THE RICHNOR SPRINGS NEIGHBORHOOD ASSOCIATION MEETING, SPRING 2013

“Why do we want to work with rich white people anyway? They haven’t done anything for us. They just want the neighborhoods near campus to be safe for their students.”

This statement was shared by Pearl (not her real name), a frustrated attendee of a Richnor Springs Neighborhood Association (RSNA) meeting in spring 2013. At the time, my students and I had been working with RSNA for two years on projects ranging from community clean ups to compiling neighborhood histories. So, we knew that Pearl and her neighbors were frustrated. RSNA had just received Baltimore City’s response to the request to build a playground in their recently adopted vacant lot - and the news was not good.

The city had rejected RSNA’s playground request, which was developed with my technical and professional communication service-learning students from Loyola University Maryland. The city rejected the proposal because Baltimore’s ambulances could not fit through the two alleys that provide access to the lot. After months of student-resident collaboration and research with non-profit organizations, a project that directly responded to neighborhood needs collapsed within a matter of minutes. Understandably, Pearl and her neighbors were upset.

My students and I sat silent, unsure of what to do. No one thought that the city would reject the playground proposal, and we did not have a “plan B.” The RSNA members tried to remain positive, but I knew that the collapse of the playground project was a serious failure for my students and me, for the project, and for our community partners. While my students and I continued to work with RSNA on literacy and employment resources for community workshops, the initial playground failure motivated me to find ways of avoiding similar missteps in the future.

THE FREDDIE GRAY UPRISING, SPRING 2015

Two years later, on April 25, 2015, I was watching television as the Sandtown-Winchester protests caused by Freddie Gray’s death erupted into violence. My home at the time was located two blocks outside of the city in a mostly white, middle-class neighborhood. While I was far from the violence, my neighborhood had its own history of racism. Rodgers Forge, built by Keelty Homes between the 1920’s and 1950’s, was a covenant community, which originally restricted ownership to whites. Though the covenants were negated by the 1964 Fair Housing Act, the wording remained in some home deeds until 2019.

As the Freddie Gray uprising unfolded over the next few weeks, many white residents outside of Baltimore City reeled against the protestors’ claims of racism and police brutality, all the while benefitting from the the racist covenants and racist laws passed in the 1940’s and 1950’s that kept African Americans in the city and kept them from acquiring wealth and education. As I watched and participated in protests over the coming weeks, I was shocked - but not totally surprised - and then despondent. I knew from personal experience that thousands of people, individually and as part of non-profit and religious organizations in Baltimore City, had worked for decades to address the impacts of systemic racism. And now these efforts were seriously threatened. It felt like decades of work were jeopardized in just a few weeks. Meanwhile, many whites, in Maryland and across America, balked at the idea that what was happening could be a race uprising in response to hundreds of years of slavery and systemic racism.

I was very concerned about the immediate impact on community members I knew. I was also worried about the long-term effects of the protests. What would these outcomes do to the lives of Baltimore residents and their efforts to address systemic racism in their neighborhoods? Tangentially, I was also concerned about our ongoing work with RSNA and the second non-profit organization we partnered with, GEDCO/CARES. My students and I had been working with RSNA since spring 2011, and we were making positive progress on the literacy and employment initiative with GEDCO/CARES after overcoming the playground project failure in spring 2013. But primarily, I was concerned that Baltimore residents would be so negatively affected that community members’ goals might not be fulfilled.

As I watched the uprisings unfold, I recalled Pearl’s response to the failed playground project. Pearl, a long-time resident of Richnor Springs, had voiced her displeasure at our inability to deliver on a commitment to build a place for children to play in the Richnor Springs lot. Richnor Springs is a yellow-lined neighborhood near Loyola’s campus that has struggled with the horrible effects of systemic racism and blockbusting, which were compounded by the 2007 recession. Pearl’s response, while hard to hear, was honest and insightful. Decades of systemic racism had left residents like Pearl leery of collaborating with institutions like Loyola. The playground project was just another broken promise in a long history of broken promises.

One of the most important questions my students asked after the RSNA meeting was, why did Pearl and some of her neighbors feel so negatively about Loyola’s attempts at collaborating with community members? Having grown up near Baltimore, I was familiar with some of its history, but nevertheless, as a white, middle-class transplant I still could not answer their question in detail. This gap in our knowledge led to my initial research into the history of slavery and systemic racism in Maryland and Baltimore. I conducted this research so that I could better understand Pearl’s frustration and help my students understand community members’ reticence to collaborate. I also wanted to learn from my mistakes and do better in the future to address the effects of systemic racism.

RESULTS OF EXPERIENCE AND RESEARCH

The Baltimore Story is one project among many that my students and I, in collaboration with community partners and other faculty members at Loyola University Maryland, have developed to help address the systemic racism in Maryland and Baltimore. The information on this website came from many hours of research and experience. The overarching question we attempted to answer with this inquiry is, what is the history of slavery and systemic racism in Maryland and Baltimore, and how does this history impact the city today?  

When I began to think about that question, I realized that there was something more fundamental that we needed to know. We didn’t just need more facts about what happened when. We needed to know the why and how. Those questions led me to join with my co-author, Stephanie Hurter Brizee, a trained historian, to delve further into my research. Now I have the good fortune to join efforts with community members, Loyola students, and other Loyola faculty members, as well as scholars at other institutions, to continue adding to this historical framework. The archive will grow with each service-learning and community-based research project that we complete. While it is a challenging time to be addressing racism in the United States, it is also an exciting time to be working on this project with my students, colleagues, community partners, and friends.

CONCLUSION

Most are familiar with the saying that those who do not know their own history will likely repeat it. Indeed, this is often the case when taking the long view of history. But there remains, in some regards, an even more compelling reason to understand history. The world we inhabit today - the social structures, the infrastructures, the rights and freedoms, laws, economics, etc. - has developed from a complex series of historical events. When discussing modern challenges, we often struggle to realize and enact meaningful change because we do not understand how these challenges have interconnected over time and interconnect now. Recent racist comments about Baltimore from nationally elected officials are a perfect example of how ignorance and racism can poison our culture and our democracy.

Our vision for this project, therefore, is to counter ignorance and racism by expanding the archive through collaboration, but we will also use this space as a nexus of heritage and community action. We strongly believe that by better understanding history we can collaborate to bring about positive change. Thanks for reading, and please contact us if you have any questions or if you would like to get involved.

- Allen Brizee, PhD, August 2019