P. Nicole King - Baltimore Revisited

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: King, P. Nicole, 1976 editor. | Drabinski, Kate, editor. | Davis, Joshua Clark, editor.

Title: Baltimore revisited : stories of inequality and resistance in a U.S. city / edited by P. Nicole King, Kate Drabinski, and Joshua Clark Davis.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, 2019.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018037166 | ISBN 9780813594026 (cloth) | ISBN 9780813594019 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Urban policyMarylandBaltimore. | Sociology, UrbanMarylandBaltimore. | Income distributionMarylandBaltimore. | EqualityMarylandBaltimore. | Baltimore (Md.)Social conditions. | BISAC: HISTORY / United States / State & Local / Middle Atlantic (DC, DE, MD, NJ, NY, PA). | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / City Planning & Urban Development. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Discrimination & Race Relations. | ARCHITECTURE / Urban & Land Use Planning. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / Urban. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Social Classes.

Classification: LCC HT395.U63 .B35 2019 | DDC 307.7609752/6dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018037166

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

This collection copyright 2019 by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Individual chapters copyright 2019 in the names of their authors

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

He rode me thru dysphoria

Where the buildings called out their pain

And the bodies laid waste in vain

And the minds were crowded with crud

Where it was hardest for flowers to bud

Pac, I want the rose to grow from concrete

The jungle where haunted souls meet

I tried running from this space

But my heart ran in place

Because my solace is tied to this locality

Have I adopted a privileged mentality?

Where I offer sutures not solutions

To defend my social position

No, this is not the case

For I love the face of my race

How do I grow me and add more growth to our tree

Without giving into capitalist desires that say to sew into me and my legacy

And leave those who aint surviving the fight like mebe.

Shawntay Stocks

Baltimore Revisited: Stories of Inequality and Resistance in a U.S. City (2019) calls to mind the publication, a generation earlier, of The Baltimore Book: New Views on Local History (1991). Both are driven by a passion for our beloved and deeply flawed city ; both present a critical local history directed at the general reader and seek to connect that history to broader national and global themes. Both also hold out the hope that knowledge of past failures, struggles, and achievementsand the deep roots of structural inequalitycan point the way to a more just, equitable future. Yet the two books also differ significantly: Baltimore Revisited is no mere update. It is perhaps useful to consider what these differences tell us about changes during the past twenty-five-plus years in our knowledge of the citys past, how we present that knowledge, and what we make of it.

First of all, Baltimore Revisited is a bigger book, with more content. Happily, this points to a growing body of research on the history of Baltimore and a welcome shift away from its status as a secondary city within U.S. urban history. Perhaps this explains why Baltimore Revisited is also more scholarly in its approach. Although both books are well grounded in careful research, The Baltimore Book adopted a narrative style akin to journalism , whereas articles in the current work are well footnoted, their arguments denser and more deeply situated in relevant literature, their reach extending to larger contexts and trends in fields from history to anthropology.

The subject matter of the two books is also different. If there is an overriding theme in The Baltimore Book , it is class relations and working-class struggles for justice, reflecting the twinned interests of social historians of the 1970s and 1980s and the authors involvement in the dissident politics of the 1960s and 1970s. In accord with current scholarly trends, Baltimore Revisited offers a forceful critique of neoliberalism as it has played out in Baltimore. It also includes several articles related to environmental and cultural history, as well as a piece on LGBTQ history and articles on two groups of relative newcomers to Baltimore, Lumbees and Koreans. In addition, where The Baltimore Book devotes proportionally more attention to events of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Baltimore Revisited focuses on the recent past and, with greater temporal distance than the earlier work, on the citys postWorld War II history.