Across oceans and screens, The Wire became a cultural phenomenon; but also a distorted fun house mirror. To many outside Baltimore, the city became synonymous with crime, poverty, and corruption. Beyond simply impacting the city’s image, according to Dav...Read More

One of my favorite African Proverbs and one that is a guiding star to the Baltimore Legacy Project is “The youth can move quickly, but the elders know the way.” It is less a proverb than a warning; speed without direction is not progress, and momen...Read More

In his book, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change, John Lewis shares, “Ours is not the struggle of one day, one week, or one year. Ours is not the struggle of one judicial appointment or presidential term. Ours is the struggle of a l...Read More

Race Work  The first time that I was introduced to Dr. Joanne Martin was through her scholarship; one of the four books that she co-authored with her husband; Dr. Elmer Martin who is now an ancestor. The book is Spirituality and the Black Helping Traditi...Read More

It was Imam Earl El Amin who first described Baltimore to me as a city of neighborhoods in a Baltimore Legacy Project interview. The phrase lingered, not as a slogan but as a fact. Baltimore’s civic identity has long been organized not around a singular ...Read More

I only recently learned the phrase “movement lawyering.” Dorcas Gilmore, at Baltimore Action Legal Team, was the first to say it when I interviewed her for the Baltimore Legacy Project, and though I could gather its meaning from context, I still lo...Read More

This year, (2026) the United States will mark two hundred and fifty years since its founding—a number that invites both celebration and unease, a round anniversary heavy with unfinished arguments, like those found in the reparations discussions this past...Read More