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| Police arrested 5,500 people, including this man, in chaos that rent the city along racial lines. ap/file |
Baltimore tries to heal wounds from riots – 40 years later
Through dance, drama, and candid conversations, city residents erase lingering marks of the social chaos that erupted after Martin Luther King Jr.'s death in April 1968.
from the April 24, 2008 edition
Page 2 of 3
Elfenbein convinced her university colleagues of the importance of chronicling the events of April 1968. She brought together historians, law and business school faculty, experts in conflict resolution, archival specialists, and artists in a variety of disciplines to join the effort.
They launched an oral history project, sending students into the community to record the recollections of more than 100 witnesses of the civic unrest, who offered powerful testimonials: The African-American mother who looted milk and pabulum from a grocery store to feed her babies, the white drugstore owner who lost his shop to arson, the college student who drove food and blankets into burning neighborhoods, the National Guardsman dispatched to restore order who actually had no bullets in his gun.
The stories – raw, shocking, heartbreaking, filled with tales of quiet heroism and bitter memories of betrayal – put a human face on the bare historical statistics: 6 Baltimoreans killed, more than 700 wounded, 5,500 arrested, and 1,000 businesses looted or destroyed during 10 days of social chaos.
Those stories also formed the basis for several artistic interpretations: a literary magazine, a dance performance, and a play, which wove the oral histories into a poignant drama performed by a troupe of Baltimore high school students. The play drew tears, and a standing ovation, at the "Riots and Rebirth" conference organized by Elfenbein's crew earlier this month, where 400 people spent three days in something akin to a communal talk-therapy session.
Every Saturday morning, from January through March of this year, the mosaic workshop met in a classroom, 12 people, black and white, who lived through the riots and volunteered to participate, hoping to piece together an authentic account of what happened and grapple with its effects on their lives. "And everybody didn't see it the same way," Birt emphasizes.
"I went in the door realizing I didn't know the whole story," says Terry White, who drew on his tile a scene of his Baltimore neighborhood under martial law. "I brought in one story from one guy, and I left with the heartfelt stories of 12 people."
Lee Baylin's tile portrays what he saw on the streets of Baltimore as a young newspaper reporter as a series of snapshots on a roll of film. Dr. Louis Randall, who was delivering a baby when the violence began, drew the scene he witnessed driving home from the hospital, filled with military jeeps and burning buildings.
"What surprised and pleased me was that strangers were willing to come together and tell it like it was," says Arthur Cohen, who was a young legal aid lawyer at the time of the riots. "It was very candid."
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