Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Ifill, Sherillyn

Titel

The Problem We All Live With: A Speech at HUD in the Shadow of Baltimore

Ist Teil von

• Poverty & Race, 2016, Vol.25 (1), p.5

Ort / Verlag

Washington: Poverty & Race Research Action Council

Erscheinungsjahr

2016

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

EZB Electronic Journals Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This past spring when Baltimore erupted in days of unrest in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, I did a lot of media. Some of you may have seen some of it. When I did that media, I was asked a lot of questions about Baltimore. After all, I lived in Baltimore City for 20 years. I've now lived in Baltimore County for five years. I have taught at University of Maryland Law School for 22 years. And, although I am a native New Yorker, I really transplanted to Baltimore and took it on as my home and raised my children there. And so people had a lot of questions for me about what they were seeing on the television screen. They wanted to know why were young people so angry, why were they throwing things at the police. Why were people burning businesses in their own neighborhoods? Will the CVS ever come back? Why is there so much tension between the police and residents of West Baltimore? Why would Freddie Gray run from the police? Why were the streets of West Baltimore in such dilapidated condition that Baltimore City police could take arrestees on a "rough ride" to punish them in the back of a police van? How could Freddie Gray and his siblings have been so severely lead-poisoned in housing in Baltimore in the 1990s, 70 years after the dangers of lead paint were well-known around the world? What were we to make of an education system that appears to have failed not only Freddie Gray but his parents, who by some accounts are also unable to read and write? How does a community get to be West Baltimore, where Freddie Gray grew up and allegedly sold drugs and had that fateful encounter with the police, a West Baltimore where police officers don't live in the neighborhood, yet manage the streets in the community using a kind of merry-go-round of catch-and-release of young African-American men for low-level drug crimes? Who are these officers? Where do they live? Few realize that Baltimore played a pivotal and pioneering role in introducing residential segregation to northern cities. When the city council of Baltimore passed the first municipal ordinance requiring residential segregation in 1910, it was the talk of the nation. People from cities all over the country called the city council in Baltimore to find out "How did you do it? Send us the bill. Send us the language" and Baltimore literally taught the rest of the country about how to create municipal ordinances requiring residential segregation.