments that will increase the utilization of the building.”

Shake and Bake was first opened in 1983 by former Baltimore Colt Glenn “Shake and Bake” Doughty as a community recreation center on Pennsylvania Avenue with 40 bowling lanes and a roller-skating rink.

“He knew that the community needed something,” Taylor said. “So he led the effort, financially, to open Shake and Bake.”

Doughty struggled to sustain the center financially and transferred ownership to Baltimore City Department of Parks and Recreation just two years after opening. Over the years, the facility has experienced financial difficulties, but has managed to stay afloat servicing more than one million people.

In 2011, former Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake awarded a five-year operating contract to long-time Shake and Bake employee Anthony Williams, Sr. and his company, Kingdom Managed. Although Williams’ contract expired last year, the city continued to allow his firm to manage the property. The recent visit and walkthrough by the mayor led to the termination of the agreement with Williams and the eventual closure for repairs.

As part of the planning process, the city has been in talks with Upton community leaders to ensure that the new and improved facility will be a viable resource for residents.

“When you talk to a lot of people in Baltimore, they all say the same thing—they enjoyed the facility years ago,” he said. “They want to see it come back in that similar form or fashion.”

Since the announcement, patrons have echoed those same sentiments on social media.

“Shake and Bake was more than just a skating rink for me,” Vito Cash commented. “This was one of the few places that I could go and just be a ‘kid’ during those tough times. I got to meet all types of people, and learn some very important life skills along the way like responsibility, timeliness, and team building.”

“I used to go there back in the day,” Natiya Grady Cissé commented.  “Shake and Bake was and is a neighborhood and cultural landmark for generations.”

Some even experienced pivotal moments in their youth at the neighborhood meet-up spot.

“My first date was at Shake and Bake,” Ebony Lloyd. “That was a perfect place to go because there was a chance that you would run into more of your friends there if it was a bad date.”

Kierra Laster-Roberts recalled a more embarrassing memory at the rink: “I remember getting my name called on the overhead speaker by my mom when it was time to go—it was so humiliating.” 

Beyond first dates and family outings, Shake and Bake has clearly been an icon for community building for the past 34 years. Taylor said the decision to close might seem difficult for the public to understand, but that it’s smart for the long term.

“It wasn’t a decision we made lightly,” he said. “That building is an iconic structure in the community and it can be enhanced and programmed properly.”

What did they tell you that they wanted out of it?
They didn’t prescribe anything. We had free reign. That was kind of the beauty of it being their first ad campaign. They were happy to follow our lead.

Can you talk a bit about your creative process?
There were a couple of rounds before we nailed down the line ‘for a better us.’ It just felt like the truest space and like it was saying something that needed to be said now. Relevancy was really big for them. They’re an old organization, so they wanted to feel like the now.

Why did you decide to go with Baltimore as the featured community?
We explored a bunch of different places. We ended up working with the director Seb Edwards, who is actually from the UK. Baltimore was one of the communities we visited because it’s been in the media a lot for not great reasons. But we know the people in the community are amazing. That’s what the Y does, it tries to level the playing field. Everyone was so phenomenal, amazing, and collaborative. Everyone had a great story. The place, spiritually and emotionally, really captured us.

How long were you here in Baltimore filming?
We were there for about three-and-a-half weeks. We started out casting and we realized it was silly because there were so many great stories out in the real world. So then we started ‘street casting,’ met their friends, then friends of friends. We asked people what they do and where they hung out. It was important for us to keep it authentic. I think the area gets enough misconception. We wanted to shoot in an area of Baltimore that gets a bad wrap, so that was West Baltimore, which is a place we’ve heard about a lot recently. We shot ‘Idle Hands’ in Dundalk because we wanted something that felt a bit more suburban.

What do you feel is the overall takeaway from the ads?
I think the overarching slogan ‘for a better us’ is what we really wanted to bring to life in different ways. Everything the Y does is in service for making us better. It was important to show how that comes to light in different ways. The relevancy played a huge role. Over the course of working with them, we learned that it really is one of the only organizations to level the playing field for everyone. It’s an election year, we’ve seen a lot of issues in the news about Sandtown and West Baltimore. You never hear underlying stories of why these communities are actually in the news. It’s systemic and people aren’t given an equal shot. The Y is working in hundreds other communities like this around the country. They prop us all up and make us all better.

Will you be running similar ads with other cities in the future?
We haven’t really decided on our plan for the next year. We do have a couple of different pieces coming out following these two spots. One of them is very different in tone, it’s a little bit lighter. We also have a partnership with The New York Times [called “Reverse the News”]. It allows readers to counteract bad news in the press by donating to a local Y initiative that mitigates the problem. For example, if you’re reading a new study about diabetes, you’ll see an ad about how the Y is working to fight that cause.

How did you feel about Baltimore after spending some time there?
I have a really good friends who lives in Baltimore, so I had been there before. But I hadn’t spent much time in these communities. I think it’s like anywhere—you get to know a place by spending time there and eventually it reveals itself. We found that the people were really great and so that became the focus.