U.S.
BALTIMORE — Sporting an Orioles cap and a stiff black beard, William Scipio, 31, quietly made the rounds Tuesday in a small park at the corner of Presstman Street and Pennsylvania Avenue in West Baltimore’s Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood.
It was about 10 a.m., and as a helicopter flew overhead, volunteers arrived, one small group after another. They planned to help clean up debris from the unrest of the previous night.
Scipio is one of the neighborhood’s young leaders, having stepped up as president of the Sandtown Resident Action Committee after the group went dormant. On Tuesday he helped connect volunteers from other parts of the city to community leaders in his neighborhood.
Since the protests on Monday after the funeral of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old Sandtown native who died after sustaining spinal injuries while in police custody, the neighborhood has been besieged. The area and its immediate surroundings have witnessed some of the worst violence of recent days, as people have set fires to cars, stolen from businesses and destroyed property. The National Guard was called in, and police have increased their presence here.
For residents, the last few days have been a heightened version of what has happened in recent decades. Sandtown is home to more people held in state prisons than any other neighborhood in Maryland. Its poverty — nearly half the children here live under the poverty line — has drawn millions of dollars for community development efforts from the city’s nonprofits. But some feel that outside help has done as much harm as good.
The cleanup on Tuesday threatened to follow a similar pattern. On Facebook, someone created an event called the “Baltimore clean-up effort,” suggesting that people from all over the region take cleaning supplies to North and Pennsylvania Avenues — the heart of the chaos where a CVS pharmacy was broken into and burned — not realizing the police had closed the intersection. More than 2,000 people responded to say they would attend.
Almost immediately, the event provoked concern. “It seems like the majority of these people are from outside the community, i.e., white students or people who have never seen this community,” wrote one commenter. “This event should be spearheaded by black people of the West Baltimore community and no one else. Know your place, white participants. This is not a trip to the museum.”
The thread devolved into contentiousness and name calling, with some saying they would take their help elsewhere.
The event’s organizers eventually got in contact with a local group, the No Boundaries Coalition, which brings together several adjacent Baltimore neighborhoods with people of different economic and racial backgrounds. The organization advised the volunteers to meet at the Presstman Street park instead of the burned-out CVS.
“To have people who are willing to come in and initiate cleanups is fine by me,” Scipio said. “At least we have the hearts of people willing to help clean up versus just sitting home and not doing anything at all.”
As dozens of people flooded into the park, they were directed by Sandtown leaders to areas that needed cleaning. The response reflected an attitude that has taken root in Sandtown over the years: We’re very grateful for the help. And we’re going to remain in control of our own community.
Ray Kelly, the head of the No Boundaries Coalition, was one of those local leaders. He led a group of volunteers down Presstman Street while passing drivers shouted thank yous from their cars. A few blocks down, Kelly bumped into a group of young men from the neighborhood.
“We got help, anything you guys need, volunteers to help you all clean up,” Kelly said. “We want to make sure through this whole process, we got resident leaders coming out and we are dictating what happens in our community.”
The young men joined Kelly’s troop and headed down Presstman to Jolly’s, a small grocery that was raided the previous day. They formed a prayer circle in the parking lot outside the building. “These are real leaders. They’re from here,” said Corey Barnes, a local pastor. He pulled the young men into the middle of the circle. “Let’s surround them.” A chorus of individual prayers began to rise and intertwine.
After the prayer, Kelly rallied the group again. Some volunteers remained at Jolly’s to clean up while others were sent down North Monroe Street. There a car fire the previous night burned part of a community garden.
“We don’t know who, we don’t know how — it just caught on fire,” said Duane Harris, whose father, Elder Clyde Harris, a leader of Newborn Holistic Ministries, helped start the farm. “One of my neighbors caught it on film. I saw it on Facebook. I looked at it, and I said, ‘Man, that’s the farm!’”
George Norfleet, 50, was the neighbor who filmed the car fire. The previous night he left his rowhouse on Fulton Avenue to survey the scene up the street at North Avenue. His wife, Phebe Norfleet, and her niece, daughter and granddaughter sat nervously in the house with the curtains drawn and doors locked. At North Avenue, he found chaos: A phalanx of riot police marched past a car engulfed in flames to a soundtrack of screaming, strange alarms and an ominous crackling. When he returned to his house, he looked down Lorman Street, saw the car on fire and called 911.
He understood the rioters’ anger. He and Phebe Norfleet say he was once beaten by Baltimore police and sent to the hospital without being arrested. “I’d say 5 percent of police here are good,” he said. “The other 95 percent are bad.” (The Baltimore Police Department did not respond to an interview request.)
But this was his home. People had stolen from the liquor store down the street and a grocery around the corner. “We’re a small community,” George Norfleet said the next day, standing in his living room as a TV behind him ran CNN coverage portraying his neighborhood as a war zone. “We’re proud of our community, and we try to take care of each other the best we can.”
The Fire Department didn’t respond to his 911 call, so he and his neighbors came together to put out the fire with buckets of water. The vehicle was so hot that it burned the plastic on the hoop houses — half-cylinder greenhouses made of plastic sheeting and steel tubing — that covered the garden. Debris blew all over the farm.
Early Tuesday afternoon, volunteers climbed up the hoop house scaffolding and began to take down the damaged tarps. Others beneath them picked up debris.
Harris surveyed the scene. “I’m not saying that we don’t need [city workers], but right now, I don’t see them out here in their trucks coming to grab the debris,” he said. “I’m just loving how the community says, ‘We really don’t need your help, government. We got it. We’ll come in here. We’ll fix it up. We don’t need your National Guard. We don’t need your state troopers. We got it. That’s what I’m loving — that we got it.”
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