Baltimore-Centric: A Learning List

We’re stunned, or maybe not surprised. We’re sad, angry, frightened. We’re protesting, or helping to clean up, or scouring the news and social media… or maybe we’re feeling helpless, or not sure how to react. Whatever it is each of us at Hopkins is doing, thinking, and feeling in response to the tragic death of Freddie Gray while in police custody–and the events of the past week–one thing we have in common, one thing we all know, is how to learn.

Here is the beginning of a list of resources you might find helpful as we continue on this journey of learning, discussion, reflection, and action. With a few exceptions, these resources are focused on Baltimore: about Baltimore, by Baltimore writers, or published in Baltimore.

History and Sociology

• ‘68: The Fire Last Time
• Baltimore ’68: Riots and Rebirth in an American City
• The Baltimore Book: New Views of Local History
• “Brown” in Baltimore: School Desegregation and the Limits of Liberalism
• Charm City: A Walk Through Baltimore
• Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District (on order for the library)
  
• The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood
• Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets
• The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood (the author of this study gives a talk next week)
  
• Middle East Baltimore Stories: Images and Words from a Displaced Community
• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness
• Not In My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City
• Police Brutality: An Anthology
• Race, Class, Power, and Organizing in East Baltimore: Rebuilding Abandoned Communities in America
• “Undue Force,” The Baltimore Sun, September 28, 2014

Autobiography and Biography

• The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood (on order for the library)
• No Free Ride: From the Mean Streets to the Mainstream
• The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates

Fiction and Poetry

• After I’m Gone (and the author’s many other Baltimore-based detective novels!)
• Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing
• The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010
• F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature
• Gone Fishin’: An Easy Rawlins Novel (why is this book on our list?)
• Your Face in Mine

Music, Art, TV, and Film

• Classic Protest Songs
• Graffiti Alley: An Oasis of Color
• Group Harmony: The Black Urban Roots of Rhythm & Blues
• Homicide: Life on the Streets
• Liberty Heights (and Diner, of course)
• Pecker (not to mention all of John Waters’ other films)
• Putty Hill
• The Wire

Please send us comments with your suggestions for additional resources: books, articles, blog-posts, films… Your suggestions may go beyond Baltimore, which is great. But by starting here, with this city, we give a shout-out to this place that is for all of us, in some way, home. Let’s show it our love by learning.