En Passant

From Socialist Worker, one of a number of articles on Baltimore.

On Monday night, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan ordered the National Guard to move into Baltimore to quell protests that erupted after the funeral of Freddie Gray, a Black man who died on April 19, one week after his spine was nearly severed and his voice box crushed following his arrest by Baltimore police officers. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake also ordered schools closed and instituted a 10 p.m. curfew.

After days of demonstrations, inflamed by an increasingly militarized response from police that included deliberate provocations against protesters expressing their frustration and anger at Freddie Gray’s death, the protests reached a new stage on April 27. Several stores and police cars were damaged, and police officers were reportedly injured in clashes where bricks and rocks were thrown at them.

Right-wing pundits like Tucker Carlson labeled the protests a “threat to civilization itself,” but the media have been less willing to show police provocations, including cops driving armored vehicles onto the sidewalk as a means of “crowd dispersal,” and the deliberate closure of portions of Baltimore’s transit system, which stranded high school students and forced them into confrontations with heavily armed police as they tried to get home.

In a press conference on Monday, Rawlings-Blake decried “senseless” property damage caused by “thugs.” But the anger provoked by Freddie Gray’s death has been building for years–the result of entrenched racism and economic inequality, not to mention the long history of police brutality and killings, mainly of African American men.

As Rev. Graylan Hagler, a civil rights activist born in Baltimore and based in Washington, D.C., wrote on social media: “[The] media may call it rioting, but the confrontations are targeted against law enforcement. It is clear that law enforcement has created such animosity and anger among young Black males here in [Baltimore] that the killing of Freddie Gray was the proverbial straw to break the camels back. Also, [Baltimore] political leaders cannot speak with any moral authority because they have presided all these years over increasingly devastated neighborhoods, unemployment and despair.”

In an article published earlier on Monday, Dave Zirin, sports columnist for The Nation and a participant in last weekend’s protests in Baltimore, wrote about the tensions that led to the eruption of anger in the city. Stay tuned to SocialistWorker.org in the coming days for continuing coverage of the struggle for justice.

Zirin says, among other things:

Let’s make one thing clear: Most everything the media reported about the Baltimore protests has skirted the line between the highly sensationalistic and the libelous. Every headline and photo has focused on property damage, allegedly done by those protesting for Freddie Gray. Played down or ignored is the Baltimore I saw: a place where more than 2,000 people—including families and children—marched resolutely while helicopters and visible surveillance drones flew overhead.

To read Zirin’s article in the Nation, (and republished in Socialist Worker), click here.