I Have A Dream

Baltimore's collective heart and spirit was broken forty years ago today with the assassination of Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and the rioting it touched off. Seared into my mind is the surreal presence of National Guard tanks patroling eerily silent Reisterstown Road, just up from my parents' idyllic Menlo Drive home. In the very safe distance, the sky was dark with smoke, but the wind carried air thick with the smell of destruction. I was eight years old and in the third grade, but already a voracious reader of the Baltimore Sun's morning and evening editions, and I was glued to the TV news. My parents told me not to venture beyond the front porch. I thought the world was ending.

But, of course, I had no idea that for many Baltimoreans and their neighborhoods, some already battered, it was or would be damn near close.

Swaths of the city were all but left for dead in the years following the riots. All but - but the lights never totally went dark. I wondered what made some people stay on blocks where only a few lights shone. As the city's asset manager, I met plenty of citizens with the means to move, but stay they did, and do. Familiarity and faith in the future, they said, and say.

I'm curious about the inordinate attention paid to the riots on this particular anniversary. Maybe it's that even amid the stalled boom, rehab continues apace. Washingtonians are still discovering us and hopefully BRAC refugees are on track to do so, too. We're not about to loosen the grip on our hard-won self-confidence. In the immortal, misquoted, and therefore parodied words of Sally Fields' 1985 Oscar acceptance speech, "You like me. You really, really like me." In civil rights parlance, our eyes are still on the prize.

Maybe it's just coincidence, but the Hebrew sages declared forty as the minimum age for wisdom and spiritual maturity. The Hebrew word for soul is comprised of the letters that also form the number forty. Noah and his ark withstood trial by flood for forty days and forty nights and Moses took up residence on Mount Sinai for the same length of time. And so close to Passover, we remember that his followers wandered in the desert for forty years.

Whatever the reason for this year's focus on what forever altered our social, psychic, and physical landscapes, I am moved beyond belief (think about those words) to be a partner with the residents still remaining within the EBDI footprint. I will in large degree measure my success by the number who choose to relocate to the classic rowhouses that together we are making green and new for that future in which they have placed their faith.