Donald Lives in Middle East Baltimore

Donald lives in Middle East Baltimore.

Middle East Baltimore is being erased. 

My class met Donald outside of an old Catholic school.  A room on the top floor acts as the headquarters of the Save Middle East Action Committee.  The committee was created nine years ago by neighborhood residents who learned about the East Baltimore Development Initiative from the newspapers.  EBDI is a fourteen year plan to revitalize the entire East side, turning it into an internationally prestigious Hopkins research park and diverse residential neighborhood.  To do this they are evicting current residents, promising replacement housing, and bulldozing their homes.  

Donald was warm and welcoming.  "I want my home to be your home today", he said with a gracious smile, revealing plaque covered teeth.  

His deep accent sounded Nigerian, and I wondered if he was from Lagos,  but as we walked down the road we passed the house he grew up in, and I realized it was just an East Baltimore accent - ebonics or black english vernacular as some call it.  

Our group of students wandered past mountains of swelled black trash bags, torn and spilling out chicken bones and whiskey bottles.  We listened to Donald talk about the pain, uncertainty and anxiety of being displaced from his home.  He talked about the community's fight for fair housing rights when EBDI left promises unfulfilled.    

I snapped a picture of an eviction notice stapled to the wood of a boarded up door.

How could I help but recall another Baltimore?  At the turn of the 20th century, this city was the first to bring about segregation and a sentiment of racialized urban reform.

A cool breeze comes down the street, and our group passes expanses of empty lots, like a bomb went off, where row-homes once stood.  We see signs:

"Building a Better Baltimore!"

"A New East Side"

"Progress Ahead!"

with pictures of white people doing yoga, and a black and blonde girl smiling cheek to cheek.

How could I help but recall the promises of urban renewal, growth, and "serving the greater good" that surrounded slum clearance in 1911?

Hopkins Hospital stands above us on a hill, a beautiful ivory tower.  Donald says he was born there, and now they are treating him like a second class citizen.  

How can I help but recall past Hopkins doctors like William Welchm, who lectured on the "negro problem", stating that blacks were more prone to poverty, immorality, and disease, especially tuberculosis.  Whites believed they would bring their problems wherever they moved, like a contagion.  Something had to be done.  Baltimore legalized residential segregation in 1910, setting the model for the rest of the country.   

EBDI's project is a model for the rest of the world.  This is how you do urban revitalization.

As our group walks further into the neighborhood, I linger in front of yet another abandoned home.  Two black and white photos are stapled to the plywood where a window once was.  One depicts a riot in the 1960's, when the Jim Crow laws were overturned.  The other is of Martin Luther King Jr. speaking to a crowd.  

A few blocks away, layers of brick and cement peel off a building, like flesh falling off a leper.  A spray paint tag on a neighboring wall cries out "I wonder if heaven got a ghetto!"

We returned to the old catholic school where we began to talk more with Donald in the classroom on the top floor.  Sneakered feet trudged up the steps, past old sunday school signs saying "Love one another", past a picture of a black Jesus and a black Last Supper. 

A plastic statue of the Virgin Mary stands next to a dirty window, palms pressed together at her breast.  Rows and rows and rows of red brick homes stretch into the  sunlight below, but her eyes are averted, staring at heaven, or maybe nothing at all, in the middle of some some quiet, anxious plea.