Baltimore My Baltimore
My Life a parallel to Anne Frank.
Cause and Effect
It was August 1949, I was five, my body was black, and I did not know it; the third son of migrant parents from Keysville, Virginia who had purchased a home on the east side of Baltimore. At five years of age, my first friend was white, and he didn't know it. Our friendship came abruptly to an end one year later when we started school; it was segregation before boys in the hood. He suddenly stopped speaking, and his friendly smile went away. I did not know why. It was my first experience with having a discouraged heart.
On April 12, 2015, Freddie Carlos Gray Jr., a 25-year-old African American, was arrested by the Baltimore Police Department over his legal possession of a knife. While transported in a police van, Gray sustained injuries and died on April 19, 2015; his death was ascribed to injuries.
In 1960 I became a high school dropout. Racial taunting at Baltimore City College High School had become a phycological nightmare. Fifty-six years later, in 2016, Dedric Colvin, with a BB gun resembling a firearm, was shot by police in East Baltimore. At the time, the Police Commissioner stated that he could not wrap his head around a child leaving home with a replica of a gun. His statement betokens a total disconnect, ignorance of "Cause and Effect" within the zip codes of Baltimore. Zip codes he vowed to serve and protect. — Zip codes of repression, as written in "A Colony in a Nation" by Chris Hayes."
Baltimore is not unique in its sins as a city. Nor are we uncommon to many being, as labeled by #45, "a rodent-infested mess." In a country that subliminally utilizes skin tone to measure equity and cultural beliefs, Baltimore has become a showcase through mythoi. Mythologies sometimes mature into alternative facts. Without a bridge between cultures, unfounded facts produce fears, illuminating anxieties that boldly integrate laws. Sometimes, a law can be unjust as it becomes fixated only on and to the benefactor's belief. Laws, as platformed in the Residential, Segregation Ordinances of 1910-1913, labeled Apartheid Baltimore Style.
https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2498&context=mlr
Baltimore's segregation law was the first such law to be aimed at blacks in the United States, but it was not the last. Various southern cities in Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky enacted similar laws. Laws that create circumstances (Cause & Effect) that are never recorded in history books.
As a military veteran, I am not an advocate of weaponry in the hands of the untrained. Nevertheless, in 1960, because of the psychological effect bestow upon me through the bullhorn of the times, if I had had access to even a replica of a gun, I might have carried one myself. I cannot speak for Dedric Colvin's mindset, but I have experienced fear and the emotional effect it can bestow upon the mind. Poverty, joblessness, and educational deficiency are the proving grounds for drugs and crime. People judging from afar are clueless to a black male's mindset born into an environment of scarcity. Black youth spontaneously run from the police, not necessarily because of criminality but because of learned distrust —a foregone conclusion.
August 2016, "Black Lives Matter," demonstrated at a police convention in Baltimore. An official from the police union, sent to all attendees on formal department memo stating: "Union members attending the state FOP conference should expect more bad behavior from the THUGS OF BALTIMORE," referring to protesters. "On the bright side, maybe they will stop killing each other while they are protesting us.
In July 2017, although it seemed to be standard procedure, "rough people up more" and not worry about injuring suspects during arrests, words from the most powerful voice in America, effectively endorsing the reuse of excessive force by police. Apartheid reinforcement with a capital A.
A privileged mind, sets no boundaries and if confronted, has no path of aberration, except adversarial, having not a clue of life in "A Colony in a Nation," by Chris Hayes.
From 1942 to August 1944, Ann Frank wrote in her diary.
As a child, I kept a diary.
In 2016 I self-published:
"Guidance Against the Odds"
(the first thirty-nine years)
on cause - because of:
"Cause and Effect,"