Not 20 minutes from where I write this, a TV station helicopter is focusing its camera on a Northwest Baltimore CVS Pharmacy as looters run in and out, ostensibly robbing a store in broad daylight.
A couple of blocks away a police car is engulfed in flames. Police are standing in a defensive line using shields to deflect bricks and rocks thrown their way. Rioters, not protestors, but rioters, openly taunted the officers. I channel surf and see a familiar sight as Wolf Blitzer reports with flashing logos of “Breaking News,” the very same temperature as we’ve seen before, be it in Tahrir Square, Gaza, and then Ferguson. Now it’s Baltimore that is leading the headlines.
In April of 1968, I delivered a now defunct daily newspaper called the Baltimore News American. I watched on an early Sunday morning at the corner of Bancroft and Reisterstown Road as I was putting my bundle of papers together as National Guard units in Jeeps and troop carriers headed into the city. Baltimore was burning after the assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Today, a man named Freddie Gray was laid to rest, in a tragic situation that implicates the Baltimore City Police.
His family, with all of the sadness it has experienced, asked that Baltimore City not march in protest on the day of Gray’s funeral. Last Saturday, after Shabbos, we learned that peaceful demonstrations happened all of the day only to deteriorate into a difficult, dangerous situation. These weren’t the peaceful demonstrators. Instead, they were thugs who co-opted the cause of the marchers, breaking windows and looting stores.
Just hours after Gray was eulogized in a spirit of peace, we are now hearing from Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake that the National Guard is returning to Baltimore. If your city needs the National Guard, it means you have lost control.
If elected officials are publically complimenting the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam for helping to maintain the peace, it means something is seriously wrong.
At least 1,000 officers, including police from around the state, are coming to Baltimore to keep the peace. In the meantime, a nearby shopping mall had a literal traffic jam of cars with people who were coming into the mall to loot to their heart’s content.
What must be said is that there were peaceful protests around the city, and those protesters were not part of the vicious running attack of the rioters.
I’m heartbroken. This has been a gut-wrenching day. It took Baltimore decades to recover from the 1968 riots. I fear an army of thugs has set this city back once again.
So many times people I meet in other areas such as New Jersey, New York, or Boston, when they find out I’m from Baltimore, ask me about “The Wire,” the TV police drama set in Baltimore. They don’t ask me about our beautiful Inner Harbor, the world-class Johns Hopkins Hospital, or the amazing Jewish community.
City Councilman Brandon Scott, a young African-American Baltimorean perhaps said it best, when he said that these rioters aren’t necessarily thugs; instead he called them “cowards.” It’s my hope that some heroes come forward from all over the city to repair what has been done.
For now as the sun has set in Baltimore, and a curfew is put in place, we await with hope a new day. Tomorrow, I’m going to ride over to the corner of Bancroft and Reisterstown Roads. I’ll watch the National Guard again.
Phil Jacobs, a JLNJ Contributing Editor, is the former Executive Editor of the Baltimore Jewish Times.
By Phil Jacobs
