Riots

The final week of April 2015 brought back memories of the 1968 riots in Baltimore; then I had sat watching the violence on television from the safety of my family home in Toronto. I was back from my second year of studies in the seminary on my way to priesthood. Now 47 years later I sat with my wife in our suburban Baltimore home watching the escalation of a new wave of street violence. We were packing for a flight the following morning from the Baltimore airport for a week in the southwest. We slipped out to grab a quick supper in the nearby mall and sat down at a table in a nearly deserted restaurant. I could hear young waitresses talking together anxiously about the unfolding mayhem in the city; some of them lived there. We ordered our meal, but I stopped the young woman before she headed off to the kitchen. “Are you worried about the rioting in the city? I asked.

She spoke quickly. “The mall is closing. We’re getting text messages that say men with guns are driving out to the big malls. The manager said you’ll be our last customers; then we can go home.”

“Then make our order to go,” I said. She looked relieved.

We joined the people hurrying from the mall to their cars. “Look at their faces,” Marian said. “They’re so frightened; they’re looking all around for trouble.”

It was dark when we reached our house. We ate supper in front of the TV as cameras scanned the fires burning in parts of the city that had just begun their recovery from the ’68 riots. We both felt the sadness of the mindless destruction, and prayed quietly for those caught in the terror. Baltimore City was Marian’s home.

My thoughts drifted back to a week I spent years before at the seminary in Detroit that sat on the edge of the destruction left by the rioting there. We were confined to the building and a small patch of parking lot patrolled by armed security. By Sunday afternoon I could no longer stand the claustrophobia and slipped out into the empty streets. I walked through block after block of burnt out tenements and apartments until I reached something of the downtown. A drugstore on the corner was open so I went in just to make some human contact. The clerks and the merchandise stood on the other side of glass walls thick enough to withstand a barrage of bullets. I found little human contact there.

I took a bus back to the seminary, feeling something of an intruder among the black passengers. A well inebriated man boarded at the next stop, but lacked money for the fare. Riders took up a collection to pay for his ride. I gave the change in my pocket and had to admit I had never seen that happen in all my days of taking public transit back home in Toronto.

Marian and I left the next morning for the airport, looking out over the city from I-95. Down in the streets, parents were beginning to bring their children out of the houses with brooms and shovels and dustpans to begin the cleanup and the healing. I pray that the city that is now my home acts as quickly to address the deeper scars that are the legacy of violence and trauma.