we have survived
so many fires
i can no longer tell
if we are alive,
or simply burning.
- people of color; pavana
The recent movie, Get Out, told the story of rich, privileged, white people stealing black bodies for a variety of reasons – health, talent, the ‘cool’ quotient, sex – you name it. In all senses, Get Out is the best movie made on slavery, without even mentioning slavery. Before race was a defined concept, slavery was about theft of personhood, it was about the appropriation of black and brown bodies as property, it was viewing these bodies as being just that – bodies – not actual people. It is important to start with this in order to understand the historical antecedents for what is happening in Baltimore.
The idea behind Get Out, comes from the story of Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cells – the idea that African-Americans did not even have autonomy and control over their own bodies, let alone on their environment. That the site of this theft was Johns Hopkins in Middle East Baltimore could have been a coincidence, but this coincidence has roots in the history of the neighborhood and the story that has unfolded thus. Gomez chronicles Hopkins’ aggressive foray into the neighborhood from the 1950s, when 1100 families living on the 39 acres that is now the hospital, were first informed that they no longer had a home. Like now, even then, 90% of the community was black. The promise had been a beautiful neighborhood which would include the city’s first housing for black residents and instead, the land sat undeveloped for four years. When work finally started up again, 100% of the development belonged to Hopkins. There were no new homes for the community. A fence ensured that local residents could no longer walk where they once lived, land where there now stood the Hopkins medical campus – for all purposes, stolen from its rightful owners. A similar story seems to be unfolding even now. Thirty years from Hopkins’ first foray into this neighborhood, another Hopkins-led group, called the Historic East Baltimore Community Action Coalition (HEBCAC) leveraged $34 million in federal financing from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to rebuild homes in Middle East.
This plan included Hopkins buying properties from the local residents, selling them to HEBAC for $1, HEBAC fixing them up and then selling them to residents in exchange for their old properties. Clearly, there were many loopholes in this plan, including no way to control prices of the final property, nor who would move into the community. However, in six years, the program built less than 50 homes, and by 2000, HEBAC’s director was ‘acknowledging’ that they had miscalculated the ‘rate of disinvestment’ in the community. The plan changed yet again. This time, Hopkins would come for what was left, leveling and rebuilding the entire neighborhood. Everybody had to go. The latest example for this battle for Middle East Baltimore – surrounding the 88-acre redevelopment, which EBDI describes as the largest in Baltimore history – is the attempt to change its name to Eager Park. This is no different from the conflict that has played out nationwide in older cities such as Baltimore, Philadelphia and Washington D.C. as they ‘revitalize’. Christopher Leinberger, professor and director of the Center for Real Estate and Urban Analysis at George Washington University, while speaking to the Baltimore Sun in 2013, said that neighborhood names and borders are constantly shifting and that this was just the beginning for Baltimore.
While the official names of some Baltimore neighborhoods, like Ridgely’s Delight and Fells Point, go back centuries, Middle East is supposedly not one of them. The name came into being around 1978, when residents banded together to demand funds for repairing these blocks, falling into disrepair. There were approximately 200 vacant homes in the neighborhood then and the city allocated $800,000 for repairs, when it was estimated that it would take $120,000 just to repair three houses. Community organizers created neighborhood boundaries across the swaths of land to the north and west of the Hopkins complex, with the western group calling itself C.A.R.E. — Cleaning, Active, Restoring, Efforts – as of 2004. They also created a group to oversee the money: the Middle East Community Organization. According to the Baltimore Sun in 2013,
“In 1982, Lucille Gorham, then director of the organization, described the community’s naming to The Baltimore Sun. The “51-year-old widowed mother of eight” instructed a young man who was headed to the city’s grant hearing: “We have the Northeast Community Organization on one side and the Southeast on the other. So tell them you’re from the Middle East Community Organization, because you’re right in the middle of everything.”
Tracing the history of this neighborhood in her blog and book, Marisella Gomez, writes that these were vibrant communities in the 40s and the 50s and the 60s. Change came to Middle East Baltimore with deindustrialization and white flight in the 60s and 70s like the rest of the United States, but what was different for this area called the Middle East, was its dependence on Johns Hopkins. During the 70s, Hopkins was also a major landlord in the area, giving them the power they needed, to continue to expand and grow and displace more people. The abandonment of Middle East was then, because Hopkins willed it to happen. In her interviews with residents in the area, Gomez talks about the fear in their head that the ‘plantation on the hill’ would eventually come and take over, hence making this a history of people waiting for the slave masters to just come and take over again. The ‘plantation on the hill’ did this by using the city and laws like ‘eminent domain’ – that allows them to acquire private property for private development – the irony being that this law was first introduced to use private property for building infrastructure for public good – like railways etc. How these notions change when dealing with communities of color is what brings the continuance of plantation politics to forefront – the players may have changed and the laws reworded, but for what it means for oppressed populations in the United States, it might all be nothing.
In the same Baltimore Sun article mentioned above, the author quotes 85-year-old Josephine Gilliam as saying that though she was heartbroken at being asked to move from her block, she had requested the developers to keep the name Middle East in use. Imagine that. Being so stripped of power that you do not even get to keep your name, preserve the history associated with the name. On hearing that the name of the neighborhood was threatened, one of Ms. Gilliam’s daughters said, “It’s like they threw her under the rug. Like she ain’t nobody.” Like she – and many like her – ain’t nobody.
References
From ‘Middle East’ to ‘Eager Park,’ an East Baltimore community is rebranded. (2013, May 25). Retrieved March 02, 2017, from http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2013-05-25/news/bs-md-ci-around-eager-park-20130420_1_ebdi-donald-gresham-east-baltimore-development-inc
Hoods, Schools, and People 