Baltimore

I grew up in Baltimore. I lived inside the city limits until I was almost four, and then again during my last three years of college, and for three years in my twenties. I left in January 1978, and have only been back to visit.

People don't believe me when I say Baltimore was as segregated in the fifties and early sixties as any place in the South. African-Americans did not attend movie theaters or Gwynn Oak Amusement Park, or dance on The Buddy Deane Show, except on specific days when the white kids didn't come. Someone once told me "Hairspray" was a "nice fantasy" but except for the happy ending, John Waters perfectly captured Baltimore in 1963.

Baltimore's schools integrated in 1954, and that, coupled with inexpensive new houses in the suburbs, led to an exodus from the city to Baltimore County, which surrounds Baltimore on three sides. African-Americans couldn't buy houses in the suburbs. The county schools I attended had  only a handful of African-American kids, and then only beginning in 1959, when Baltimore County closed the separate schools. They came from formerly rural neighborhoods older than the suburbs.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 opened up public accommodations for people who had money, but those who didn't were often excluded from good jobs and the deindustrialization which was already happening. There were riots in many American cities throughout the sixties, but not in Baltimore, where home ownership was more widespread and there were still jobs. When Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot, the city exploded. I was in college; my parents and sister left the day of the shooting for spring break with my grandparents in Miami. I was home with my uncle, trying to finish my coursework for my freshman year in college. The city and then the county were placed under curfew. Among my friends, many had parents who owned stores in the inner city that were looted and firebombed. Friendships were tested when this group of friends, angry at the rioters, confronted friends who were sympathetic to the rioters.

Baltimore today is very different than it was. The formerly white working-class neighborhoods are being gentrified at a fast clip; the African-American neighborhoods have been hollowed out by losing the middle class to the now-integrated suburbs. The once segregated and largely Jewish neighborhood where I grew up in Baltimore County is now mostly African-American.

I don't remember anyone ever being fond of the Baltimore Police Department. When I was in college, in long hair and bell bottomed jeans, the police always seemed just plain mean. There was a police riot at the downtown Flower Mart held the first week in May in 1968. The press said it was disrupted by thugs, but the truth was, it was peaceful until the police moved in. Nationwide in the last year especially, there has been a focus on police brutality and the killing of young Black men, with no action taken against the officers. I read on AOL this morning that a police report states that another inmate in the same patrol car heard Gray banging against the fence in the car, trying to injure himself. That seems self-serving from the police. A report from a group called "The Fourth Estate" says that Gray had back surgery before this incident. Even the police don't believe that story.

Like in Ferguson, it's time to blame the victim. Friends on Facebook posted Gray's long rap sheet. I had to tell one friend to say one hundred times "THE POLICE DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO EXECUTE ANYONE." Others have complained that Jeopardy was preempted or the baseball game was canceled, or it took a long time to get home from work.

Back in the day, when I protested the war in Vietnam by helping to block major streets in Baltimore during rush hour, people were ready to kill us for the inconvenience we caused. As opposed to the inconvenience of having your house burned by napalm, or your son killed in action or coming back a broken drug addict.

That's how I feel about this current unrest. People were inconvenienced. The ghetto in West Baltimore hasn't been a good place to live in a long time. There are blocks of empty houses, not many stores. It's bleak. And the police still apparently have the reputation for sheer nastiness they had in the 1970s.

I saw the looters in online videos (we don't have a working television). They were carrying rolls of toilet paper and boxes of diapers. As my late grandmother would say "It's a pity on them, they should have to live like that."

I lived through the Baltimore riot of 1968, safely  out in the suburbs. Same with Miami's riots in 1980, only then I was laid up with hepatitis and couldn't go anywhere anyway.  I lived off Vermont Avenue and Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles in 1992, when the police were acquitted in the Rodney King case. I was in the middle of it then, but even before that, there was anger when a Korean store owner got probation after shooting a fourteen year old girl in the back. The local bus service had also been cut that year.

Los Angeles in 1992 was a terrible place. In Baltimore this week, neighbors came out after one night of looting to help clean up. Most of the protests were peaceful, although that wasn't entirely clear from the news broadcasts. I think Baltimore's mayor was right to delay asking the Governor for help. And I think bringing in the National Guard in full combat gear is excessive. It's not Iraq out there, it's just people frustrated and angry that the system is rigged against them.

I pray for the peace of Baltimore, as I do for Jerusalem, another deeply divided city.

This is a picture I took last June of a street in the "Old West Baltimore Historic District" near where the rioting occurred.

Alan Gross and Cuba

There is a party tonight at a temple in Rockville, Maryland to welcome Alan Gross back from Cuba, where he was imprisoned for more than five years. I was supposed to go with my sister, who lives in the Washington area, and spend time with her. Unfortunately, I've been suffering all week from a cold. I felt a little better yesterday, not really well enough to drive four hours over the mountains from my home in Morgantown, West Virginia, in potential ice and snow alone at sixty-five years old. I'm trying to kill off the "shtarker" (big shot) in me, who thinks he is unstoppable. I am very stoppable. I wish Alan had thought that maybe he was "stoppable" before agreeing to go on his adventure to Cuba. It wouldn't be like Alan to be cautious.

Alan and I go back to fifth grade, when his parents moved to Baltimore from New York, buying what was at the time considered a luxurious house in the next neighborhood over from us. We turned up in the same class that year, and became friends. We also attended the same Hebrew school. We remained friends, even though we were not always in the same classes in junior high. In ninth grade, he and I and several other pals joined Chesapeake AZA. Alan's parents were great to me. I had sleepovers and dinners at their home, and spent one day each summer for several years on Alan's dad's boat in Chesapeake Bay.

The line that divided neighborhoods zoned for Woodlawn High, where I went, and Milford Mill, where Alan went, both on the west side of Baltimore County, ran between his street and mine. Alan ultimately became a wheel in AZA. I believe he was District president and became a life member. We drifted apart our last year of high school. He spent more time with AZA people, and had friends at Northwood High in Silver Spring.

I only remember seeing Alan once after my first year of college. A group of old pals planned a trip to Atlantic City. Alan said he would meet us there. He showed up with a beautiful girl with long black hair, named Judy. In my memory she talked about being a feminist and working for Planned Parenthood.

Alan contacted me, like so many old friends did, on Facebook in 2009. We caught up briefly with messages. I told him I was in Los Angeles and had recently married my boyfriend, a student rabbi. He told me about his two grown daughters and said "Judy Morgenstein Gross and I have lived in the DC area since 1970." I said "I met Judy. Congratulations on having the same wife for so many years." He answered "Judy is a very patient person."

That was the same Alan I knew back when. He was funny and personable. In my memory, we always had a good time together, even if he drove 100 miles per hour on then-deserted US 29 in his father's cranberry-colored Oldsmobile to Silver Spring, scaring me to death.

I sent him a message about a Chesapeake AZA group on Facebook in June 2009. He answered a few days later, apologizing for the delay. "I was out of the country," he said. I didn't hear from him again.

Alan's sister Bonnie contacted me on Facebook a few months later. It turns out the cantor at the synagogue where she worked in Dallas, Texas was a friend of mine from Los Angeles. Bonnie asked me if I knew what had happened to Alan. I didn't know anything, so she sent me a link to a news article.

I investigated the whole issue from all sides. The United States' policy towards Cuba was the root of the problem. Not to say that Castros are nice people. But I believe the United States is, in many respects, not a competent superpower. My Grandpa Wendell had two brothers in Cuba. The regime ultimately confiscated the textile factories they owned, and the uncles left. My grandparents were in Cuba January 1, 1959, when Castro took over. Grandpa would be 120 and Grandma 119, if they were alive today. The Castros are still in power. It seems the Cubans wanted some kind of recognition and an exchange of prisoners. They didn't want to hold on to Alan. I think Judy Gross was correct to sue the United States government for not making an effort to deal with Cuba. We made a swap with the Taliban; we freely trade with China, Russia and Vietnam.

I was angry that Alan was a pawn, hostage to Democratic Senator Menendez from New Jersey and Republican Congressperson Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in Florida, who represent Cuban-Americans. Alan couldn't come home because New Jersey and Florida are swing states, and I thought it was despicable that Alan couldn't be freed because of that. I wrote to our representatives in West Virginia and to President Obama. I was not hopeful from their responses.

With the election over, President Obama was free to take action. He also figured out what I knew in 1980, when I lived in Miami: the most hard-core anti-Castro Cubans will never vote Democratic. So Alan was freed, and now we are opening up to Cuba.

I remember years ago, the pictures of Chinese workers bicycling to work in Beijing in their Mao outfits. Now Beijing is almost unlivable with pollution, and everyone wants a suburban house and a new Buick. I hope Cuba doesn't lose its soul to the worst of American values.

Meanwhile, I'm happy for Alan and Judy and their entire family. I'm sorry Alan's sweet mother Evelyn didn't live to see him come home. I wish I could be with Alan and our other friends from the old days who will be at his event tonight. If my sister sends pictures, I will post them.