From Wednesday April 29th: Baltimore Uprising – what a beautiful phrase. I write this coming back almost an hour ago from one of the largest marches (possibly around 2,500 people) I’ve been to in the past two weeks. It was entirely student run. Saturday the 25th was the first day I was properly able to protest without taking off work, and proved to be one of the largest of the movement’s besides the one I mentioned previously. We started in Sandtown/ Winchester with only a few hundred people before waiting until 3pm when Freddie Gray’s family, and about another three hundred people, started joining with us from West Baltimore to City Hall. We marched peacefully gaining many more protestors in the streets, past Camden Yards for the first time. One of the main organizers at the front of the line waved a worn copy of The New Jim Crow, a book I had in my backpack. I pulled it out and waved it back at him. At City Hall, we heard from speakers including Freddie Gray’s (or Pepper as was his nickname) cousins, Malik Shabazz - a very controversial figure and president of Black Lawyers for Justice, and many others. Though most media coverage completely missed this part of the day and the speeches that were made, one of Gray’s cousin’s words rang out like the reverberations of a bell, “No one thought that a young black man from my neighborhood could lead a group of protestors this large through the streets of Baltimore peacefully to city hall. I proved them wrong. “ During the talks I saw things I will never forget. The Crips and Bloods, both men and women, sitting peacefully next to each other on the top of bus stops. Children with shirts that said “Stop Genocide.” A group of protestors forcefully lowering the American flag to half mass, and on the opposite side forcefully taking the American flag down completely and replacing it with a black and white version. Then we marched to Camden Yards. This is where you might know the story. This is where the rest of the world started paying attention. Smashed windows, people getting in fights, damaged Cop cars. The thing is – I understand why everyone started paying attention. I understood that the media got exactly what they wanted – a destructive and apocalyptic portrayal of violence that gave them cause for the term “thug” to be thrown around. What people may not know is that night many of the incidents were actually started by drunken Orioles’ fans agitating fed up protestors (“outside agitators” as the news & city phrases it) whose emotions were already at an all time high. The Baltimore City Paper has documented the misrepresentation of Saturday night’s images extensively in this week’s issue. As things got heavy, I left the scene to go to my second job at The Crown only to be once again glued to social media. Scenes of the police presence and occupation in Sandtown at the Western District Police HQ reached a high point of the day, as videos and images of the “chaos” downtown reached social media, and word that Orioles fans were being detained inside the stadium for “public safety” reasons. Most of the white people had left the protests as they moved West, but by the end of the night a certain City Paper staff photographer was one of the last standing and was beaten down (on video) by what appeared to be about ten fully armed police in riot gear. Mass circulation of out of context images of “rioters” starting fights and smashing windows pervaded headlines the next morning, twisted and coated with layers of subtle racist language and subtext. Sunday was mostly calm. Baltimore needed to breathe. I went with a friend to a small demonstration held at the prison where we waited for the release of protesters who were locked up the night before. Organizers shouted on the megaphone to prisoners in their cellblocks telling them they are not forgotten, while giving speeches demanding the end to capitalism. This might have been the most meaningful moment of the movement to me. Monday: I woke up for work, and by noon had already heard reports of the Crips and Blood’s vow to kill off police. Something sounded very off to me, mostly because I had heard this news on our local NPR station, which I ultimately do not trust. And here is what I very much want to emphasize – the timeline. The suspiciousness of it all comes way too close to a conspiracy theory, but when other people I talked to (including students I’ve talked with) corroborated my thoughts, I couldn’t help but feel that this whole thing was staged. And here’s how it goes from what I’ve gathered from talking with students and hearing their voices: 1.Media announcement that Crips/Bloods/Black Guerilla Family vow to kill off police. Gangs later confirmed they never made that statement 2. Rumors circulate about a “purge” started on social media, but cannot be accurately traced back to a source. 3. City buses, subways and all reliable transportation are shut down or rerouted from West Baltimore neighborhoods. 4. Most students not notified by the school systems of any disruptions of transportation, except for by family or social media. Principals and city officials gave no word to students about shutdowns. 5. School gets out and students are left to find their own ways of getting back home. On some accounts, police forcefully required bus drivers to stop and unload what students they did have on the bus. 6. Students are faced with hundreds of police in riot gear waiting for them to make a move, still with no alternative ways of getting home. 7. Taunted by police, a few angry students, with decades of built up anger and hopelessness pervading every aspect of their lives, decide to throw a few rocks. Police throw rocks back. 8. Things escalate from 1 to 10 and immediately the images of burning Cop cars and looters are played on every major media network on loop for the rest of the night. 9. Baltimore is placed under a strict citywide curfew for the following week, and students are called “thugs” once again by the Mayor. 10. The immense respect paid for Freddie Gray’s funeral that same day is quickly forgotten. Much like everyone else I knew, we were all glued to our social media outlets in some Baudrillard-esqe spectacle. I could feel everyone’s hearts collectively stabbed in Baltimore. Not only did the major news networks completely destroy any credibility the past week and a half of peaceful protests, but also all sorts of racist trolls came out of the woodwork. I was busy tweeting up a storm, retweeting as many other voices on the streets as I could, yelling at the BCPD online, and letting friends on FB from far away know what was actually going on. Around 11pm, one of my friends from the band Romantic States expressed a desire to start a clean up effort for the following morning. I messaged her, and within a few hours we had a facebook event up detailing our mission to use the event as a place for people to come together to post about what neighborhoods needed help cleaning up. The event went “viral” I suppose, and within the following hours gained 2k attendees by the time I went to bed at 1:30am. I was put in contact with Sandtown community organizers No Boundaries Coalition, who wanted to join forces and meet up in one central location on Penn & North that would become the hub for volunteers, which I felt honored and humbled to do. The next morning at 9am we went straight to work as hundreds of volunteers looked to us for guidance. Community and faith leaders in the Sandtown/ Winchester neighborhood led the effort and I helped to direct volunteers to the areas that needed most help. By noon, the entire neighborhood was spotless, due mostly to the fact that residents took to the street cleaning action around 5am and did the majority of the work. With more protests looming in the afternoon, we quickly realized that we needed to leave the neighborhood at the request of the community. The rest of the day was a surreal afterglow effect, a bright sunny day in the aftermath of a turbulent storm. I went to a few community-organized events, including a student-led discussion that turned into more of a group therapy session between people of all different backgrounds in my old neighborhood of Remington. There were a few protests and demonstrations being held around the Penn & North intersection, which I did not support due to community leaders whom I’d talked to earlier expressing a desire for people to no longer occupy their neighborhood. However, the protests seemed largely positive and peaceful and full of a celebratory nature, with videos circulating of residents in rollerblades parading around in the afternoon sun. In the Station North neighborhood, right outside of The Crown, local musician TT the Artist hosted an impromptu dance-off among many of her devout followers. Many people gathered around the abandoned lot where she brought her own sound system and DJs. The dancers were unbelievable and ultimately extremely welcoming as people from the neighborhood came up and started dancing and showing off their footwork with a growing crowd of on-lookers. It was apparent they just wanted to start something positive, and that’s exactly what they did. I saw an old man with a cane walk away from that dance party trying to pull off some of his own moves, throwing a few spins and an attempt at some footwork. It seemed like the whole city was dancing. And then the first night of the 10pm city wide curfew started. Protestors still lingering at the Penn & North intersection were maced and forced into a martial law of compliance. The next day (Wednesday the 29th) saw protests in New York and DC, along side the largest protest of the movement in Baltimore, which was once again all student led.
