By Ian Bourland
Police line from south to north, blockading North Avenue at Pennsylvania Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland, April 28, 2015 (Photograph: Nate Larson)
By U.S. standards, Baltimore is a small city, about 40 minutes from Washington D.C., and three hours from New York. It is emblematic of the country’s one-time industrial might and, alternately, an ongoing wave of millennial reclamation in blighted urban centres. Baltimore is mentioned in the same breath as Detroit or Cleveland, and is known internationally for medical research and an emergent avant-garde scene. The city is one divided by race and class, a sedimentary landscape in which its histories stir beneath the comforting surfaces of a post-industrial service and research economy.
Yet Baltimore remains a relative village in which as an art critic, I can live comfortably, within walking distance of the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), the art school where I work. A mere half mile away, the Baltimore Police Twitter feed reports near-daily shootings and the median family income hovers around $20,000. A popular story published in 2013 in New York magazine describes a clandestine economy, in which Tide laundry detergent is routinely shoplifted, as it functions as de facto currency in a place where residents have little, but recognise the value of looking one’s best. President Barack Obama, on 28 April, remarked that the neighbourhoods beyond the city’s finance and tourism-wealthy Inner Harbor do not share in the abundance of the city’s creative class: they inhabit a landscape denuded of industry, depopulated by zero-tolerance crime policy and the carceral state, and buoyed by the drug trade – one of the few remaining employers.
This is the sort of neighbourhood for which Baltimore is known, mostly thanks to popular television depictions such as The Corner and The Wire. The Gilmor Homes of the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood are an easy walk to MICA, but occupy vastly different topographies. As much of the world knows by now, this is where Freddie Gray was apprehended on 12 April after fleeing a bicycle-mounted police officer, and loaded into a personnel carrier and driven around for nearly an hour. He died in the hospital a week later on 19 April, with a severed spine and crushed larynx.
During the ensuing ten days, large groups of demonstrators – clergy, students, professionals, community leaders, and everyday Baltimoreans – turned out for near-daily gatherings downtown, or marches on main thoroughfares. By and large, these marches have echoed ongoing demonstrations throughout the U.S. in response to the deaths at the hands of police of Michael Brown (Ferguson, MO) and Eric Garner (New York, NY), and under the clarion call #BlackLivesMatter. In a sense, then, Obama was correct when he argued that ‘this is a slow-rolling crisis,’ and that the use of excessive force against black men ‘has been going on for a long time. This is not new and we shouldn’t pretend it’s new.’ One crucial difference in the Baltimore case is the prospect that in the short term, some modicum of justice will be had: as of publication, State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby has determined that the six officers involved in Gray’s killing will be charged in criminal court for offences including second degree murder – a promise of serious public inquiry and judgment on the affair. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake announced the end of the curfew, signalling a gradual departure of state troops on 3 May.
But for all of its cosmetic similarities to those other places, and for all the solidarity shown for city and for Gray by large demonstrations in other cities (such as the 28 April rally in New York City), the Baltimore case remains unique. The city garnered international attention on the evening of 27 April, as social media covered, in real time, rioting that spread from the Mondawmin shopping centre down a west Baltimore high street where, at the intersection of North and Pennsylvania, a corporate chemist was looted and torched, and groups clashed with police. Over the next 12 hours the group dispersed and re-emerged in other parts of the city, continuing to burn or rob small businesses. By late evening, the conservative Maryland governor Larry Hogan declared a state of emergency, with a one week mandatory curfew to follow, and the National Guard deployed – complete with camouflage and assault weapons – near the Inner Harbor and other ‘vital infrastructure.’
National Guardsman at the student-organized Freddie Gray solidarity protest, Baltimore, Maryland, April 29, 2015 (Photograph: Nate Larson)
As Martin Luther King, Jr. once remarked, ‘a riot is the language of the unheard.’ And for many on the left, such confrontation with the police might be cheered – the inevitable bubbling over of long-standing tensions, and a show of resistance against police forces that rely on excessive force and paramilitary tactics, including the longstanding tradition of the ‘rough ride’– forcefully driving handcuffed suspects around without seat restraints in the back of a van – to which some have argued Gray was subjected before his hospitalization. What this formulation overlooks is an argument that the Baltimore riot was not solely motivated by Gray’s death, or a larger protest agenda. It was, rather, a simulated crisis, compounded by police incompetency. This is made clear in a few ways.
For one, local residents – including those motivated to protest – were not seeking a reprise of earlier violent uprisings, such as the riots that engulfed Baltimore and Washington in April of 1968, echoing similar events in the preceding years in Detroit (1965), Los Angeles (1965), and Newark (1967). Indeed, CNN correspondent Miguel Marquez broadcast the looting of Penn/North in real time, with cameras rolling. One could not but be struck by how low the stakes seemed – looters emerged from a pharmacy with junk food, toilet paper and, later, tennis shoes and alcohol. Others mugged for the camera, some holding up homemade demo CDs. At the far side of the intersection, another man played Michael Jackson hits and danced to ‘Beat It’ (1982).
The relative mayhem spread into the evening, including people turning up in cars to plunder clothing from the unguarded shopping mall where the conflict with police had started earlier in the afternoon, when police reportedly responded to a social media blast to area children to stage a ‘purge’ (after a popular 2013 satirical movie of the same name, in which anarchy is briefly permitted). Baltimore authorities preemptively placed dozens of officers in riot gear at the mall, even as the vital transit hub was shut down, marooning the teenagers in a parking lot in tight proximity to a makeshift garrison of local police.
In neither the initial standoff with area students nor the subsequent carnivalesque at Penn/North was there a concerted protest related to Gray. In fact, organised protest had been temporarily suspended after days of peaceful demonstration in observance of his memorial, held earlier that day. Police were nonetheless wary of violent demonstration and, it seems, may have inadvertently provoked one. What resulted was an unnecessary crisis that saw opportunists not motivated by a political agenda so much as an opportunity to vent long-simmering anxieties.
Tellingly, as Marquez watched the riot unfold, he interviewed neighbourhood residents, including an older woman who insisted that 2015 would not, and should not, be a rehearsal of 1968 – a year she remembered all too well. For many in Europe, 1968 epitomises a utopian optimism crystallised in public uprising, followed by a period of melancholy, as the promises of May ’68 failed to materialise, and (as David Harvey has argued) late capitalism metastasised into the current neoliberal order throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In the United States, 1968 is synonymous not with hope, but with the slaying of heroes of the left, and with vibrant cities razed.
Places like Baltimore have, in a sense, never recovered. While the reanimated spectre of its majesty re-emerged in some precincts (a neo-retro baseball park, farm-to-table restaurants,) much of the city bears the infrastructural scars – boarded up buildings, businesses that never re-opened, a homeless crises in the shadow of vacant townhouses – of those two weeks of riots in April of 1968. As much as 1968 heralded defeat for the new left in Europe, it also signalled the end of one American dream, in which a multiracial working class could thrive in its Baltimores and Detroits, even as much of the white population accelerated their exodus to the suburban periphery.
Citizen protection line from north to south, on North Avenue at Pennsylvania Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland, April 28, 2015 (Photograph: Nate Larson)
It is unsurprising, then, that as the sun rose the following day, hundreds of people turned up in looted areas to pitch in for clean-up efforts, ultimately ending up at Penn/North, where there was work to be done. The scene that I observed was incongruous: a line of state and county police created a fortification opposite scores of reporters and photographers, even as people from around Baltimore hauled rubbish and broken glass, and onlookers shared stories, played Motown from windows, and gawked at a street preacher with two bullhorns. Gang leaders – who had, during the week, called a provisional ‘truce’ at the behest of local clergy – chatted amiably, bedecked in signature blue clothing, or Chicago Bulls’ red; Nation of Islam activists turned up to make sure the gathering remained peaceful.
Throughout the day, hundreds prayed, danced, and practiced capoeira, buffered from the police by a ‘love line’ of local men and the local 300 Men March anti-violence group. One sensed that the overall goal was to change the optics of the reporting, and to occupy space that might otherwise open on to opportunities for conflict with police. It was, nonetheless, not a protest, and when national media tremulously wondered what would happen as the 10PM curfew approached, all but a handful the crowd preemptively dispersed, leaving a near farcical tension between the large gathering of reporters and the advancing riot cops, who dispersed tear gas. The cameras captured a skirmish of their own making, even as the rest of Baltimore remained quiet. On 29 April, concerted protests recommenced, including a highly organized, multiracial student initiative that culminated in the central city.
These peaceful initiatives echoed earlier mobilizations around the country during this year, reinforcing truth that Black Lives Matter. But these protests – like Occupy before them – seem to enact earlier moments of large-scale public address (namely the late 1960s) but propose little by way of concrete remedies. On 2 May, the day after Mosby announced that she would pursue murder charges against the officers involved, a so-called ‘National’ rally organized by the ‘Black Lawyers for Justice’ group was staged in any case, not to make demands on the city per se, but to gather a weekend crowd drawn from beyond the city limits, to convene and hear the words of the controversial Malik Shabazz – a figure who has been criticised by the Southern Poverty Law Center for anti-semitic rhetoric and whom, according to the Baltimore Sun, ‘political, religious and community leaders have denounced… as a self-interested agitator.’
As to the efficacy of this and other, locally driven protests, we will never know if Mosby would have decided to prosecute in their absence. Her announcement may be cold comfort anyway, as at the heart of the demonstrations in New York, Los Angeles, Ferguson, and Baltimore is exasperation with the outcomes of larger structural shifts in American life towards disinvestment in middle income jobs and urban industry, outsourced instead to other corners of the globe. The police, for their part, are left with the intractable task of managing the containment of neoliberalism’s losers on behalf of its winners.
What the protests and the riot have accomplished is to draw sustained international attention to these forgotten corners of the American experience. The work of Baltimoreans over the past week falls more in line with what Baltimore-based journalist Benjamin Wallace-Wells identifies as the tradition of the march. He notes that ‘you protest seeking punishment for the villains, and a policy correction. You march against intractable social situations.’ And so, during the last weeks of April, we witnessed an anomalous, and unnecessary back-to-the-future moment of civil unrest in Baltimore that obscured the real story of tenacious citizens marching day-by-day, drawing attention to more abstract and elusive issues. In this way, they are aligned with those in the art world whose practices also direct attention to questions of opportunity, equality, and the outcomes of decades of neoliberal policymaking – such as LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographs of her economically devastated hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania – or those that seek to actively re-invest in communities that have been largely forsaken, as in Theaster Gates’s re-direction of art market wealth into the physical and cultural development of South Chicago, an area glibly known as ‘Chi-raq’. If one draws anything from recent events in Baltimore, it should not be a confirmation of its dystopian cachet but, instead, a reminder that the project of redressing larger structural challenges is a quotidian one, and one in which media and visual culture play a critical role.