Baton Rouge, La. — IF you grew up black in Baton Rouge, La., you know the street corner where Alton B. Sterling lost his life last week. For me, it’s on the other end of the neighborhood in which my father opened his law practice before becoming a judge. It’s down the street from my current church and up the street from where I first started a youth mentoring program. From now on, however, the image of my city includes that of a visibly restrained man being shot at point blank range, then left to bleed to death while members of our police force picked his pockets for a gun.

That is not the only glimpse of Baton Rouge that the world is seeing now. The other image is one of peace, resistance and civil disobedience. It’s one that says after a week in which two men were killed by police officers and after the cowardly attacks on police officers and peaceful demonstrators in Dallas, we are willing to do the work necessary to turn our community around.

Protests in Baton Rouge in the past few days have so far led to hundreds of arrests, including that of DeRay Mckesson, who is a prominent voice in the Black Lives Matter movement. This is all happening in my city, and people who are being introduced to us through these images will understandably want to know more.

I feel truly blessed to have been born and raised in Baton Rouge and to be bringing up my young children here. I would love to tell you about our rituals around family, food and football. Despite our many virtues, we are a community with a long, troubled racial past. Much of the Baton Rouge we experience today is a direct consequence of that past. We were home to the first organized bus boycott of the civil rights movement and the nation’s longest-running school desegregation case. The latter distinction continues to shape our city in profound ways.