GREG WOKE UP LATE MONDAY morning groggy and unsettled. It was the alcohol and the weed daze, but also something more ominous. Across town, thousands were descending on New Shiloh Baptist Church for Freddie Gray’s funeral. After a weekend of chaos surrounding his death, today was supposed to help Freddie rest in peace.
Greg had taken the day off from work to renew his driver’s license, and he planned to leave for the DMV as soon as his uncle dropped off his last week’s pay. He enjoyed working with Marlon in the home improvement business. It was the kind of work that’s brutal on the body but good for the soul. When he was working in someone’s house, he’d always have conversations with the people who lived there that he’d never have had in the more impersonal setting of an office. Whether it was Section 8 housing or million-dollar mansions, he always felt connected to the people who lived there—like their equal. He never felt dismissed as a young guy; rather, he was treated as someone who had valuable life experience. It was legitimizing for him to be able to have these conversations and be able to hold his own.
While he waited for his uncle, Greg strolled around the neighborhood, looking for some conversation. He wanted to take the temperature of the city and gauge how everyone was recovering from the weekend. Some said they’d heard that tensions were still reverberating downtown, and the answers to his questions confirmed that the worst was still yet to come. Neighbor after neighbor declined his invitation to go downtown to where the action was brewing, and most had some variation of the same response: “Don’t you take your ass out there.”
Greg decided to go somewhere that kept him out of trouble. The tall, sturdy young man climbed the hill to his most sacred place, the basketball court behind Coldstream Elementary and Middle School. That’s where he often went to clear his head, pounding rubber against pavement for hours until dusk settled over the skyline and the city’s stars, the lights of the Transamerica Tower, the Legg Mason Tower, and the Pandora building. The facade of urban splendor masked the realities of his life in Baltimore: poverty, drugs, violence.
Greg always turned to basketball in times of tumult and turmoil, and April 27 was brewing with both. Over the last three days the anger and fear that had been swelling in the city had begun to spill over, peaceful marches turning into rage-filled protests with violence and destruction. Greg knew from his own life that rage didn’t subside in a matter of hours.
He’d tried to put on a good face for the last three years, telling himself that the Coldstream basketball court was just as good as the gleaming court of a college. He had earned a full scholarship to college while playing for Poly, where he had become a basketball star almost overnight, it seemed. He didn’t play ball for Poly his ninth-grade year. He was still working at the FYC as an assistant group leader, overseeing its after-school program, mentoring the younger kids, the ones in kindergarten, first grade, second grade. He helped them with homework, fixed lunches, cleaned up the building. He’d continued playing AAU ball regularly, though.
By the end of freshman year, Greg had made a lot of friends, including Poly basketball players he’d play pickup games with, and it was clear it was time for him to hoop for real. The next fall he tried out for varsity and made it.
Poly’s team, the Engineers, wasn’t known for winning until Sam Brand came along. The tall, lanky white man arrived in Greg’s junior year and shook everything up. He told them how to play, how to understand the game, how to win. Sam and the boys started on a journey together to be respected in the city. And soon they started climbing together. In one breakout game from 2012, number one Dunbar scraped out a narrow 58–51 win over number thirteen Poly. The Engineers, The Baltimore Sun reported, got a game-high seventeen points from senior Greg Butler.
Sam and Greg formed what would become a lasting bond. Sam let Greg miss practices to work in his uncle’s home improvement business. Greg needed to make money to help his single father, who still struggled with the bills, and also to pay for the ancillary costs of attending a largely affluent high school: team trips, new clothes, new shoes.
Sam knew that Greg was special. He’d always promised Greg, whom he constantly praised as brilliant, that if he pushed himself, it would pay off. And when he discovered that it wasn’t really true, at least not for a black kid from Baltimore, Sam was devastated.
Sam was also a math teacher, and a year after Greg graduated, he became the source of one of Sam’s most formidable lessons. For six months, Sam led his math class in a project investigating a recurring issue that he saw beginning to affect his student athletes. They were taking rigorous honors and advanced placement courses that qualified for extra “quality points,” but their weighted GPAs were coming up short. The students researched the policy, called other school districts, compared their syllabi and transcripts to their friends’ in surrounding school districts, and calculated and recalculated GPAs to compare the grading systems of the city and neighboring county. They presented their findings to a stunned Baltimore City school board in April 2014, crystallizing the point with a real-life example of how this policy had already shattered dreams.
A star basketball player, the students told the board, had been taking rigorous courses all four years of high school and was relying on certain “quality points” awarded for honors and advanced placement courses to boost his GPA and lock in his qualification for the NCAA. He had a scholarship waiting for him at Saint Leo University in Florida. But it was discovered after his GPA fell short that the Baltimore City school system awarded its students only a fraction of the quality points awarded by schools in neighboring Baltimore County and every other suburb in the state. Greg Butler, who had graduated two years earlier, had missed the GPA cutoff to qualify for the NCAA by a fraction of a point.