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Title A name given to the resource UMBC Oral History Collection Subject The topic of the resource Interviews Description An account of the resource Oral histories contributed by students of University of Maryland, Baltimore County Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available MdHS Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Michael Stone Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Michael Stone Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Daniel Scotten Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Father Kevin A. Mueller Location The location of the interview The Maryland Historical Society Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:28:47 mins. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Father Kevin A. Mueller interview Subject The topic of the resource Demonstration / event Description An account of the resource Father Kevin A. Mueller interviewed by Daniel Scotten, UMBC grad student. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Daniel Scotten Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available MdHS Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 04/04/2017 Relation A related resource Fr. Kevin A. Mueller Collection (photos) 1968 Baltimore Riots Baltimore Fulton Avenue National Guard North Avenue Pennsylvania Avenue police Pratt Street http://baltimoreuprising2015.org/files/original/192085c62dae462b41b359ee1aab7b80.mp3 392104aa05035f4dd8e162ffbfa643ae http://baltimoreuprising2015.org/files/original/e7ef19c87107fe78638c9e440fbded63.pdf 244348e8e5561e0168490e781ca4d4b4 PDF Text Text Michael Stone: So first thing is, could you just say your name for the recording? Andrew Copeland: Hi, my name is Andrew Copeland, and I am a manager of content development and creative in‐house and Maryland Institute College of Arts. MS: And we already discussed this off‐TAPE, but you are originally from Jamaica? AC: Yes, I am originally from Jamaica‐‐moved here in the mid‐2000's. And I came to school in Baltimore 2010 and graduated 2013 from the Maryland Institute of College Arts. [00:00:38] MS: Ok, have you lived downtown that entire time? AC: Actually, I don't live in Baltimore at all. I actually live in Frederick, Maryland, but I do love the city of Baltimore because once I started to come to school here, I spent most of my time here. And eventually it got me coming back to work here, so even though I'm not a resident here, I do participate in a lot of activities here, and I do represent it in certain ways. I like the city a lot. MS: Talk more about your relationship to Baltimore. Your first impressions when you moved here. AC: Um, I mean, my first impression of Baltimore is definitely driving up on MLK Boulevard and actually seeing that industrial look. I think Baltimore is somewhat like a pizza, so to speak. Or a pie. It may look‐‐driving on 95‐‐it may look crusty a little bit. You know, all the brides, all the shipping yards, stuff like that, but once you enter into the city, you find yourself seeing different things architecturally, different styles, different places to go to eat, and different people. So I think Baltimore itself has, you know, a sweetness to it, but you're not going to get it right off the bat, you know. You have to kinda come in and experience it. I don't think anybody can actually tell you what Baltimore is. I think you need to come in and experience it. It's not the Harbor. It's not Pratt Street. It's definitely coming in, understanding how people speak, there's two different ways of, you know, they say "Bal‐more" versus "Baltimore." I mean, those are the little things, the little nuggets, that I've found that Baltimore has. You know, but then driving on North Avenue, you see a completely different thing. But if you do interact with the people and talk to them, you know, they want something for themselves, but at the same time, they're fun‐loving. So Baltimore can give you both of everything. You go on Bolton Hill, you know, nice, residential area, so it has a mix of everything. [00:02:53] Which is the good thing about Baltimore and the promising thing about Baltimore because it can actually improve if people actually see the potential of what the residents do see. I think Baltimore residents are very loyal. Especially today's sports teams, but on a whole, even after the Uprising. People got together to clean up the area. You know, they called out, "We're gonna clean up this street." And people came and they participated. I think Baltimore people have a certain pride about their city that a lot of people‐‐and I'm �sure other cities are like that‐‐but you'd have to be here to kinda see it. the news can't really tell you how Baltimore is. [00:03:32] MS: What do you think the uprising meant to Baltimore as a city? [00:03:39] AC: Looking at the whole social landscape of the country in itself, a city that is predominantly black, and, of course, you know, every city has their crime issue, I think the uprising was more of a sign of people not saying that there is not crime or there are not bad places in the city. They just want to be treated fairly. You don't want to be scared coming outside of your home, and I think even for individuals who are not black, they felt the same way as well. Because we have become [00:04:19] a much more diverse and integrated society, and your friend could be accosted. You know, it's not fair, and I think right now I think people are more thinking about it's not fair. It's not saying that it's not right, but it's more like treating me fairly. If you're gonna treat me like this, treat everyone like this. But I think people realized that the type of treatment some people are getting is just not fair period. No one should be treated like that. And I think that people, you know, they're tired. And I think that came out of it. [00:04:50] And that's what will happen to any area or any city that feels as if they have been oppressed by the media, by the social system, the educational system, and it's something, it's a conversation that's always been talked about but never to this level. And I think with Freddie Gray, it was a blatant, you know, from the videos we saw, that was just a blatant disregard for a human being. [00:05:21] A body. And they threw him in and after you heard what happened, I think people realized that could be you. That could be me. and I think that's when people said, you know what, enough is enough. [00:05:33] MS: How did you feel when you first heard about the death of Freddie Gray? AC: At first, because, again, I'm somewhat not here, like live here, it didn't strike me at first. But I think after the information started rolling in of how and why and why he was accosted or what was the accusation of why he was accosted and how he was treated over a pocket knife, I think, that could be me. You know, I could be leaving my job [00:06:08] one evening or just walking the streets and because of my look or my demeanor I could be a suspect. And not to say that the police are not doing their job, but I could not be‐‐maybe I'm not in the right state of mind today. I could be mad. I could be frustrated, and I would just be dealt with like a rag doll because I didn't act the way I thought I should. So yeah, I started to feel like that could be me. that could be my son. That could be my daughter. And that's when a lot of feelings started to come into play and that's when you know that even though I leave to go home, I'm still a part of this city. [00:06:48] No one's gonna see my credentials on my forehead. That's what the uprising or what happened to Freddie Gray meant to me. It was‐‐it could happen to you type of moment, and what do you do? and I think that's a question that has been on everyone's mind. "What do you do if this was you?" You know, it's sad that it happened to him. But it could have been anyone. �MS: So on April 29, you went out for the march from Penn Station to City Hall, so talk about what was that march. How did you hear about it? [00:07:27] How was it organized, and what was your participation? AC: Well, part of it was a photo assignment from my communications office [00:07:35] that wanted to highlight the students that were participating from the Maryland Institute College of Arts, and I think, you know, maybe it was just to kinda get a photo op of them kinda walking through, but as you became part of the march in itself, I think you got swallowed up in the whole feeling of this type of solidarity. [00:08:03] Walking past Penn Station and seeing people join, just people start joining from different sections, people coming out of their homes, chanting, and putting their hands in the air, you know, in response there with you. And it was not one race of individuals. It was a city of people that were male, female, homosexual, transgender, everybody was in solidarity of the situation. So it wasn't a people thing, it was a city thing, and I think everybody was in support. No one stood outside feeling that people shouldn't be here. You saw that everybody [00:08:43], they took their kids, they made signs, they were passionate about the fact that they want their city back in a particular way and just that alone swept me up and I started taking photos of different things and different people: kids, men, women, people just standing up on their front stoop just to say "I'm with you." That was a very powerful moment as I walked through the streets. I've never seen that before. Or I should say I've never been a part of that before. I've probably seen things like that on television and stuff but never having the chance to be in that situation. So you know, your imagination could have taken you there, but it's almost like you were connected.[00:09:33] In a sense. So you couldn't avoid it, and I think even the officers that were there wanted to be a part of it, but they were doing their job. People actually care for the city and they actually felt that this is something that should've been done. MS: [00:09:49] So you were there as an artist, as a documenter, but did you also feel that you were there as an activist? AC: And that's what I'm saying, that whole feeling took you over, and before you knew it, you're chanting as well. [00:10:01] You felt like you were a part of this championing, this movement, to say, "Hey, we want better." Even if you weren't a part of the city, even if you just drove in. You would've gotten engulfed in that feeling of enough is enough. I want to stand up for what's right. And I think that was a very, you know, you saw people from different organizations, different cultures, different races, they were out there in support because they understood that this is important as a people or a people that we're trying to be, which is diverse, understanding of race, religion. This is what's happening now. People want to dissect these arguments and really be a part of it. And for the youth, the colleges that stepped out, John Hopkins [stet], University of Baltimore, Loyola, I saw everyone in their college gear. They were out there in support of something that meant a lot to them because they come to school in �the city. They live in the city, and they love the city. So that's [00:11:15] , you could feel it. Even if you weren't from here. You understood without any words at all. You could see it. [00:11:24] MS: You said a little earlier that you felt like even the police wanted to be involved but couldn't because they were doing their job. Did you feel that way‐‐that every police officer was kinda supporting you? Or did you also feel some other feelings coming from the law enforcement? AC: Well, I saw police officers, even military staff, [00:11:46] trying to get photos, trying to document this event, this happening. And some people got a little pushed back, and police officers would probably be like, "You can't do this." But I feel like even though the police or the military have a brotherhood of their own, I feel like they know that this is something they would want for themselves. I'm sure when they take off their uniforms, they're just a regular Joe walking down the street. And I feel like, I know, they knew this could have been them. They want a better city. I don't think anybody wants to sit there and be blinded by the fact that I'm only a police officer or I'm only a military person because for every indiscretion of another police officer [00:12:40] or alleged indiscretion, there's ten more officers that want to see well for other individuals. That want to police a good community, that want to be a part of the neighborhood, but given the circumstances of, you know, what is fed to them, you don't know. They just want get home [00:13:00] . So I could understand from both sides. MS: [00:13:04] A lot of people when they talk about the uprising and even when they're observing and participating, they are very focused on the divisions between people, the separateness, especially between law enforcement and protesters. But you really saw, and you can see it in your photographs, the togetherness and the standing in solidarity. Could you talk about those two narratives? AC: I guess while walking off by Barnes and Noble off of Mt. Royal when you were approaching Penn Station, you saw them prepared. Or they are being prepared, they were in buses, they had their riot gear on, but you know, only a few looked‐‐had that intense look on their face. Everybody else, I think they knew that nothing was popping off. Nothing else was gonna happen. I think you have to be prepared because they're there, but I saw police officers having conversations. They looked like they're watching, they're securing, but at the same time, I don't think there was a presence of fear going on. To say, like, this is something. I think these college kids and anybody that was a part of it, I can't say everybody was college students, but I feel like everybody that got involved in the situation knew that this is something that they were gonna be a part of. And they wanted to also kinda debunk or say to people like, "Hey, we can peacefully protest and speak for what is right" without actually, you know, whatever the media was showing‐‐it's a total opposite. And i'm glad I was there to take photographs to show that perspective. Yes, police officers were off to another corner [00:14:58] . Military people were off by different places, but I think people handle themselves accordingly, so I don't think fear or anything like that was something that they should've gotten off. But at the same time I feel like yes, �there was division. But it's their job. They had to be there. I don't think they could jump in and be like "we're with you" even though that would be nice or nostalgic, but it's not. MS: So in national media CNN, the reporters who were here at these things, they really recycled these images of property destruction, of anger, and you really counter that, I think pretty powerfully. Could you talk about how you're aware of this difference and the kind of narrative you were creating, and how the narrative being created‐‐how that made you feel as well? AC: So [00:16:03] in terms of my photos, my photos took on a more black and white characteristic. Because I wanted to remove anything that was distracting: colors, anything, and just for you to focus on the emotion. And while we didn't walk the same area that RIVALDO and other‐‐while the uprising was happening‐‐I think there were more on North Avenue and other places, but I think people, they painted the picture of this depressing, destroyed city that was once great being destroyed by these people that, you know, it was nice and pristine before, but they just came upon the city and just destroyed it, and that wasn't the case. Where we walked on St. Paul and all these areas, they were nice communities that everyone's mixed there, the dynamics of whether you're educated, not educated, go to school, you saw different people, and I don't think CNN [00:17:06] or any media organization actually showed that type of imagery. I don't think that if you were sitting on your couch and somebody told you‐‐this was your first experience of Baltimore‐‐you would have realized that this city has much more to offer. And where we‐‐the route that we took to the courthouse‐‐was different. It was a different side. You saw smiling faces. You saw people being almost in a exuberant way of saying "we love our city." And the media company sells fear. That's how I feel in my mind. [00:17:52] I feel like you get educated by ten, fifteen seconds of media clip and then somebody narrating what this is. They didn't do a good job of talking about the city. They showed a lot of places that were already burnt down, so I don't think they gave context to what the area looked like before. And they never showed photos of it either. And that's where I felt like I should take photos that captured people, not necessarily the environment itself but how the people felt about where they are. [00:18:32] How they say a house is different from a home. Baltimore is not a city, it's a home for these individuals, and I think these photos encapsulated people that love their home, and that's what I‐‐you know, it started to kinda come through‐‐people smiling, people frustrated. There are a couple of photos that I have in the vigil's room, draping themselves with the American flag. [00:18:58] They're in America. It's a city in America that people consider themselves Americans. and it's their home, and it's nothing any different than any other person who considers themself [stet] a patriot. And I think that's what the people exhibited, that they are a patriot of their country and their city, and they wanted people to know. [00:19:22] MS: And I think you captured that really well in two specific ways that stood out to me as an observer, someone who saw all of your images, you really captured people's faces, the kind of emotion and their expressions as they're marching, as they're standing together, and I think that really encapsulates �everything you're saying, but then I think you also focused on their signs and the words they were presenting to show these same kind of ideas. And I thought that was really powerful how you did that. AC: Right, you noticed that it was a mixed group of people having the same feelings, and the signs also portrayed that. [00:19:58] So it was a unifying feeling, which I think a lot of people should know that that's what happened. It's not necessarily that people were feeling angry or that they were feeling disenfranchised, or saying "feel sorry for me," it's about actually seeing what they feel and actually saying, "hey, this is what I'm fighting for." And I've come to like Baltimore even more because of that kind of unifying way people come together, you know. It's just sad that a lot of people cannot‐‐we're divided by the media, so we don't get to see how passionate these people are. MS: So that was a feeling on April 29th, and now we're almost a year later. Have those feelings, that unification, have those stuck around? Do you think things have changed?[00:20:51] AC: I think based on my observation of some years, that was just a blimp [stet] in history. I think that people have learned to kinda turn certain things off, so to speak, and therefore they go about their daily life. However, for some individuals, they're still wanting to see better. Certain activists are still out there championing the cause. I think that's what it is. The media coverage has lifted for now, so it doesn't seem that way but I think people are still out here having conversation, having dialogue on what to do next, how to make this city better, how to have people feel more inclusive‐‐be more inclusive in the way‐‐how the city is shaped for the future. So I think a lot of conversations that I've been a part of or seen people talk about is really for the future, developing the city with this, you know, enormous potential. Both [00:21:58] in human residents and also building. You know, that's a big resource that the city has. You know, a lot of talented people are here that vary from art to finance to law from technology. There's so many people here and they want the city to show that. So I think that's where the conversations are right now as well as watching what's happening in the trials. I think that's what people are more focused on, but I think that a city that has always had certain odds against them have learned how to cope and make the best of what they have in light of anything. So I think they're still watching. I think conversations are still happening. I just think that right now people are really focused on the history‐‐it's not the history; it's the future and how they are‐‐how they will be a part of it. A lot of people are worried about gentrification, how the schools are going to be a part of the neighborhoods, how does technology effect them, and the future of everything. So I think that is where sights are set on right now, but people are still keeping a close eye on the trials. And people are still worried if there's another outbreak or uproar, I should say, not outbreak, about what comes out of it. They want justice, and as long as the city provides that justice, I think people will be satisfied. But I do believe that if people don't feel that sense of justice being delivered [00:23:47] people may champion something. But not in a destructive manner. I think they will try to deal with the heads of government that try to get these people out of‐‐‐you know, election's coming this November. They may try to vote people in that stand up for their best interest, and I think that's where people are trying to educate �especially youth because they're the main participants of this movement and they're more knowledgeable about their laws and championing people to read more about your rights, and that's where you'll see where I think people will be in terms of what is rightfully yours. So yeah. MS: So you were living in Frederick, Maryland, you know, the suburbs‐‐ AC: [laughs] MS: ‐‐no, I grew up in the suburbs. What were the conversations like during the uprising and the people you know [in Frederick], and have those continued if they happened? AC: So where I live, I don't think‐‐'cause I was here that day. I was in my office. And we couldn't leave because of what was going on. So we had to be there and kind of watch, but at the same time do my job. [00:25:17] But when I went home, again, a lot of people saw the media's version, and I'm not going to say the networks‐‐I felt that they all took on the same tone irregardless if it was FOX or CNN or whoever covered the whole issue. They kind of lead the narrative of this destructive set of people coming up on the city and the city is in turmoil when it was only two or three blocks of city being‐‐you know, having problems. I think from Mondawmin Mall, some parts of North Avenue, that was it. The city wasn't burning like they made it seem. It was a small section of the city that had people [00:26:15] really going out there and doing things. So I'm not picking up for any sides. It was what it was, but it wasn't a city‐widespread thing where people thought. It was in small areas that had people coming out, and they just needed to get it under control. When I explained that to them, they'd think it was the whole city. So that's where I feel like some people should take a drive into Baltimore, should take a day to come see the sights, eat here, drink here, and see what living in Baltimore is like. I think the media did do an injustice to the city itself because they're only going after the story in hand, which is to say that this is happening. But, you know, with crafty editing [00:27:12] and repetition over and over again, you feel scared. You feel worried. My brother called me from Florida, my friends called me from different places, like "Are you okay?" And I'm like, "I'm fine. I drove home safely." So the media put a lot of fear out there and while it was a serious situation, but it wasn't as serious as they led us on to believe. And I think that's the responsibility of the media houses to give context, to report correctly and fairly about what is happening, why it's happening versus just saying "The city's burning, the people have destroy‐‐trying to destroy the city." It wasn't like that. A small group of people in different parts did do damage, and I think that's how they let out their frustration. It wasn't right, but when you put people in a situation where they feel they don't have a voice or an outlet or feel like anyone's on their side, that's where all hell broke loose. And I think they focused more on that versus what people could be going through or what people should be doing. [00:28:39] Or why they're doing this, and I don't think they gave a "Why" situation; I think they were just more saying it wasn't right. And rightfully so, but there wasn't a perspective on it. Like a "however," you know. It was a straight up "this is what happened; this is what these people are doing." And even me driving back to work the next day, I drove �the same streets [00:29:02] at Mt. Dawn (?) mall pass Coppin State (?) nothing was there, nothing was burning, I mean, the same mall that they tried‐‐they broke into. It didn't look any different. Nothing was‐‐there wasn't ashes on the street like they let it believe. You know, the place was the same. So I think for the places that people tried to vandalize, people began the cleaning process immediately, and the people of the city responded and helped out. And that's what they didn't show. They didn't show that the people were actually there helping to put things back together. They didn't see‐‐show that people there knew that, yeah, this is something that happening, that they're beginning to deal with it as a city. Not just "we need help" or "we're helpless and help us, they're destroying the place." They weren't in that situation. I had to explain to pepole that that's not really true. These buildings were already burnt. You just didn't drive‐‐you know, if anyone drives on North Avenue, you'll see the state [00:30:16] of the buildings. They're boarded up, they've been abandoned or people are putting signs that say we'll purchase it, but nobody's there. Nobody's fixing them. The city has been this way‐‐that part of the city has been this way‐‐for years. Before me and after. So that's what people should have known: that context, the living state of what some of these people are living in. And they didn't do that, and I think that was a shame. [00:30:49] MS: Do you think in places like Frederick‐‐I'm not trying to pick on that‐‐but places outside of Baltimore city, do you think it's still on people's radar? The Uprising, the protests? AC: No, I just said if the media doesn't bring it up, I don't really think people‐‐a lot of people don't even think about it. I think the conversations that are circulating are with individuals that live here, that actively participate in making the city better, and if you are lucky, as I am, to be a part of these conversations, you're in the know. They're the ones that's trying to get it back out in the media's forefront to say "hey, these are the things that we're doing," "this is what needs to happen," but outside of that, it's like fifteen minutes. It came and it went. I think media pundits will bring it up when they want to show context and then they can point at and say, "Hey, look here. Look at Freddie Gray." Or "Look at Eric Garner"[00:31:58], but outside of that, it's not a main conversation to say, "hey, how do you get this city back on its feet?" If it's not on it's feet, you know, technically. And that's where it is. I think they mayor is making an effort. I think because it's political season I think everyone is in political gear, and that's what's happening. Not necessarily to really deal with the city right now. I think right now it's election season. Everybody's campaigning, so I'm sure it will come back up, but I'm not sure who is actually using this for their argument to let (?) themselves, [00:32:39] so we'll see what comes from that. MS: What do you think still needs to change, if anything? AC: I think a lot more collaborative efforts need to be taken into consideration in terms of how do businesses see themselves in comparison to the city residents? And I mean all the city residents‐‐not just the nice places but the individuals who actually surround the city or who live there. [00:33:08] �Think about what happened, why it happened, and how can they participate, and having individuals make the city better. I think that's where a lot of people need‐‐as I said, the future, they need to focus with those things. Like how can we have these people participating in making the city better. Like I said, the city is full of human resources [00:33:32]. It's a resource that you can tap into, so depending on the project, you could have people that are actually being productive citizens of a city, but that has to be something they need to kinda think about. [00:33:45] So not just them versus us, but more of us as a whole. Baltimore has a large homeless and drug situation happening, and people collectively need to find out a way to kinda deal with that. Not to say that these people are something to throw away, but how can you get these people to better serve their community or the community that they are a part of‐‐you know, wherever they're displaced. they could be on MLK or North Ave, and they're homeless, they're begging, but it doesn't have to be that way. Some of them I've spoken to want to work, but whether it be they were in jail or they just run from home or they are drug addicts or whatever it is, some of them want to do things. So how do you use these people, how do you tap into their resources, and I think that's an argument they need to start discussing. MS: And I think the people who aren't in that situation, how do we serve them, too, right? AC: I think, sorry, I think that's what I was alluding to, to say that it should be both parties trying to talk to each other. [00:35:05] I think we're so busy that we drive by individuals every day and you assume that the reason that [they're] outside on the street was because [they] didn't do the right things. [They] were a criminal, or [they] had all this opportunity but it was wasted. I think some people weren't educated on how to be better citizens or better custodians of their neighborhood. A lot of that is generational, [00:35:43] a lot of that is misinformation, a lot of that is resources or access to better information, and sometimes it just‐‐you need people to care for you. There are a lot of people working actively in the city to make the city better, but there is no light being shone on them. they don't have the support financially and motivationally to actually get what they need to do‐‐be done. It's just what it is. Baltimore is a large art community that actively [00:36:16] tries to help a neighborhood in art ways, but again, who knows this? If you're not a part of the city, you do. I mean if you're a part of the city you do know, but if not, well, you know. so I think the city needs better PR or help with PR. I'm not saying they're not good at the job; I just don't know what their resources are to get this kind of stuff out‐‐not in a political way but to say "hey, come to this city." I think that's one thing that people need behind it. How they do it? That's a big question, but I do believe that's what the city needs right now: people actually feeling like you are my brother and I'm you're sister, and the city is our home. MS: And I think that's what you were trying to do, and I think you accomplished a little bit of that with your photographs. And I think that's what the archive's trying to do. So if only the media who carry a lot of power could do it as well. �AC:[00:37:29] I'm hoping that the archives‐‐that people will go back to it and kinda peek (?) and see and think, you know, I think a lot of people don't know what to use some of these photos for yet. I think we don't know the future, but in terms of context, a lot of people are trying to tell stories now. And hopefully the photos that I took will do a "however" segment on somebody's network to say "hey, even though this was happening, this also was happening at the same time." So some form of hope can be there to say "hey, the city's not destroyed. It just has an issue right now, but there's room to grow. There's people here who want to grow, and they're passionate about growing here." And I hope my images are looked at in that light eventually, or more people might look at it and see it. I'm sure every other photographer captured great moments, and I'm hoping that all of it can be used to show what the city is‐‐on the crusty edge or the nice tasty side inside, but I hope people kinda appreciate the pie on the whole first versus just the center. [00:38:47] MS: So those are all my questions. Is there anything else you think we missed in talking about this and are really important to you? AC: Um, I mean, for me I'm hoping that the schools in the city [00:39:04]‐‐and I'm talking about the universities‐‐take a big chunk of the responsibility of how the city is shaped. I think education is a big thing that a lot of people in the city need. I'm not going to say everybody needs a tertiary education, but helping to education people should not only be for the individuals who pay for it but also the city. And I'm sure the universities are coming together to do something, but I hope that that is a big part of their agenda going forward‐‐that this happens under our watch as well. You know, a lot of these people are surrounded by universities. Not the people surrounding it. Johns Hopkins, University of Baltimore, Coppin State, and I could go down the list. They're doing massive constructions on their buildings, taking up parking, I mean, it's in people's‐‐it's city schools. They're part of the neighborhood. It's home for them as well. I'm hoping they'll see the citizens of Baltimore as not just citizens but also part of their home. As in, "we are here, come in. Come participate in our colleges, activities." You know, have some of them attend here. Make scholarships for some of them here, not necessarily just people coming in all the way from out of state to come to school, but actually offer them competitive scholarships and programs for people to be better citizens and ultimately custodians for the city. I think that's a big, big [00:40:57] activity and undertaking that they should consider because the more educated you have individuals around you, they become much more valuable in terms of how you want to use them. And I feel that's just it.[00:41:14] The cost of education is high. However, you can kind of balance it out, so to speak, in that way. So that's the only thing I feel that the Uprising, which mostly that march that we were a part of was of college students, so I hope the college, all of the universities and colleges of the city, see how important the college is to the city and also see how important the city is to the students. And I think that is also something that should be talked about: how important their impact was. These colleges do have a big pull, and they're very important to the city because a lot of people work here who come to school here, so that's another thing that I think a lot of people didn't talk about. No media talked about the schools that are here. [00:42:14] Mondawmin was being �destroyed, but right behind them was Coppin State, and not one camera turned behind them to highlight the fact that Coppin State was here and Frederick Douglass was down the street. nobody said anything. So I urged the government, I urged the universities whether they're profit or nonprofit, to actually be active in rebuilding the city and pushing the city forward. MS: Yeah, I'd hope that the institutions can be as invested in the city as their students are. AC: Yeah, that's it. I'm a student of one of the universities, but I also fell in love with the city. You know, I grew up in the city in a different country. I grew up in Kingston, Jamaica, and I have a lot of comparisons, you know, the streets, the people. And I was always a street kid, so I'm an urbanite, so to speak, and I feel like that should be something that is highlighted, made [00:43:23] proud of. You know, people should be proud of the fact that this is the talent, the love of what the city produces, and I think we can all benefit from that whether you're an institution or a resident, we should all be proud of our football team as much as our universities and as much as our people. And of the person who is asking me for change on the streets. You should look out for them. Someone said this to me before. I guess they said, "There's a saying that says"‐‐I forget, but it's more saying that blessings for the man that can provide for himself, I think that's what it was saying, but I believe that‐‐I think it should be more of a blessing to give somebody who can't help themselves. Right, so God blesses those that help themselves, but I think it should be a situation where you should be blessed for helping someone who cannot help themselves. And I think that's where we should be as a society. And we understand that our country is a capitalist country, so let me not act like that's not true. But at the same time, help your fellow man. I think that should be as simple as saying, "do you want some water," or "here's a coat, it's cold." We have dozens of things we don't use anymore that, while you think they are not working, they need it. So I think those are things that I think the city should adapt. [00:45:08] I'm sure some city has the city of brotherly love. I think that's Philly, right? [chuckles] I think Baltimore should have some type of slogan like that, because I think we have all the components to make the city great. Coming from an outsider looking in. I have the lens of being an immigrant, but at the same time, I can actually identify great qualities of the city that people might not see yet, but it has great potential to have people be great assets to this city. That's the only thing I would add. MS: Thank you so much. AC: Hey, no problem, Michael.   � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource UMBC Oral History Collection Subject The topic of the resource Interviews Description An account of the resource Oral histories contributed by students of University of Maryland, Baltimore County Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available MdHS Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Michael Stone Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Michael Stone Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Michael Stone Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Andrew Copeland Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Yes Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:45:47 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Andrew Copeland Interview Subject The topic of the resource Demonstration / event Description An account of the resource Andrew Copeland interviewed by Michael Stone. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Michael Stone Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available MdHS Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Michael Stone Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3, PDF Relation A related resource Andrew Copeland Collection (photos) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 09/22/2016 city hall Freddie Gray Penn - North Metro Station Photographer police protestor http://baltimoreuprising2015.org/files/original/fd796a77202a833713819ae51284f0d8.mp3 b3a9979144fc02da92ff3ed8ef1a0d0e http://baltimoreuprising2015.org/files/original/7dedcfd5bfd1cb3f4cc4bffd1d6ab0e0.pdf 109baae8f0c2ed643c194aafa4e21afc PDF Text Text Michael Stone:  Do you live in Baltimore City now?     Markele Cullins: Mhm, yeah, I live in the city now.     MS: What part of the city do you live in?     MC: I live in Cedonia—like northeast.     MS: And is that where you grew up as well?     MC: No I moved a lot. I lived in Baltimore County, I lived closer to the city, I moved a lot, but I always  lived east or north east.     MS: So how did you feel about the death of Freddie Gray?      MC: I was really upset. There was a lot of other protests before the death or murder of Freddie gray,  so I wasn’t necessarily surprised because he wasn’t the first person that was killed from police  brutality in Baltimore, but I was definitely upset. I was going through a lot of I guess, trauma, because  of all of the other killings and it was just one after the other and it was so many other protests that  were already happening that that just kinda like was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me,  um, so I was definitely really upset to hear about that and it was a lot, a lot of things happening. His  cousin was actually in my class, too, so that also was pretty upsetting as well. Um, yeah.      MS: So were you involved in the protests preceding­­     MC: Mhm, yeah.     MS: ­­Preceding Freddie Gray?     MC: Yeah, I was at almost every one I could go to. I was literally calling out of work to go to protests. I  was at a lot of protests for Freddie. A lot of the protests revolved around Michael Brown, Eric garner,  Tim ​Marias,​ every time something would happen there would be a protest. (1:51) And then of course  there was West Wednesdays.     MS: Did you go to West Wednesdays before—     MC: I actually haven’t been. I haven’t been but I know a few people that are really close with her,  Tawanda Jones.     MS: So what does the death of Freddie Gray mean to you personally?     MC: Um, for me it means a lot of things. (2:25) I feel like I could be Freddie gray. At any moment of  time. I’ve recently been dealing with issues or have been coming across issues with police lately, so  �that’s also really, really scary. And also it makes me personally scared for my grandfather and family  members that live in Sandtown because I have a good amount of family members that live there. So I  also get worried thinking about them because I understand that they’re in position where police are  constantly surveillancing the area and police are like everywhere. Like always on the corner, always on  something. So yeah, it means, it’s very nuanced. It means – the death means a lot to me.     MS: So you have family that lives in Sandtown?     MC: Mhm, yup yup.      MS: Did you grow up spending time there?     MC: I didn’t actually. I spent all my town in east Baltimore, but my grandfather lives there, and my  cousins and my aunts live there but I didn’t spend much time over on the west side.     MS: What do you think that Freddie Gray’s death or murder means to Baltimore as a city and as a  community?     MC: I think it’s another instance of racial injustice. But I think it was amplified so the entire city was  hurting by that one murder. (4:00) So I think that it means that, but I think that it also helped unify the  city, and I really hate saying that because I don’t think the way to unify a place would be to –through a  tragic murder like that at all. And I also think that there were a lot of groups that were already doing  like social work, and I feel like it was a reminder to, like, this is why we keep pushing. This is why we  have to keep creating these programs and doing all of this work.     MS: (4:25) So in what ways did you participate in the uprising, and how were you involved during mid­  to late­April and early May?     MC: So I was there on that Saturday I believe? Actually, no, I was there the first day. (4:50) I guess the  uprising really started. And I was participating in the protest. We were walking all around from, like,  City Hall to Sandtown and then we walked back down I believe. And then I remember, like, the shift  happening (5:00) where it was like if things were about to get really serious because they were about  to go to Camden yards to pretty much a hit ‘em where it hurts—in the city’s pocket. So I remember  that shift happening, and I was like I’m gonna keep going. (5:25) So I kept going and I remember  everything just started to get more crazy and crazy. Yeah, so I participated in that. And then after that  I stayed around and then on Monday I was also running around the city just trying to get people  because all the bus lines were closing and everything was shutting down, so I was running around the  city trying to pick up friends and family members. And in addition to that, I was trying to participate in  other events happening centering on the uprising. So the Real News Network had an event. There was  an event in ​McElderly park​. I was trying to participate in those events and figure out what are the next  steps to getting justice.     �MS: (6:00) Could you tell me more about the night when people went to the Inner Harbor? The first  night­­you said the “shift.” Could you talk about what that was like and the kinds of things you saw?     MC: A lot was happening at once, but I do know that there’s definintely the way the media portrayed  the situation was literally not what happened. At all. There was a lot of people actually being like  hey­­(6:25?) First of all, the whole reason why things got escalated was because of outside forces  literally (6:43?) being disrespectful to the cause and disrespectful to protestors.​ ​I remember when we  first got to Camden yards. There was this couple that barged through the entire protest that were like  well we came here to the game, so we’re going to see the game—without any sympathy for why we  were hurting or why we were protesting at all. There were other people saying racial slurs like  throwing stuff, taking stuff, there was a lot of that going on. And then, and I think that people don’t  realize that the reason why the things that were happening was for a very particular reason rooted in  racism in this country, racism and white supremacy in Baltimore. And I think that that’s why it  happened. I also think it’s really important—I saw a lot of people trying to defend cops. People that  don’t really care about the cops, either, being like “ok, we gotta stop. Let’s focus. We’re here to get  justice.” So I think that shift was many things. (7:51) But it definitely was like distorted by the media.      MS: In your participation, what were you most trying to accomplish, and what do you think most of  the protestors with you were most trying to accomplish?     MC: (8:08) I think that I was just trying to get justice and I was just trying to break down the system.  And pretty much get the rights that black people, cis, trans, male, female, queer, straight, all, just all  black lives, I was just trying to get justice for them. And I, yeah, pretty much that’s, I think that’s what  everyone was trying to accomplish (8:25). That was the goal. That was the mission.     MS: How did you hear about the events—the marches, the Real News Network things? (9:00) What  were your sources of information to be involved, to participate?     MC: The internet and people I knew that were going. So it would be like texts from people but also,  like, I would see things on the internet, which I feel multiple ways about. In one sense I feel like it’s  really, really helpful, I love it, a lot of this movement, or the continuation of the movement, is through  the internet, through us being able to access a whole bunch of people at once and invite people to  events and let people know about the specific killings in the same way that television helped to kinda  enforce, like, the last movement. So I think that I love that about it, but I also think that it can be really  easy for media and for police and for government to completely catch on to what we’re doing and just  (9:51) infiltrate protests and infiltrate events. So yeah.     MS: What were some examples of that in the uprising?     MC: Some examples of that were literally undercover cops joining the protests. Like literally being a  part of protests and dressing in normal clothes. And this also happened in a lot of previous protests  before the uprising. So at one event someone literally saw someone come out of a cop car in regular  clothes and just walk into the protest. And then, so yeah. That was the main issue. And the other thing  �is they were so prepared. They were so prepared for whatever to happen, so you see, like, the military  trucks in everything that were downtown during that event. And then also, again, previous protests I  remember this one protest I was at where they literally locked everyone at the protest in front of—I  forget which street it was but it was downtown—and we were there for literally an hour or two and  they had buses and buses of police officers. Because they were, like, so ready. They were so prepared.  So I think that those are specific examples of that happening and just also being able to call the police  that are like circulating the area. So just be like “ok, this is where they are going now” and sending  those texts. I think that’s what they’re doing. (11:18)     MS: What effect do you think that has on the protests and on the protestors that you come to your  peaceful march­­usually­­where there are already Jeeps and Humvees and police in riot gear wating  for you?     MC: I think there is a level of intimidation initially because, first of all, what we’re doing isn’t  unethical. We’re fighting for basic human rights, and yet we’re met with such resistance from the  government and from the military that’s so heavy and intense. Man, I think that the police officers  and the military and whatever, they come there themselves kinda ready and they kinda, they  themselves or at least the way they phrase what’s happening, they psych themselves up for (12:25)  something that it’s not and then they’re super aggressive. And I think that’s one of the effects. I think  another effect that it has is that it tries to hinder the movement a lot. They’ll try to­­you’ll go be  protesting, you’ll be walking down the street, and then they’ll try to block you off that street so that  you have to go to another street. The end result of what they’re trying to do is to do what they did  that one time and they will try to corner you into a specific area where police are barricading every  single part of whatever area you’re in so that you cannot move at all. So you can’t do anything. So you  can’t actually create—even though I think that’s still creating an effect of change—so you can’t  continue and push it. So you can’t go to the gallery, or so you can’t go to Camden yards or wherever.  That’s their goal.     MS: (13:10) So it seems intentional what places they’re trying to keep you away from. Could you talk  about that a little bit—the geography of control?     MC: (13:28) I feel like I haven’t thought about this well enough to explain it in a way that actually  makes sense, but I’m gonna try to. So I guess when I think about, oh shit, I’m sorry if I curse. I guess  when I think about the Harbor I think that there is— So what Baltimore City wants the Harbor to be is  a money generator for the city and surrounding counties. I think people already have this­­when they  think about Baltimore they’re like “oh, the wire”, (14:08) and they’re trying to create this area that’s  more touristy and attracts people and like “nothing’s gonna happen to you” and all these others  things. So since this area is already like—I can’t explain this well. I’m sorry. Let me start over.      MS: No, it’s interesting.     MC: So, I guess the point of the Harbor is to not only quote­unquote “be an attraction” for people that  live in the city and the surrounding counties but it’s also to create revenue to get more donors and to  �bring more money into Baltimore and to get people to come here and see that it’s a great place so  people can come in and developers can now build the city and do all of these other things. So they  don’t want anyone to disrupt the money flow that’s happening there, so they’re going to try to do  everything in their power to try to stop protestors from invading that space and blocking people out.  And like pretty much disrupting the peace and continuing the revolution. So I think that’s why they  protect those areas. Because there are so many areas in this city that are not protected like the  Harbor is protected. I remember at one point in high school when­­you could not go into the gallery  unless you were eighteen­­and I went to high school downtown, so I would try to go to the Gallery  every Friday, and at one point, I could not go. Like, if I had to use the bathroom, the Gallery has a  bathroom. If I had to charge my phone, see people, anything, you could not go at all. So I think that’s  another way of them doing that, I think.     MS: Growing up in northeast Baltimore, do you think that sends a message about who the Gallery is  for?     MC: Can you rephrase that question?     MS: Do you think the Inner Harbor, do you think Harbor East, do you think these kinds of corporate  developments, do you think they benefit the residents of Baltimore—especially those in east  Baltimore?   (16:20)     MC: No and yes, and this is just from my personal experience. I used to‐‐when I was in high school‐‐I ​ feel like a lot of people who went to high school downtown, the people who went to the Digital Harbor or something like that, they would go to the Harbor to hang out with friends and stuff like that. And it would just be to see friends, to chill at Federal Hill, or go to the Gallery, eat some food and then go home. But I do think the older you get the more you're like, "what is this place?" You just don't really‐‐it doesn't have the same impact. But that could just be my personal experience. But I do think that the way that the development seems to be going now‐‐I've seen a couple videos and a couple articles‐‐it seems like they're definitely trying to make the Gallery for residents that live in Federal Hill, residents that live in Fells Point, residents that live in Mount Vernon, and those are all three really expensive areas to live in, so I don't think that's it's really benefiting or for the people of Baltimore city. But I do think‐‐I'm not going to lie and say that there aren't some people that I know that still go down there and chill. MS: So an interesting difference between the uprising in 1968 when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and this uprising in 2015 [00:17:53] is where protesters went. And it's very interesting that you as protesters chose to go to the Inner Harbor. And I think earlier you said, "hit them where it hurt." Can you talk a little more about that sentiment among you and other protesters of going to the corporate center of the city to protest? MC: I think the point of that was to get to disrupt capitalism and disrupt Baltimore's most beloved area, but also I think that it was also to get attention. Because if you protest in the area that Baltimore city �already does not care about they're not going to care at all. But if you go and protest at The Gallery, the Harbor, Camden Yards, they then will be, like, "ok, we understand." I think it's just strategic in the way that [00:18:56] we know that the city is putting a lot of attention on this area, and they're trying to build it and develop it and do all these other things, so the point of going there is to get the city's attention fast so we can further create legislation changes and further create‐‐yeah, just further create change. [00:19:19] MS: Who do you think, or who do you know, were the leaders of and the organizers behind the protests‐‐the ones who came up with the strategy of where to go and when to march? MC: So [00:19:47] I know the PPA (?) was really important in a lot of the protests. They were very active in calling people and sending out emails to be like "hey, this is what's happening." I don't really‐‐I don't know if I know other groups. Well, I definitely know other groups that have been organizing, but that's the group that I'm most familiar with. There were a lot of different groups organizing at once, so I don't necessarily recall the other groups that were organizing. I know that there were definitely different protests. And I think that also in what's happening right now, there's not really‐‐I'm not going to say there's not a need‐‐but there's not really a leader right now. I don't really think that's the goal. I think that we're all trying to focus on different aspects of, not only justice, but intersectionality and all of these other things. I know that Freddie Grey's family members were involved in organizing some of the marches. [00:21:06] Is this particular to the uprising or just in general, like general protests? MS: I'm interested in both. I'm interested in the uprising. I understand that there aren't these individuals‐‐that's a simplistic view‐‐but I know there are these organizations that have been really involved, and I think those were often the same organizations. So if you want to talk about other leaders and the Black Lives Matter movement and Baltimore social justice‐‐? MC: Tawanda Jones is an amazing leader. I think she does a lot. I really appreciate everything she does. Yeah, I think she's an amazing leader, to be organizing that hard every single Wednesday. And she doesn't only do that. She's been in documentaries. [00:21:55] She's just done so much, so I think that she's an amazing leader. There's a few others. There's definitely a few others, but I guess I just wanted to mention her, to be honest. Yeah, there's others. And I guess the way I look at it is that there are people that are creating organizational efforts to help the movement. [00:22:28] Baltimore Creative Alliance has Neighborhood Voices, which is a group of people, and JC Faulk has Circle of Voices, The Real News Network has regular programming. But I don't want to enforce how I view what they do on them, but it seems more to me like a group effort of understanding and a coalition of trying to work together as an organization opposed to "I am the leader; this is what I think." [00:23:03] MS: Do you have any specific interactions with the police, with the National Guard, specific interactions that have really stuck with you? �MC: [00:23:25]        � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource UMBC Oral History Collection Subject The topic of the resource Interviews Description An account of the resource Oral histories contributed by students of University of Maryland, Baltimore County Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available MdHS Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Michael Stone Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Michael Stone Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Michael Stone Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Markele Cullins Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Yes Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:34:35 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Markele Cullins Subject The topic of the resource Demonstration / event Description An account of the resource Markele Cullins Interviewed by Michael Stone. The Oral History transcript is incomplete. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Michael Stone Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available MdHS Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Michael Stone Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3 and PDF camden yards city hall Freddie Gray National Guard police brutality protestor Sandtown-Winchester Social Media West Wednesday http://baltimoreuprising2015.org/files/original/de72f419a6b4471d2dfc2a215005bbd3.pdf 35cdd4ca1569ccd66031facc766b4616 PDF Text Text Michael Stone: So I have a list of questions and you can look at them with me, but I have a couple of  things I want to ask you about. So do you live in Baltimore City?    Vanessa Barksdale: In part. My parents are split up, so I spend half of my time with my mother, who lives  in the county now, and half of my time with my father, who lives in the west side of the city.    MS: Ok, cool. Where in the west side?    In a neighborhood called Park Heights. It’s near a train station.    Nice, so were you there at the time of the protests?    Yes I went to three, I think. Three protests.    (0:55) How did you first learn about or hear about the death of Freddie Gray, and what was your  experience hearing that?    I have to think about that because I don’t remember the moment.    It doesn’t have to be the exact. Maybe just around that time when this first hit the news and just around  that time. just thinking about your experience.    You know what, I don’t remember when, but I do remember how that made me feel. And I do remember  the visceral reaction if that’s meaningful to you at all. I remember sitting down, (1:40) I remember my  stomach just turning up into a complete knot and just thinking how wild it must be for someone to get in a  police car and then within the course of the day to be completely damaged to the point where their entire  spine is damaged and disrupted. And where you can hurt someone so much that you can crack all the  bones in their body. Which is the wildest thing ever. Which is such a procedural thing that these things  happen. You know what I mean? That’s just the kind of thing they expect. And I was just—I don’t know.  It was really scary to me. (2:20) There was a lot of fear in my stomach. I don’t know if there was anything  else.    Was that the first, well—what do you think it meant for Baltimore? The death of Freddie Gray?  I think it meant for Baltimore City, for the people that live there,     I think it was kinda a moment for them—for us—to say that someone needs to care at least about this  because for something so violently horrible, unapologetically inhuman to happen to a single person, at  some point we need to be able to say we can’t accept this anymore, and for us to keep watching this  happen over and over and over again to so many Freddies and so many boys and to so many little girls  and to have people’s brothers not come home and to have people’s sisters not come home and just to be  afraid to walk outside and say “Oh, is there a policeman outside? Should I come back? What should I do?  What should I wear?” I think people just got tired and just got really angry at the fact that they had to be  scared every day when they walked out of the house.  �  (3:40) So I think you said a little bit earlier that you were involved with three protests. Could you talk  individually about each of those about where you marched, what you did, what was going on?    (3:56) The first one was in the beginning of the protests when everything was happening. It was on a  weekend. It was on a Friday, and it was just a bunch of people going through the streets, talking about  how crazy everything was and how we needed to use our voices to fight back. And we marched past the  Inner Harbor, around to where the jails are, which is a really long strip in Baltimore, and just around a  couple neighborhoods. And I remember walking through there and seeing the policemen on the side of the  streets we were marching on, and it was kinda like a “oh, we’re not doing anything. We’ll just let you  guys do what you’re doing.” But it was kinda this eerie little shadow on the side of the road where you  know if you move to the left or you move to the right you know something serious is about to happen.  And I remember watching the marching down the street, knowing that I had to make a left because if I  made a right down that street there were tanks guarding the other side of the road. And if I made that right  and tried to walk past a tank then something really unfortunate probably would happen. So I was like  well, it’s really interesting, (5:15) I remember thinking how interesting it is and feeling like it was kinda  like a scene out of the ​Hunger Games to feel like I’m walking down the street and these people are  nonverbally explaining to me, “You can go this way, Vanessa, but if you do, you may die.” You know, I  mean, because that’s usually what you would expect when someone’s using a tank or a gun strapped to  their chest or something like that.    How did it feel to see the army and tanks in a city that you grew up in?    (5:45) It felt like an alternate universe. ​It felt like a different planet from a scifi movie where these things were‐‐where a state like this exists. Where you just don't allow people to exist and move and be angry and feel their feelings. It was just a scene of‐‐I've never felt like the state could be like, "we may kill you. We will kill you, Vanessa, if you move left. We can and do have the authorization to kill you." So that was just the wildest thing for me not to feel safe in my existence as a girl walking down the street. Then despite the fear that you experienced, you went to two more protests, so how was it different the second and the third time? What was different about that experience? What was different about the way you did that, or was anything different? Now the second time I went, now this may have been the second or third time I went, the protest was more of a celebration because the state's attorney decided that she was going to press charges. So everyone was running through the streets and they were rallying and we were so excited. And it was just a big community party. Like just marching down the streets. it was kinda like a parade. Everyone was‐‐I remember me and my friends were walking through this one part of the procession where eveyrone was dancing and they brought metal pots and steel drums and things like that. And we were all jamming to our little protest songs. It was like a "We did it" kind of thing. Like they're listening to what's finally‐‐and even if they're not. Even if they're not listening in the sense that we're going to �actually do something about this two years from now, three years from now, at this moment, we have what we need. So that's just kind of a "we can do this" family type of thing. So. So those, either the second or the third[00:08:02], some of those protests were more celebratory. The first one was the protest, the anger, the reaction. Did you have anything specific that you and the people around you were trying to accomplish? what were the kind of things that people were trying to accomplish? What were the kind of things people were talking about? And what were specifically your goals? [00:08:20] Specifically? Yeah, not precise. But just like generally, you know? Okay, well it's actually interesting because a lot of different organizations were asking for a lot of different things. For example, the People's Power Assembly, they came out with these 14 points that they were asking. Or it may not be 14, but it was a series of points that they were asking for. And they were asking for indictments of course, but they were asking for a lot of things. But a lot of organizations were just asking for more systematic stuff‐‐more general police accountability, let's implement these body cameras, let's figure out how when an officer shoots someone and the end result of that is I'm gonna put you behind a desk for more 30 days, I'm going to make sure that you have to do more than just the requisite two pages of paperwork. You know what I mean? [00:09:23] It was just like a lot of people were asking for a lot of different things but at the end of the day we just want these people's lives to be accounted for. We want these people's experiences to be valid. [00:09:34] How did you hear about the protests? How did you get your information to participate? Facebook.[00:09:43] [laughs] A lot of sharing, a lot of sharing from People's Power Assembly, a lot of grassroots organizations. Baltimore Algebra Project has been really integral, too. Were you involved in any of these organizations before the Uprising of 2015? Actually, no. It wasn't until after these uprisings happened. So you saw them, their rallying calls, through Facebook. Was that shared to you through friends or kind of through your social networks through Facebook and social media? I think it was definitely through my social networks. When the failure to indict the officer, Darren Wilson, the person who killed Freddie Gray,[00:10:42] not Freddie Gray‐‐when Mike Brown happened. I started to‐‐that was, for me, that was a moment in my life when I started to get more in tune with �activist work and get more in tune with engaging with activist voices and things like that, so I already had my ear to the ground in that way. [00:11:04] Was Mike Brown kind of the first case of police violence that really hit home for you? I think so [00:11:14]. Yeah. that makes sense to me. I think for me‐‐or for people older than me I know there were a lot of cases in the 90's and stuff‐‐but I think Trayvon Martin of course. I think so. Could you talk a little bit more about the significance of social media? Just in how these protests with Michael Brown and then Freddie Gray in the Baltimore Uprising, social media seems to be a big part of it, and it seems to be making these, in some ways, a very different than kinda our parents' social activism. Any thoughts on that? Yeah, I was actually thinking about this the other day. That when you look at TV and when you look at articles posted by mainstream media sources, sometimes there's a lot of in‐congruence with the things they're actually writing versus the things, the pictures that they're posting. They can say, "Oh, a protest happened downtown and people are angry because of this thing." But then they post things on fire, cars being flipped over, things like that. [00:12:28] But, in actuality, the protest is not the same as things on fire, things being lit up, things being beaten up. That things on fire part is like a small, tiny, little [00:12:44], itty bitty percentage of the actually bigger issue that's happening. But with Twitter, with Facebook‐‐Twitter's usually the biggest platform that we've been using‐‐but since using 140 characters is so short, you immediately have to say "this is what's happening, and this is what this looks likes." "This is what's happening, this is what that looks like." So for me if I wanted to say "okay, what's going on downtown? what's going on near the Inner Harbor?" And I can hashtag Inner harbor. I can see exactly what they're doing there, and I can see what the protest looks like form the perspective of the people that are actually there and from the perspective of hundreds of people actually living that experience instead of just this one biased pictured source. You kinda talked about the two images of the Uprising. There was the protests. There was a lot of celebration. There was a lot of marching for justice, and then there was kind of the national CNN [00:13:54] images of fires and of broken windows. You were there. You saw a lot of things. Did you see any of that CNN stuff happening when you were downtown? No. [laughs] If we're being honest, [00:14:12] no. Actually, neither of my times. It's actually really interesting. I've been downtown in the protests and I've done a lot of stuff outside the protests, too, �and me seeing hundreds and hundreds of people marching peacefully and getting from point A to point B peacefully‐‐none of those things ever happened. But the scariest things that had happened to me and to my friends and to the people that I came down with was just the interactions [00:14:50] and the not violent, non‐verbal communication with the police officers and things like that. That was the scariest thing. Talk more about that. Ok, alright. Well, good example[00:15:03]: I think this was the first time I ever went to a protest. We, it was me and three other friends that came with me, so it was four of us, we paired up. Me and my friend, May, we were walking past the Inner Harbor, I think they call it‐‐I don't know what the specific name for it is but we just call it Inner harbor‐‐and there was policemen all lined up next to these stores, next to the Cheesecake Factory, next to all these restaurants and things like that, and I remember thinking "that's the wildest thing ever." Because me and my friends used to go there all the time. And I was like, "when are they gonna open those stores?" The business owners that get their money from those stores probably aren't going to get that money because you all are closing those stores down for days and days and days and that's wild. I was like, "why is this closed? what are you doing? like why? Help me." And so, I was like, let me just ask. So I decided, had the full idea, to ask one of the police officers. I said, "Excuse me." And he was like, "You can't go past here! Turn around!" And I was like, "I just wanted to know‐‐" And he was like, "It doesn't matter. Turn around." I wanted to ask him a question and just ask him when they're going to move away from the stores so the businesses can open up again, but in his voice and in his face and in his literal words‐‐it was very scary. [00:16:37] It was‐‐I've never‐‐it was the most steely‐‐I know people can say that your words can be violent[00:16:53] , and that was the most violent way that anyone can ever say a sentence, ever. It wasn't just like a "oh, it's okay. Turn around, please." He could have just as well have been like, "if you say another word, you will be shot on site." And so I was like, "Alright, well, May, let's go." And I was just like, oh dear. [00:17:19] Let me just not ask any more questions. Okay. Let's just let that sit. Hopefully that will get better, but I'm not going to ask them any more questions. This is scary. [crying] I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Alright, I'll stop crying. It's okay. It's an emotional topic. If you need us to take a break, we can. But we can keep going if you want to as well. I'm okay. I'm sorry. [00:17:58] No, don't be. I'm emotional. �We're all emotional. Do you think things have changed since or because of the uprising because of the protests? [00:18:21] Hmm. [00:18:25] I think so. I think a lot of people are asking a lot more questions, which is very valuable to me because I‐‐with the type of activism the protests have inspired me to do‐‐I think of things very academically as to why organizations and why institutions don't help the city in a lot better ways. And I think that because of all these things that have been going on, a lot of institutions, a lot of universites, like UMBC, for example, are turning around. They're saying, what? What's going on? Why is this happening? How can we help these people? How can we make their lives better? And I think, for example, with UMBC's women's center, we had a critical social justice week, and we did the theme of the week on Baltimore and Baltimore and the Baltimore Uprisings and things like that. and it brought a lot of discussion, a lot of conversation and something that would not have crossed people's minds otherwise. And they wouldn't have been sitting around thinking about the institutional structures that exist that would hinder people of this age bracket to this age bracket. But after these people have already gotten up and said, we're angry, and this is already happening to us and we don't want it to happen anymore, it makes a lot of people think otherwise. [00:19:52] For a lot of your fellow classmates, a lot of UMBC people, did you feel that institutionally there was a lot of people involved in protests? [00:20:03] I think they're trying to be. I think there's a lot of really‐‐it lets a lot of really broken‐hearted people that want to ask, "What can we do? How can we make this city that we're so attached to better?" And I know a lot of people that are asking themselves that same question. But at the same time, there are a lot of people that are countering that with the "you guys are overreacting just get over it" type of thing, which I don't know if that's more hurtful or not. It's something that exists. [00:20:37] Which one do you think you hear more of at UMBC? "You guys need to get over it." It's 70/30 over "how can we help?" Or 60/35. Something like that. What do you think still needs to change? [00:21:03] [laughs] A lot of things. [00:21:13] A lot of things. A lot of where our investments go, a lot of where we place our money goes to the neighborhoods that already have things. And theoretically, say we just had a big blizzard and there was a lot of stuff going on, and a lot of resources needed to be given to make sure that the STATE streets are safe and clear and people can get to work and so forth. the streets that, say, give the most money, that have the best returns and things like that, and with the most affluent people, essentially, they will get cleared the most and those people wouldn't have as TOUGH a �time getting to work. Whereas my dad, he lives on the sid eof town that's not as affluent, to say the least, and he was saying that the only reason that his street was shoveled was actually by chance because on his street was someone's grandmother. And someone was like, "Well, I'm not going to let my grandmother stay on this unplowed street any longer." So we just plowed the whole street for him. But if that man didn't plow that street for my father, that street would have been unplowed for days and days and days, and he wouldn't have been able to go to work, and he would have just had to sit in his house. So just like a lot of little things that add up to a lot of unfair, biased, hurtful things that just kind of communication, "Well, yeah, you are a Baltimore resident. Yeah, you're here, but you're kind of like a Priority 2, a Priority 3." You're kind of like a side note at this point. So I think a lot of people are trying to navigate the feeling of being a side note, and the point of this uprising is to instead of being a side note they want to be more of a front page type of thing. [00:23:17] What are some of the most hopeful things you see going on now in Baltimore city? I get a lot of hope from talking to Baltimore‐based organizations and people who are really invested and connected to the city. And people who say that we really care about these people and really want them to grow and progress and do better. And people who are really committed to doing blanket drives. I've seen that a lot. People who are committed to doing food drives and who are committed to‐‐during the winter [00:24:00] when it gets really, really cold‐‐they're saying, Ok, well let's figure out how we're going to put all these homeless people who are living outside without anywhere to go, let's figure out how we can get them to the appropriate places and how we can call the police and get them to the shelters they need to be in. so I think basically what's hopeful to me is seeing the people who really do care and how they feel about it. And how come hell or high water they're gonna really do everything they can to make the city something better. [00:24:37] Do you think that as time goes on and we remember the uprising, do you think it will be seen as a turning point in the city's history? And if so, turning towards what? [00:24:52] I think so. I think it is going to be seen as a really big turning point. It's like if you, if there was someone really important that you wanted to talk to and you really needed to get their attention because of whatever thing, and you tapped on their shoulder and you say, "excuse me," and they didn't listen to you, and you tapped on their shoulder again. You say, "excuse me," and they didn't listen, and then you smack them. You say, "excuse me," and they say, "yes? What? What's wrong?" And you say, "this is the issue. This is what's going on. This is what we need to happen." And he said, "ok, ok, ok, just calm down. Stop smacking me. We'll figure it out." I think that's what the uprising is because I think the national media got a smack in the face a little bit.[00:25:32] And whether they're gonna take that and run with it or take that and just say whatever is one thing, but in the context of the larger movement and the context of the black lives matter movement, it's not something that's just gonna be fleeting. �But what's affecting Baltimore city is gonna affect Maryland is gonna affect the United States. So it's a lot of things coming together. What are your opinions on the Black Lives Matter movement? It's come to a very large stage in recent years. [00:26:11] I think it's painful. It's very painful to me to have to explain to people that such a thing is necessary. And it's very painful to me to have to say it's important for us to talk about the value of black life. It's important for us to talk about the fact that police brutality not only exists but it's pervasive in black communities specifically. And have people tell me, Well, it's not your fault. Or, It's your fault for running away. Maybe if you did this. Maybe if you did that. Maybe if you pull up your pants. Which is completely silly to me because whether I was running, if I was confronting police and I was running away, you still shouldn't be shouldn't regardless. If I was a man and my pants were sagging down, you shouldn't be shooting me regardless. If I was in an affluent city or a poor city, you shouldn't be shooting me regardless because my life is valuable. And it shouldn't matter to you what I look like or where I come from. It shouldn't be so‐‐it seems like a lot of SCIENCE that shouldn't actually exist. [00:27:23] And it's difficult for me, as a very idealistic and very passionate person but also coming from a really spiritual Christian point of view to try to explain to people in a loving way how viable and how relevant this is without being angry, without just giving up on humans entirely. Because I think the Black Lives Matter movement has been long overdue. And I'm tired of explaining such things.[00:27:54] It makes me sleepy. I'm sorry. What do you think is different in the Black Lives Matter movement compared to previous civil rights movements? [00:28:11] I think that the Black Lives Matter movement is a lot more nuanced. It's a lot more under‐the‐surface things that you would have to open a book or open a periodical and sit and study. If I took ideas and just made them into truths, I would perfectly well believe that, Well, black men are just more criminal, and so that's why they get locked up more. Or black men are just more violent, so that's how they get shot more. Because those are the ideas that just turn into a truth in my mind. But instead of just making ideas into truth, there's a lot more under‐the‐surface research that needs to be done for the Black Lives Matter movement. For you to realize that actually there's a much higher rate of black men that get killed than white men between the ages of eighteen and twenty‐five. And just a lot of things that you would have to read and study for yourself to be true. But taking that in contrast with the civil rights movement, [00:29:22] I shouldn't have to explain to you that "white people can eat here and black people can eat here, and white people and black people should eat in the same place." You should be able to walk down the street and see visibly white people eat here and black people eat there. We should both be able to eat in the same place. Or I should visibly see a bus where white people were in the front and black people were in the back. and you say, We should all sit together. �Just a lot of things that you should visually look at and understand. That's what I'm asking for. And the Black Lives Matter movement is a lot more nuanced information. A lot more nuanced, strategic, systematic things that would be integrating. It's a lot more internalized. It's a lot more under‐the‐surface things, too. Yeah, that's a really interesting observation that the civil rights movement really focused on the visible surface and the Black Lives Matter movement really focuses on the roots and the underneath things that need to change. Yeah, not to say that, of course, the civil rights movement didn't look at the roots things because the visible things come from the roots things, right? [00:30:29] I don't say, "Oh, I would like for these people to sit here and those people to sit there" just because it's prettier. I say that I think black people should sit here and white people should sit here because I inherently believer there's a difference between the two of us, and there should be‐‐there's a disconnect between these two people. [00:30:52] And so changing outright: "I think that black people are inherently different than me and they should be treated differently"‐‐changing that mindset is a little different than changing the mindset of: "Oh yeah, I love black people. Black people are perfectly fine, but I'm not going to sit with one. I'm not going to walk past one at night. I'm definitely not going to let one marry my daughter." You know what I mean? Just a lot of, in the Black Lives Matter movement, just a lot of, "Are you sure? Are you really not racist? If you're really not racist, why do you say such things? Why do you treat people that way?" A lot of asking nitty gritty questions. [00:31:43] When you go back to your dad's neighborhood and stay with him, do you notice anything different there in the past year? [00:31:56] [00:31:59] I actually haven't, to be honest. Maybe it's because I haven't come back to my father's house as much as I should, but what I have noticed in April is what I noticed in January, is that a lot of people there are not necessarily sad people. But they're not sad because the existence of the people on the west end of Baltimore can be just as happy and just as fruitful and the relationships that develop there are really in‐depth and meaningful. But I just notice a lot of people that I've talked to and a lot of people that I've had a chance to just hang out with and chitter‐chat, they all just want an opportunity to do better. They all just want an opportunity to feel like someone gives them an opportunity to come out of the rat race of "I need some money. I need some money, but I can't get more money because I don't have enough childcare" because of a continuing circumlocutive [stet] circle of financial issues and continuing with a circumlocutive [stet] circle of health issues and just problems and problems and problems and problems coming from the same issues of socioeconomic background. Yeah, I think they all just‐‐I think in April, May, June, July, and January‐‐they all just want the opportunity to do better. [00:33:37] �So that's most of my questions. Are there any other things that have been going through your mind? Obviously you've been doing a lot of research. Anything you would like to share or talk about? [00:33:50] Hmm. [00:33:58] Yeah. Yeah, one more thing. I remember‐‐actually two things. I'm sorry. I remember walking‐‐so it was, this particular day, it was when the uprisings just started, and I remember sitting in our campus dining hall eating food and I remember watching on the news the fact that the uprisings were happening and all this stuff going on and they were showing a fire and all this wild stuff. And everyone in the dining hall where I was were literally getting up and standing toward the TV and all these people just standing there just watching the TV. And it was like‐‐this is gonna be really corny‐‐but Zora Neale Hurston has a book called Their Eyes Were Watching God, and there's a specific part of her book where she was saying‐‐where she was describing watching a flood come into her house. And in this one paragraph of this book, she said‐‐of something to this effect‐‐"Their faces were fixed to the water rising, but their eyes were watching God." So I was thinking about that quote in comparison to them. They're physically facing the TV screen, but they're all like, "So, what are we going to do? Why is this happening? The world's kinda ending. What does this mean?" This is kinda crazy. And it was just the wildest thing ever to see, for you to leave a dining hall and for you to walk across campus, because on that particular day, I left the dining hall. I went to class. I went to a student org meeting. I went to the library, and I went to my dorm, and literally every single place I went, everyone was talking about the same thing. And everyone was talking about the same, "Oh what do you think about the protests? What do you think about the uprisings? What do you think about this? What do you think about the protests?" And it was the craziest thing ever because everyone was talking about the same thing. Everyone was talking about having the same conversation at the same time wherever you walk. And it was so suffocating to me because I was like, "this is the craziest thing ever." I just don't want to think about this for ten minutes because it was so stressful and so frustrating to me. And I just couldn't breathe after a second. I was like, this is wild. I remember thinking [00:36:25] that Park heights is really close to Mondawmin, which is a neighborhood directly adjacent, and I remember that I‐‐because I used to stay with my dad during a couple summers because I interned in Baltimore and I worked a lot of hours there‐‐I used to take the train over to Mondawmin, I used to shop there, I used to get clothes, and I remember that the first thing I bought with my big girl money that summer, I bought a silver cross from a store in Mondawmin. I remember looking on the news and seeing that the same store that I got that silver cross from was bombarded by policemen and that they weren't gonna‐‐that people weren't allowed to go in for that day. And that all the stuff was happening at Mondawmin and it's just so crazy. And I was just like, I don't know. It's like someone setting a doll house on fire. It's like, "Why would you do that? Why would you do that to‐‐it was just like this place that had so many good, fond memories of that mall‐‐Mondawmin Mall‐‐where I got my first cross, where I went shopping, because of all these different things. I twas just like, I don't know, just the wildest thing ever to see 20 things explode at once. [00:37:44] It was just a lot of explosions at once. It was very draining. �[00:37:52] If you don't mind, and if you do remember, what was the first date or day of the week that you went down to the protests? It was a year ago; if you don't remember it's totally fine. That's real specific. Uh, [00:38:16] it was either a Thursday or a Friday, I think. It was either a Thursday or a Friday because‐‐no, it was a Friday‐‐because the university had a teach‐in. And it was a teach‐in during a Friday, and they were saying, they said at that teach‐in, "Oh, if you guys want, we're going to sponsor a shuttle to take you guys from UMBC to Baltimore. And so a lot of my friends, a lot of my groups were like, Oh, ok, let's take the shuttle, guys. Let's show up and show out at Baltimore. And I remember that because the shuttle was so full. There were, like, packs and packs and packs of people that couldn't get on the shuttle, so we were all trying to coordinate carpools and stuff like that. And that's how I met my friend May. [00:39:07] You're still friends now? Yeah, she's a nice girl. Awesome, well, that's all the questions I have, so thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. I feel wildly unhelpful, but I hope you can get something helpful from my incoherence. No, you helped a lot. The things you said were really powerful. Okay, alright.   � http://baltimoreuprising2015.org/files/original/1b13c1a7b7d1efb0ab7cc593ea5c98fd.mp3 33cbeef8efbc51ce1b3fca720e28ff02 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource UMBC Oral History Collection Subject The topic of the resource Interviews Description An account of the resource Oral histories contributed by students of University of Maryland, Baltimore County Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available MdHS Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Michael Stone Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Michael Stone Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Michael Stone Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Vanessa Barksdale Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Yes Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:39:23 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Vanessa Barksdale Interview Subject The topic of the resource Demonstration / event Description An account of the resource Vanessa Barksdale interviewed by UMBC graduate student, Michael Stone. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available MdHS Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Michael Stone Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3 and PDF Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Michael Stone #socialmedia Freddie Gray inner harbor Mike Brown police protestor http://baltimoreuprising2015.org/files/original/86af8c14dafa3210c8b7bb3c684d4ae8.mp3 d937a39f3a47a03fdb8bed629a752dd5 http://baltimoreuprising2015.org/files/original/46f71ac3ade49e4e8494fee74358b1b4.pdf a90e58358b500b9f63b7ecda95608ea4 PDF Text Text Michael Stone: Alright, so where are you from? Terrence Pope: I am from‐‐oh, that's a very good question‐‐I have a military family, so Baltimore has become a home, but I was born abroad. Technically, I'm not from anywhere. MS: When did you move to Baltimore? TP: About six, seven years ago. MS: What brought you here? TP: To be quite honest, chance. A friend and I, we came here because of Google. It told us we needed to come to Pikesville to find a bank we were looking for. We didn't find it and ended up driving into the Harbor since we were near the city anyway. And we kinda fell in love with it and moved here a week later. MS: [00:00:47] What did you think of Baltimore when you first came here? TP: You know, I have the benefit of never having heard any of the really negative things about Baltimore, so I actually didn't know that it was a place. I didn't know anything about it, there was no pretext, there was no coloring to my experience. I thought it was a nice place, you know, It was one of the larger cities I had lived in in a long time. I liked the people. I met a lot of people who were swing dancers, a lot of people in the service industry, and a lot of people who were just people from around the neighborhood. I thought people here were very kind, actually, when I first came here. MS: When did you start hearing negative stuff?[00:01:32] TP: Mostly initially through stereotypes from people who lived here, venting about what they didn't like about the perceptions of it. People making the same old complaint at bars, like "I get asked if this is like The Wire, and it's not." Or people telling me about how when they came here for college, their family was against it. And I had to ask, "why?" "Well, Baltimore's really sketchy; it's a very dangerous place." [00:01:58] And then, of course, I'd say, "Well, why?" and there's never really a good answer that follows that second "why?" But yeah, it was slowly starting seeping into my experience here. But it's really interesting because it came from the people‐‐sort of them being aware of the perception of Baltimore. So it's kinda imagined in a sense. It's really interesting. MS: Talk a little more about that. How does that line up with your reality of Baltimore? �TP: Well, I mean the reality is that it doesn't. I‐‐sure, I've had my bike stolen, I've gotten my fair share of parking tickets, but aside from that in terms of what people describe as being the bad aspect of Baltimore, of course, describing violence, I think actually predominantly violence is the way that people describe the place. I have never really directly interacted with that. I've seen, sure, I've seen different kinds of bias operating in society. Baltimore is a very segregated place; in that way, it's not very different from Detroit or from really any other major city I've been in. Seattle is like that, Denver is like that, [00:03:16] Austin is like that, you know, so for me the experience has never really quite matched the perception of what the experience should be like. and it's always been very interesting to make that observation, and I think that's why so many people are evangelists when they say that it's a charming place or that they really love this city, or that people have the wrong idea or that it's better than DC, it's kinda a push‐back against the idea that no one is really like‐‐in the day‐to‐day‐‐having the experience that Baltimore is a dangerous place. No one's afraid to live here. [00:03:51] MS: Do you think you fit into that category of "Baltimore evangelist"? TP: Yeah, I think so to the extent that it comes up in conversation. I don't think that I will introduce myself and say, ​ "Yeah, I'm Terrence from Baltimore. What's up? Great city. ​My ​city." But I do find ​ myself becoming really sensitive to when people start talking about Baltimore. So I've been traveling a lot recently, and when I go out of the city, they'll say, "Oh, where are you from?" "Oh, I'm from Baltimore." "Oh, that's interesting. Tell me about that." And the first thing that I say is often, "Well, it's beautiful, there's a lot of people that really care, there's a very active green space in Baltimore, there's a very active arts and theater and music scene in Baltimore[00:04:45]. There's a very active activism scene in Baltimore, you know." And I talk about the neighborhoods and the people that I meet. So I do, I think, conform to that quote‐unquote "Evangelist" stereotype I think. But to some sense there's pride more than anything else, and that a lot of my very close friends, deep relationships, a lot of personal growth has happened here. It's a really important place for me. [00:05:13] What are some of your go‐to stories to win people over outside the city? Well, I mean, most recently, the events of April, but sort of dancing around that, I think things like when I moved here, we met a guy named John who worked down at whatever the wine shop is in the Inner Harbor. I can't remember what it's called anymore. Bin 604 I think it is? But we meet this guy, we don't know him, he doesn't know us, he's from here, [00:05:44]‐‐us being me and the friend I moved here with, a lady named Elizabeth‐‐and he was really, really kind actually. He took us out that night, he showed us some bars, and just for that to be the first interaction that you have with a person, one of the first people that you meet in this city I think really spoke to the kinds of people in this place. And that was a really powerful experience to me because I have tried to chat people up at restaurants, ask 'em about what's around town, or sit next to someone on the bus and try to strike up a conversation, and people are not always so friendly. [00:06:21] that was a really powerful experience �to meet someone who just right off the bat was friendly, who was excited, who was a very real person. You know, he was kinda crass in his manner of speech. He swore a lot, which was great. I love that. I don't know. [00:06:36] That was a really powerful experience, and I would say outside of that it's less about these really big sort of movie moments where you're standing and the sun is setting and everyone is smiling. But it's more about the small things along the way‐‐the interactions that you have with the cab driver and you just talk about something and you sit in the cab for, like, a lot longer than your fare is just parked at your destination just talking about the city. Or, you know, you go sit down at a place like Long John's Pub and the bartender is telling you stories about how she grew up in Remington [00:07:12] and is the next time you come in doesn't remember you and tells you, "Two drinks‐‐you've gotta have two drinks before you do karaoke." Or you know, hanging out with a bunch of friends in West Baltimore saying, "Let's play softball in one of these parks," and then starting a community softball team and playing softball. These really small moments that sort of form this tapestry that is the experience that I've had here. And it's not about any one moment more than it is this collection of different moments. And it really is about the people. [00:07:45] MS: I'm sure as a bartender you meet a lot of people. TP: Yeah [laughs]. I've had the pleasure of working at a neighborhood dive bar, and CVP [Charles Village Pub] is not the diveiest of places, but it's also not the place you take your parents when they're in town. I worked there for two or three years and I got the chance to meet everyone in the neighborhood. Also the people who were from the Waverly neighborhood, Charles Village, Hampden, Remington, some people who came down from Roland Park. It's an interesting place right outside of Johns Hopkins that kind of sits at the nexus of several different neighborhoods with several very different populations. For some reason CVP was the watering hole for a lot of those people, so I did get a chance to meet a lot of people, have a lot of conversations. You know, there's a lot of good and a lot of bad at CVP, and I think that that was one of the most authentic experiences of the city that I have had, making friends with some of the people that come in there. MS: So you've talked a good deal about the good. What are some bad‐‐? TP: You know, [00:08:58] I think that as someone who is not very well‐versed in the history, I think that the bad comes from what I do know about the history in that it is‐‐Maryland perhaps more so in general than Baltimore‐‐has always been a kind of conservative town it seems like. Taking one step forward and two steps with some things. Like you put money into this neighborhood but then you close down these institutions in that neighborhood. Or you built up a project and then you shut down that project. Or you half‐start a development process in one neighborhood and then it just never finishes. Or you say, "we're gonna relocate people from x, y, or z" or restructure the school zones‐‐things that are made out of‐‐sort of governmental things, changes that have been made at sort of a broad level that have these really [00:09:47] powerful effects that seem to not be very conscious of the people that they �affect. So I think that there's some bad there and at times it feels like the goals of local government are inconsistent with the needs of people who actually live in this city. But I think that more than that it's‐‐there is a sort of vicious cycle of perceptual bias, I guess, that influences behavior. And so you have people, I mean, to put on its nose (?) is just one example‐‐as a black man‐‐there are certain perceptions of certain kinds of black men that affect the way that people treat those men‐‐and women and children. And [00:10:35] And the awareness of that perception influences the way that you interact with those people, right? And so I walk down the street and I know that the person in front of me‐‐it's dark‐‐and she's kinda uncomfortable, so she grabs her purse and walks a little bit faster. And that's a lesson that I learned in that moment and it's very subtle and it happens over and over again over the course of years. And what is your reaction to that? Your reaction is that when you meet that person, you're a little less trusting because you feel like they don't trust you, so I think that there's some of that cycle that is built into the history of this city where people just‐‐they want to[00:11:12] but then at a very fundamental they sometimes have a hard time trusting each other, which makes it hard to interact with people sometimes. And you do find beautiful spaces where people come together, and perhaps as another thing, for as much as people push back against perceptions of extreme violence, there seems to be a sort of fetishization of when those things happen. Like really blowing up, we have murder rank in ​City Paper​ that talks about people killed via homicide this week. And maybe you can say that's about awaredness and maybe there's some aspect of that that's kinda a voyeurism. And I think that there is‐‐I don't know. There is some really difficult [00:11:55] to quantify things, I think, that trouble me about the city. But nothing else really. I mean, if you wanted to talk about how there are like the streets are bad or some people are kinda rough, there is this DIY culture that's great for starting new projects but people don't always finish those projects, or you know, some of the weird things that are racially and sexually motivated in terms of how people are separated. I don't know. None of those things really bother me because those are the things that characterize any city, I think. But I think things specific to Baltimore are more subtle. So that is my not‐very‐clear answer to that question. MS: That's great. [00:12:40] So let's change pace a little bit. You talk about the fetishization‐‐I did not say that right at all [both laugh]‐‐of the violence and of the community. Talk a little about the April protests. You participated a little, right? TP: Yes. [00:13:01] I mean, so I would say that that is‐‐to be clear‐‐is something that's a little bit different than what I was sort of referencing when I referenced that. And I'm thinking when I talk about that initial idea, I'm thinking of like, everyone listened to Serial, right? The infamous podcast about the murder of Hae Min Lee by Adnan Syed and this whole investigation about is he or isn't he guilty. And it's that sort of attention to those details, I think, that you see a lot in these conversations. Some of the first stories I heard were "so this kid, you know, at Hopkins, he‐‐this guy broke into this house once and then he chased him out and then the guy came back, apparently, weeks later, and he cut his arm off with a katana sword and it was crazy and then the guy died" and I was like, "why is that a story that �people are excited to tell, you know?" And it's like [00:13:51] this black guy breaks into this student's house, apparently, which‐‐this is a secondhand story, so I don't even know to what extent it's true and to what extent it isn't. Or I came here from Kalamazoo, it's the city I lived in before I moved to Baltimore, and I heard another story where it's like girl is walking down the street and she's talking on the phone with her parents and it's right near campus and some guy mugs her and then she resists and then he kills her so her parents hear her on the phone die via mugging and isn't that a horrible thing? And that's what I mean I think when I talk about sort of the glorifying or perhaps paying the wrong kind of attention to the violent aspects of it. And that is part of what contributes to the narrative of Baltimore as being a violent city. Or people have a tendency to generalize [00:14:41] crime that happens within communities and then characterize entire communities based on the acts of people within those communities who don't represent the majority of those. That taken on a larger scale begins to color the city and speak to the character of the city. So you have Murdermore, Mobtown, all these different things. So that's one thing, but I would say that the protest is something entirely different because the protest is‐‐ MS: I was just going to interrupt a little bit because I think you were touching‐‐so before I get to my question, who benefits from pulling out those sensationalized stories? TP: You know, these ideas are influenced by the fact that I study psychology, right? And I think that there's this idea about a confirmation bias. And so the view that you have of Baltimore and of the certain kinds of people in Baltimore‐‐whether they be people from Hampden or Dundalk or people from West Baltimore or whatever or people from Hopkins or MICA‐‐there are a bunch of stereotypes about the individuals, but you have these ideas about [00:15:51] what the experience of living here should be like or what people living here should be like. And I think that focusing on those stories and focusing on certain aspects of the culture here, what they do is they serve to reinforce and to support those stereotypes because ultimately that's your worldview. Because it's a lot harder to reconcile meeting someone who's like a really gregarious and charming‐‐who is totally the opposite of what a person you thought a person from that community was going to be like, let's say. Or if you meet someone who is, you know, a Hopkins student but they seem to be really engaged in local activism because there's a stereotype that people in that community‐‐especially the undergraduates‐‐don't engage outside the bubble, the quote‐unquote "Hopkins bubble." So to meet someone who is defying that stereotype, you say "well, that guy is an exception to the rule." But the stereotype is that, "I have a noise complaint because these bros were partying and these girls and dadadadada..." You know, it's more comfortable to accept the stereotype or to accept the data, the information about the world that conforms to the expectations you have for the world, and I think that that's why people tend to focus on those things and think that it is [00:17:13] in some conscious or unconscious way, it is what you look for because that's the story. And then when you leave here and when people say "Baltimore's a really dangerous place, and how do you live there?" There's a part of you that says, "No it's not. I think it's a great city." And there are some people who, rather than have that experience,e they want to tell the story of �"yeah, it is dangerous. This crazy thing happened, and it's so wild." I don't know. I think that it's not a really sexy thing to admit to that, but I do think that there are people who want that story so they can tell it to someone else. So there are a lot of different aspects to it I think, and I mean, think about being a person who doesn't have that experience. So you have a boring job, and you go to work every day, and you get off work, and you go to the bar that you go to, and you come home, and for the same reason that people watch sports, and for the same reason that people engage in celebrity worship[00:18:13] there is an aspect of it that is the sensationalist nature. It sorta gives some flavor to the life that you have. So if you have this boring life in Baltimore and someone gets murdered two blocks from where you live, that becomes your story. It becomes important for you to tell that story because you can own a part of it so you're not just Terrence who goes to work at the University of Baltimore and comes home and plays video games. You're like, "oh man, on the way home. It was crazy, this guy got mugged and there were like ten cop cars" and on and on. And I think that's what it serves. I mean, again, I think there are many parts of it, but those are all elements of it. Ms: Yeah, I think that's a really astute observation certainly on the individual level of why people attach themselves to those things. So now let's talk about the protests. Talk a little about how you participated, what got you involved, what you were doing. TP: I got involved because it seemed like‐‐there was no decision I guess to get involved.[00:19:28] It was just sort of "well, of course." Like everyone else, I was it Sunday night, Monday night? You know I saw it was on the news, on the television, the bar, the stories of all the stuff happening around town, people were roaming the streets and dadada, and of course, this is before I jumped on Facebook and wanted to get more information. But I saw what's happening and it was very disquieting and for a reason that is not‐‐which I can explain a little in a second, but it was very disquieting and the interesting thing about the way that the messages and activism ideas move through social media is that they're kinda infectious. So what it turned‐‐what started was sort of a benign night‐‐getting off of work and going home‐‐turned into this maddening cycle of refreshing the feed [00:20:37] and reading posts and seeing links to articles and tweets and trying to get more information. And then slowly the narrative shifted from this conversation about what's happening to "well, now it's happened. What can we do?" And then people started saying "well, let's go and be a part of clean‐ups and let's go and be a part of these organizations like LBS," who are in neighborhoods (Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle) trying to organization something. And so I initially went out because I wanted to go and help the clean‐up, right? And then being there, being around all the people and sorta being in this neighborhood, being in Penn North, where I haven't lived for several years but had once lived, it was really interesting being back into that place. And I should say I lived near Penn North; i lived in Reservoir Hill and went through Penn North to get to work. But the‐‐being there in that place, seeing people marching, seeing people form drum and dance circles, seeing the interactions people were having with police, and seeing snipes on the roof and on cars, it was very surreal, and I think that that moved me to be involved even more than the initial sentiment, which was "I wanna go help clean up." Because I think it's important as a �person who lives here, as a citizen of Baltimore, as a member of this larger community, I have to be part of something that I think is positive. And I am but one person, and I don't have the wisdom to know what and why and the where and to how it affects the people that it has affected and the true impact of that. But I know that I have something to give, and even if it's just time and my hands to bag things up, I was like, "I want to go out and give. And the more information that I get the more informed decisions I will start making." But that gut reaction was I've gotta get out there and be part of something. So I attached myself to a group that I thought had something interesting to say, and then I just did what they told me at first. [00:22:49] MS: Was that group LBS? TP: Yeah, I found out about it through a friend [00:22:55]. It was something that got posted on Facebook and then I signed up for their newsletter, and they were pushing a lot of emails forward throughout the course of the entire week. And those emails had information about, like, "this meeting is going to happen here at Red Emma's" or "we're going to do clean‐up in this neighborhood and this neighborhood, so we need two teams, and bring these things." So I was like "great, this is exactly what these groups are there for." To be a point where we can look to and without imposing or coming in and trying to be benevolent in some way that is disrespectful, we can be a part of something and help out. So it was really important for me to be involved with something like that. MS: So you had a positive experience with LBS particularly? TP: Yes, absolutely. [00:23:48] I mean, my involvement with the group was stronger in the beginning and then as the week progressed, I had had conversations with people and had started figuring out where the news was becoming disseminated from online and joined those groups on Facebook. And then there was a little bit more agency that I had there, so, you know, when they did the protest march around the city, I knew that there was a part of it starting at Hopkins, so I joined up at Hopkins and walked around until basically the sun set. But in the beginning they were really important to help me figure out where do I go. Because I didn't know. MS: And when you did get some more information and more direction, what was the process of making the decisions of where to go because there were a lot of options? TP: Yeah, I think that for me I thought about, well, we all have the capacity to give based on the resources that we have, including time, including money, including whatever, whatever, whatever. And for me, I was like, "Well, I live in Charles Village, I bike around town, where can I access? Where can I get to in a reasonable amount of time?" Also, I didn't violate the curfew, so when the curfew was imposed, there was the question of, "well, where can I be and then also make sure that I can leave and get back home without pushing up against that too much?" For different reasons, I didn't want to �violate the curfew, although ideologically, I thought it would have been important to stand out. But, you know, my mother gave me some really good advice, which was "it's important to care about things, it's important to put yourself out there and be a part of something, but don't forget that you have your own context and your own life and future. Don't do anything that will extremely jeopardize that unless it's really, really, really important to you." You know, I was incarcerated when I was nineteen and have had some different [00:25:59]‐‐like I was homeless when I was twenty and twenty‐one, you know I have a mild record with the police, and I was looking at it saying‐‐well, weighing the costs, weighing the benefits. If I'm going to stand out in Hampden with a group of predominantly white people to parallel a group of predominantly black people at Penn North to violate the curfew, worst case scenario, what happens? If I get arrested and if they take me in, am I jeopardizing the fact that I'm a college student, and I am actually‐‐I can't afford to be pulled out of work for more than a couple days at a time because my rent and other livelihood depends upon it. So it was really difficult to make that decisions, so that was a factor. Where can I go and be back? I don't know. I thought that it was important for me to go to places that were close, that I felt like I had some connection to, I didn't want to step into‐‐like, I haven't spent much time in East Baltimore. It would have been inappropriate to me to go to East Baltimore and say, "I'm gonna help out," where it's different to go to parts of West Baltimore where I have been, you know, or parts of Southwest Baltimore where I have been. So those kinds of factors definitely played a big part of where I was. [00:27:20] MS: So you referenced when you were nineteen and incarcerated, spent a little bit of time homeless. Is that something you're willing to talk about? If not‐‐ TP: I mean, there's nothing glamorous about it I would say. I was young. [00:27:32] And I basically convinced myself that I didn't need anybody else's support to get by or to take care of myself, so I left where I was living at the time, which was Northern Virginia, and I went to the West Coast, and I didn't have any money or a place to stay or a plan. So I kinda just made do and that was when I was like‐‐those were the times when I was sleeping outside and those were the times when I was begging and trying to get by. And I tried to steal clothes from a store and got caught, and that's why I was arrested. [00:28:14] And when you don't have a place to stay, staying indoors somewhere is always nice. So it was me just kind of figuring out the way that the world works. [00:28:24] And so I don't want to conflate it and say it has anything to do with my ethnicity or my age or anything like that. I was just making some important personal choices, but in the grand scheme of things probably not the wisest choices. [chuckles] But I've always been the kind of person who has to get in there and figure it out. And that's kinda how I've always live my life. MS: What do you think are some of the most important lessons you learned from that time in your life? TP: Oh, to take care of yourself. I think that you‐‐so many people are afraid of‐‐"I can't move across the country. What would happen if I moved? what would I do?" And it's like you'd be fine. You'd take care of �yourself. "What if I don't have my friends and family?" You would be fine. Because we're resilient, and I think that's what it taught me. People are resilient, and we can take care of ourselves, within reason of course. [00:29:18] And that we'll be okay. And that if you learn to rely on your instincts, you'll find that you're, I'm sure, more resourceful, more clever, more capable than you probably give yourself credit for. And that was an important lesson to learn because I spent so much of my life growing up in the military where things are provided for you. Where you don't have‐‐I don't have any close relationship with extreme poverty when I was growing up, with the exception of the time when I lived in Detroit with my aunt and uncle. My mother was fighting abroad, but those lessons, I think, have influenced my adulthood in a huge way because it's taught me to trust myself. And some people learn that lesson in other ways. I had to learn it the hard way. [00:30:05] When you do learn that and when you do learn that as bad as things get you can still kinda turn it around, it is very powerful and it teaches you to not take life too seriously a little bit. But also to take it very seriously, to take yourself seriously enough that you respect your own experience but not to get hung up on something small. Like if I go to the coffee shop or bar and I say "I want this drink" and they make it wrong, I'm not going to throw a fight. You know, I have money to buy a cocktail at a bar in town on a regular basis, so how bad are things really? [00:30:42] I don't know. That's more of what it's given me is perspective I would say. MS: Earlier you referenced that you were going to share the reason you found a lot of the events in April‐‐I think you used the word‐‐disquieting? TP: Yeah, I think that because the whole conversation is specifically about the way that the police handled their interaction with Freddie Grey, which speaks ultimately to a larger problem of the relationship the police have with certain communities and police brutality, which speaks to a larger conversation about institutionalized discrimination and the kind of perceptual biases that people have against certain groups and communities and individuals as members of those communities. So there's this huge really uncomfortable conversation that has been going on in this country for decades really, but more acutely in the past several years, right? And this is a larger part of that dialogue, but one of the things that has been really challenging about it for me is, you know, I want to talk about it and I want to be engaged but I think that at times you‐‐people don't realize they're kinda doing the similar things that are problematic with the situation when they place a lot of attention on you. So I, by virtue of being black‐‐people are very interested in what I have to say about the events of April, and they are very interested in what I have to say about the larger dialogue about the institutionalized racism and discrimination. [00:32:28] But I don't have a general experience, you know what I'm saying? And I don't have the same experience as a kid who grew up on Greenmount and lives in a neighborhood where police are patrolling on a regular basis and where if you walk into stores, it's just a part of your environment that you think, "well, if I got to Towson mall and I walk into the Apple Store, someone's going to look at me funny." You know what I'm saying? That is not an experience that I have had every day that is part of my persistent environment, and something like the protests and the event of that Saturday, Sunday, Monday night‐‐it puts you in an interesting place because at once I'm confronted �with the reality of being black and being in America, but then I'm also confronted with the sort of dissonance of the narrative of that black American and then my experience as someone who goes to university [00:33:37] and works at this neighborhood bar and, you know, has micro‐aggression occasionally levied against me, but by and large, I don't‐‐I'm not confronted with that at all times. And then it makes me think about, "well, what am I doing or not doing to be connected to or to be involved with or to be a part of the conversation that's happening that involves me and people who look like me, you know?" So it makes you ask yourself a lot of really existential and sort of identity‐focused questions when you are someone like myself who is middle‐class, fairly‐‐I don't want to use the word "white culture" because I don't like idea of lumping any kind of culture into one big category. I don't believe there's one black culture, let's say, because I think there are many expressions of blackness, and maybe you're a nerd who watches anime and maybe you speak French and grew up in Morocco and maybe you are someone who's from West Baltimore and maybe you're from California and you have a beach bod and you go surfing. There are lots of black experiences, but I would say perhaps more mainstream culture or more the sort of bourgeoisie‐‐like having the privilege to engage in "hipster culture" as it were‐‐I've had that experience growing up, right? So I have to confront that experience and ask, "How am I representing or what is my identity as a black person within the context of that experience?" And the protest really made me face that part of myself, I think, which is largely invisible most of the time. And then look at people when you're marching, and you see someone who is crying out in pain [00:35:37] and outrage and to feel a weird sense of disconnect where you say, "I empathize with that experience," but it's also not one that I have. And you might look at me and say, "My brother"‐‐I have this experience that always sort of catches me off guard where if I see someone who is black and older and male, I always say hello, regardless of the environment. If it's a bouncer at a bar and I walk by, there's always a little bit of an acknowledgement. It's like I am a member of this community and this is a conversation that's happening in this community, and have I been paying enough attention to that conversation? So I think that's what it means when I say it's disquieting. You really have to confront‐‐and I think a lot of people had to confront‐‐the way that they lived in Baltimore and the way that they interact with people and the things they take for granted. And that is what it's about, actually. That is exactly why [00:36:35] when people are pushed in a corner they resort to violence. It's because it's powerful, you know. And it's impossible to look at the face of someone who is in anguish and to not‐‐whether you respond to that with anger or you shut it out‐‐there is a response. And that's ultimately what you see: People saying, "I'm going to force you to respond." And my response was that of a black person who sometimes loses sight of what it means to be a black person. That's more of what I think I was referencing. What does it even mean to be a black person, you know? Those kinds of questions are very difficult, I think. MS: Yeah, I think you're on an individual level having a really interesting internal conversation and conflicted about something that you can see on the city level. People talk about the two Baltimores. And there's more than two Baltimores. �TP: Absolutely! [00:37:35] And that's the difficulty of a black/white discussion because you leave a lot of nuance out of that. Because Bernie Sanders is very different than Donald Trump and they're both white, you know? Which then represents white America? and I'm very different than Obama and I'm very different than, you know, any‐‐there's this guy who I was a huge fan of. He's part of this group called Blackfish, and they're this rap group out of Baltimore. My friend Dan put me onto them, and they have this song called "Fishbowl," and it was really great and it was about sorta the woes of living in Baltimore. The guy's name was OO (?) and he passed away a couple of years ago, and I remember I listened to that song. And this is a guy who grew up in Baltimore. He grew up in West Baltimore, moved to East Baltimore, got involved with the community and then moved back to West Baltimore and tried to get involved in the community there and was really invested in the betterment of young black men and women in this city and was highly intelligent and his music was great, it was brilliant, and that guy is the guy you want to talk to when you start having a conversation about what does it mean to be from and be about Baltimore? [00:38:48] I am a tourist more or less. I live here and I have a home here, and it's slowly becoming more and more my place, but in terms of that​ Baltimore, you know, that is‐‐I'm ​ very different from that person. [00:39:03] But we're all here. We're all part of the tapestry that it is, and you're right. It's not just one or the other. There's a lot of different things going on. And what about those places where it overlaps? When I lived at Highland Town, this interesting mesh of a Latin‐American‐slash‐ Greek‐slash‐white community all sort of existing in the same space right around Eastern Ave just‐‐that's Baltimore, too, Where's the conversation about Hispanic Baltimore, about Greek Baltimore, about Jewish Baltimore, about Irish Baltimore, you know? Those all have a place in the city. They're all part of a history of this city, as I'm sure you know very well. [laughs] MS: So bringing your context to it, [00:39:46] which is, of course, what I'm interested in‐‐what that is‐‐how did feel when you heard about the death of Freddie Grey? TP: I think that it is another voice in what has become a deafening roar. In terms of‐‐the social media's been really wonderful, right? Because what does it do? It puts the means of communication‐‐it gives everyone a platform. It gives everyone a voice to some extent, and the part of what's happening now as a result of that is that we're hearing more and more about something that I believe has been going on and the people know has been going on for a long time. But now we can record videos of it and we can post it on the internet and a news site can pick it up and they can run a story about it. And we can start asking questions, and people can see it. In the same way that it was very important during the Civil Rights movement for [00:40:43] Martin Luther King's protest to be televised; that was a very strategic move. They said, "We're gonna televise this because when you put it into people's homes, when you show them what's happening on the streets, it will be impossible for people to sit still." And I think that specifically the death of Freddie Grey, as an individual, as him as Freddie Grey, impacted me no more or less than the death of, you know, Garner or Brown or, you know, any of the other men over the past few years that have been killed by police brutality. Which is to say that it affected me a lot, but I didn't know what to do about it other than having the conversation. There is a sort of sense in �which it feels good to write a post on Facebook, and you send it off into the world and then you go to work. And then maybe at a certain point in the day the thought hits you, "well, what did I actually do in the world by doing that? Did I actually contribute to anything? What have I done aside from repost to redistribute some information? Certainly that has value, but what am I doing?" And I think that the initial reaction to that was the same thing. Reading the article, feeling some way about it, having a conversation, and then later walking away form that and going, "Well, what am I actually doing about this?" [00:42:10] That growing realization that I am living in a world different than the world that I thought I was living in, which is really interesting. And I think that's one of the‐‐as a brief tangent‐‐one of the things that's interesting about Donald Trump, regardless of your political views or your views about what should and should not be, I'm notm making a value judgment about him as an individual. This is not the place for that. However, what he does and what he has done has made me sit back and go, "Oh, I thought I was living in an America that was slightly different than that, you know?" And to see that certain values and ideologies and behaviors and manners of speaking and treating other people are apparently heavily endorsed by a very significant part of this country, it makes you take a step a back and ask yourself, "Well, have I just been living in a weird fantasy about what the world is?" And I think that that's how I felt after that: this increasing realization that I might be living in a fantasy [00:43:13] about where we actually are in terms of the efforts of activists of yore, which is not really that long ago, it's a generation ago. Or the efforts of my community, or my own efforts in the way that I interact with people. Since I live in this weird bubble, what I call the Charles Street circuit of Mount Vernon, Hampden, Charles Village, all the places where kids hang out, it seems like we live in a really egalitarian place where people are asking questions and pushing boundaries and trying and starting community gardens in their neighborhoods and working with churches and doing events that are for the people and putting on concerts and people helping kids in Montessori schools and people working down in East Baltimore [00:43:57] and like, "Ah, man, they have this one kid that they just love so much and his parents are great and dadada and we're just really helping him out and his grades improved." And "Oh, you work at the school by Marker Brent (?) and you work at the library, and those guys are doing really cool stuff, and these little beautiful black boys‐‐" And letting myself eat that and eat that and eat that and consume that and at some point believe that because I'm seeing these things in my immediate proximity that like, oh, that's what the city is like and this is what the world is like. And when someone dies, every single time someone dies, it's like someone is pulling back the curtain a little bit more [00:44:34] and going "no, it's not." And that's really the impact of it; that the slow and terrifying, impending realization that "No, it's not." [00:44:46] MS: Bleak, but I really resonated with what you're saying. TP: Yeah, well there's something great about that, right? I've always said I don't want my friends to lie to me.[00:44:54] If I have something in my teeth, tell me I have something in my teeth. If I'm wearing shorts that don't look good, tell me, please. Because you know what I can do when I know that something isn't right? I can change it. So pull back the curtain. Let us know. Let us know what's going �on in the world. Let us know what's going on around us because the more that we are aware of what's going on around us, the more that we have to make a choice about doing something or not doing something about it. [00:45:18] And maybe that means you don't drop everything that you're doing and you, like, get a tattoo of a heart with a Baltimore flag in it and, you know, you go to bike party and you wear a cool shirt that has Freddie Grey's face on it or get really persnickety when the police pull you over. Maybe it's not that, you know. Maybe it is: you go to work and you keep it in your mind and you're mindful. And then when you have interactions with people, you think about the interactions you have with individuals. And when someone says, "Man, I don't want to go to this. It's kinda sketch." You say, "Well, why? Why is it sketchy exactly?" And you kinda push back a little bit, and you talk to your friends in a way that challenges them but doesn't attack them, and when you see someone in need and you have the opportunity to help them, you help. Or when someone‐‐I do research on people and behavior. I study psychology at University of Baltimore,and how do I do something about it? When we start having conversations about [00:46:30] "well, in our study we found that nonverbal behavior wasn't able to be manipulated in this way consistent with the research that we have found in this study that was done by Bodie and Rule (?) and dadadada and yaddayaddayadda‐‐" To say, "Well, how much of that difference is influenced by the fact that our community is very different, you know?" And trying to bring the awareness that living here and seeing what's happening here‐‐being that awareness into the rest of your life, and that's how the world becomes a better place. So yes, it's bleak to look behind the curtain, but it gives you something to do, which I think is ultimately the goal, right? [00:47:07] MS: So you reference how Freddie Gray['s death] was tragic and we all felt things, but it kinda felt similar to a lot of these police‐caused deaths in recent history. Can you talk about when it came on your radar? Police violence? TP: That's a good question. It's hard to say [00:47:36] when, right? Because it's always been there, you know? I mean, what did they say in the NWA? They said "fuck the police." Forgive my French, but it's always been‐‐I don't even know if "Fuck" is a French word, actually. If that's even an accurate thing to say. It might not be. I need to educate myself about that. In fact, it might be really offensive to refer to all swear words as being French when, in fact, most of them are probably not. In any case, I will not use that phrase again until I investigate that. But this is a conversation about privilege, right? When did I become aware of it? I became aware of it the very moment that I went out into the world because my mother has always told me, "You're black and you're male,so don't do this. Cut your hair because if your hair isn't cut they're gonna think you're this kinda way. Don't wear that out because if you wear that out, people are going to think you're this kinda way. [00:48:31] You can't do this, you can't get in trouble." You know, some people have the experience of growing up and [hear]ing "these are the things that you need to do to be successful in life," and other people have the experience of [hear]ing, "well, you're a woman, so you need to make sure if this guy asks you out, don't go alone with him to a place in the middle of nowhere because you never know." And part of the narrative I had was, "Listen, you can't do these things or get in trouble"‐‐I shoplifted when I was in middle school [00:49:05]. We were living �in Germany and there was a Nintendo 64 game, and just out of sheer curiosity‐‐I wanted it and my mother was probably going to say no. And it wasn't a conversation about money. I just knew that she would say no, so I wanted to sneak it into the house in a way that she wouldn't be able to detect. And I got caught, and they put me in a cell so that I would learn my lesson. It wasn't anything traumatic. It's in Germany on a military base, you know. It's like a well‐lit place and it's really just formally a cell. It's more like an office space. It has an area that's barred off. [00:49:39] And, you know, she was mad and disappointed because she didn't want to see me get into the habit of petty crime. Because she knows that black men who run afoul of the law don't have an easy time of it. So when did I become aware of police violence? I've always been aware of police violence. That's a thing that you never forget and that you're never allowed to forget and that is, you know, when you get pulled over you get a little bit nervous because on one hand, they might ask for your license and registration blah blah blah, but on the other hand, they might not. Because we haven't forgotten black history. Even though I come from not an affluent background. My family is poor.​ [00:50:28] But my mother's in the military, so because I come from a green collar family, I've had a certain experience, and that experience might be different from someone who lives in inner‐city Detroit. However, that doesn't mean that I still didn't learn those lessons about the way that the world works. So seeing things published in the news about people being strangled or shot in the back or cuffed and thrown into an unsecured, an unfastened vehicle‐‐what that does is highlight to me the lengths that people will go to. [00:51:06] Or how angry it seems people can get and how dehumanized people are capable of treating one another. And how much of a dehumanizing‐‐how do I say this sentence properly? It's just interesting to see the extreme levels of dehumanization in operation. So that aspect of it is new, and that started happening, I guess, in the last four or five years with the publicization of the deaths of these people. [00:51:34] But I have known that people have been gunned down and I have known that people have been harassed by police and slapped around by police. and I've had an uncle who's been incarcerated over a long period of time, and I've known that it's‐‐the relationship between the warden, the prisoner, and the prison guard is a tenuous relationship. And those are all part of the‐‐so maybe that's what black culture is, you know: the history, the legacy of those that have come before you and your place in that. And whatever you choose to do with that information, whether you become a nerd or become an athlete or become an actor or become a scientist or a writer or whatever it is, those are all different expressions of it, but perhaps that quote‐unquote "black experience" part of black culture is that history. And the fact that whether you're rich or poor, [00:52:27] part of your education is going to involve the oral transmission‐‐because oral traditions have always been important in culture in general but I think particularly in Latin culture and black culture, every culture, everybody has oral traditions. But part of that oral tradition has been like, "Listen, don't forget what you look like to people." So I don't know. I guess I like the question, but it's also like, when did I know about it? Of course I've known about it a long time. Of course I've known about it my whole life. Did I see it on the news all the time? No. But of course I've always known. It's not like someone showed me one day, and I was like, "Oh, wow! The cops don't like black people? When did that happen?" [laughing] You know, come on. So I don't know.[00:53:20] �MS: [00:53:26] So since all the protests, it's almost been a year now‐‐ TP: Yeah, it has. MS: You're still in the city. You're still seeing the stuff that's going on. What's changed? TP: Uh, you know, that's a good question. I think that people, unfortunately‐‐I think some people are disappointed because, you know, we all have heard the stories of Baltimore in sixty‐eight. We've heard the stories of‐‐I saw, what was the movie that came out last year? Selma. We know the story of marching through street and marching on Washington, and we've seen the black and white videos of thousands of people. And you know, I imagine that many people came out in March because there was a desire to be part of something like that. [00:54:35] Something that was bigger, because when in your entire life have you had that experience outside of, like, a concert? Or some other kind of fun thing? I don't think that people have had the opportunity to really see what happens when a lot of people come together and put their foot down, and then it makes you realize, Oh, authority is only authority that's given. And are we allowed to walk in the streets? Absolutely not. It's against the law. Are we going to walk in the streets? Absolutely. And at that point it wasn't necessarily a matter of permits. We didn't get a parade permit. People took to the streets, so I think there's something really compelling about that, and I think it captured the imagination of a lot of people. And even myself, I remember looking back‐‐I was standing on Gay Street and I looked back down Pratt‐‐and all the way back 'til MLK you could see just faces. it was just a non‐ending, ongoing sea of faces of all different kinds that crowded the entire street. [00:55:49] Pratt's a wide street. That's a street that holds four lanes? Three or four lanes? Especially up at Gay, and you look back on a quarter‐mile of road, and you see just thousands of people. There's something very powerful about that, something very powerful about seeing that many people come together. People that we had, like, a rolling ball of clay that we had gathered‐‐people from southwest and southeast Baltimore. And we walked by the prisons and walked up to the Mount Vernon neighborhood and through the Remington neighborhood and up into west Baltimore and up onto Penn North. And marched down through southwest Baltimore. So you know there was something that was really powerful about seeing all the people there together. So I say all that to say that people [00:56:38] at that time, I think perhaps forget the rest of the story of, like, the civil rights movement. It didn't stop with the I Have A Dream speech. He didn't give that speech and everyone was like "alright!" And they went back to their lives and then we [snaps] fast forward to today and everything's in color, and we're all living, and black people go to college now. It was a slow‐moving process. And what probably happened was that the people in those communities in the fifties and sixties, after the crowds dissipated and people went back to their house and they sat back in front of their TVs where they were first called to action, they continued the hard and unglamorous work of doing things and trying to be involved in legislation. So I think that's kinda happened again where a lot of people were really moved and it was important for them to come out and they came out. And some people have �gone and said, "well, wait. Things are supposed to change now." But it's like no, that's not how it happens. And I think as a result of that some people have forgotten already why it was important or what was important about it or what that experience was like. [00:57:52] And for some people it's become a story and some people have gone back and rewritten their memories about it and said, "Well, you know, actually it was really‐‐I don't think it was that great for the city because of daddadada," or "I lost money that week because the bars closed and I'm a bartender, so I was broke for, like, three weeks" or whatever it is. So I think that that's what I've seen happen on the ground level, but I do think that what I've also seen happen is it is motivated, it has instigated [00:58:25] renewed vigor and conversations in the city about exactly how the city is and exactly how it is segregated. [00:58:34] I've heard a lot of bad ideas. I had a friend come up to me and say, "I want you to speak at this thing." And it's like, "Why?" And he was like, "Well, you know, because you have, you know‐‐" I was like don't do that. I'm not the guy that, you know‐‐because we're friends and you have this art project and you want the people of Baltimore telling their stories. That's kinda insulting, you know? But to that person's credit, [00:59:01] the fact that people are trying to have that conversation is different. And it's not that it hasn't been going on, but it seems like there is some more interest. And you know what? At a pragmatic level, more interest means more money, and more money greases the wheel. And if the next mayor of Baltimore‐‐I mean, we have a candidate now who is running and he's just totally grassroots. And how much of that is possible because of the events of April? That people are saying, "Oh, we need different voices in local government." So there have been changes, and I think that there have been changes that will take years to blossom into larger, more systemic differences in the city. And it may take a decade for those things to happen. [00:59:50] But the mountain has moved, you know? And what will begin is like little pieces of rubble falling from the peaks will eventually form into an avalanche of something and Baltimore will be a different place in ten years than it is today. [01:00:04] That will probably be in large part because of what happened in 2015. And much like the events of sixty‐eight precipitated a change and it's easy to look at the parallels between 2015 and '68 and say, "well, not a lot has changed." But actually, a lot has changed, you know? And while there's still some of the same problems, people are trying. And I think that that's perhaps one of the big takeaways. That you not only get to see a light shone on the experiences of the lives of people who are often invisible, but also you have breathed some new life into these small organizations and these small groups and these small communities of people who are trying to do something. And I remember the five hundred man march came out in their matching T‐shirts, and they were walking around and they were trying to get things in order. And that's what they'd been doing. Five hundred man march has been doing that a long time. That's one dude that started that. And walking around giving pamphlets at night, and the fact that those guys were on television and that someone might have seen them and gone, "who are those guys?" And looked it up and read an article and then that's maybe one other person who joins the march. And maybe it's another person who tells their friend and their picture of Baltimore becomes bigger‐‐going back to the beginning. It becomes bigger than the story about [01:01:34] senseless violence and people getting murdered in the city. If the perception of Baltimore from the outside shifts from this haven for the obtuse and the violent and the depraved into something that perhaps has more life, perhaps people �will see that this place is kinda writhing. And it's trying to shake off its history or maybe embrace its history and grow into something different. It's hopefully, and I can't speak to this because I don't live outside of Baltimore, but hopefully what has also happened is that it is, for better, for worse, these protests and the quote‐unquote "riots," they were publicized across the entire country. And so people's narrative about what the city is is going to start changing or it has changed a little bit. In some ways it seems like for the worse, but there's something‐‐change means something. There's a butterfly effect to all this stuff. In any case, that's what I think the intro to that question is. [01:02:47] MS: Is the candidate that you're referring to‐‐are you talking about Deray Mcckesson? TP: Yeah. MS: Okay. So just speaking for yourself as an individual and not for a group, what do you want to be different in ten years? TP: You know, I keep thinking of things and going, well, that's never going to happen. Because, what is it? The red line? The purple line? The red line? ‐‐is a perfect example of it because Hogan comes into office and pulls the money out of this program and puts it into the county, and you look at this map and you go, oh, there's money going into the richest counties in Maryland. Great. Awesome. Like, what happened to the "better city" and all of that? So hopefully less of that. What I want to see in ten years? I want to see someone who's in a position of power who has the vagina to make some change happen. [01:03:50] [laughs] To shift the metaphor from "balls" all the time‐‐"they need to have the balls to do this," you know? To have the gusto, to have the moxy, to actually be less conservative, you know? That's what I want to see happen in ten years‐‐is for Baltimore to just be less conservative than it has been. And it's a government‐‐in terms of the local government and perhaps in terms of people and how much they're willing to give and the chances they're willing to take. You know, have more moxy. This is a badass town. People here are badass. [01:04:29] and for some reason we put up with a lot of weird BS, and‐‐you know what, though? I think a big part of that, though, is because of the way that this is structured. Because wasn't Baltimore, if I recall in my really rudimentary understanding of the history of Baltimore‐‐our capital's in Annapolis. And the seat of, let's say, government is in Annapolis, and there's some weird thing about the city doesn't get as many votes as the county does or the surrounding counties. Something to the effect of Baltimore has basically been cordoned off into this little, well, "you have this much of a voice, but not so much that the voices around you can't speak for you." So Baltimore county actually has a lot more to say about what happens in Baltimore city than the residents of Baltimore city do, it seems, because of the vested interests in where money is distributed and money really is the sort of lifeblood of all of this. [01:05:39] It would be interesting to see a change in that. Like, why can't Baltimore grow into the county? Why can't we grow our city lines? How come we never have been able to? Because no county wants to get poor. And, you know, those are lofty goals, I guess, but I think that shaking that, changing the government, you know? [laughs] Now, I �hate to be sort of the idealist because it a little bit naive to say like, "change the government, man," and actually expect it to move. America is a very large ship, and very large ships take a long time to change directions. But on a more practical level, I don't know, I don't presume to know the needs and the interests of the people. So what would I want to see different? I don't know, I like Baltimore. I like the people of this place, and I like what people are doing. So I just want to see people keep doing what they're doing and being more successful at it. That's what I want to see. So what is the change? I want to see people be more successful in the city. [01:06:53] And whatever success means, I want to see people be more successful in the city. There's a lot of really wonderful about this place, and you know, maybe the lines will never blur between neighborhoods and mesh and have us be one big happy family, a rainbow coalition where we all walk down the street, and I'm holding hands with my Asian friend on the left and my Hispanic friend on the right, and my white friend two people down from him, you know? But maybe there are more moments like this or more moments like the protests where people, when it matters, they show up. And I think people do show up. So I want to see people be successful. That's what I want to see in ten years is more success. [01:07:36] MS: It's funny to hear you say "the rainbow coalition" because I think one of our best pictures in the archive is‐‐you're in it‐‐and it's in front of a protest that goes on for blocks and blocks‐‐ TP: I haven't seen this picture [laughs] MS: It's the rainbow coalition. There's black people and white people and an Asian guy. It's all right there [laughing] TP: [laughs] That's perfect. Well, it's happening every day. I don't know. Yeah, you know, people want to know what the value of the protests are and was it all worthwhile. Like, was it meaningful? Does it all matter in the grand scheme of things? And maybe an image like that is an answer to the question, you know? [01:08:20] Because no one knows how much money I make in the picture. No one knows what my education is in that photograph. No one knows where I'm from, what my mom does for a living, my criminal background, the amount of people that I've slept with, how much money is in my bank account, you know? What you see in that photograph is people together and we're there and we're together for one reason. [01:08:52] That reason is our belief in Baltimore, and so that's what it's about. That's what it was always about, and hopefully that's what it will continue to be about. Everyone who lives here believes in the city, and everyone who lives here, to some extent, loves this city and cares about this city and cares about their role and their place in it. I don't know. That's why I did it, and that's why everybody did it, and I think that's the big takeaway, you know? As cheesy as the "one Baltimore" thing is, that is the goal, right? That is the dream. So the protest is people trying to make the dream a reality‐‐even if it was just for a day. [01:09:39] MS: Any closing thoughts? �TP: Nah, man. This is a cool place. Charm City. [laughs] MS: Cool, thank you very much. TP: Thank you.   � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource UMBC Oral History Collection Subject The topic of the resource Interviews Description An account of the resource Oral histories contributed by students of University of Maryland, Baltimore County Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available MdHS Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Michael Stone Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Michael Stone Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Michael Stone Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Terence Pope Location The location of the interview MdHS Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Yes Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:69:53 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Terrence Pope Interview Subject The topic of the resource Demonstration / event Description An account of the resource Michael Stone interviews Terrence Pope about his experience during the Baltimore Uprising. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Michael Stone Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available MdHS Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Michael Stone Relation A related resource http://baltimoreuprising2015.org/items/show/1184 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3; pdf curfew Freddie Gray Johns Hopkins Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle police brutality protestor