baltimoreblackwoman

Short Story By Eric Grandy

The fourth of April 1968 didn’t dawn as a particularly ominous day. It was ordinary in every respect. My sister and I still had to go to school. My father still had to catch the bus to work. My mother was still asleep after working the 3pm to 11pm shift at Greater Baltimore Medical Center. My eighth-grade classes were as routine as ever. The walk home from school was as long and arduous as normal. Our German Shepherd, Thor, still had to be walked. And mom had dinner waiting for us before she left for work. As far as I knew, there was perfect order in my world, until about eight o’clock that evening. 

When I was eleven, in September of 1966, my family moved into a house on East 36th Street, to a neighborhood called Waverly. Until that day, it was an enclave of working-class whites. They didn’t all have calloused hands; some wore shirts and ties to work. Being the first family of Blacks in their midst meant there was resistance to our presence. Sometimes, the racism was blatant, unmistakable, like the several occasions when rocks were thrown through our windows. Other times it was more subtle and insidious, like when I would be in a group, and someone would say something disparaging about Blacks. They would quickly try to appease me with, “but you’re not like them Eric!”  What worked in my favor was the fact that I was a good athlete. Once the neighborhood kids saw me play, I made friends quickly. Sports became my currency. Unlike the rest of my family, it lowered any resistance I might have otherwise encountered.

Even though I lived in Waverly, I attended middle school at all Black Clifton Park Junior High. A year and a half earlier, we lived only blocks from the school, but my mother was determined to find a better home, in a better area. Her search led us to Waverly. My sister took the bus to the more racially diverse Woodbourne Junior High. Maybe April the fourth would not have been so impactful had I gone there too. But this issue was black and white. My parents simply couldn’t afford the eighty cents a day bus fare for both of us, so I was left with “the walk,” the lengthy bipedal journey to and from school. It went through the Memorial Stadium parking lot, across 33rd street, past Saint Bernard’s Catholic School, a left past the row houses on Gorsuch Avenue, toward Loch Raven Boulevard. Once across Loch Raven, the racial mix of the neighborhoods changed from Black to white. It was the local version of “the other side of the tracks.” Then, it was a straight shot down Gorsuch Avenue, right past our old house, to Harford Road and a right turn to the school. Looking back, it’s ironic how moving to a better neighborhood required that I walk to school through the old one. I covered about two to three miles, and it took around forty minutes one way. I did this twice a day, through wind and rain, snow and ice, heat, and humidity, for three years. I don’t know how I did it. I must have really loved school even though I settled for just getting by.

My Junior High was a red brick and concrete, unairconditioned structure located on the edge of Clifton Park. On one side of the school were railroad tracks and on the other side was a vast, beautiful, open park with baseball diamonds, softball fields, a seldom used, grass covered track, surrounding an even less used soccer field. I have fond memories of my time there, but I regret spending so much effort trying to be the class comedian because my grades suffered. I was funny though!

At 8pm that April the fourth evening, I was at home watching television when Walter Cronkite blurted out the following:

“Dr. Martin Luther King, the apostle of non-violence in the civil rights movement, has been shot to death in Memphis Tennessee.”

I sat there for a second. Did he say what I thought he said? The announcer continued with more details, “…died at the hospital… the balcony of the Lorraine Motel…in town to support sanitation workers strike…” I was numb. I looked around but I was alone. I wanted to tell somebody. My thirteen-year-old brain couldn’t grasp the scale nor the notion of such an event. As the report went on, reality sank in. It really did happen! Then came the bitterness. Why would anyone do such a thing?…to him! My mind went back to November 1963. I was a third grader when President John Kennedy was assassinated. Even at that age, I still remember where I was when I heard the news. This would be the same.

 Baltimore remained peaceful until the sixth, even though Governor Spiro T. Agnew called out the National Guard on the fifth. The riot started out small, on Gay Street, and blew up from there. By eleven P.M., the local news was flooded with footage of burning buildings and young Black mobs roaming uncontrolled in the streets. Rioters were shown silhouetted against the flames of burning buildings, anger and outrage fueling their wrath. Sirens blared, emergency lights flickered, and fire engines tried in vain to keep up with calls for assistance. The police and the National Guard were overwhelmed and outnumbered, so Governor Agnew asked for Federal troops.

The morning of April seventh was a regular school day. It seems incredible to me, as a 68-year-old Black man, that schools remained open after a night of citywide rioting. Today, they close the schools for the flimsiest of reasons: it’s too hot or too cold or too windy. As I made my way through my neighborhood, it dawned on me. There were absolutely no signs of violence. No looted stores or burned vehicles. Waverly was untouched. I was amazed, but I shouldn’t have been. In hindsight, my neighbors didn’t have a reason to riot. Martin Luther King Jr. ‘s death was the explosion at the end of a fuse that was lit generations ago. It was the tipping point of lifetimes of pent-up frustrations and prolonged injustice. I didn’t know these things that day. It took me many more years of living life to come to this realization.

As I neared Harford Road, the landscape changed dramatically. A small neighborhood store owned by a classmate’s family, the Walkers, had been vandalized, its broken glass windows left dangerously jagged and exposed by looters sometime during the night. Didn’t the community know these store owners, I thought? Didn’t they go in and out of this store every day? It didn’t make sense.

Just before the corner of Harford Road and Gorsuch Avenue there was a fire station. I saw that its two large overhead doors were raised and there was a lone, white firefighter sitting in a wooden chair at the entrance. The chair was tilted on its back legs and his feet were propped on the front bumper of the fire engine. He was fast asleep with his helmet on his lap. He still had his boots and heavy overalls on. It appeared that he and his fire company, despite their fatigue, had to be ready to move at a moment’s notice.

At the corner, a green blur zipped past me. It was an army jeep filled with helmeted servicemen. I had never seen a real army vehicle. As I glanced about, there were more. Many more. Moving in all directions. And every occupant of every jeep was armed. 

I looked across the street into the park. The baseball fields and the track were smothered by what resembled a green, undulating ant colony. There were camouflaged transport vehicles and tents and soldiers swarming all over what was once a beautiful open space. As I proceeded along Harford Road, I got my first glimpse of the true scale of the unrest. There was an unbroken row of shattered, looted and fire gutted businesses, dry cleaners, bars, barbershops, hair salons, and convenient stores. No vocation was spared. Some owners were already in the process of cleaning up. They were sweeping the shards of glass from inside their shops and from the sidewalk. There was a distinctive sound that the broken glass made. That day, that sound was dreams and trash being swept up and discarded together. I remember thinking how real this was. I wasn’t watching this on television. 

When I finally reached the doors to my school, things became even more surreal. Soldiers were everywhere. They roamed the halls, the bathrooms, the gym and the offices. Until then, it hadn’t occurred to me that they would be inside my school. In retrospect, where else would they be? I would learn later that the park, along with my school, had become a staging area for the Maryland National Guard.

Once, I was sitting in class, next to an open window, when, from the outside, I heard an officer scream, “Don’t ask me why, just do it!” Everything stopped in my room; writing stopped, my teacher froze, every head popped up from their work, and there was complete silence. For several awkward seconds we all listened for something to happen. When nothing did, we resumed our classwork. Me, my class, and the rest of the school did the only thing we could do, we carried on. There was no other choice.

In ensuing days, I listened to my classmate’s accounts of the nightly destruction they witnessed, or in some instances, participated in. Their tales ran the gamut from evading the cops, laden down with loot, to staying in the house, too afraid to go out into the streets. I had no firsthand accounts to relate. I lived in Waverly. Any stories of returning every evening to a safe and secure place would have seemed pretentious and out of touch, so I just listened.

On the way home that first day, I again passed the Walker’s store. It was now boarded up and spray painted in fluorescent orange. “Soul Brother,” it read. It meant, “I am Black like you, so please don’t further destroy my business.” The same was scrawled on every Black owned business in the riot torn areas. Even in unaffected sections the handwritten pleas went up in an attempt to dissuade any potential vandals. The tactic didn’t always work. In my later years, I realized that most looters were opportunists. They didn’t give a damn about right or wrong, only in taking advantage. 

As I neared home, I was again struck by the dichotomy. Was I even on the same planet? Everyone in Waverly walked about carefree, totally oblivious to the carnage from which I had just emerged. The only evidence of the riots was a single jeep with four soldiers inside driving down 33rd Street. They just wanted to see the facade of Memorial Stadium.

The unrest lasted for about a week and the public schools never shut their doors. I guess administrators took advantage of the fact that, since all the violence took place at night, why waste a perfectly good school day. I had to make the same heaven-to-hell and back journey the entire time and I had the rare advantage of seeing it from a unique perspective.

Among my white friends, the riot issue went mainly unspoken, at least in my presence. We went about our normal evening ball games and, honestly, I was reluctant to bring it up. At my young age I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to discuss it in any depth. The reasons ran so much deeper than what my neighbors, and I, saw on the news. With the benefit of hindsight and life experience, I now look back at the whole MLK assassination and resulting riots through a prism of black and white. 

Black and White described the colors of the two races involved. White was the color of the majority, those whose objective it was to control the unrest. Black was the color of those who were to be controlled. I didn’t agree with the riot as a response, but I understood why.

Black and White was the makeup of the two neighborhoods I had to navigate. I was torn between feeling the relief of being secure and distant from the riots and guilt for being merely an unaffected observer. 

And, Black and White described the attitudes of everyone affected. You were either for or against what took place. There was no gray area. Strictly black or white.