The Open Veins of West Baltimore

by R.L. Stephens II on August 14, 2015

I mentioned my time in West Baltimore the day after the Freddie Gray riots on Doug Henwood’s show yesterday, and I thought now would be as good a time as ever to publish my more complete thoughts. This article was written in late May 2015 and has not been updated. Special thanks to Siobhan McGuirk for helping me edit this piece.

On Tuesday, April 28th, I visited West Baltimore for the first time. Pockets of riots had broken out in Baltimore the night before. By the following morning, the government had declared a state of emergency, and everything was shut down, including schools. 84 percent of the city’s school children received free or subsidized lunch; they were bound to go hungry without those meals. When a local church called for volunteers to help provide lunches to Baltimore’s youth, I didn’t hesitate to answer.

Volunteering in the neighborhood allowed me the opportunity to survey the damage for myself. What I saw, over the dozens of blocks I traveled, shocked the conscience. Boarded-up properties littered every block as pieces of dilapidated roofs and walls lay crumbled on the sidewalks and alleys. This wanton blight didn’t square with narratives about shameful riot damage destroying the city. Hardly anything resembled the now iconic burned out CVS Pharmacy so heavily covered in U.S. media.

Once inside the church, I joined a group of mostly local volunteers, many of whom were teachers making sure their students ate. As we prepared the meals, Ms. Pauline, an older woman and long-time West Baltimore resident, told me she didn’t want to feed any of the “rowdy kids” who had rioted. “The only thing they did was destroy our own neighborhood. We have to live here,” she said. The scene outside told a different story: the whole landscape had long since been made unfit for habitation.

Though our conversation began with Ms. Pauline expressing outrage toward the rioters, it became clear that long-term neglect and decay had taken a far greater toll on her than recent events. As she recounted her frustrations with absentee owners, abandoned properties, and a lack of basic services like trash removal and tree-trimming, her tone lowered and her face became weary.

The Wages of Poverty

I began taking food into the neighborhood. I saw a young man, perhaps in his late twenties, swaggering down the street, taking sips from a brown paper bag. We offered him some of what we had. He didn’t want to eat. He told us he preferred his beer.

This was a food desert. The sprawl of fractured housing was interrupted by just a handful of corner stores and churches, many of which were just as tattered as any other building in the area. There were no grocery stores, and almost no greenery of any kind. Nothing about the infrastructure that suggested its inhabitants’ lives were worth sustaining. In that environment, it’s no wonder people would choose to turn to the bottle to cope. West Baltimore wasn’t just a product of economic deprivation; it was a scene of ongoing, psychological assault.

If poverty is violence, then West Baltimore is under siege. I could only compare the destruction I observed that day with images of war zones that I had seen on television. I thought of Yemen, Iraq, and other far off places where, newscasters tell us, people have no choice but to carry on in the midst of total devastation.

Professional activists had been flowing into Baltimore, retreading the same trainings and tactics I’d become all too familiar with as a participant in protest movements. Standing in the midst of Baltimore’s war-like conditions, I started to imagine these same responses in actual war zones. Does a “die-in” make any sense where drone strikes are the norm? Should Iraqis be told to go limp when being abducted by ISIS? The comparison isn’t just aesthetic. Like military operations abroad, the suffocating poverty in West Baltimore is death by design.

Baltimore City tracks what city authorities term “avertable deaths,” meaning “the percentage of deaths that could have been avoided if a particular neighborhood had the same death rates as the five highest-income neighborhoods.” Fifty-one percent of deaths in this West Baltimore neighborhood were officially considered “avertable.” This reality is the product of systematic, economic and state-sponsored violence and we must name it as such.

Getting By

For many in the city, this was just another day – even with all the post-riot excitement – spent trying to get by. Continuing my walk around the neighborhood, I found myself at a busy intersection. A man was walking with two young children, one of whom was riding a tricycle. As I gave him a few lunch bags, he told me that he had been forced to take the day off work to care for his kids, because school had been cancelled.

I saw another man, posted on a corner and flanked by two friends. As I had done many times before, I offered him some food and words of encouragement. I said, “I respect y’all’s struggle out here.” He replied, smiling, “What struggle? I’m selling dope.” I thought about how Huey Newton built the Black Panther Party by recruiting street hustlers, and I responded, “The hustle is the struggle.” I don’t really know what the line is between street hustle and revolutionary struggle. However, the next time I walked down the block, this dope seller threw up his arms and gave me an approving shout from across the street.

I went to Baltimore looking to support people in resistance, and I feel I did that. But that resistance was not sensational. It did not focus on the dramatic protest scenes that first captured my attention. I found a different kind of struggle: a people’s everyday battle for survival in a city – in a country – seemingly hell-bent on seeing them suffer.

Riots as Social Rupture

I handed a lunch to a little boy who looked to be three years old. Before I could turn away, he jumped up and gave me a big hug. We stood half a block from the police department headquarters. The national guard had just erected a barrier on his street and were patrolling the area with automatic weapons. In this terrifying situation, this child was still full of life and eager to share his joy. He reminded me to have hope.

I am not, however, naive. Had popular protest not erupted, it is extremely unlikely that I could have freely walked the streets of West Baltimore, chatting with everyone from groups of kids to drug dealers, and passing out free food. A friend from South Side Chicago told me point blank that I could not have just strolled onto her block as I had in West Baltimore that day. In many impoverished cities, your neighborhood affiliation is often a more important identifier than race. Though the people I encountered were still facing the same problems as ever, the day after the riots was not just another average day. The riots created a rupture, a chance to break down barriers and find new solutions to old problems.

Not everyone appreciated the opportunity that the riots created. Each time I went back to the church to gather more supplies, I heard Black church members vocalizing contempt for the area’s residents – their own neighbors – and repeating the same old anti-riot talking points. Questions like “Where are the parents?” were common. These sentiments echoed remarks made in corporate media, as everyone from President Barack Obama to Baltimore’s Black mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake referred to rioters as “thugs.” While common, these condemnations were misplace, ultimately letting the system off the hook by placing blame on the residents’ supposed lack of character.

Too Many Liberals

By 5pm, the church had run out of food. Rather than go home, I and a few other volunteers went to the burned out CVS to observe the crowd. A police line had formed at the intersection, and protesters had gathered directly in front of the police. Local residents – mostly Black men – shouted slogans and put fists in the air.

In the midst of the standoff, boisterous debates abounded. A heated exchange about fifteen yards to the left grabbed my attention. Three demonstrators were discussing the legitimacy of rioting, and the need to “support Black businesses.” A circle of onlookers, myself included, had gathered around them, and side conversations started to flare up. We talked about working in retail, and commiserated over the fact that no matter how hard we worked, the company took more than it gave to us. As we found a common ground, I asked if they thought that Black capitalism would be any different from our current situation. Most expected Black capitalism to look exactly the same.

A number of demonstrators were asking similar questions as they advocated for an aggressive, if undefined, militancy. Yet, the seeds for this more confrontational approach were not allowed to grow, as groups of Black liberals shouted down anyone attempting to agitate the crowd. Serving as self-deputized marshals, the Nation of Islam and others told people where they could stand and eventually pressured demonstrators to go home. Occasionally, they created their own “buffer” lines between armor-laden officers and demonstrators. The resultant spectacle was the opposite of the expansive work I had been doing earlier in the day. As I handed out meals, I felt a cautious optimism. On the supposed front lines of the battle, that feeling was replaced with a sense of defeat.

Epilogue

Everyone from politicians to celebrities to locals continually demand “peace”. But the peace so many clamor for is a hollow one when the “return to normal” is a death sentence. In West Baltimore, nine out of ten houses are bombed out. The tenth house is barely livable. The only real opportunities are precarious low wage jobs across town, or the drug and sex trade just beyond their doorsteps. Those lines of work are policed by heavily armed individuals, unafraid to shoot to kill, many of them dressed in blue uniforms. I wonder which of the young people I met will make it to eighteen.

Wednesday May 27th, seven-year-old Tony Browne, was shot and killed alongside his mother Jennifer in Southwest Baltimore. They are just the latest casualties in the month following the riots, the city’s deadliest since 1999. The crowds have dispersed and the cameras have moved on to the next “crisis.” The struggle continues in their absence. This struggle will not end with new elected officials, media spotlights on inspirational individuals, or charges against a few “bad apples” in uniform. The people I met in West Baltimore deserve a revolution, and nothing less.