ANTHONY’S PACE QUICKENED. TUESDAY WAS supposed to be his day off, the one day a week the Bake was closed. On any normal Tuesday morning he would be just waking up after a late Monday night at the Shake & Bake. But this Tuesday morning he was speed-walking down Pennsylvania Avenue as the sun beat down on him.
He studied the damaged buildings as he walked past them. He’d intentionally parked almost a mile away from his normal spot right in front of Shake & Bake because he wanted to walk the neighborhood and see firsthand what Monday evening had wrought. Anthony lived in Towson, Maryland, a suburban enclave about fifteen minutes outside of Baltimore City. When he locked the doors at Shake & Bake on Monday, he’d thought the worst of the night was over. The violence in Penn North had already started, but in his mind it seemed relatively controlled and restricted. Anthony went home Monday night insecure about the future of Baltimore but not worried about his place of employment—Shake & Bake was about nine blocks away from the infamous intersection where the CVS and cars were on fire, capturing international attention.
Tuesday morning, his phone rang at eight. Already up, he answered on the first ring.
“Ms. Gloria, how you?”
Ms. Gloria lived near Shake & Bake and was a mainstay of the community. She immediately launched into a rundown of the events from the night before, her Baltimore twang becoming more animated as she went on. She told him about the looting—it might have started in Penn North, but as the evening progressed it had worked its way down Pennsylvania Avenue. The Korean-owned grocery store, the Downtown Locker Room with its familiar beet-red DTLR sign over the door, the check-cashing store—all of them were now either burned out or with gaping holes where glass windows used to be, shelves emptied.
Ms. Gloria went into detail about the intensity of the night, how fast everything had seemed to move. The police had usually been nowhere to be found—and when they were on the scene, they’d showed no interest in stopping the chaos.
Then, Ms. Gloria went on, the crowd kept moving farther east down Pennsylvania Avenue, and by the early morning hours they had reached the Shake & Bake.
Anthony braced himself for the worst.
But Ms. Gloria, pride in her voice, described an unbelievable scene. Malik and a group of other Shake & Bake loyalists met the crowd. They stood in front of the building, arms locked, backs straight, and shouted to the angry crowd that they needed to move on. Ms. Gloria recited to Anthony verbatim what Malik had yelled at the protesters as they moved closer to Shake & Bake: “This black owned, yo! All this down the street is black. You need to move on.”
As Anthony listened to Ms. Gloria, he recalled what Malik had told him a few days back: “Ain’t no way they gon’ burn the Bake.” When Anthony had heard Malik say this, he thought the young man just meant the Bake would not be a target. Listening to Ms. Gloria, he now realized that Malik had meant they wouldn’t burn the Bake because Malik wouldn’t allow it. Anthony listened in satisfaction. It wasn’t simply that his young people had protected his business; it was that he knew their commitment to Shake & Bake was a return on what he had invested in those young people, in his community.
Anthony had been two years old when the Baltimore riots of April 1968 took place. That was when Baltimore, along with more than a hundred other cities around the country, suffered through a spasm of riots after the brutal assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Thousands of National Guardsmen and hundreds of Maryland state policemen descended upon Baltimore during eight days of civil unrest that culminated in five deaths and more than five thousand arrests.
The dynamics of Baltimore in 2015 mirrored those of 1968 in that even though the death of one person—Freddie Gray or Dr. King—might have been the spark, the social conditions in Baltimore were what had allowed the flame to burn so hot. The riots around the murder of Dr. King had been driven by a sense that a dream had been shattered. The uprising around the death of Freddie Gray was a response to the generations-long nightmare that followed, a dream deferred.
Now Anthony walked past familiar faces as he got closer to Shake & Bake on Tuesday morning. Young people asked him what size sneakers he wore, in case he wanted to buy some new kicks; Anthony knew that those were sneakers that just the day before had been sitting in the now-busted display cases up and down the avenue.
When Anthony had first woken up that morning at five-thirty, he had immediately turned on the television and watched the reports from the night before in heartbreak and disbelief. He lay in bed and despondently turned from the national shows to the local news. There he saw a story that not only caught his eye but made him sit up.
The story began with the same image of the burning CVS that the other news outlets had been replaying, with people running into the store empty-handed but leaving with diapers, baby formula, paper towels, candy bars, and anything else they could carry out. It was a mix of opportunism and necessity—and people rushing to take advantage of a total breakdown.
But the next image on the local news was one he had not seen yet. It was from that morning, not the night before. The CVS was no longer burning but burned out. In front of it was a young girl, no more than ten years old, wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and yellow work gloves. In her hands she grasped a shovel that seemed to be as tall as she was. Over and over again she shoveled away trash and debris, both remnants and symbols of the night before. Anthony could not take his eyes off this little girl, who first thing in the morning wasn’t dwelling on what went wrong but had her eyes on what was next. She was strong and beautiful. She was resilient. She was Baltimore. And when Anthony saw her that morning, his immediate instinct was that his day off was not going to be a day off. He got up from his bed and started to get dressed.