Baltimore is a 70 percent black city.

West Baltimore is neighborhood in Baltimore that is 83 percent black.

If you want to know the truth about Baltimore, pick up a copy of The City that Bleeds: Race, History, and the Death of Baltimore.

After it was dubbed a “disgusting, rat, rodent infested mess,” by President Trump, a bunch of white conservative supporters of his decided to travel to West Baltimore and clean up the city.

The result? This spontaneous act of momentary gentrification resulted in white conservatives picking up 12 tons of trash the citizens of West Baltimore – mind you, the population is 83 percent black – had left all throughout the community, never cleaning it up but only augmenting the piles of refuse on a daily basis.

Enter the primarily white editorial board of The Baltimore Sun. They blasted the white conservatives who cleaned up the 83 percent black community of West Baltimore for “reinforces the tired image of our failing urban cores. That the poor people in this dilapidated city can’t take care of their own neighborhoods and all the public officials around them have failed as well. The bureaucratic, all-talk Democrats strike again. If a crowd of volunteers could clean up 12 tons of trash in 12 hours, how incompetent and helpless must Baltimoreans be if they can’t manage it in decades, right?”

[We assume it was pure motives that led a Trump supporter to launch a cleanup in Cummings’ district, right?, Baltimore Sun, August 6, 2019]

It made for good photos, compelling videos and catchy Twitter hashtags. A group of conservatives rolled their pickup trucks into one of West Baltimore’s most impoverished neighborhoods Monday for a cleanup day. Loaded down with trash bags and shovels, they cleared alleyways of old tires, food containers, paper and other debris. They pulled up weeds and cut away overgrown grass. The group posted before and after pictures on social media showing their progress.