A warning that Baltimore failed to hear
As we all social distance to limit the spread of COVID-19, like everyone else, I have found myself taken by the images of desolate parks and streets, closed stores and empty ballparks. And I can’t help but think about how eerily similar it is to five years ago when the same conditions existed but for completely different reasons.
That is when the city erupted in unrest after the death of Freddie Gray.
Thinking back to that time, it makes me remember something Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said: “I think that we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard.”
Those famous words came more than 50 years ago, when Dr. King was asked to defend the rise of unrest among disaffected blacks during the Civil Rights Movement. Without hesitation, he defended the young activists who had taken to the streets — whose actions were so very different from his own pronounced path of peace and civil disobedience. To do anything less, he felt, would be to lose sight of the socioeconomic injustice that they were united in fighting.
I don’t like the word “riot,” when describing what unfolded in the streets of Baltimore following Freddie Gray’s killing. Yet, however it is described, what happened was undeniably the language of the unheard. It was a warning of the consequences of leaving people out and leaving people behind in our society. It was a warning that five years later, we have still failed to hear.
Freddie Gray’s death in police custody five years ago followed a string of tragic loss of life of young black men at the hands of the police in the region that drew far less attention — lives that included Anthony Anderson, Chris Brown and Tyrone West. It was that pain, barely heard until Freddie’s death, that also poured out of the soul of Baltimore and onto our streets.
To understand the full tragedy of Freddie’s death, we must confront the tragedy of his life. Because his death — and the outbreak of anger and emotion from the previously unheard that followed it — were about much more than the police and the dire need for police reform.
The fact is that arguably the most peaceful days of his life were his final ones, spent laying in a coma where he was surrounded by caring doctors and nurses. Where attorneys and community members vied to represent and advocate for him. Where a city knew his name and cared whether he lived or died.
Freddie Gray was born into poverty. His mom, Gloria, battled the horrible disease of drug addiction, like so many others. Maryland has the fifth highest rate of new moms addicted to opioids, including heroin.
Freddie Gray was poisoned by lead in the paint of his childhood home on N. Carey Street. Five micrograms of lead in a deciliter of blood is enough to cause cognitive and developmental disabilities. As a young child, Freddie Gray was diagnosed with 36 micrograms in his blood.
In the past two decades, a span almost as long as Freddie Gray’s short lifetime, roughly 100,000 children across the state of Maryland have been registered as having been poisoned by lead.
Freddie Gray spent his life in special education classes and ultimately dropped out of high school when he was in the 10th grade — at 18 years old.
Currently, in Maryland, only 40% of students are able to pass a 10th grade English test and an Algebra 1 test when they graduate high school.
Two years before Freddie died, his half brother, Raymond Lee Gordon, was gunned down in downtown Baltimore. One of 235 souls silenced by homicide that year. Last year Baltimore ended 2019 with 348 homicides. Many in our city live with the trauma that comes with the consequences of the carnage.
Freddie Gray’s life was poverty and violence. Trauma and hopelessness. His death was an exclamation point on an unspoken story. The fate he was condemned to was unacceptable five years ago. The worst part is, he was not an outlier then, and he isn’t one now either.
Five years after Freddie Gray’s death, five years after the unheard souls filled our streets and our news cycles, how much has changed? I wish I had something to tout. That we would have ended the maninduced horrors of having children and families living with lead piping and paint. But we still endure the unheard screams and castigated fate from a toxin that we have known about for generations. I wish I could celebrate that the city, with the assistance of the state, had prioritized transportation assets connecting our most undervalued areas with job assets. Connecting opportunity with ambition. I wish I could say we were intentional about addressing our history and pain with a truth, trauma, and reconciliation process where we could acknowledge the damage caused, its lingering impacts, and decide how to move forward.
Sadly, we have done none of this. And we have continued to rely on individuals to clean up the debris that results from broken systems.
The question we must now confront is much larger than what we are failing to hear. It is what we are failing to do about it.
Wes Moore (moore@robinhood.org) is a nonprofit executive, a bestselling author, combat veteran and resident of Baltimore, where he lives with his wife and two children. His upcoming book, “Five Days,” exploring the uprisings that followed Freddie Gray’s death from a kaleidoscope of perspectives, is due to be released later this year.