On Saturday January 31 I stopped at Lost City Diner for a bite to eat before heading to the Charles Theater to see Selma. In retrospect, going to see this film when I did was a great way to start off this course. Here I was at the end of January, the beginning of my last semester as an undergraduate student, Black History Month was about to begin, and I was about to dive into this American Studies course called Community in America- where we would be studying the topics of redevelopment, gentrification, and community change in Baltimore. The semester had barely begun and it already felt like an interesting space to be in. It seems that with each year that I have been living and learning in the Baltimore area the layers of Baltimore's racial tension and history are continuously being peeled back to reveal more.
Now that the end of my last semester basically here and "riots" erupting around the city, occupying this time and space feels more bizarre than it did before. My mind keeps wandering back to the events described in Baltimore 68'. Today my life feels like an episode of The Twilight Zone, like I stepped off my doorstep and walked into the Baltimore of the 1960s. With the same questions that danced around my mind at the start of this semester as I sat enveloped in the cushions of seat in the Charles while depictions of history splattered across the screen.
(Lower image: bydvnlln.vsco.co/)
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