Something to Behold in West Baltimore

Something to Behold in West Baltimore
By Jamie Haft

This is a story about how residents, artists, community organizers, university professors, and students responded to a massive urban renewal disaster in West Baltimore that displaced 19,000 African Americans for an expressway that was never completed. This story shows what a large-scale action for art and social justice can look like. How does a national organization come in for an event and significantly boost the capacity of the ongoing local struggle for justice?

In June 2011, three years of grassroots art-making and organizing was marked by a massive festival next to that 1.4-mile dead-end expressway dubbed by community members The Highway to Nowhere. Eleven thousand West Baltimoreans came together to celebrate their struggle and resilience with a star-studded line-up of musicians, singers, spoken-word artists, and dancers. ROOTSFest 2011 was co-produced by West Baltimore’s CultureWorks and the southern regional arts and activism nonprofit Alternate ROOTS. There were tents and stands for social justice and neighborhood organizations, food vendors, community drummers, and conversations with national activists including the Free Southern Theater’s John O'Neal and El Teatro Campesino’s Luis Valdez. The festival marked the 35th anniversary of ROOTS.

Recently, in October, those involved in the festival came together for a reunion at the historic Arch Social Club. The six-hour event had three acts: 1) a reading of a play; 2) story circles with community members and ROOTS leaders in response to the play; and 3) collective reflection and discussion of next actions. Tasty food, libations, and dance music crowned the event.

The Progression

After the 2011 festival, Ashley Milburn, Denise Johnson, Randolph Rowel, Bob Leonard, Dudley Cocke, and Jon Catherwood-Ginn began a critical dialogue about the festival’s successes and shortcomings. They emailed each other and audio recorded and transcribed their conversations, and presented their reflections at the 2012 Imagining America national conference in Minneapolis. Their reflections and critique became the basis for an 18,000-word essay that was authored collectively and edited by Catherwood-Ginn.

Moved by the essay’s testimonies, I proposed turning it into a play. West Baltimore leaders liked the idea, and ROOTS agreed to sponsor the event. To create the script, Dudley Cocke and I began by reading the essay aloud and considering: Who are the main characters in this multiyear organizing effort? What are the most dramatic moments? What turns of phrase and images resonate? We virtually convened project leaders for draft script readings and input, and the parts were cast with volunteers from the West Baltimore community.

The Performance and Dialogue

Drawn from the first-voice descriptions of the organizing and eventual festival, the characters in the play are: Artist, Organizer, Professor, Producer, and Community Woman and Community Man, who take on multiple roles from residents to government officials. Here’s the play script.

Sixty people came to witness community members performing their community story, to share their own experiences in the ensuing story circles, and, as a group, to consider new collective actions to advance justice in West Baltimore.

The Portability

To spark further reflection and action, the West Baltimore and ROOTS communities are sharing the play, multimedia, essay, and the timeline, compiled by Bob Leonard, describing the organizing process from 2007-2014. ROOTS is considering reprising the performance and dialogue as part of ROOTS Week, August 4-9, 2015, as a way for its membership to plan its 40th anniversary in 2016.  Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life is also considering using the play as part of its Summer Institute on Organizing and its next national conference, October 1-4, 2015, both at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Educators are invited to use this content for teaching and learning about the practice of community cultural development. We’ve started a list of issues and questions for reflection. Other folks for their own purposes can adapt the three-act event model – a play created from reflections of stakeholders followed by story circles and then group analysis.

Let us know your thoughts here in the comments. To get involved, contact [email protected].

Timeline: West Baltimore CultureWorks
By Bob Leonard

The artistic practice of community cultural development centers on the discipline of planning, doing, and reflecting in a regularly reoccurring iterative process, often extending for years. Time frames are important because the issues such development projects typically take on have been years in the making. In the West Baltimore project, the core community-identified issue is economic, political, and social disenfranchisement. With its goal of positive transformative change, uncovering and understanding complex community histories is a hallmark of community cultural development. This 2007-2014 West Baltimore timeline is a testament to this process.

Script: Something to Behold

Essay: Remembrance, Healing, Celebration, and Resilience, Art and Organizing in West Baltimore
By Dudley Cocke, Denise Johnson, Robert H. Leonard, Ashley Milburn, Dr. Randolph Rowel

Edited by Jon Catherwood-Ginn

Something to Behold: Issues & Questions for Reflection
By Jamie Haft

Here are five questions that the play, Something to Behold, prompts me to ask.

#1. What does art in a democracy look like?

In the play, at first the Artist is worried: With the perceived trappings of privilege that being an artist often carries, I worried I’d face a problem working in West Baltimore. So I was hesitant to show off my skills. Until one day, a community member told me, “Man, we need you to share what you got.”

Thinking about the art that’s made in the play – for example, those 12-foot outdoor sculptures conceptualized by young, single mothers in the community: What’s the relationship between art and the lives of people in an economically struggling community like West Baltimore?

#2. How do people decide to work together to better their community?

The Artist brings people together to tell their stories about Baltimore’s Highway to Nowhere. In the play, the Community Organizer recalls: “A lot of people showed up, and they were teary-eyed talking about the past. I started thinking about my own memories and realized – damn, this is part of my story too.” The community starts to express their history through art. The Organizer notes: “I had organized before around crime, sanitation, infant mortality – you name it. Deficit ideology. To organize around something that the community could create – now that was fresh and new!”

What strategies do you find most effective for getting groups to imagine a healthier, more just community and to work for their vision?

#3. How can art, culture, and organizing produce positive social change?

 The play includes several theories of change:

The Framework of “Remembrance, Healing, Celebration, and Resilience”
The Analysis about “The Rock and The Hard Place” and the fluid “Third Space”
The need for constant awareness of and opposition to the status quo’s unrelenting exertion of force
What theories of change do you use in your work, and how do they affect your artistic process?

#4. How can a large-scale festival advance social justice locally and nationally?

The play focuses on producing a festival in West Baltimore. CultureWorks was the local community organizer and festival host, and Alternate ROOTS was the national organizer and festival producer.

What successful strategies have you used to form a bond between the local and the national?

#5. How can we better understand the power dynamics involved in advancing social justice?

Within the play there are numerous power plays. I’m asking myself, what are the underlying assumptions and motivations for each of these opposing stakeholder groups?

• The Barber and other community residents who strongly disagree with CultureWorks’ vision for a “Highway to Somewhere”
• The foundation and university leaders who will only support the festival if it’s moved to East Baltimore
• City Hall who slaps a $50,000 “culture tax” on the festival

Please share your insights to these questions, and other questions the play raises for you, in the comments.

Something to Behold: Performance

This performance took place on October 25, 2014 at the Arch Social Club in Baltimore, MD.

Something to Behold: Community Dialogue

Community dialogue following the performance of Something to Behold.

Transcript

Pauline - We have been utilizing a lot of the different things that you did because of your festival to enhance and develop the area and to make people realize we have a rich history in our neighborhoods. [audience responds] Some people think they're poor. I don't think it's poor. I don't know what your perception of poor is. They call us deserts and whatever area, but this is a rich history and a rich neighborhood, and we have been utilizing that. I was telling them the one thing that got me about the whole festival was at night was the music playing just before you closed, just when the sun was going down, we were sitting on the bridge, and the music was playing. For someone who lived through the whole Road to Nowhere, whatever it is, to hear that music bounce off and down and just go right on down to Martin Luther King Boulevard. I just went down there and the sound, it was just something that you could not, you just had to just sit there and stop. And we could feel the effects of the music and the rhythm all over the community as it played in that evening, and that was just something that was just very much good.

Daki - We started in the community AFRAM, which became the African American Culture Festival, which most folks in community can’t event afford to have been there. It's downtown and it doesn't represent our culture. We started Art Scape, which became the most successful art festival on the east coast, if not the United States. Once the city in its complicity gave it over to a corporate entity and it became not the people; it became a cultural festival, an artistic festival where you can have entertainment and good times, headliners and, at the end of the day, they leave and still catch hell in this town. It is not enough to do only a celebration.

Ray - I'm hearing this being co-opted. I'm hearing it being stolen. I'm hearing the Red Line with the audacity to name the train the Red Line. The balance of what's going on today and the energy of what it is that we're doing now as we are a minority needs to be spread. I'm hurt oftentimes when I drive through this city and I see the lighter complexion of the people in communities that have economic strong engines, and I look at the majority of the folks that are in the hinterlands, there ain't much there. It's bleak. That's our challenge: Take every neighborhood in this city and create the kind of energy and the synergism to make it truly a city of charm.

Ashley - What I saw today was the story of our lives, the story of the beginning of us all as we do collective work. It was a new thing for all of us. We experienced something unique here. Each and every one of you put in a pint of blood. The thing about collective work in art and culture is that it is the most powerful tool you will ever your opportunity to change a life with, and it doesn't require a degree, experience. It doesn't require money. All it requires is us sitting together and doing this.  I'm proud of everybody in this room.

Denise - We had to say no to a lot of people so that we could honor community. We definitely could have gotten money and done the usual thing, but we were truly trying to honor community, and I'm one of the people. I was honoring myself, too.

Carlton - My answer to your question is not, "What are we going to do?" as if we have to do something new that hasn't been done before. It's: When are we going to do it together? So, starting with understanding what is already happening in this community. It's beautiful to see this group of people together, and I don't know how many times you all meet on a regular basis to further the goals the mission of this community and this collective of people. I know that people that we were working with with Roots Fest hadn't seen each other since Roots Fest. That's a problem. That's a real problem. That's not a Roots problem; that is a problem of our ability to keep and sustain a method of movement.  So, what we got that was started during ROOTS Fest was the fact that we were meeting every week. A group of people were meeting every week to move forward an idea. That idea happened to be ROOTS Fest, but what is the idea right now that needs to be moved forward? It's not necessarily a festival, but what is the thing that this community needs to focus its energy on in order to advance to that next stage?

Photos: West Baltimore Performance & Dialogue

Photos: West Baltimore ROOTSFest 2011