Commentary

On Sept. 22, a mother stood in front of the Anne Arundel County Board of Education, railing in anger about masks and canceled Homecoming dances and said to the board members, “My kids are dying inside!” This same woman and many like her have shown up repeatedly at meetings of our Board of Education to speak out angrily against decisions made in an effort to keep our children safe during a global pandemic.

With Wednesday’s announcement that it will erase $5.8 billion in federal student loans owed by an estimated 560,000 former students of Corinthian Colleges Inc., the now-defunct for-profit college chain, the Biden administration has changed many lives. People’s debt-to-income ratios and credit scores will improve; wage and tax garnishments will cease. But the relief is long overdue. Had it been granted eight years ago when former Corinthian students began to organize, they could have been spared immense financial and emotional hardship. Instead, they had to fight for justice.

Pride Month is celebrated each year in June to honor the memory of the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City. Members of the transgender, bisexual, lesbian, gay and queer community (more specifically, transgender people of color) had grown angry at the continual police harassment they received across the city. Tensions rose and one night at the Stonewall Inn, a popular bar in Greenwich Village, members of the LGBTQ+ community, led by Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, fought back against this abuse of power.

How do you love a stranger locked away in prison? I was only 7, and that stranger was the reason I was shuttled through metal detectors on Saturday mornings. His addiction was why I was in a pastel visiting room in an uncomfortable chair in a room of men in white jumpsuits convicted of crimes in the state of Arkansas. This stranger is my father. My twin brother and I were taken to visit my father in prison three times as children between the ages of 7 and 9. I have no memory of hin before he was in prison.

The night before a half-dozen men found 15-year-old Howard Cooper hiding in a barn under a pile of corn husks, pleading for protection, an angry white mob had surrounded the Towsontown jail miles away, demanding to know if the Black teenager were inside. Cooper had been accused of brutally beating a young woman named Mary Catherine Gray a few days earlier. Gray was the daughter of a prominent farmer who was living on land belonging to The Baltimore Sun’s founder, A.S. Abell, according to an April 1885 account in the newspaper.

While it was hardly shocking to learn that Memorial Day weekend provided no respite from gun violence in Baltimore, there was something especially brazen about the Saturday night shooting of two 17-year-olds, one of whom later died, at the Inner Harbor at 7:35 p.m. near the amphitheater — a peak time and place for visitors and police. As Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison later observed, there were at least 20 officers in the general vicinity. The perpetrator clearly wasn’t concerned about getting caught. If that wasn’t depressing enough, two other men were killed in a triple shooting later that night, and a woman was shot and killed early Sunday.

I came to Baltimore in 1970 to work at the Regional Planning Council, a predecessor of today’s Baltimore Metropolitan Council. My work was as part of a team analyzing the demographic and economic trends shaping the region consisting of Baltimore City and the five surrounding counties. As part of our studies, we tracked the major employers that played a key role in the regional economy. Standing out above them all was Bethlehem Steel, with its steel mill and associated shipbuilding activities at Sparrows Point in southeast Baltimore County.