ON APRIL 30, 2015, the Baltimore Orioles defeated the Chicago White Sox with a tenth inning homerun at the Camden Yards ballpark, built at the initiative of William Donald Schaefer. The home-run ball landed in empty stands. A riot a few days earlier had followed the arrest of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, who had suffered a serious spinal cord injury while in police custody and later died. The gathering of thousands of fans at the stadium seemed to pose a risk of further violence, either by or against the baseball crowd. Local authorities ruled that the game could proceed only if there were no spectators.
The Baltimore riot attracted a nation of spectators. It succeeded another disorder in Ferguson, Missouri, where the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown had ignited collective violence and looting. In Ferguson, as in Cleveland, Staten Island, and North Charleston, South Carolina, white officers acting under largely white political authorities had killed black men—in Cleveland, a 12-year-old boy. Baltimore seemed different. Its mayor, police commissioner, and state’s attorney were African American, as were three of the six police officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray.
Institutional practices, of course, can persist long after the personnel change. But Baltimore’s particularities got swallowed up in a national narrative of white racist law enforcement and black victimization. A New York Times editorial, “How Racism Doomed Baltimore,” explained that the town was really a southern city where “the segregationist impulse . . . was particularly virulent and well-documented.” Racial isolation and concentrated poverty created the conditions of unrest in many cities. “But the acute nature of segregation in Baltimore—and the tools that were developed to enforce it over such a long period of time—have left an indelible mark and given that city a singular place in the country’s racial history.”1
The Times editorialist seemed misinformed about the “acute nature of segregation in Baltimore”—and in New York. An analysis of residential racial segregation in America’s metropolitan areas based on 2010 Census data found that Baltimore ranked forty-fourth, just outside the top 10 percent. Metropolitan New York was fourth in residential segregation.2 The “tools” developed to enforce segregation over such a long time presumably referred to Baltimore’s residential segregation ordinance enacted in 1910, thrown out three times by city and state courts, and finally invalidated by the US Supreme Court just seven years after its passage.
A post-riot report issued by the Brookings Institution described the Baltimore metropolitan region as rather affluent. It ranked seventh in per capita income among the 35 largest urban regions in the country and was home to a sizeable black middle class. Median household income for African Americans in the Baltimore area ranked second of the 35 urban regions, just behind the District of Columbia. But the disparity between the central city and surrounding suburbs was stark, and the capacity to reduce those inequalities was limited by the city’s institutional independence. The separation of Baltimore City from Baltimore County by the constitutional convention of 1850 relieved the county of any direct responsibility for living conditions in the city and deprived the city of direct access to county resources. The city line also functioned as a racial divider—a barrier between the unequal schools, services, and perils of a majority black city and its majority white suburbs. A report issued by a local foundation in 1995 suggested that the downward spiral of the city might be irreversible and that the surrounding suburbs could be pulled into the whirlpool of the city’s decline.3 So far, “edge cities,” industrial parks, and shopping malls have kept the suburbs afloat.
Within the city itself there were gaping inequalities between black and white residents in education, employment, and poverty. Still, income inequality in Baltimore was about average for big cities, the poverty rate among its black residents was lower than for most cities with large African American populations, and the employment rate for black adults was near the median for these cities. Nor did the spatial concentration of poverty set Baltimore apart. There was one respect, however, in which Baltimore was distinctive. A team of Harvard economists ranked the 100 most populous counties in America according to the social mobility of their residents—the likelihood that a child born into poverty would escape it as an adult. Baltimore placed last.4
The city’s sorry showing was undoubtedly due, in part, to its status as a stand-alone unit of government, not included in Baltimore County. Baltimore County’s population contained many of the upwardly mobile households that had left Baltimore City for life in the suburbs. The move did not carry them very far. Baltimore County, exclusive of the city, ranked sixty-first among the 100 counties included in the study.5 The social mobility of Baltimore City and County residents combined would have placed well below that of the average county, probably a by-product of economic stagnation.
The city that Mayor Kurt Schmoke inherited from William Donald Schaefer in 1987 was in decline, notwithstanding Charles Center and Harborplace. Schmoke did not abandon Schaefer’s focus on economic development, but he had other priorities. In particular, he shifted city hall’s attention from Harborplace to the public schools, and he dropped Schaefer’s “Baltimore Is Best” slogan in favor of “The City That Reads.”6 Education had been a pivotal issue in Schmoke’s election. Governor Schaefer’s proposal to bring in outside experts to study the school system had helped to focus attention on the subject. But, according to Marion Orr, the unsuccessful mayoral campaign of William H. Murphy four years before Schmoke’s victory had elevated the issue of education on the city’s agenda and made it the center of Schmoke’s campaign. Murphy charged that Mayor Schaefer’s preoccupation with downtown development had drawn attention and funds away from Baltimore’s failing school system. Murphy’s campaign theme helped to initiate a discussion on the state of schools between the city’s corporate elite in the Greater Baltimore Committee and black leaders, mostly members of the clergy, who came together in Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD). Schmoke embraced BUILD’s educational agenda during his campaign and formed a working relationship with the group after he was elected.7
Mayor Schmoke’s school improvement efforts were politically risky, a fact widely recognized from the start of his administration. No one had developed a formula for enhancing the educational performance of poor black children in a big city with thousands of single-parent households. Downtown development was relatively straightforward by comparison, and Schaefer had his reasons for concentrating on bricks-and-mortar projects while steering clear of the schools.8
Schmoke’s educational initiative stumbled on his personnel choices. His first choice as president of the board of school commissioners, for example, seemed eminently qualified. Meldon Hollis, like Schmoke, was a graduate of Harvard Law School, and he had an inspirational biography. Hollis had worked his way up from childhood poverty in Columbus, Georgia, to a distinguished law firm in Baltimore. But the experience was, apparently, anything but humbling. Hollis created an important new administrative position—executive director of the school board—without taking a formal vote of his colleagues on the board. He then hired a person to fill the job before the board had approved a candidate. He admitted that he deliberately gave false information to board members and school officials so that he could find out who was leaking confidential matter to the press. Schmoke demoted him from board president to board member.9
Schmoke played an unusually active role in the appointment of a new school superintendent. The school board had the formal authority to make the choice, but the mayor persuaded its members to bypass their top candidate to hire the applicant that he preferred. He soon had reason to regret his choice. After months of vacillation, the new superintendent, Richard Hunter, finally rejected the school-based management plan worked out laboriously by the teachers’ union, the Greater Baltimore Committee, and school administrators. His plan for reorganizing the system’s headquarters bureaucracy would eliminate 119 jobs and require many demotions. Under union contracts, layoffs and demotions were to be made on the basis of seniority rather than performance. Some of the more able administrators looked for jobs elsewhere, and staff morale plummeted. Hunter vetoed one school’s adoption of a rigorous private-school curriculum supported by a local foundation’s grant. He would allow adoption of only peripheral elements of the curriculum, and he demanded that the foundation give the school system an additional $4 million to reduce class sizes systemwide. Finally, he dithered for so long about Baltimore’s participation in a national project to improve teaching in the sciences that the program finally went to Philadelphia. Hunter’s contract was not renewed when it expired in 1991. In departing, he claimed that Schmoke had set him up “as the scapegoat to take the blame for this administration’s failure to live up to the mayor’s campaign promise to the voters of Baltimore.”10
Schmoke’s educational initiative eventually landed him in court. He sued the state of Maryland for the funds that Baltimore needed to provide its students with the “thorough and efficient” education required by the state constitution. The state countered by arguing that the city schools suffered not from insufficient state aid but from local mismanagement. Given the school system’s recent history, it was difficult to refute the argument. Schmoke and the state finally concocted a bargain under which Baltimore got more money from the state, but the city had to surrender some of its authority over its school system. The governor and the mayor would jointly appoint the city’s school board and the system’s CEO. The school administration had to adopt a series of management reforms demanded by the state.11 Baltimore’s control of its own affairs once again gave way to state intervention.
By this time, Baltimoreans had recast Schmoke’s “City That Reads” slogan as “The City That Bleeds.” The homicide rate had surged in the years after his election. Baltimore was one of the deadliest cities in the country. Its murder rate might have been even higher had it not been for its cutting-edge emergency medical system and shock trauma center.12 Although he had served for four years as the city’s prosecutor, Schmoke did not place crime near the top of his mayoral agenda. Sun reporter David Simon wrote a four-part series about the deterioration of the police department under Schmoke’s leadership. Though violent crime was on the rise, the mayor had ordered a reduction in the number of police officers as part of a budget-cutting effort made necessary by a reduction in state aid. Experienced officers and commanders retired or went to work for other police agencies with better salary scales. Morale sank, and patrol officers busied themselves with arrests for minor drug offenses instead of tackling tough cases of homicide, robbery, or aggravated assault. The arrests earned them time in court, for which they might be paid overtime. To many in the police department, Schmoke seemed “peculiarly passionless when it came to fighting crime.” “In the past,” said one commander, “when we got near 200 felonies a day in the city, you’d have Schaefer demanding that something be done. Now we’re routinely over 300 a day, and no one bats an eye.”13
Another subject on which Mayor Schmoke remained largely silent was race. As he prepared to leave the mayor’s office in 1999, Schmoke complained that Baltimore was a “city where issues of race continue to be important, but they are issues that no one wants to talk about. It’s almost as though people would like to ignore the fact that race continues to be a significant factor determining the quality of life in the city and metropolitan area.”14 Given that he had been mayor of the city for 12 years, one might ask what kept him from using his own office to promote discussion of Baltimore’s racial divisions. Perhaps it was the same culture of avoidance that had long kept the race issue from rising to the top of the city’s political agenda. In an interview with an out-of-town newspaper reporter, Schmoke conceded that he tried to avoid making race a subject of city politics.15
The mayor had come closest to making race an issue in his 1995 reelection campaign, when his principal opponent was the white city council president, Mary Pat Clarke. The color scheme on Schmoke’s campaign bumper stickers was black, red, and green—the colors of black nationalism. Though he said almost nothing about race in his campaign, whites accused him of playing the race card. The Afro-American, on the other hand, took offense at Schmoke’s belated discovery of the race issue. The mayor’s campaign manager denied that the bumper stickers had anything to do with black nationalism.16 Baltimoreans have delicate sensibilities when it comes to the politics of color.
The election of Schmoke’s successor could easily have ended Baltimore’s longstanding avoidance of racial politics. Instead, it seemed to demonstrate more decisively than ever the independence of the city’s political alignments from its racial divisions. At first, two black politicians presented themselves as leading candidates for the Democratic mayoral nomination: Lawrence Bell, city council president, and Carl Stokes, school board member and former councilman. Influential black leaders were not satisfied with either candidate and set out to recruit others. Howard “Pete” Rawlings was one of the chief recruiters. As chairman of the House Appropriations Committee in Annapolis, he was regarded by some as the most powerful black politician in Maryland. Rawlings at first tried to induce NAACP president Kweisi Mfume to declare himself a candidate for mayor, even though Mfume lived outside the city limits. Mfume’s backers engineered modifications in mayoral residency requirements to accommodate his candidacy; they also increased the mayoral salary so that Mfume would find it easier to abandon the income he received as leader of the NAACP. But Mfume decided to stay where he was.17
With only two weeks remaining before the filing deadline, Martin O’Malley, a white city councilman from Northeast Baltimore, declared himself a candidate for mayor. The immediate response was racially heated. Black leaders attacked O’Malley as a political opportunist trying to capitalize on the expected division of the black vote among several African American candidates. A prominent black minister predicted that the election of O’Malley would be “devastating.” In fact, O’Malley was one of the political notables who had tried to persuade Mfume to enter the primary, and race-related attacks faded when Rawlings and several other black leaders endorsed O’Malley. On the other hand, a substantial number of whites supported Carl Stokes. Polls showed that voters were less likely to cast their votes along racial lines than in the mayoral election of 1995.18
O’Malley concentrated on the crime problem. As councilman, he had been sharply critical of the city’s police commissioner for alleged underreporting of violent crime and for refusing to appear before the council to respond to the Community Relations Commission’s critical report on the police department. O’Malley announced his candidacy for mayor at a street corner notorious as a site for drug dealing. He stressed the connection between illegal drugs and Baltimore’s high homicide rate and insisted that the city would be able to deal effectively with other problems, including education and jobs, only if it could bring crime under control. O’Malley won the Democratic primary decisively, with 53 percent of the vote, over 16 other candidates. But some black leaders were concerned about his emphasis on crime. They worried, in particular, about his advocacy of the “no-tolerance” policing strategy practiced in New York, which targeted minor offenses such as drinking in public, loitering, panhandling, and unlicensed street vending on the theory that they created an atmosphere of disorder that encouraged more serious offenses. After O’Malley won the general election in November, Delegate Rawlings arranged a city hall meeting between the new mayor and 20 black elected officials who were concerned that no-tolerance policing could lead to racial profiling or abusive police conduct. The new mayor promised to be “as vigilant in policing the police as in policing the streets.”19
The no-tolerance strategy was based on the “broken window theory”—the observation that a building with one broken window left unrepaired would soon have all its windows shattered. The police, in effect, should repair the first broken window by making arrests for minor offenses that were thought to create the climate of disorder that led to more serious lawbreaking.
O’Malley’s embrace of this policing policy reemerged as an issue in the aftermath of Baltimore’s 2015 riot, when the former mayor was preparing to run for the presidency. The broken window theory had undergone searching criticism since O’Malley made it the model for policing Baltimore.20 Among other things, critics suggested that such an assertive approach might aggravate animosities between the police and the communities in which they were supposed to maintain order. These tensions might help to trigger riots in response to police overkill—as in the case of Freddie Gray.
Reflecting on the Baltimore riot, sociologist Orlando Patterson suggests that it exploded out of the intersection of aggressive policing and a ghetto subculture that draws together disconnected young men, aged 16 to 24, who are not in school and are chronically out of work. It echoes the Wild West outlaw ethos of Jesse James and Billy the Kid, a ghetto version of “core American mainstream values: hypermasculinity, the aggressive assertion and defense of respect, extreme individualism, materialism, and a reverence for the gun, all inflected with a threatening vision of blackness openly embraced as the thug life.”21 Stuck at the bottom of Baltimore, with scarcely any hope of reaching the ranks of the respectable, the ghetto minority who choose “thug life” have fashioned a kind of knighthood with its own perverse code of honor. Under the regime of no-tolerance policing, the knights of the ghetto are likely to receive disproportionate attention from the police, and the seeds of civil disorder might easily germinate in the confrontation between overaggressive law enforcement and the minority of ghetto residents who take up “thug life.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates, who grew up in Baltimore, sees something more behind “thug life”: fear and vulnerability. In a soliloquy addressed to his young son, he counsels caution in the presence of police, who can “destroy your body” with impunity while “enforcing the whims of our country.” But he also warns that there is cause to be wary of other black boys. Venturing into a neighborhood controlled by a rival gang can be just as dangerous as a hostile encounter with law enforcement. The response to fear, Coates suggests, is to become fearsome oneself—to project “fearsome rage” as a deterrent to potential assailants.22 That “fearsome rage” was plain to see in the young men who stomped on abandoned police patrol cars on the day of Freddie Gray’s funeral. They gave Baltimore one of its rare moments of media attention.
Demonstration at Baltimore City Hall after Freddie Gray’s death. Used by permission of the Associated Press.
But fearsome rage cannot account fully for all that happened in the late-April uprising that followed Gray’s death. The looting of 27 pharmacies and two methadone clinics, most of them far from the television cameras and the scenes of violence, seemed to express a rage of acquisitive capitalism.23 Media coverage understandably concentrated on images of angry young men pelting the police with rocks. CNN could hardly have been expected to report on the riot’s significant non-events: no one was killed; not a single shot was fired (except for one accidental discharge when a careless rioter dropped his handgun). In fact, while the disorders lasted, there were no homicides in a city with one of the highest murder rates in the nation. (Killings spiked after order was restored.)
Though acts of violence naturally stood at the center of the nation’s attention, nonviolent actions occupied the margins of media coverage. Many enraged Baltimoreans engaged only in peaceful protest. Thousands from all over the city converged on the sites of civil disorder to clean up the mess or restore order. Though the police reported that black gangs had targeted officers for attack, members of the Crips, Bloods, and Black Guerilla Family met with about 75 clergymen to discuss what could be done to end the violence, and some gang members joined the ministers in demonstrations and prayers for a restoration of order. Other gang members stood with the president of the city council to plead for peace. The members of a local antiviolence organization, the 300 Man March, broke up fights and stood between angry young men and lines of police officers. And there were more than a few instances when angry, rock-throwing young men were outnumbered by people dancing and singing in the streets. In the Sun, one letter to the editor suggested that the “disorders that followed Mr. Gray’s demise were less protest than party.”24 Perhaps it is possible to be Mobtown and Charm City at the same time.