Interview of Lou Diggs

Historian, archivist, and writer Louis S. Diggs shares how his upbringing in Baltimore City, along with his services in the military and public education system, informed his work in chronicling the legacies of African American communities and war veterans in Baltimore County. Starting from his childhood and high school career, Louis talks about leaving home and immediately joining the military at age 18 where despite being integrated nationally in 1947, was still very much segregated by his accounts. After his time in the military, Louis talks about his work being a substitute teacher in Catonsville and how after conducting a lesson on family history and ancestry one day, he learned that the majority of his students (who were black) did not know much about their own history. With little to no resources detailing African American history in Catonsville and Baltimore County, Louis decided to begin his archival work and write his first book It All Started on Winter's Lane, so that young black children in the area could grow up and learn about their history, as Louis states, that is critical to one's growth and identity. He then goes on to talk about the archival work he's been doing after It All Started on Winter's Lane, which includes conducting oral history interviews with Baltimore County residents, writing and publishing several more books on Catonsville and Baltimore County history, and the collaboration with Baltimore County Planner Lenwood Johnson to create the Diggs-Johnson Musuem, a museum that explores Baltimore County's African American history and heritage.This interview was conducted during the 2021 Interdisciplinary CoLab as part of the project, From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter: Oral Histories of the Lived Experience in Baltimore. Transcript is edited.From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter: Oral Histories of the Lived Experience in Baltimore Date: 7 June 2021 Interviewer: Kayla Brooks Transcription: Kayla Brooks Interviewee: Louis S. Diggs Length: 02:42:21 ________________ KB = Kayla Brooks (Interviewer) LD = Louis Diggs (Interviewee) E = Elizabeth (Louis Diggs’ wife) ________________ 00:00:00 KB: Hello, this is Kayla Brooks from University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s Summer Colab Project “From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter: Oral Histories of the Lived Experience in Baltimore”. Today is June 7th, 2021 and I will be interviewing Louis Diggs. Louis Diggs is a writer and historian who chronicles the legacy of Baltimore County’s African American community and serves as an honorary board member of the Historical Society of Baltimore County. Following a 20 year military career as a veteran of an all-black unit, he worked 19 years as an educator in the D.C. public school system and as a substitute teacher at Catonsville High School. Diggs teamed up with fellow historian Lenwood Johnson to track down the last standing trustee of Cherry Hill A.U.M.P. Church and made a promise to preserve its function and history. This building started out as land residential shacks for slaves who had bought their way out of slavery in Baltimore County area and became a meeting house for local black laborers and buying grounds. He was then granted $400,000 from Delegate Adrienne Jones for the complete renovation and conversion of the church into the “Louis S. Diggs and Lenwood Johnson Mini-Museum of African American History in Baltimore County '' which formally began in 2014. Diggs emphasizes the importance of tracing Black family ancestry in his work, an example of this being interviews he conducted with Baltimore County residents whose ancestors served in the Civil War. As times change, he works towards transitioning from preserving history through paper records and artifacts to making historical information accessible in online spaces. So, it's very nice to meet you and I'm so excited to do the interview today with you. Is there anything you want to say about yourself first before I start asking any questions? LD: Okay, yes, I think so. Look, I started off in life through a wonderful, wonderful mother. She had five babies; I was next to the youngest. She had a legal husband who I find difficult to say is my father because he abandoned this beautiful woman with all these babies. And in Baltimore when I was born in 1932, believe me African American women—especially women—there were no means to assist them and they were strictly, strictly on their own. Now, my mother, she was a teacher and she did okay. She mentioned the first couple of babies, but when it got to be five and—man, I never knew—she still had two more. My sister and I, we’re the two youngest, and we're the only two remaining of the five. But to abandon a woman that...that’s one of the worst things that African Americans can have—at least back in the ‘30s and '40s when you lived a completely different life than you live today. Let me give an example: I did not like going to school. I did not like it; I was a dreamer. I would hook school and go out to Druid Hill Park and just daydream. And as a result, I failed, and I failed, and didn’t care. Until 1950, when I failed so much, I was eighteen years old. I think I was only in the 10th grade at that time. Anyhow, I decided that things were so bad only because I did not go to school. And the bad thing about it is that: a) you just don't graduate and you are just stuck in life. You’ll never get anywhere. But: b) there was a woman, she was a police officer, but her role was to catch boys and girls like myself that do not go to school, and it stopped when you're seventeen—I think you’re mandated to go up to that age. And she had taken me and several others a couple of times down to Northwest Police Station and said, “Now, look, if you do not go to school, the boys will go to Cheltenham.” Cheltenham was a place for African American boys that are bad. When I say “bad” I mean, really...criminals. And you come out there a criminal. My only thing is that I did not go to school and I did not have any mentor. And fortunately, it just happened that I got by that. And when I turned 18, I decided that I had no choice but to leave because I knew that there could be no job for me. A high school dropout, Black in Baltimore—no, ma'am. You can really forget it. And I know it had an effect on my mental life because I was afraid of White people! I did not know White people, just a Jew on the corner. And the police, I couldn't tell you what they really look like because you're an African American boy: you encounter police, you put your head down and you don’t look at them ‘cause you can be in trouble if you look at them. And they just had these small enclaves—I was in a community called Sandtown, it's up near where the old Douglass High School is. So, anyhow, I just decided to go join the National Guard. And I understand it was an all-Black unit, and you could go during the summer and train, and if you wanted to stay in, you could stay in. If not, they would pay you to go to school. And this was pretty good for older boys. Yeah, I think you had to be sixteen or seventeen-years-old to go. And it was a way to make a little change. So, my friend said, “You lived up the street from me on Stricker Street.” We joined the Maryland National Guard, that was June 20th, 1950, and I was eighteen years old. Well, five days later, the Korean War broke out June 25th, 1950. And we were in summer camp training. And when the war broke out in August—August 19th, to be exact—the Maryland National Guard was ordered to have a transportation unit—I guess it was transportation—activated. And they activated our unit on August 19th. Now, I could have gotten out ‘cause I was still legally in school and I had not dropped out. So, sitting there, we both said that we're going to go. And next time I saw my mother—and that poor soul oh, my goodness—’cause it was this train that came in that way down North Avenue. We marched from the Fifth Regiment Armory, which is a block up behind it where African Americans soldiers in a place called Richmond Market Armory, and we actually soldered in that…we were not permitted to go into the Fifth, that was for the White soldiers. Anyhow, when I saw my mom, ‘cause she was crying, and I really looked deep into her eyes and she was saying to me, “Louis, you're making the right move.” ‘Cause I really needed to get out of Baltimore and try to make a life for myself. So anyhow, I went on to Korea. As a matter of fact, it was an entire battalion of mostly Black—because it was during the summertime, and they were coming in from all over the place just to train and they got trapped in it. And it was a good life training. They didn't treat us bad at all, they just taught you how to march. So most of everybody liked it, and most of us joined, we stayed. And I was not afraid because I was with this Black unit, so I knew to go in the army and I knew what the army was like. So they said that it was supposedly integrated. In 1947, it was actually declared integrated military. And ‘cause the National Guard was the only state and they were segregated and they kept it that way. Anyway, off we went. And I had one thing going for me: I loved to type. Oh, my goodness, I was a speed demon! Look, when I would write a book and I’d be maybe 200 pages into this book, and I don't like it, and I throw it out, and I start all over again. I never had anyone type for me. So, matter of fact, there were about 300 of us lined up on North Avenue. And the command was: “Those that know how to type, raise your hand.” So I raised my hand, of course, and I looked over and not another soul had their hand raised [laughs]. So I became what was called a company clerk—and a truck driver, we all had to drive trucks. There was a serious need for truck drivers overseas. So everything else you can do is secondary to learning how to drive a truck. So, when we got to Korea December, 1950, we were the first United States National Guard to set foot in Korea. And the ship was full of thousands of trucking units from all over the country. And I don't know how, but our unit was the absolute first one off the ship, and they broke our unit. We went with the headquarters and my company was 726. They hooked us up with the [???] headquarters and sent us to Korea. One of the other units went to Germany, and our last unit went to Virginia. So, we were all in Korea together at this time, but they separated us. And they sent our unit to the 1st Cavalry Division. And even though we did not stay with them, we, uh, we still felt...being segregated. Just to give you an idea: when the 1st CAB...after North Korea came in—and they came in November of ‘51. And when you were moving the units, you're responsible for—now, I don’t know how the White units were treated, but the Black units—first of all, we could not stay on the grounds with the 1st CAB. We had to find our own grounds. Secondly, we could not use their mess hall. And we were given—at least if they anticipated we're going to be out for two weeks—we get two weeks of C-ration or K-ration, but it was food from World War II that the cook had a big fifty-five barrel of hot water and we all threw our food in to get heated. Everything was in cans and we had to survive off that until, you know, we got back and were released from whatever unit we were in. And that was not fun. We did exactly what the army told us to do. They could have changed us to an infantry unit—anything. You really don't know where you're going to go when you go into the army. You have to take a series of tests and supposedly that would give them an idea of where to assign you to. Now we were with the actual unit. Either the infantry unit, or the [???] unit, or trucking unit, or whatever. You normally stay in that unit but, uh, you know, you had to stay. But this skill that I had, which is really good. I was a company clerk, and I took care of everything that an administrator had to happen. But I was first really a truck driver and I drove a truck. But now in ‘51, it was around...June or July, I was pulled out of my unit and put into the battalion that my unit was under. And I was surprised because they didn't have anything but White officers and Black [???]men. But that was kind of strange because I was looking to see, then, how I was going to make out with the Whites, and of course there was plenty of Whites there and I guess that must not meant too many Blacks that could type. But Lord knows, girl, I would type so fast! Being young, I could absorb a lot in my memory. And you would think that I had never looked at the keyboard. I could absorb whatever it was that I was doing and I could mentally put it in the right form, you know, whatever form was required. That took me for almost twenty-one years through the army. I have always been an administrative person. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the grades that I really deserved—a lot of us didn’t. Those that went in during the Korean War, we were only paid, what, fifty dollars a month? When you retire, like when I retired, you get about 300 dollars a month to live on, it's just terrible. And, look, the grades only had six grades...seven grades that went up to Master Sergeant. About a year before I retired, they added two more years. So, people that had been struggling during those first years, some of them had to take their stripes off because they couldn’t make the E-7 or the E-8, and it was really terrible. And when you retire, you have to retire at the lower grade. The work that I had been doing all of my military life has been...twice, I was, uh, on embassy duty, and believe me you got to be at the top of your game! I spent eight years at Morgan State College helping to teach youngsters to become officers. And you have to be at the top of your skill in order to do that. Do you all know where Morgan is? Oh, that’s right, you all are from Baltimore! [laughs] Look, so many times I get schools that are in California or Oklahoma. But yeah, I spent eight years there. I took my family with me to Germany for four years. I was always assigned to the Pentagon or somewhere doing...not clerical work, I was the supervisor. And just to give you an example, I was assigned for a year at Fort Meade working at the Pentagon and I learned how organizations are being reduced or being upgraded. I had to just control what were called Schedule X's and they had a lot of high paid civilians. It was just me and a colonel—that was it—just to keep a military presence. And they would let me do the small organizations and I learned, really, and that was a good skill for me to have. And then they sent me back to Korea again and I went to Korea three times, always came back home, though, and never left Baltimore in almost twenty-one years of being in the army. And most people, most guys—I don't know about women. Now, when I was in the army, there were Blacks, but they were highly different. They were not integrated with the males. They had their own units. And it was just such a great life when I did retire. My last year and then I went back to Korea. This was my third time. I stayed there two years first, three years—two years, separately, and one year in Japan. Not being in a regular unit, when I came back in ‘61, I was assigned to the U.S. Army Procurement Agency, and all I did was run a bidder’s list. And this bidder’s list—well, it was soldiers in different categories. First, I would determine whether or not a person had a possibility of starting up a company to get a job with the American government. Say, like, maybe putting the groundwork at Kimpo Airbase and it might lead him to$15,000, but he gotta prove that he could do that or prove that he could put a company together. And they could take my bid and go to the Bank of Seoul, and they could acquire money on that based on the fact that they could get this job being paid by the American government. So, there was a high-paid civilian doing the job when I got there, but he was compromised and let him go, and they asked me could I do it. Well, sure, you got the right person there to deal with honesty. And it was good, learned a lot, enjoyed it, then when I came back to—the last time was in ‘69. I was assigned to the embassy duty, and I could have taken my family, and I was hoping and praying that my wife did not want to go. We had four children, and they were ready to finish high school. And Shirley said, “Louis, I know you want us to go, but I cannot take these children from all the friends they made, they’re ready to finish high school.” Oh, Lord, I just felt so happy! [laughs] So all I had to do was my last year there and come home every time, ‘cause I really—[audio lags at 00:20:57—00:21:01] —learn this skill individually by, like, I got a special medal for this. We had to increase the 25th Black Division, which was a Korean division that was fighting in Vietnam, and I got a special medal—I did it myself. I just had a little knowledge of something; there was a colonel that was overseeing me. And I was hoping maybe I could get that sixth stripe before I go and I get some darn medal! But that turned me off from the army. 00:21:37 But that led me to something else. I retired in 1970, and I took a job the next day teaching ROTC in D.C. high schools. I taught over at Ballou High; that was an awful bad area in Southeast Baltimore [T/N: This is misspoke for Southeast Washington D.C.] But I did that because of that skill [gestures typing]. For a year, I was in charge of those ROTC units under the school and I had worked my way up to—I was almost personnel officer, which they call human resource nowadays. And I did go back to school. I was...I didn’t take any—like, go to a [???] school, I wanted to sit down and try to learn something. And gosh, it was so easy at school I was ashamed. Because when I went to University of Baltimore where I’d liked because you had to be—at that time, you had to be a junior to go there. You had to do your first two years in the community college. So I liked the fact that I was working with men and women and everybody helped everybody learn. And I stayed there a year-and-a-half, two years, and I graduated cum laude, and then I stayed and I worked and earned my master’s in public administration because my goal was to become the personnel director. And I was the second—I was the first to him—I was the supervisory staffing specialist. I did staffing of the high schools, sent my team out when colleges were looking for the jobs during the spring break. And I learned really well, and I went to graduate courses at Georgetown University. But I got hooked up in politics, and it just happened that I just didn’t like the political side. And I had enough time because, being in personnel, I always kept up with everything in the military seriously. That was my job and I knew that: a) when I took my job, I began to take, I think, it would be maybe twenty dollars pay and I would be able to buy the twenty-one years that I spent in the military. So I drew $300 of my retirement plus—I wasn't GS-11 then, and I retired as GS-13. So when I retired in 1989, then I was able to retire instead of going out at thirteen with twenty years, I went out at thirteen with forty-one years. And it’s made an extremely nice life for me. So, then when I retired, almost the next day, my children made me do something because they didn't want me to sit home and just look at television. Because at that time, if you had a big yard you could get one of these big ten-foot dishes and you could see HBO and everything, but they wouldn’t allow this. They said, “Dad, you gotta go down to Catonsville High School, and if nothing else, just be a role model.” And I was extremely good with boys. Look, four sons and I had seven grandsons before I finally got that granddaughter! I love that girl so much when I took her to school—she’s a doctor now—I made sure that she went through. But she’s my first, first daughter. But anyhow, I stayed there not too long. ‘Cause the principal talked me into taking a class for a lady that was out for...when you have a baby. And I took the class—I liked substituting ‘cause when you finish your class, you go home. As a regular teacher, you gotta stay there until school closes. So anyhow, while I was there was when I really got this idea of what I should do with my life. And that is to see that for my own children, I was starting—we were from Baltimore County. I was born in Baltimore City, but my father was born in Baltimore County up in Piney Grove, and that’s where I was researching all the while. So, I started teaching a class with these kids and noticed that from the Winters Lane community out in Catonsville—are any of you familiar with where Catonsville is? Oh, you know where it is? It’s a little enclave of Blacks that had been there since the slavery era and the county executive, they have problems with all of these enclaves. There were specks of them all over this 550 square miles of Baltimore County. So, when I—I hadn't thought that far I was still thinking about what to do with my first book. Since I took a couple of years working on my own, the kids asked me could I help them find their history there. Nobody knew about their history. So, uh...I started to research, and I was blessed because my wife worked in the library and they were all 100% helping me. So I guess maybe after three or four, maybe five years, I put this first book together. It’s called It All Started on Winters Lane. And after I had gathered all of this information, the library people insisted that I go to the Maryland Humanities Council and share with them what I had done. So, I did, and they listened to me, and they were really amazed with what I had done.

Interview of Tré Murphy

The director of Strategy and Programs at Organizing Black, and member of several organizations focusing on education for underprivileged individuals, Tré Murphy, talks about how he got involved in organizing and specifically his work in education. Starting with his childhood experiences, Tré talks about how his diagnosis of ADHD at a young age, as well as not having a strong educational support system, led him to go seek out other support systems such as the Baltimore Algebra Project. He also talks about how this experience in his youth inspired him to focus his time and energy in later years on organizing work concerning education, and creating educational support systems for disenfranchised youth like himself. Tré then goes on to talk about the differences and similarities between the Civil Rights movement and Black Lives Matter movement as well as current collaboration between elders of the previous movements with current members and leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement. Afterwards he talks about Organizing Black's campaign which includes participatory governance, divest and defund the Baltimore Police Department, and reparations for black people. Finally Tré touches upon his hopes and visions for the future of black liberation.This interview was conducted during the 2021 Interdisciplinary CoLab as part of the project, From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter: Oral Histories of the Lived Experience in Baltimore. Technical difficulties occur in audio recording from 01:04:36-01:06:15 and thus can be edited out of recording. Transcript is edited.From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter: Oral Histories of the Lived Experience in Baltimore Date: 14 June 2021 Location: Online via Webex programming Interviewer:Deysi Chitic-Amaya Transcription: Deysi Chitic-Amaya Interviewee: Tré Murphy Length: 01:23:48 00:00:01 Deysi Chitic-Amaya (DCA): All right, so, um, yeah. Hello, this is Deysi Chitic-Amaya, from the University of Maryland Baltimore County summer CoLab “From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter: oral histories of the lived experience in Baltimore”. Today is June fourteenth, 2021, and I will be interviewing Tré Murphy, Tré Murphy is a cofounder and director of strategy and programs for Organizing Black, a grassroots member led organization, focused on transformational, direct action, political education and participatory governments in Baltimore City. Tré began his organizing journey with the Baltimore Algebra Project, a fully youth run organization that uses math literacy and organizing to create systematic change in Baltimore City. Following his time with the Baltimore Algebra Project and the Baltimore Uprisings in 2015, Tré co-founded Organizing Black with three other members in order to address the needs of black people and center those marginalized black people in conversations of equity, inclusion, and the right to live free. In addition to his work with Organizing Black, Tré has also been a part of many coalitions, including the Alliance for Educational Justice, the Journey for Justice Alliance, the National Student Bill of Rights, the Schools-to Prison Pipeline Coalition, the Movement for Black Lives and more, continuing his mission of helping the efforts of black liberation. Tré is also currently the deputy director of community organizing for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Thank you for joining us today Tré! 00:01:49 Tré Murphy (TM): Thank you so much for having me. DCA: Okay, so what initially brought you to this line of work? 00:01:57 TM: Oh well, I think it was a combination of factors honestly, the first one being my experiences. Growing up in Baltimore City, particularly to a single mom household in the hood as we would call it quote/unquote the Park Heights, was not without its challenges to say the least. But also, one of the things that I had to quickly learn is that as angry as I was at the environment around me, the conditions for those environments was created as a result of systemic racism and systemic oppression and so my environment was one of the first pieces that brought me to this line of work and honestly, I just wanted to be a young black boy who quote/unquote made it out. 00:02:43 But the second piece that kept me inside of this work was the commitment to my ancestors. The idea that my ancestors had fought so hard to receive, even the marginal gains that we have got inside of this world, inside of my lifetime, inside of the history of this country was the things that kept me inside of this work and I felt like I had a mandate to carrying forward that legacy and making sure that I did everything that I could to ensure that the next generation after me was better off than I was and the same with my ancestors made sure that my generation was better off than they were. 00:03:27 And then finally just this idea—it sounds very cliche but following up on what I just said—just this idea that truly it is about ensuring that future generations have a fighting chance inside of a world that oftentimes was not built for young, black and brown little babies such as myself. And so those combination of things really is what kept me inside of this work. I can go into personal stories about growing up in Park Heights, what it meant at some point to see our lights get cut off, what it meant at some points to know that I could walk out of my house every day and my mom would worry if I would come back home as a result of systemic racism, as a result of police murder, police brutality. All of those factors was unquestionably a part of my childhood and my life and along with so many others. But, it really, really, really was this idea that the system had disenfranchised us so much that it created the conditions for the environment that I came up in and I was committed to ensure that did not happen for my little siblings, my little sisters, my unborn children and future generations to come. 00:04:46 DCA: Yeah, we would love to hear those personal stories. I mean, just going back to the introductory statement, a lot of the coalitions that I mentioned that you work for, they have a real like, basis in education. So,I kind of want to know, like, was there anything from your childhood or growing up in your own life that kind of like influenced you to make you want to work specifically in education for the fight for black lives and black liberation. 00:05:19 TM: Yeah, sure. So I can definitely go into this, so one of the things that, um, well, actually, just starting back to my early childhood. Uh, if you, if you let my mom tell it or any members of my family who knows the story, they tell you that I'm a miracle baby. I spent constant amount of time in a hospital when I was younger, so much so that I had surgery at a young age, and doctors at the time projected that I would not actually live past my teenage years and so to make it sort of out of that was one big accomplishment, but going back to your question more specifically, there was a time in my life where I was diagnosed with ADHD where I'm quote/unquote as, as they would say about little black babies that they don't want to spend the time to invest in, I was a busy body, I was a throwaway, I was something [laughs] that nobody really wanted to invest the time in, to be able to make sure to find out exactly what was wrong with me, what exactly could be beneficial to my growth and development at a early age. And so growing up I only really had my mom inside my corner going along with a few select family members who were encouraging me and pushing me forward and saying that I actually could be anything that I wanted to be and that I actually did not have to accept what society was telling me, because at the time it was teachers, it was community members, it was at times even family members who said that I wouldn’t amount to anything, who said that, that I was a lost cause, that I was beyond saving and, and a pretty funny story [laughs]. When I was diagnosed for ADHD , my mom actually refused to put me on medication as much as the doctors had pushed for me to be on medications, as much as the school system said that I needed to be on medication, what she said was, “I'm going to pray for him and whoop his ass”, excuse my language, “and that was going to be a remedy”. And of course, naturally both happen [laughs]. So, both I was not without my discipline as a child, but that, but the time and investment that my mom spent, and then later on, get into the latter years of my middle school and into high school I found educators who was willing to actually deposit information into me. There was no question that I was a quote/unquote, smart child, right? There was no question that I actually had all of the makings and potentials to actually learn and grow and develop inside of different ways than what society would deem normal, but it took people who actually decided to deposit into my life and that's actually, when I began to to launch my activist and organizing career. It was as a result of those experiences that led me and then again, combined with the factors of my environment at the time, growing up poor, growing up black, growing up in the inner city growing up in a hood, all of those combination of factors along with the experiences of people so often telling me what I could not be led me to my activists and organizing career. 00:08:54 I mean, it actually follow suit shortly after my, my older brother who again society said the same thing about, he was a loss cause, he was beyond saving. Now his experience was a little bit different because the similarities was that we were both busy bodies, the difference and his, to some extent was that was that he was quote/unquote, a bigger distraction to society. Right, I'm a bigger quote/unquote menace inside of the school system and when he got to high school, after being put out of a number of schools the Baltimore Algebra Project found him, they were teaching a class at his high school that he entered and I remember him coming home every day talking about this awesome program, this awesome classroom that he really enjoyed that was really honing in his leadership skills, that for so often people told him he wasn't a leader but what the Baltimore Algebra Project saw was that there was this young black boy who had the power, regardless of how he was using this power, he had the power to drastically change the landscape of the classroom at any given moment. Every time he opened up his mouth, it was the difference between order and chaos. Right, and so that was real leadership, regardless of what the school system or traditional society would teach you and so the algebra project found him and they collected him and they decided to give him a job and that meant that we did not have to be out in the streets hustling right? They decided to give him a job, so that he could be able to meet his basic needs and also exhibit the leadership skills in a more constructive way with his classmates, with his fellow peers. 00:10:46 And so, I remember like I said, him coming home, every day, talking about this and me getting extremely excited to the point where I ended up following suit behind him and joining the Baltimore Algebra Project and I'll just say that the rest from that is [laughs] sort of history. I began to learn, I wasn't the best at math. Like I said, I had to have some skills, wasn't the best at math, but the thing that I did figure out or that the algebra project helped me to figure out was that my love for history and my ability to identify an issue and be able to map out both a strategy and a plan for addressing that issue and all of the possible contingency may be an incredibly valuable asset and further push me into social activism work. 00:11:41 DCA: That's really cool! Looking at your organizing and activism work at large, like, what does activism mean to you? 00:11:53 TM:Yeah, so that is a good question. You know, I'll just say the traditional sort of definition of activism that I work off of currently is one who actually advocates on, speak on behalf of somebody else or on the specific issue or a more specific experience. I would just say for me, I take more of an organizing approach and the reason that I separate the two out is because organizing for me is fundamentally different in the way in which it actually brings people who are closer to the problem to the forefront of the conversation. Right? And that has been the mind mindset and the mind mentality that I've taken throughout my approach and so I'm— going to your question more specifically, it is extremely important to me, because these are the ways in which we push this country to actually be better, but not just be better, address its racist past and live up to the true meaning of the words that it says. To me, organizing is the wheel which we force this country to live out its values in practice, not just in a way in which it preaches, right? And it holds this country's feet in the systems of power albeit to the fire. 00:13:15 In terms of ensuring that there is a fair, more just, more equitable society and that future generations—again, going back to my opening don't have to live with the consequences of the actions of this current generation because we are honestly, we have a chance to address these issues and fix them in more tangible, more real more substantive ways, but that often times require us to be bold, to be radical, and to be unapologetic in our stances and our beliefs, and in our activism and organizing. 00:13:58 DCA: And then in a similar fashion, what does like civil rights mean to you? TM: [Laughs] So, um, so I, I chuckle a little bit at this, just as somebody who, in constant conversations with people around should the word be civil rights, should the word be human rights? You know, should the word be equity, should the phrases be equity. But to me at its base level,civil rights is the belief that people should be able to live in their full dignity. And to me, at its base level, the ability for somebody to really live in their full dignity, to not be persecuted, to, to not be ridiculed to not be oppressed as a result of their identities, as a result of their beliefs, as a result of their socioeconomic class or status, all of those things that for so often has been the defining market in our society around who is quote/unquote,a full—I hate the term citizenship— but who’s quote/unquote a full community member or resident of this country, right? And who isn’t right? 00:15:14 An elder, mentor, civil rights icon, Bob Moses once imparted into me— I mean, he was the founder of the Baltimore Algebra Project, member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the Civil Rights Movement— but he once imparted into me this idea, this philosophy, this concept that there is two fundamental questions that, to this day this country is still wrestling with. One is, who are the constitutional people? For so long when this country was founded it was white men with property, right? They were the ones who had inalienable rights as we like to say. They were the ones who were able to make decisions to govern their lives to live in their full dignity, right? And everybody else, including white women, was second class, right? So he asked this first, fundamental question which was, “Who are the constitutional people?”, right, and then I'm sorry, it's actually three questions, right. Um, the, the second question is who is the constitutional, or what is the constitutional property? For so often it was black people inside of this country, it went through the system of slavery, and so he asked that question for us to begin to spark our imaginations around, do we actually still think about people as a commodity, right? Do we still think about people as something to be bought with or traded right? Or can we think about people as actual autonomous human beings who deserve to live in their full dignity so that's the second question who, or what is the constitutional property? 00:17:05 But the third question, which is so powerful, which is so revolutionary is, what does it mean to be a constitutional person? Right. We have to recognize that oftentimes times have shifted, times have changed, changes are part of life in general as we see it right now. And so, this question around, what does it mean to be a constitutional person means is it a standard right? Does everybody deserve to live in their full dignity? Does everybody deserve to be able to live inside of this country and have access to health care, to have access to food, clothing, shelter, all of their basic necessities that we know are critical and important for somebody to not just survive, but to be able to thrive, right? To be able to actually grow and develop and be a contributing member of society in a way that will actually allow them to have their full dignity still intact. Right, so who is the constitutional person? So, all of that to say, going back to your original question around what do civil rights mean, it means that to me,we are able to fundamentally answer all three of those questions, to be able to ensure and guarantee that we don't just say that we are a country where we're in the land of the free in home with the brave and everybody has the opportunity to get pathways to whatever, milk and honey, glory, whatever, those sort of American dream that we are sold upon growing up inside of this country. It, to me, doesn't just mean that we can say that, it means that we have to be able to practice. We have to be able to practice the ability for people to live in their full dignities, to be able to experience all of the wonders, all of the life, to be able to have what I like to call that awe moment, right? I don't know if you all ever had awe moment when it feels like your heart sings, right? Where it feels like, you’re in such amazement, such a so astounded by something, right? To be able to wake up every day to know that, that is a consistent feeling, that joy and happiness is a part of your life, that you can walk outside of your doors every day, and not worry about if you or your child is going to come home at night, right, because there are police who will racially profile you because there is systemic violence inside of our communities that was taught to us by a violent system. Right, and so now we have adopted that and assimilated that into our society. So all of those things is what civil rights means to me, being able to get to that point where people can live in their full dignities, where we can unlearn the harmful toxic ways that this system has imparted into us, that we are not worthy, or that we are not worthless or that we're disposable because we know that we aren’t. 00:20:12 DCA: That's awesome, thank you for your answer. That was just like, wow, that was like yeah. So, like, aside from, like, education, like, what are some other specific issues that you're working to change in the community as an activist and how have you gone about doing this? 00:20:33 TM: Yeah, that is a great question. So my time [laughs] it expels many different issues. You know, I would like to actually fit all of this under this idea that what I'm really working towards is the refounding of this democracy, right? To me, this American democracy in many cases, and for all of the benefits that it has to a degree, it is, in many cases, a failed experimentation, particularly for black and brown people. Right and so what I'm working towards right now is the collective re-founding of democracy, one that can at its foundation be built with everyone in mind and not just particularly white men with property. Right, as this country was founded on so long ago, and so that means that there are a bunch of sub issues underneath of that, one is, is the issue of racism and white supremacy. Right, which also expands many different Spears, but it's this idea that the entire system has to be overhauled. Right, that we have to create new systems that bear in mind the complexities of the many identities that communities that exist outside of this country right now, right? Another sub issue of course, naturally is criminal justice and policing, and particularly on Organizing Black’s side it is this idea that the entire system of policing and the entire criminal justice system itself has to be refounded, it has to be abolished, it has to be replaced by something that truly values the dignity of every human being that comes in contact with it and one that does not, that does not rely on the profits that come from it, right? Because the profits are also what is keeping the system going or people's relying on the system going, particularly the state and big corporations and all of those are like, who so desperately benefit from the system from the console system itself. Another particular piece is also economic justice, and I tell people all the time that one of the most helpful things that Malcolm X ever said, and he said many helpful things, but one of the most helpful things that he ever said is that, “When you give somebody the power to feed you, you give them the power to starve you”. Right, and so inside of this country, we have an issue of black and brown, particularly black farmers, but black and brown farmers and landowners being able to access an equitable ways,the agricultural system, right? And so that oftentimes boxes us out, uh, from a vital piece of our society, that will actually be one of the, the founding pieces, I think gets us to what I like to call black liberation, right? And then, of course, that's certainly for economic justice, there’s the piece around housing. I believe that housing is a universal, and it should be a

Interview of Marc Steiner

President and Executive Producer of the Center for Emerging Media and host of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc Steiner, talks about life experiences that have shaped his perspective on race and influenced his life's work. He particularly talks about his first experience with seeing racism as a young child, being the only white scout member in an all-Black scout troop, and how this influenced his future work with both the Civil Rights movement and Black Lives Matter. He then goes on to talk about the mission and work of the Center for Emerging Media and the importance of community in delivering their own narratives. Marc also extensively discusses media coverage between the Civil Rights movement and Black Lives Matter and how social media has altered one's relationship to the movements.This interview was conducted during the 2021 Interdisciplinary CoLab as part of the project, From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter: Oral Histories of the Lived Experience in Baltimore. Transcript is edited.From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter: Oral Histories of the Lived Experience in Baltimore Date: 7 June 2021 Location: Online via Webex programming Interviewer: Deysi Chitic-Amaya Transcription: Lorra Toler Interviewee: Marc Steiner Length: 01:18:03 Deysi Chitic-Amaya (DCA): Hello, this is Deysi Chitic-Amaya from University of Maryland Baltimore County’s Summer Colab Project, “From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter: Oral Histories of the Lived Experience in Baltimore”. Today is June eighth, 2021 and I will be interviewing Marc Steiner. Marc Steiner is the host of The Marc Steiner Show, a radio now podcast show which has been on the air for twenty-eight years as of the date of this recording. He has previously worked for radio stations such as WYPR and its predecessor WJHU before operating his own production company, the Center for Emerging Media, which, since its inception, has produced a wide variety of media content including the Peabody award-winning series Just Words which features the voices and stories of working people in Baltimore who are often relegated to statistics and not given a platform to speak. The mission of the Center for Emerging Media and all of Marc’s projects is to employ media that produces unique programs that addresses issues that affect our world, often issues that individuals may find difficult to talk about or are not regularly given a platform in mainstream media and news. Today, Marc continues that mission with his current work on a video documentary series called, “The Alabama Chronicles”, which features Dr. Martin Luther King’s Montgomery, Alabama barber and other key players in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Marc, thank you for joining us today. Marc Steiner (MS): My pleasure to be here. DCA: Okay. So, how did you emerge as a radio talk show host? MS: Out of a cocoon. No, I, getting on the radio for me was an accident. I mean, it didn't, was not part of my plan. It just kind of happened. I had gone, this is how it happened. So I went to the dentist, and sitting in the dentist waiting room was the general manager of WJHU who’s a friend of mine, Dennis Keeta, because a few years earlier I had worked to produce a series out of that station in the late nineties, late eighties, called the history of Jewish music. And then for a number of reasons, I left the place in good stead. And he said to me, “We're thinking about starting a public affairs radio show. And we know you know the city so well, from the street corners to the corporate boardrooms, what do you think?” and I said, for some reason, what came out of my mouth was, “Well, I should be the host.” And he said, “But you’ve never done radio,” and I said, “Well, that's true. But what difference does that make? I can learn radio,” and so I didn't let it go after that. And then so one day he just said, “Okay, Marc, here we go. Every Tuesday and Thursday night, seven o'clock, after All Things Considered,” no, “Every Tuesday night, after All Things Considered at seven o'clock. This is your studio, this is your microphone, this is your desk. Good luck.” And so that's how it started. And then folks started helping me produce it and it just developed from there. A student from Hopkins, his name is Roger Sorkin, who’s now a filmmaker, wrote to me saying that he was graduating and that his parents would pay his salary for a year, and could he work for me. So he became my first producer. And we moved from Tuesdays and Thursdays to Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. And then in 1995, we moved to five days a week, two hours a day. So it was absolutely, it happened on accident, but I'm glad it happened. DCA: Awesome. And then like, I guess what were the kind of stories that you covered as you did this radio show, like what was the first radio show you did when you first started working? Sorry. MS: That's cool. The very first show was a debate between four women on Norplant. And Norplant, I don’t know if you all know what Norplant was, but Norplant was a contraceptive device they would put into, under the skin of women, so they wouldn't get pregnant. And it was highly controversial because it was being used only on poor women of color, poor black women in the city. And so there was a huge uproar around it. And so we had this raging debate for an hour and a half. The first shows were an hour and a half long. So it was a huge raging debate on that, and that's where it began, that was the first show. But then after that, I mean, I covered, I mean I've always been involved in community affairs, I've always been fighting against racism in this country since I was a kid. And so that, and the community rights, and also interviewing authors and ideas, it became, you know, a plethora of things. But so things that I cared about is what I brought to the airwaves. I was just lucky that everybody, like, also cared about them, or wanted to care about them or learned about them. So it worked. At least it seems to work too. DCA: That's really awesome. And then was there like, I guess anything from your life prior that, like, influenced the work? Because, like, it's clear that when you went into radio, like, you already had this, like, this idea that you wanted to, like, these stories you wanted to tell, these people you wanted to amplify your voices? Was there anything from your life beforehand that, like, gave you this drive? MS: Well, I think there's a couple things. I mean, I had a fairly eclectic existence professionally. And so you know, I was involved in theater, I was a community organizer, I’d been a union organizer, I’d been a therapist, and all mostly in poor working class communities where I worked. And so that was what the point of view I brought with me, it was like, one of the most important things to me was having a program where the voices that are not heard are now heard. Doesn't mean you cancel out the folks that you’d usually hear the, you know, the leading politicians and the business leaders and all the rest, academic leaders, but it's bringing in the voices of others. It was for me, you know, let me give us an example. I mean, it was bringing people into discussions that people would not ordinarily do. In other words, you can, whenever you talk about civil rights or races, is when you bring black folks on your show, that's what people do. So my idea was to really change all that up. To do that, but also, no matter what we're talking about, to ensure that women and people of color are part of that discussion. That was a huge motivating factor for me to do the work. And so what that meant was, if I was going to do a program on cosmology, or on astrophysics, let's say, which we did a bunch, because I did a whole series with Hubble, on the work that their space telescope, I made sure that they're always women, astrophysicists, and astronomers and black folks who were nuclear physicists, were on that show, so that the voices were heard, and you create a new sense of what is possible and what people hear. That way people hear and see is what gives them the perceptions, what's around them. And so to me, that was to work at changing that. And so that became a big part of it. And, you know, everything I've worked in, I brought to the show, I mean, I spent years working in prisons and programs that were alternatives to people being incarcerated, and we brought that to the airwaves and brought those voices to the airwaves, things like that. And so I tried to really mix it up and create something that gave you a sense of a larger community, and not just the same narrow thing most people do in their radio shows. DCA: That's great. And then, you mentioned about amplifying the voices of others. So what does it mean to be an ally to communities involved in the Civil Rights Movement and Black Lives Matter? MS: Interesting question. I, first of all, the word ally is part of the nomenclature for the last ten years, not one that we used coming up, but for me, you can use the word ally, you can also use the word solidarity, you can use the word, there's a lot of ways you can describe it. But, I was, alright, so when I was a kid, I was a civil rights worker. So I'm seventy-five now and when I, let me take it way back. So when I was eleven in 1957, remember this is Baltimore 1957, Baltimore was a legally segregated city. The black and white neighborhoods were just that, black and white neighborhoods, and they were legally segregated. I came from a pretty middle class home. And as a lot of people in the neighborhood, they had domestics working in their house, or a woman worked in the house. And so that was the case in our home as well. And her name is Mrs. Moselle Jackson, this is important to the story. This is what happened. This changed the whole nature of my existence because at eleven-years-old, I wanted to be a Boy Scout more than anything in the world, all I wanted to do was be a Boy Scout. You know, my uncle from England sent me the original Handbook, I read it. I was out of my mind reading it, I was like I gotta go be a Boy Scout, I got to go camping, I got to do this. So one day, my mother was sitting at the kitchen table with Mrs. Jackson and Mr. Dennis Foster, her nephew, came to pick her up as usual, he was sitting at the table. They're all having coffee and cake and talking. And I came downstairs saying, I’ve got to join the Boy Scouts. You know, I'm eleven. I’ll be eleven next week, I’ve got to join. And so I guess I was ten, almost eleven. And my mother said, oh, and my mother’s a Brit, was British, so she had this English accent. And she said, “Alright, love. I’ll sign you up straightaway, Monday morning, Beth Tfiloh,” which was the synagogue. And I said, “But Mom, I don't want to be in a troop of all Jewish kids,” because I had this mythology in my head about, you know, that Boy Scouts were about all kinds of guys, little boys, getting together. And so Mr. Foster said, “I'm a Scoutmaster, you can join my troop.” So my mother knew exactly what was going on at that moment. And she looked at him and she looked at me, I'll never forget it, and she said, “Oh, that's a lovely idea.” And so that Monday, Mr. Foster comes by and picks me up and drives me to his scout troop, and so we went from the northwest side on Forest Park, all the way down North Avenue, making a right on Broadway, down Ashland Avenue. And there I was at the Faith Baptist Church. And it was an integrated troop because I integrated the troop. And so that was the beginning of a huge lesson for me about race and class that changed the course of my existence while I was a kid, and for the rest of my life. And it's where I first confronted racism at the Boy Scout camp. That summer, I was eleven-years-old and it was one of those things where I was walking down to get my merit badge in swimming, and I think in canoeing, one of those two things, and we were the only black troop there. And a Boy Scout from another troop was leaning over a fence post on my way down to go swimming and he said, “Where's your trooper?” I pointed to the grove we were camped in, and he said, “What are you doing in a troop with all them N’s?” And I was devastated that a Boy Scout would use that word. I was a kid. I was a little boy. I didn't know, you know. And so that began changing things for me. I mean, everything began to kind of unfold in terms of the contradictions in our society. I remember, as a little boy, we were driving from the Boy Scout meeting and a whole bunch of guys in his car, and they stopped at this donut shop on Broadway, and everybody piled out of the car, and I sat there. And the Scoutmaster, Mr. Dennis Foster came over and said, “Come on, Marc.” And I said “No, I’ll sit here. I’ll wait.” He said, “No, no, no, you don’t understand. Wherever we can go, you can go.” And I knew that wherever I could go, he couldn't go. So all these things sort of happening to me as a kid, and it began to change the nature of how I looked at the world and, you know, being ostracized in my community, because I was in an all black troop, and I had these guys come over to visit me at the house and spend the night and that was a no go for a lot of guys in my neighborhood, you know. And then at thirteen-years-old, almost fourteen, I walked my first picket line at Mondawmin Shopping Center at the White Coffee Pot. And that's when I started working in the Civil Rights Movement. So that was like, for me that was, as a little boy, all these things had happened, and I won't go on and on, but the police thing can happen and they were kind of earth shaking and changed the nature of my perceptions of the world. And they never stopped. But that's where it began. DCA: Wow that's, yeah, that's incredible. Going off that similar, like, how do you define and enact good allyship? MS: So I suppose that’s what you asked in the first place, I'm sorry I digress too much. So, okay, to me, there's a lot of ways to look at that question. So if you start with the assumption that one of the most defining factors in America is racism and race, which it is, it's divided union movements, class struggles, all kinds of things in our country, besides being a completely repressive and oppressive regime for hundreds of years for black folks in America, and other people of color as well. So, I think part of that, to me, is you always have to stand up to it. If it happens in the course of your daily work, if it happens in the course of your family, if it happens wherever it does, you've got to stand up and speak up and say something. You don't just let it happen. And I think it also means that, you know, this is, I'm just preparing now for an interview with Hy Thurman, who's an old friend of mine who is a part of a group called the Young Patriots, who were members, some of them used to be members of the Klan, and the Ku Klux Klan. And they live in a neighborhood called uptown Chicago. And they formed the first Rainbow Coalition back in 1967, ’68, with the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, who were Puerto Ricans, and the Brown Berets, who were Mexican Americans, and the American Indian Movement in Chicago. And so, building these cross racial coalitions to fight for justice is something that's been going on in my life for forever. And to me, that to me is as, I mean, when people say ally, sometimes the system that it’s in support of, black movements and against racism, and that is critical, but it's got to be more than that. You have to, from my perspective, be willing to organize in diverse communities and other communities in your own community, to build those kinds of coalition's to make that happen. I think that that is, that to me is key to it. So that's why I've never really in my own life never really used the word ally just because it's not in my nomenclatures, not where I come from. I'm more, I mean, I think about how you organize and fight racism, and how you organize and fight for economic and social justice in this country, and how you always confront racism everytime you see it, every time you hear it. And as someone who grew up as an organizer in the sixties and early seventies, organizing in mostly white working class communities. That to me is a critical part of what you do, if you really want to change things, building these coalitions. I don’t know if that answers your question, but that's, I'm happy to probe it more, if you’d like. DCA: No, I think you answered it just fine. It's just very interesting throughout doing, like, a few of these interviews, just, like, hearing everyone's, like, perspective and relationship with these words, which is something that, like, we don't think about a lot our own relationship with, like, what do words mean, and what do they mean to us? So I think it's really important. So thank you for your answer to that. Bringing it back to your work with radio as well as media, why do you think it is important for journalists and media to cover social injustice in communities such as Baltimore? MS: Why it’s important for media to do so, is that what you said? Why it’s important for media to do that? DCA: For journalists and media, yes. MS: Well you see, first of all, you got to think about what is journalism? I mean, what is, that to me is, journalism is kind of morphing and changing over the years. And so growing up, you know, there were, for me, there were three stations on television. ABC, CBS and NBC. That was it. Those three. Then PBS came along a little later, then Fox, the forty-five stuff came in even later. But there were three major stations and the idea of media was, whether it was print or TV or radio, was that it was supposed to be objective journalism. And so, but what does that mean? I mean, objective, I think objective is a really difficult thing to get to. Because we live very subjective lives, in terms of how we feel and see things. And then you got to remember that almost all the hosts, almost everybody on camera, and behind the mic, and radio, were white men, unless you were in the black media, then they were mostly black men, and some women, but mostly black men. And so, even in Baltimore the radio stations, while they are still segregated in some ways, still very segregated. I mean you had WSID and WEAA. There were just a few black stations, you know, that were on the air, mostly other stuff was white. So, but you looked at journalists who were supposed to be objective, but never really was. And I think that the ensuing movements in the Civil Rights Movement, Anti-War Movement, other things were happening, change that began to change the nature of media itself. So that now we have media which is, in some ways, really partisan. And so media is always a changing landscape. And I think that, for me, the important role that media plays is one that exposes the contradictions, that exposes the inequities. But just more than that, it's helping the world find solutions, to create the discussions that allow people to find the solutions to what we face. You know, and I made no bones about where I stood the whole time I was on radio. I couldn't hide who I was, I wasn't gonna hide who I was, but I also began to realize that even in the places that I might oppose politically, that the truth lives in every corner. There's truth in every corner. That no one has the lock on it. And the media's job is to hear it, and to listen to it, and then to bring it into play and into dialogue with the other. And I think that that's important. I mean, I think that, you know, you might hear, I could give an example, I hope this connects. Back in the late, in the sixties, this actually happened in the spring of sixty-eight. I was in a meeting in Chicago with the Young Patriots, which was the Appalachian white group of guys who came out of a gang in Chicago that worked with the Panthers, you know, the Lord's, that I described earlier. And there was a meeting taking place in Uptown, which was the poor white neighborhood. And the Black Panthers were there talking to this group of mostly poor white folks. And they talked about police brutality, which was affecting both communities. And Bobby Lee from the Panthers said, you know, “We have to stand and march to the police station together, and we have to stand and fight these cops, we can't allow this brutality to go on.” And an older white guy jumps up out of the back with this deep Southern accent, And he says, literally, he jumped up and said, “Well if that's what them N’s said, then I'm walking with them.” And everybody stopped, he said “What?” Because he used the word you know? And then Bobby Lee and the other Panther over there went over to him, put their arms around him and said, “That's right, brother, we're marching together.” And one of the things that came out of that was that that affected this man's attitude about race and racism and what he said and how he said it and what he had thought, that it was common struggle. And I say that because, to me, that's where the truth is in every corner. You have to listen and not put your own thoughts and feelings sometimes into what you hear. You got to really hear what the other person has to say. Listening is key to making media work. And not just spouting but listening, and that's how you begin to change people's hearts and minds, if you're willing to listen, and then you build on that listening. And so to me, that has been kind of what I really learned the most. And I think I picked that up. And I really learned that in media because when I first started out in radio, I did some work for the John Hopkins Center for American Indian Health, and I went to a couple of reservations, and there was one meeting, and there was this guy who was Cherokee, he was like a holy man and a writer and a thin

Interview of Rob Ferrell

A local organizer and multi-disciplined creative, Rob Ferrell, discusses his first experiences with the Black Lives Matter movement as a staff photographer/videographer at Goucher College in 2013-2015, with the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray prompting action for the movement. He then discusses how the fire and passion for the movement he saw in young people around him inspired him to get more involved and join workshops like that of the Baltimore Racial Justice Action group which provided him with antiracism education as well as become a more active member in the movement through organizing and his work with Organizing Black. Rob then goes on to talk about Organizing Black's current campaign to defund the Baltimore Police Department, and the issues surrounding race and policing in the community. He also discusses the organization's collaboration with members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Afterwards, Rob talks about his own photography work, specifically the story behind his photo of Melvin Townes, as well as photography inspirations, the importance of the narrative of the Black Lives Matter movement being told from the perspective of protestors, organizers, and individuals who are currently living through what it is fighting for, rather than the individuals who are merely observing it, and what he wants his audience to ultimately take away from his photography work.This interview was conducted during the 2021 Interdisciplinary CoLab as part of the project, From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter: Oral Histories of the Lived Experience in Baltimore. Transcript is edited.From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter: Oral Histories of the Lived Experience in Baltimore Date: 7 June 2021 Location: Online via Webex programming Interviewer: Lorra Toler Transcription: Deysi Chitic-Amaya Interviewee: Rob Ferrell Length: 00:37:57 00:00:04 Lorra Toler (LT): Hello, this is Lorra Toler from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, summer CoLab project “From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter: oral histories of the lived experience in Baltimore.” The day is June seventh, 2021 and today I will be interviewing Rob Ferrell. Rob is an artist, organizer, archivist, designer and activist based in the Baltimore area. He is grounded in the black, radical tradition and came into the movement through the frame of direct action as a lifelong learner and teacher. He works as a lead trainer in the Ellen Baker organizing Institute to build the capacity of the next generation of black organizers. He currently serves as a senior organizer and cofounder of Organizing Black, a grassroots member lead organization focus on transformation on direct action, political education and participatory governance in Baltimore city. He is also a national member of the Black Youth Project 100, an alumni of black organizing for leadership and dignity. As an experienced multi-disciplined creative specializing in photography and video production, he focuses on capturing black organizing and liberation from an oppressive society. Thank you for joining us today. My first question for you is what initially brought you to this line of work? 00:01:32 Rob Ferrell (RF): I'll just for the record, my name is pronounced fuh-RELL, just because this is recorded and I figured it'd be helpful for the record, but... What brought me into the work, so I was working at Goucher College. I worked there as the staff photographer/videographer for around eight years from 2013 to 2021. And you know, if you're working with the movement, history of the black lives matter movement, 2013 was a very pivotal year. With the murder of Trayvon Martin and then 2014 is the murder of Michael Brown, and then 2015 involved the murder of Freddie Gray. So, during that time I was around young people and as a young person myself, and they showed an amount of passion and an amount of drive to organize that inspired me. Young people’s radical imagination and a willingness to transform it, sure lit a fire underneath me and allowed me to see the possibility of organizing it in general, so. But I also at that time, I didn't have any real training, understanding, like, they were like running circles around me with, like, theory and like language and so I, I decided to like take a workshop with a Baltimore Racial Justice Action, which is a local group here in Baltimore that does workshops and antiracism education and then, like, after I took that workshop like the blinders were removed, the proverbial blinders and I realize that now that I can—I can't unsee these things now. Now my life has to be somehow changed to address... all the ills of society that I see all around me. So that's what really got my start was being around young people, the fire of young people, and then... Yeah, working at, ironically working at a higher institution, but I was in a position in which I had a lot of freedom of movement and autonomy as the campus photographer/videographer. So I could be very subversive in the ways that I showed up in spaces, I could kind of come and go as I pleased. And, like build relationships with people across campus so that— I use that position within the institution to, to, to essentially organize. And then I started branching out after that ,showing up to like every single protest that I possibly could in Baltimore and in similar to the ways in which people did in twenty— summer of 2020 after George Floyd was murdered, a lot of people were mobilized, and and they just didn't know what to do and they just started showing up to protest. That was me. But in 2000, thirteen-fourteen. And then I eventually found my home with my people and I guess we'll talk more about Organizing Black later, but I found those people around that time. 00:05:25 RF: I think you're on mute. LT: My apologies. What exactly does activism mean to you? 00:05:34 RF: I don't use the word activism and I don't identify as an activist. I identify as an organizer and I guess I can talk a little bit about the difference between the two, or at least the ways that I perceive the difference between the two. Activism is really a broad word that can mean a variety of different things. Um, but the crux of it for me is that activism is essentially an individualistic framework, and any individual can identify as an activist as long as you're doing something that that aligns with a cause, you can be an activist and that's essentially what it means right? As an organizer, you are moving people and aligning people with a shared purpose towards a common goal, right? So, the idea of wielding—building a depth and volume of relationships and then aligning those relationships across a shared purpose towards a shared goal, right? So, I identify as an organizer and I think activism is some—still somewhat imbued and embedded in organizing, but it's not my primary identific—identifier. 00:07:08 LT: Well, thank you for clarifying that and that you make a really good point. So, like, as an organizer, what specific issues are you working to change in the community and how have you gone about doing this? 00:07:25 RF: So, right now I'm leading Organizing Black’s campaign to defund the Baltimore police department. I'm a senior organizer with Organizing Black and so this campaign to defund the police is all around the idea that police, well, they're inherently anti black, right? They were born out of slave patrols and they are inherently violent and we, as a society have given them way too much power and resources and expect for them to solve any and all problems in our society and it's a simple solution that we can just take money from them and invest in the root causes that of the problems that we're actually talking about, right? So we know that crime is not or criminality, things that we label that anyway are—is done out of survival not necessarily out of people being quote/unquote, bad people, people in a, in a capitalistic society are pitted against each other to fight for resources. Um, and so, the communities in our society that have the—that are the most safe have the most resources so if we just take the money that we're investing in police and invest it into social determinants of health, like, literally education, hou— affordable and public housing, um...health care and and all these jobs, right? All the things that people need to actually survive, then we actually can be a more healthy society and police become obsolete, or at least in, in the ways in which we're using them today, so that is the campaign that I'm working on. How am I doing that? So we're rolling out a a canvas right now actually to go door to door in black communities and talk to directly impacted folks to learn about their experiences, but also to talk with them around ideas for, for, for alternatives to policing. Right, ‘cause when we say “Defund the police”, people are like, well, what is, what are we going to do about “Insert problem here”, right? And that's the thing about police abolition, it's not just about abolishing something, it's about generating a new future, right? New possibilities. So, but we have to collaboratively work on what those are right? No one is saying that they have the answer. Like Organizing Black or myself. No one is— we are not saying, “Hey, we have the answer to transform society and a create a new public safety mechanism”, but collaboratively black people have the ability to, to, to build that together and so we have to organize people we have to talk to them door to door, we have to build consensus, we have to build power again to be able to show that power to the government so that they actually follow through on defunding the police. But also there needs to be a base of black citizens and residents that are organized to to build solutions together. 00:11:10 LT: Yeah, you make a great point about, like issues with the police and how it's basically an attack against black lives. So could you discuss more about how like these incidents of racial injustices directly impact functions of the community and what long term impact do these incidents have? 00:11:38 RF: Functions of the community, I'm not sure exactly what you mean by that? I would say police violence as a like, directly inhibits the freedom of movement of black people, right? If you look at the way that they operate in our societ— in in our communities.They like, sit on corners monitoring whether you're hanging out in front of a corner store or whatever, and so, yeah, they're, they're actively trying like to patrol our neighborhoods, and yeah, I would say, just in general, it's just restricting our, our freedom of movement, our freedom to, to, to be, to just be black, to be useful, like often if they target youth and criminalize activity that young children do just naturally, whether they're black, brown, purple, green, or whatever, but it happens in black community specifically, right? So, black children are not able to be children and to do child- like things. As far as functions of the community, I'm still not sure exactly what you mean by that question. So if you want to...clarify or expand on that. 00:13:06 LT: I think you covered it well. RF: Ok. LT: Oh what, so what does civil rights mean to you? 00:13:18 RF: I really don't use that word. What it means to me is generally the history of the movement, when I think of the word civil rights, I think of—of the sixties and and the fifty—fifties through seventies, really. I think of SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. I think of folks traveling from all over the East Coast to to the South East of America to, to organize black communities to be able to vote leading up to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965. That's what I think of when I think of civil rights. I'm not a lawyer and I think that word only really gets used in legal contexts and in contemporary society, yeah, it really has no real weight or meaning—meaning for me other than like, kind of historical context. 00:14:29 LT: Okay, so in your approach with organizing, is there any strategies you take from, like, those earlier time periods? 00:14:41 RF: Yeah, I would say I kind of— it's nice to have this on record— that I'm in the lineage of SNCC, right? I'm still directly working with our SNCC elders today. Ms. Betty Garman Robinson who's Baltimore base here, I think she has extensive archives at the University at Baltimore and other folks like Courtland Cox and Judy Richardson are deeply involved in the advising of Organizing Black’s leadership today and I would say [laughs] what they always tell us, is that the people have to lead you [laughs], right? Strong people don't need strong leaders. So...yeah, being in a relationship, deep relationship with black people and not trying to dictate to them what is needed for their lives, allowing them to lead you and um, is probably the most important facet of their leadership style that we try, and continue today. What's required for that? Like I said with SNCC, their organizing history was to literally travel and embed themselves in communities. Whe—whether it's Georgia or Alabama or Mississippi and they had to be led by— they couldn't air drop into these communities and tell them what—they had to be led by those communities and helped to organize them. Here in Baltimore like, since most of my organization is from here— I'm not from Baltimore, I came here for college in 2004—and I've kind of been here ever since, but you know, folks are indigenous Baltimoreans, and so it's not the same level of urgency in the sense that, like, you're not from this place so you need to like branch out and like organize that community really, really effectively to be able to, like have any influence in that space. Folks are from here and these are their neighborhoods, and, you know, they can organize their communities and their families and their families families and their friends, et cetera and then the circle just gets wider. Um, but yeah, leading, having—allowing the community to lead you is probably the most important lesson from SNCC, and from our elders that they pass on and continue to emphasize for us. 00:17:52 LT: So you make a great point about the importance of working with your elders. So I want to ask you, why do you think we're still seeing a lot of the same issues that they were fighting for, in the past? 00:18:11 RF: Because it's about the structure of our entire society? And, if you look at it, basically a numbers game we’re activating and mobilizing around three to five percent of the country to try and shift the entire society, right? So it's a massive system, that has many different webs and branches to it, and it's in its own interest to continue, right? So whether capitalism underguards it right? And that's the reason why mass incarceration, even though there's relative consensus, even across liberal and conservative leadership, that it's bad for society, that it makes money, so it can—it will continue. Whether it's people investing in those corporations, those corporations then lobbying the government, like right? It's a continuous cycle. Yeah, our entire society is built on Black death and and there's no March or [laughs] one protest that’s that's going to bring that massive system to a halt. You would have to literally destroy America. 00:19:46 LT: Okay, thank you. So now I want to talk more about your work with photography. So why do you think it's important to take photos, like, during these movements? In the past and in the present now? 00:20:05 RF: It's important for people that are active—directly active in these spaces to tell our own stories. What I would not want is for thirty, fifty, 100 years from now, there are only to be photographs taken by random white people, or white journalists and photojournalists that are able to to create a narrative around what we did and so I came to Baltimore to go to MICA, so I'm classically trained as a photographer and artist, and it, it doesn't make sense—it makes the most sense for me to be utilizing the skills that I naturally have for the sake of the movement. Although I am an organizer, that does not cancel out my artistry. I can do both at the same time and so, yeah, it's important for us to tell our own stories. 00:21:09 LT: So in telling your story, are you influenced by any other photographers, or any photographs in particular? 00:21:20 RF: I would say I'm mostly influenced by my contemporary peers, the work of Devin Allen, he’s from West Baltimore. The work of Joe Giordano, he’s a native Baltimorean as well but he’s white, but he’s kind of an OG in the space and have been shooting for a long time. The work of Shan Wallace, also a native black Baltimorean that focuses on the life and beauty and joy of blackness. And then the work of Gioncarlo Valentine, who’s also a native Baltimorean, but...they focus specifically in their archives on black male bodies, black male life, black male emotional and social issues and they've, they've grown and developed into an editorial photographer that does a lot of like big assignments for like the New York Times and Esquire, and, you know, every, all these magazines and stuff so it's cool. I have a kind of a small net of contemporary photographers that they really influence my work. 00:22:58 LT: Are there any stories or moments behind any photos that really resonate with you? 00:23:07 RF: Yeah, there's a photograph. I'm trying to pull up this story for you all, so give me one second, but it's—it's a few years old, so I always forget the young man's name. July eighth, 2016, I took this photo of Melvin Townes. He was about 16 years old at the time and he, he directly confronted a Baltimore police officer. He has, he's kind of standing erect with a black pow—a black power fist raised and this officer is sitting in the front seat of a paddy wagon and his windows rolled down, and he’s giving this most smug, pig-like, face and so you're looking at Melvin from the back as you—he directly stares this man down and it was this like showdown, like, he stood there for a solid, like, at least a minute, and this was during the flow of like, a natural flow of a march where this paddy wagon was parked on the side of the road and he stopped and engaged with this officer and this officer’s response is just so smug and like dead and like anti black and hateful. That was definitely a photograph that like stood out to stood out to me and his history, so, “July fifth, 2016, just 3 days earlier, Melvin was walking to his brother's house at night when he noticed an officer arresting a man and thinking of the high profile instances of police brutality, he went over to observe the situation to make sure the man was okay. The officers told him to leave repeatedly and he hesitated, but eventually did, but wasn't able to get far before BPD officer Carlos Rivera Martinez chased him down, slammed him to the ground, put a knee in Melvin's back and punched him repeatedly. Although Melvin was hospitalized, he felt lucky to be alive and to walk away from the situation”, and so, like Melvin, like, during that night, that protest, he was just full of rage like in, in, on fire. But it wasn't known to me at the time that that had just recently happened to him, and these are the stories of black people's interactions with police every day in Baltimore and that's hopefully what my work can capture when folks are taking to the streets. That every photograph or every person in in the street has a story. Every person in the street has an interaction with the police. I myself have terrible interactions with the police, so that's what I hope to capture in my work. 00:26:28 LT: Yeah, I think you gave a very vivid description of that picture even though, like, we aren’t able to see it. I can definitely picture it in my head. So, I wanna ask you, what do you want your audience to take away from observing your art and photos like that? 00:26:50 RF: Yeah, I-I think there's magic in resistance, and in imagining new possibilities, new futures and I want people to see that magic. I also spend a significant amount of my time photographing black organizers outside of organizing spaces, and in their maroon spaces, so spaces they've—safe spaces that they've intentionally created to liberate themselves from society, so essentially photographing them at rest and at ease. And so I don't want all of my work to be consumed by the idea of, of rage or anger or being a victim, like black people are full of power and magic, and we can manifest these spaces where we can be safe and loving and caring, caring for each other and so. Yeah, I want people to see the whole picture, like, when people think of me, even in this context of this interview, I want people to think of, like, who I loved, like what I did for fun like the fact that my entire life is not based on and my entire worth as a human being is not based off of my ability to resist and so I want my, my photographs to expand folks’ ideas of who we are, and then also capture the work that we're doing. 00:28:42 LT: So, in your many years of organizing and doing art and photography, do you feel that progress is being made in the Baltimore community? 00:29:02 RF: I think whenever we ask these questions, the key is, how are we defining these words? What is—what do we define as progress, right? How are we measuring that progress? I would say there's definitely a growing sense of... political education, people— people understanding that police are bad, people understanding that we need to shift resources, to invest in poorly invested areas of our society, I would say that structurally, nothing has changed,

Interview of Michaela Brown

Local organizer and executive director of Organizing Black, Michaela Brown, discusses her emergence as a leader while growing up in the city through involvement in such programs as the Baltimore Algebra Project, Peer to Peer: Youth Enterprises, and the Baltimore Urban League. Afterwards, she talks about how her youth experiences influence her organizing career, first starting out in working to improve education for disenfranchised youth and then moving onto police brutality organizing following the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Freddie Gray, and Korryn Gaines by police. She then goes on to talk about her experience in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray and what she did as well as what she saw others do during the Baltimore Uprising. Finally she talks about the goals and solutions she hopes to achieve through her work as well as discuss the importance of marginalized voices such as women and LGBT members of the community being brought to the forefront of movements such as Black Lives Matter just as much as black male voices.This interview was conducted during the 2021 Interdisciplinary CoLab as part of the project, From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter: Oral Histories of the Lived Experience in Baltimore. Transcript is edited.From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter: Oral Histories of the Lived Experience in Baltimore Date: 16 June 2021 Location: Online via Webex programming Interviewer: Lorra Toler Transcription: Deysi Chitic-Amaya Interviewee: Michaela Brown Length: 00:59:52 00:00:02 Lorra Toler (LT): Hello, this is Lorra Toler from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s Summer CoLab Project, “From the Civil Rights movement to Black Lives Matter: Oral Histories of the Lived Experience in Baltimore”. The day is June sixteenth, 2021 and today I will be interviewing Michaela Brown. Michaela is an executive—executive director and organizer based in the Baltimore area. She has thirteen years of experience in direct-action grassroots organizing. She has served as a vol—as a volunteer with the Baltimore Algebra Project from 2007 to 2012 where she was then hired as the co-director in 2012 and lead organizer in 2013. She later served on the Baltimore Algebra Project board of directors from 2014 to 2016. Michaela also worked as the first coordinator and organizer at the Baltimore Black Workers Center, and led work with Baltimore Bloc from 2014 to 2016, during the time they impacted the Baltimore Uprising, Afromation, and the City Hall sit-in. She currently serves as the executive director and cofounder of Organizing Black where she believes it is imperative to create safe spaces for black organizers to learn and grow. Her leadership is influenced by the concurrent experiences of being black and a woman, as she believes it is important for people of these identities to occupy leadership positions and organizations spaces. Thank you for joining us today. Uh, my first question for you is what initially brought you to this line of work. 00:01:47 Michaela Brown (MB): Um, that's a good question. So, I think it all stems from me, being a policy debater, starting in middle school and from there that put me in relationship with organizations, like the Baltimore Algebra Project through a coalition called Peer to Peer: Youth Enterprises. And so, in 2007, they had a, an extravaganza which is when they put on a showcase of all the youth led or run organizations that train the young people in skill sets so like it may have been in a videography, it may have been in tutoring, it may have been in organizing, but the point of the extravaganza was to show young people there are opportunities out here that isn't working at Target or working in McDonalds so forth and so on. And so from that first extravaganza I became a part of the Peer to Peer Coalition, um, while still working at the Baltimore Urban League, and volunteering at the Baltimore Algebra Project. 00:03:00 LT: Very nice. Um, so in previous interviews, we asked this question, and we got like, mixed answers, so I want to ask what does activism mean to you and, like, how do you define it? 00:03:17 MB: I think I think, so, I was thinking that every organizer is an activist, but every activist is not an organizer. And so what that means is that activism, literally is like the act of raising awareness about specific causes. Where, um, if you think of something like an advocate, an advocate is a person who advocates on behalf of people who may not be able to speak for themselves. So that could be a lawyer, you can even think of lobbyists as advocates, because they go to the hill and they advocate on the behalf of the people for certain bills, right? And then you have organizers who are trained in a skill set that, and it can vary across the board because you can be a digital organizer, you can be a direct action practitioner, you can be a labor organizer and they have a very specific skill and niche in things that they organize around to raise awareness to train the community in and to advocate on the behalf of folks who may not be able to speak for themselves. But organizers, typically, or the goal should be for them to create a space for the community to speak for themselves and train them in the areas that they feel may be useful and beneficial for the community to be able to achieve the goal that they want to achieve so it goes beyond just posting on social media or making, you know videos or things of that nature. It's literally being in the community training people, maybe or maybe not creating an organization that there is around the organizer and so that would be a dif—[audio cuts out] 00:05:15 LT: So, what specific issues are you working to change in the community as an organizer and then how have you gone about doing this? 00:05:25 MB: So, over my career—if that's what we want to call it— as an organizer that has been different. So when I started out I was in education and youth job— that sounds weird— but essentially, I organized for young people, whether that was around education or employment. Um, and so education is about being able to get what was considered a quality education, so to go beyond what is provided to young people now, particularly in public schools, and make sure that, you know, schools had adequate funding, they had properly prepared teachers, schools had air condition, adequate food that, like, there was a whole list of things that we talked about as education organizers to show people that it goes beyond just what happens in the classroom. There are a lot of things that impact young people that, that has an effect on their education and their ability to get it. Along with youth jobs, which was around the conversation about providing skill based employment to young people beyond just youth works. Instead of telling young people to go work at Mcdonald's, the idea is that young people will get employed to work at the Baltimore Algebra Project, or Youth as Resources or Wide Angle Media and a whole list of other nonprofits that would give them an actual skill that they would be able to build upon through the program and at a high school. Um, especially since a lot of our high schools now do not provide trade education anymore and so then from there I went into police organizing or like police brutality organizing. So, after leaving the Baltimore Algebra Project, I ended up at Baltimore—what is it—Bloc, Baltimore Bloc, where they focus specifically on police brutality and supporting the families, who were impacted by the crimes of police officers and that was a natural transition based off, like, where we were in the world with things happening around us, like Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown Freddie Gray, Korryn Gains. 00:07:45 Um, and so I was doing that while also being the first coordinator and organizer at Baltimore Black Workers Center and their focus was around, similar to like the algebra project, so figuring out what the community needs work and how we could uplift those needs and organize and provide the skills around that and now at Organizing Black, our focus is in three main areas. So participatory governance, which is the idea that the citizens of Baltimore have the skills and the know how to be able to decide a policy agenda, the budget so forth and so on for our city. We don't need this very heavy top down approach that doesn't actually engage the community around what we should be budgeting for, how our city should run, things of that nature and that ties right into our defund the police campaign, which is around the idea that we Baltimore City. Surprisingly enough, we don't have control over the police, but we provide the largest portion of their budget and so, if policing was looked at as any other job, they would be seen as inadequate, right? They do not perform at the level in which they should perform. However, the budget increases every year. So, our goal is to decrease that budget and put it back into the community and areas in which would actually solve the things that police are claiming they're supposed to solve, right? So we all know that police are not a deterrent to crime and more importantly more policing doesn't solve homelessness, it doesn't solve the poor quality education, it doesn't solve food deserts or any, any things of that nature, right? So if we decrease that part of the budget, right? The part of the city budget that gets the most funding and then we put it in areas like education, mental health, housing we would then be able to see and show that policing isn't the answer to the issues that we see in our communities? I mean, so we've broken that down into two parts, we're asking for a thirty million dollar, like, community trust from where the community literally decides what happens with that thirty million dollars and the other seventy goes into in a sense funding the apparatus that will respond to quality of life issues that police are currently responding to, like, you know, mental health, vagrants, see things of that nature and make it so that they're like, quality, trench social workers. So, like, and that's that's a complicated piece there, but, like, there are people who are actually trained and informed on and the responses we need to deal with, you know mental health crisis versus police who are not trained and if they were to respond, and then there's more community violence because the police officer has now harmed someone who was literally in the middle of an episode. And then our third piece is around education and so we are currently a part of a coalition that is fighting for an elected school board. So we are, we either are the only one or one of the few areas in Maryland where the school board is not elected, our school board is appointed and so that then impact—those people have an impact on the decisions that are made about our students. However, a lot of those people don't live in our cities or their children don't go to our schools. So, the idea is that we should have people who are elected by the community that sit on the board instead of these appointed individuals who have no relationship if you will to the community to then be able to make better decisions for Baltimore City education. 00:11:50 LT: Thank you. So you discuss policing and your campaign to defund the police, so how do incidents racial injustices, directly impact community life and what long term influences do these have? 00:12:10 MB: I think that if we look at history, maybe as someone with a degree in history— that is what I went to school for— we know that we know a couple of things. So one, that black, brown and poor communities have always had a relationship of tension between them and police. Two, we also know that policing as we see it today is a direct, is direct correlation or in direct relationship to slave catchers and so that means regardless of the amount of training that police officers go through, regardless of the amount of community events, that police try to put on or participate in, the very foundation that policing was built on is a racist institution. Right? And so what that means is in its current iteration police can never not be non-racial, right it, it literally is built on the concept of race and so it has literally had an impact on our community since then. From slave patrol days to now there is a long deep history of the way that police do black children like, for example, we know we've literally been in conversations with former police officers who have said it, and it's also in data that police officers view black children as older, at least by two years than what they are compared to their white counterparts, that alone is not something that can be untrained. It's little I don't know how it's been ingrained in the way that policing occurs, but that is a a clear example of how it has an impact on our communities where we are told, or viewed as black men or black women when we're really thirteen year old boys and girls right? I mean that can have an impact on how the media, and even how people in the community view the crime and who is involved in it and so there are a lot of areas in which this, you know, the view of race and racism and policing impacts how we have conversations about crime, how we view crime. Why is it whenever we talk about crime, especially when we talk about black on black crime, which isn't a thing because race on race crime exists because our communities are still hyper segregated, whether we want to call it that or not. If you look at cities across the country, the overwhelming majority of cities are still segregated by race, intentional or not, because it can still be connected to things like red lining and making sure that black people stayed in certain communities, they couldn't get access to other communities, do public transportation and things of that nature. You know, that you have interactions good or bad with the people in close proximity. So, for most black communities, that would be black people, because that's how the communities are designed, but we don't have those same conversations about other racial groups right? The overwhelming majority of white people live amongst white people, the overwhelming majority of Asian folk live amongst Asian folks so forth and so on. But the only demographic that has the title, or a name for the crime that is committed in their communities are black folk, black on black crime and so all of that impacts how police view us, how the media view us and the conversations that even we have amongst ourselves about the, the violence in our communities and so. There's no amount of training that can— you can't unlearn that unfortunately at least not through one training, not, you know, “Oh, I've been through one year of racial justice training as a police officer. Now I'm fixed”. No, the institution is much much older therefore it's going to take something much, much larger than, you know, some pockets of racial equity training here and there to be able to change the way that our community, our community see police, and how police see us. 00:16:25 LT: And then earlier you had brought up Freddie Gray, um, if you felt comfortable, could you talk about, like, what it was like, in Baltimore City at that time and how that experience was? 00:16:39 MB: I think, so for me in particular, um, in a sense, I would say that I was better prepared than most and the reason why is because I happen to be an organizer who was already dealing with these conversations with folks around the country and also with other families who have experienced similar things in Baltimore that didn't get the same like national profile as Freddie Gray’s murder. I think that at that time in Baltimore, just like in many of the other places that we saw before and after Freddie Gray, but that was the tipping point. Our communities, especially like, so I'm someone who grew up in Western district, I literally could walk from the house that I grew up in to Freddie Gray’s home. Um, and so growing up in Western district, knowing the type of police they are, that literally was the tipping point for that community. Freddie Gray wasn't the first and unfortunately, it wasn't the last they had to deal with the, the brutality that police, that particular police department inflicted on that community and so people were tired and got up, and there's something about it and I know that people have their opinions about whether or not what happened during the uprising is what should or should not have happened. 00:18:11 But people did what they felt like they needed to do to be able to make sure that there was a conversation that happened in Baltimore, even nationally about policing and the brutality that black, brown and poor communities face at the hands of the people who are supposed to protect and serve us. So, during that time, tensions were high. There was a lot of, there also was a lot of very positive community things that happened in the midst of the uprising, conversations happen. You know, there was dancing in the streets during the curfews. All types of things that that often times get missed when having the conversation about the uprising, people often only want to discuss, like, the CVS that caught fire, or the fire that was in Patterson Park, or any of the, any of the other things that are, quote/unquote seen as violence, instead of discussing, like, the community conversations that came out of out of it, or the, the way that the community figured out how to get medication and food to the elderly folk that didn't have access to any of those things because the curfews that were placed on our communities, there was some really great and dope programs, organizations and formations that came out of the uprising that has been able to lead to like, community gardening right? And having the conversation about who does this in our communities, and how we can do what we need to do, like urban farming to make sure that our communities have fresh fruits and vegetables. Um, and that wasn't something that was necessarily taking place prior to the uprising or not at larger scale. Um, and I think what was in terms of for me, I think the hardest things to grapple with during that time, was one of the fact that I was in the middle of taking finals in college, and I had to explain to my teachers, like, “I'm not going to be here because I need to be out there. 00:20:26 Some teachers understood because they already knew what I was about and other teachers didn't care, but that's another conversation in terms of, like, you know, how schools or not just schools, but institutions to do a better job of supporting students, workers, whatever it is when it comes to you know, trying situations in the communities that we live in, or are part of. I think the other hard thing was. I mean, literally having to deal with the police. So I think about the march that happened that led all the way to Oriole Stadium, where it ended up being like, this large barricade of police who decided it to be violent towards the protesters, but did nothing about the white uh, baseball goers, I guess is what we can call them behind them that were literally saying racial slurs and spitting at people and throwing alcohol on, on the protestors who were literally just trying to get people to hear their plea around the issue of police brutality. And I think in the remnants of the uprising, there's still a lot of things that haven't improved, despite all the things that happened on the uprising, our government still hasn't really been moved to do anything about the issues that were brought up during the uprising and, like, a good example would be the fact that the city council just unanimously passed the budget for fiscal year 2022, but did nothing to cut policing right, and so that is a very clear sign about where our government officials stand and where the community stands in terms of what we think should be done about police and police brutality in our city. 00:22:31 LT: So, what does civil rights mean to you? 00:22:41 MB: I mean, I think it means, I think that civil rights is the stepping stone or cornerstone to the movement that we see right now, in terms of Black Lives Matter, the movement, not the organization. Um, I think that if it wasn’t for the people, the organizations, whether we're talking about the people, you know, who didn't get highlighted for the Civil Rights era or those who did. If it was not for the blueprint and their footwork around issues of like voting rights and the other things that they were fighting for at that time, I'm not sure that the Black Lives Matter movement today would be where it is. I think that civil rights has definitely progress beyond, you know, or maybe, so, I think overall it is about black people or poor people or brown people, so marginalized as people being seen as people, being seen as individuals who have an impact on influence, you know, in the world as it is today, in society. I think on smaller terms, if we think about, like, you know, what we're often taught about on civil rights. I definitely think it has progressed beyond voting rights. Right? It's it's about things, it's about that and more, because unfortunately, even in 2021, there are people who still have to fight for the right to vote or the right to accessible voting. So, even though they can vote, there are all these things in place that still doesn't give them adequate and equal access to it. Um, and so it goes beyond that in this day and age, because we're talking about things like police brutality. We're talking about things about, like, housing and red lining again and gentrification and we're talking about health with an inclusion