E115: Baltimore uprising ten years later

Rebecca Snyder sits down with Lisa Snowden, founder of the Baltimore Beat, to reflect on the 10th anniversary of Freddie Gray’s death and the uprising that followed. Lisa shares the process behind the Beat’s commemorative coverage, her collaboration with the Baltimore Museum of Art and photographer Devin Allen, and her commitment to telling the stories of those too often left out of the narrative. From grassroots storytelling at Lexington Market to mentoring future journalists, Lisa speaks candidly about the role of journalism, community and truth in shaping Baltimore’s future.

Chapters

• 0:00 A decade since Feddie Gray
• 3:00 How the uprising changed the Beat
• 8:56 Listening at Lexington Market
• 15:23 Telling the story through art and memory
• 25:31 The future of community journalism

Transcript

0:01

Good morning. I am so excited to have Lisa Snowden, the publisher and founder of Baltimore Beat here in the studio with us today. And we're going to talk about their special section on the Freddie Gray uprising because it's the 10th anniversary. So Lisa, welcome to the program. Thank you so much. This was just, it was a big project, but I think it turned out really well. think it hopefully gave justice to this event in the city. Well, and it is really hard to imagine. It's been 10 years. April 19th was the 10-year anniversary of uh Freddie Gray's death. So for people who, you know, there's been a lot of, there's been a lot that's happened in that 10 years. Tell us a little bit about why this was so important and what people need to know about Freddie Gray. Sure. So, Freddie Way was a 25 year old black man in Baltimore city. He was out walking with his friends. Police identified him. He ran. They chased him down. They got a pocket knife off of him. um He was thrown onto the ground and then put into a police van. We never really found out. The whole details of how this happened, but he sustained injuries where within days of getting into police custody, being taken to the hospital, he died, get severe spinal injuries. um We had to always be careful and make sure that we don't say in a professional capacity that he was murdered because nobody was found guilty of murdering him. Our state's attorney at the time, Marilyn Mosby, charged all of the officers. Only a few of them even went to trial. They were found not guilty. The case kind of fell apart after that. Mosby dropped the charges. But in the interim between, even before it went to trial... When he was injured and thrown into that, taken to the hospital, sentiments started kind of bubbling up in the city. There were other public police involved deaths at that time. Mike Brown in Missouri had just happened not too long ago. So like people were already having conversations, really feeling strongly about the way that police dealt with citizens, especially Black citizens. Once Freddie Gray passed away, It almost set off. It felt like it triggered what we call an uprising in the city. Right. really was just a, like the zeitgeist just bubbled up and it just felt like there was frustration throughout the city for, you know, for a variety of reasons. And, and Freddie Gray was from Sandtown, Winchester. And so that also is just oh a, a, part of the city that has a lot of systemic issues. And so what, and the beat was you were, you were certainly in, uh the news industry then, what do you remember about that time during the uprising? At that time, was mostly, I was freelancing and I was a stay at home mom. At that time, my kids were five and seven and I was working part-time for the Afro. So I actually had been in Baltimore to cover his funeral, but I was back home by the time things kind of started picking up. And so my job wasn't so much being out in the streets at that time, but figuring out who were the major players. Like for this issue, I talked to Devon Allen, who was a photographer. who really made his name during that time. He was out in the streets a lot, taking pictures of whatever people were doing, all types of different movements that were happening. But I remember following him online, DMing him, DMing some of the activist groups, figuring out who I needed to talk to and set up interviews with, figuring out who were the people, because I wasn't even involved. Now I feel like activism is part of my beat and the paper's beat. At that time, I wasn't thinking about it at all. So I didn't know any of the major players. I found out for the first time about Tawanda Jones, who had been protesting for the death of her brother, Tyrone West, at the hands of Baltimore City Police and Morgan State University Police before this even happened and talking to her and getting context in that way. Well, honestly, when you have the small children, that just sucks up every bit of your life in some ways. And so, and of course, had a lot happened in the aftermath of the uprising. And so you, in the intervening time, you founded the Baltimore Beat, you've done all sorts of things. And when the 10th anniversary came around, tell me about why it was important to you and to the Beat to really cover this. m this anniversary and sort of what gap you were trying to fill in. I mean, I think what I learned, I wrote in this issue that this was the time, if this really changed the way that I thought about journalism and some of the weaknesses and some of the strengths and some of the weaknesses were that people like Freddie Gray, poor people and black people weren't always getting their stories told. Also that, We live in a situation where it's very easy for politicians and people in control of the city to control the narrative. watching things like seeing, even like when we were starting to have in Baltimore, like these panels that were ostensibly about, I'm so sorry. Can I stop real quick? Can we stop? Okay. And I also saw that politicians are able to kind of shape and control the narrative. um Even thinking about years after this uprising, when we were talking about the activism around George Floyd's death and News organizations from outside of the city were checking in with Mayor Brandon Scott, before him Mayor Jack Young, not to really get a real idea about whether things had changed or Black people were more safe, but just like, you guys didn't have people burning things down this time, so it's a success story. Like, they're bringing it in that way. And so, like, trying to figure out how to tell the truth, knowing the power of the narrative that politicians can shape. Sure. Well, and I think also there was so much national attention at that point. so like teasing out what's really happening on the ground, how things have changed, what it feels like versus, you know, the retrospective of, well, and this is where Baltimore is against some, you know, outside uh sort of status check. So, and I think the beat is in a really unique. position within Baltimore to tell that story. And I feel like you think that too. So tell me, tell me about where the beat is now and sort of how you wanted to approach this anniversary and what you ultimately decided to do. Again, I feel like politicians have a lot of power. They have press, know, folks that are paid more than journalists at this point. And so I know in our coverage in general, in our coverage of the uprising specifically, I know that there's plenty of folks that are gonna go talk to the mayor and gonna go talk to the police chief. These are people with a lot of power in the city. There's no problem there. The problems are regular, everyday folks, poor folks. who aren't gonna be able to have the Baltimore Sun, you know, in their, you know, at their phone contact or be able to just reach out to the banner and get an interview. So for me, it was more like, I know that those perspectives are going to be covered and covered well. What about everybody else? Who is not being heard? And I think that for me, one of the things that I kind of feel very passionately about in this moment, particularly in our country is, It's not enough to have the voices of people who have power, people who have money to be heard. We literally need to have a cohesive functioning society. Everybody's opinions matter and everybody needs to be able to have a voice and a say. And I think that in general, the beat is looking for everybody else. So that's kind of how we operate. And how do you do that? I mean, when you're looking, when you're sort of looking for everybody else, does that mean, and because you only have the resources that you have, you know, let's let's be honest, you're not a 50 person newsroom by any stretch. So how do you really reach out to the community? How do you get them involved? Because I do feel like uh you are so community based and enmeshed in the community. So one of the things that we tried to do with this issue is partnered with the Baltimore Museum of Art. The Baltimore Museum of Art is also doing their own outreach programming. So they have a space at Lexington Market and they use that space in lots of different ways. um Artists have been in that space, uh musicians, different folks can just use that space and interact with whoever just happens to be at the market. um They let us use that space and we had a series of kind of gatherings that started the end of February and went into the first week of March, of April. Every Friday we were there giving people an opportunity if they wanted to, they could orally tell us anything that they wanted to share. We had forms that they could fill out. We had QR codes, they could scan it and fill it out later if they wanted. And also had people that are major players in kind of the movement around policing that's happened in Baltimore since then. So Ray Kelly, who has been really instrumental in getting, locals control back with Baltimore city's police department, because for literally hundreds of years, it was controlled in Annapolis. Now it's back in the hands of citizens and Ray Kelly had a lot to do with that. And, or even having like an artist like Devon Allen, who's self-taught from Baltimore city, come and sit and share with people. how he got to be a photographer, his path, what he thinks about now, just being able to share those things with people. And to me, that made me feel really good because sometimes you get these opportunities, you can get these opportunities to talk to these kind of people, but it's only by having a lot of power, maybe having the agency to be able to get into the right meetings in City Hall, maybe to be able to pay to get into a talk or an exhibition. And this was literally anybody. you happen to just be at Lexington Market, could access these people, you could share these ideas. And I think that Baltimore is a very segmented city. again, like it's easy for, you're kind of, know, for me, I'm a journalist. I can be places that other journalists are. I can get in the city hall, I can access the mayor, but not everybody has that privilege. And for me, it's like knitting those communities together in the small way that we can. And I think that it seems so, I think also it's sort of representation, like to have someone like Devin Allen or Ray Kelly to be there to tell their own story really gives people that are maybe just walking by to grab dinner, do whatever they're going to do at Lexington Market, gives them an opportunity to say, oh, there's someone that looks like me, that's from my city, that maybe started out like me and is really having a tangible impact on the world. I think, you know, certainly uh local control back to Baltimore for the police force, like that was a long, hard journey to fight. And I think many people don't, A, never knew that Baltimore didn't have local control, but what goes into it. And so can you talk a little bit more about, you know, when you were reporting or doing that kind of listening tour, what you think the impact was on the community to have the opportunity to really be heard and to speak to others. think that it's a drop in the bucket of work that I think I'm going to be continuing until I am no longer alive. I think that because just in general, there's such a big gulf between journalists and regular people, no matter where you are in the country. And that's a gulf that we need to be all working to fix because one of the things that I always said was like, there might be people that never see a journalist until they're having like the worst day of their lives. And that's not the same as just talking to a journalist. And if you have people with power calling journalists literally the enemy of the people, the way to combat that is to say, like we shared some Chinese food at Lexington market, or they listened to me. That's, think the way that we do a small way of kind of fixing the gulf between news and people that actually are listening to. and put him into practice what they hear him read in the news. I also, remember talking to this one man, he would not, I was, kept trying to get him to go on the record or fill out a form and he would not, but then he kept saying amazing things. He was an older man. He was biracial. His mother was Japanese and his dad was black, but he did not look biracial. He just looked like a black man. And he said he remembered when Dr. King was murdered and what happened in Baltimore then. He shared. seeing police officers when he was a little boy, seeing him with his mom, calling him the N-word and being like, get away from that lady. Like, you're not supposed to be around this lady. Not knowing that that was his mom, because again, they look different. And sharing that, like how the police officers used to feel very comfortable um talking to Black people when he was younger. And then I also asked him, have you ever talked to a journalist before? And he was like, no. And I'm like, yes, like that's the win. Talking to somebody who's never talked to a journalist before is the win. And getting, even when people don't want to um share a story on the record for this project, for me, it's like, we're gonna be back in some capacity and maybe the next time you will, or maybe you'll say, hey, here's the thing that you should know about. Here's the thing that's a concern in my community. And for me, those are the wings and they're like small microscopic wins, but I think that they matter. they build a, I think they build a community and a culture of trust. And so, right, you're not going to, because being in a situation where people feel comfortable sharing their story, especially if they've been kind of swept aside in, in, the past, you're not going to un, you know, unburden yourself completely first go round. It is a, it's it's uh a progression. So you all, the beat was, uh kind of uniquely situated to tell the story, tell me about the package and what you wound up doing. So you started doing the reporting and anchoring within Lexington Market on Fridays, but what was the ultimate package that you put out? So we did that. We worked with Baynard Woods, who I got to know when I was at Baltimore City Paper. Baynard is an amazing journalist, also specifically suited to write about the issue of police brutality because he wrote, ah Got a Monster with Beat co-founder Brandon Soderbergh, which was about the gun trace task force and them like shaking down and robbing regular citizens. Baynard wrote a really beautiful piece that caught up. with lot of people that were the main players at this time. So Shorty and PFK Boom are two folks that have been incarcerated. PFK Boom has been associated with gangs before, but they were like out on the streets trying to fix things. Talking to Tawanda, talking to young people, um because young people got caught up in a lot of the response and interacted with police in really negative and harmful ways. I told Bader when he turned his story in, it felt like Baltimore, which I don't think that there's any more of a win in a piece of journalism than that. um Also, because for me, city paper was my entry point into thinking about journalism in a different way, thinking about journalism that does justice to everybody, that takes into account of like a Black city and what that means. But also because of the city paper being owned by the Baltimore Sun, and the son making whatever decisions they make with archives, all of that reporting from that time is basically gone. Like if you go into the way back machine, you can find some, but you got to really want to. uh There's physical copies floating around I've been told, but a lot of it's gone. The reporting that I did that was at the trials for the officers that went to trial, I can't find that online anywhere. And I thought it would be interesting to talk to Evan Serpich, who was the editor in chief at that time. Evan let me know that his son is a writer going off to Columbia in the fall. So I had his son write a piece talking to his dad about what was it like to cover this? How did you guys do it and try to do it differently? So there's a piece about that. Devon Allen gave us access to amazing photos. So those were there. And Jessel Knorr and another reporter whose name Gabe, I can't remember his last name. but they did a big piece on um legal services group that came out of the uprising, that came out of folks seeing activists, protesters being swept off the street. And we're like, we got to do something. So now, BALT Legal still exists to this day and they work with like expungement and helping folks get back on their feet, you know, legally after getting out of incarceration, things like that. So they're still working right now. So we had a story on that too. So sounds like you looked at it from all these different angles. I wanted to go back though. You said when Boehner turned in the story, it felt like Baltimore and that was a big win. What does Baltimore feel like to you? Like what does that mean? Baltimore was called mob town. Baltimore has never been high society, polite, pinkies in the air. Baltimore has always been this rough and tumble mix of a port city. We have an exhibition up at the BMA, the Baltimore Museum of Art, with Devon's photos, and I wrote the... Language that went with it and I describe it as this rough this rust belt town So for me, I feel like sometimes Journalism can sometimes even though we don't get paid a lot and in some ways journalism is a blue-collar You know industry, sometimes we can get a little too fancy To me it felt like good journalism but also kind of meeting Baltimore's DNA is just kind of like a no BS. We're going to tell you how we feel. We're going to say it plain type of place. And I love that about the city. mean, it is, it's a sort of take me as I am kind of place. uh So you looked at it from all these different angles. And I love the sort of way you went deep, deep, deep into the community to try and uncover stories and especially with the loss of the city paper archives, pulling back and doing some retrospective work. uh And then it feels like, just want to check in, it feels like what you're doing with the BMA is almost like an installation, like dynamic retrospective in the moment. Can you tell me a little bit more about that partnership and how it came about and how that fits into the beat? It's philosophy. I was already talking to the BMA. We were thinking about Lexington Market, but we also were like, well, what else can we do? At the same time, I was reaching out to Devin because again, I knew that Devin was a major part of the uprising. That time cover is iconic. So Devin and I were like, let's chat. We talked, he said he had all these images that had rarely, if ever been seen before. He was like, I just got them, like sitting on a hard drive at home. Hmm. While we all in the city marked this 10 year anniversary, Devin has been marking every anniversary, doing lots of different things. Like he's done things around mental health. He's had his images shown in other places. So for this, he was like, I talked to young people. Some of the young people weren't born or they were like very small children. And he's like, for me, I'm passionate about letting them know what happened, keeping this memory alive. And so he had all these images and he was like, I don't care. I just want people to see them. I don't care who sees them. I don't care how they're shown. I just want them out in the world because they're just sitting on my hard drive right now. So I took that back to the BMA and they were like, well, we can show them. And so we had a meeting and I remember we had this meeting in January and I was like, I know nothing about art exhibitions. I know a little bit because Terry Henderson, our arts and culture editor. She has done exhibitions where she, she doesn't, she's not an artist herself, but she can curate. And I'm like, Terry talks to me about events that are like two years down the road. So it seems like they take a long time and the BMA is like, yeah, they can take a long time, but also we could do this in two months. So, so Devin gave us a drop box of like 500 images and was like, I don't know, Lisa can pick them. And I was like, what? Yeah. So I go through it and it's very emotional for me. It felt like um opening up a time capsule, seeing like images of Stephanie Rollins Blake, images of people that I know now that, I mean, we were all, the people that I knew that were like in their 30s, now we're all like 40s and 50s, so we look older. Figuring out how to narrow these 500 images into, I think at one point the BMA was like 15, and I was like, what? Wow, that's so hard. up being, I think it's 27, because Devon was like, we can't. But like figuring out, the way that I picked images was like a few categories. It was things that just were striking to me, things that kind of were journalistic. So like the picture of Stephanie Rollins Blake was important to me because she was the mayor at the time. a picture of a lady holding a sign encouraging Marilyn Mosby was important to me journalistically because she was the state's attorney and she kind of did this radical thing in charging these officers. There's an image that is on the cover of the issue inside our issue and also very large in the exhibition of somebody, the back of a man who has an American flag with different names of other Black people throughout the last decades that were victims of police brutality. For me, was a stupid, that was, to me the definition of photojournalism because it puts Freddie Gray literally in the context of these deaths. And those were kind of like the ways that, and then things that were just beautiful because Devon's an immensely talented artist. So that was kind of how I was trying to hit these different notes. Devon also described um how overwhelming it felt being in the streets. Sometimes it would be peaceful. So there's images of people. cleaning up together, there's images of people praying and holding hands. And then he was like, it would just pivot and it would be crazy. So there's images of like police officers chasing people down. There's images of someone getting milk poured in his eyes to help pepper spray. It was just like, so I knew that Devin wanted it to feel immersive, again, feel kind of like Baltimore, which is a loud chaotic city in some spots. So that's kind of how I picked what those images were gonna be. And then Devin said that he didn't want them framed nicely. He wanted them as kind of like, they're just kind of stuck to the wall. And that's what we did and somehow it all came together. And so when you were doing that, feels like you wanted this immersive experience that would tell the story and hopefully put people in the context of feeling like they were in the streets during those days. Was it meant to be sort of a companion piece to the work that you did at the beat or do you feel like the stands alone? I I think we actually have copies available, not there because there's not a space in that exhibition room, but like when you first walk into the BMA, there's a big image and it says the name of the exhibit and there's copies of the beat. So I think in a way it can be a companion piece, but it can also be just, I think that the photos tell their own story. It does feel like it could definitely be a standalone. I want to just, you and Devin working together just puts me in mind of some of the things that you do with other city youth to develop their journalistic impulses and skills. And so can you kind of like put in context what partnerships like you had with Devin who's self-taught? like you have with wide angle youth media and like you have with city students, like how that informs what you're trying to do with the beat and why you think that's important. So I've been a journalist in Baltimore for like 20 years. And what I've seen a lot, and this is not even, it's no shade, but sometimes Baltimore can be a pass through for journalists. You can come from another place. You can come from maybe from the University of Maryland. You come in, you do your time in Baltimore. You move on to like a bigger market like DC or New York. And this isn't, that's not always the case. Sometimes people come here and fall in love with the city and stay, or sometimes it's just that they're in the city doing the work the best they can and then moving on. So it's not to say that there's anything wrong with doing that, but I think that there's a lot of that and not a lot of nurturing talent. And I think about myself, like, I'm doing this interview for my parents' bedroom. When I was a kid, or my old bedroom, when I was a kid living in this room, it never occurred to me that I could really be a journalist or writer. I didn't know any journalists or writers. I didn't even know that many people that went to college. So to me, it's important to plant those seeds because again, if we talk about the place we're in in this country and what we need, we need all types of voices. I have so many rants about journalism, but one of them is that there's no such thing as objectivity, but there is getting as close to the truth as possible. And I think that the way you get to the closest truth as possible is through having a diverse newsroom that can call each other out in a healthy way and figure out maybe there's a perspective that you have on a piece that I write that I didn't see because we've lived two separate lives. And so getting diverse newsrooms means nurturing talent early, encouraging folks early and getting them ready to work when they can. You know, it strikes me, I'm going back to what you did at Lexington Market and having people like Ray and Devon, they are talking, like planting those seeds sort of wherever you are to give people the idea like, yeah, I could do that, or I'm interested in that. People in general are very interested in the truth or the closest we can get to truth. And I love your perspective of it's all these different lenses that are kind of honing in a little bit. uh to get it more focused. If you just have the one lens, you can only see a little bit at a time. uh people going into journalism, usually, they have to be given the idea. It's either like their school newspaper or they, like no one really just sits around and says, hey, I wanna be a journalist. Like it doesn't occur to them. So uh in terms of like planting that seed, You also are working with Wide Angle Youth Media, which our listeners may not know very much about that organization. Can you share with us and tell us a little bit about what you're doing? Sure, they are a nonprofit here in Baltimore and they really introduce and work with young people in all types of the arts. So if you go to their space, they have a space where you can do like claymation. They have studios, they do TikToks. They introduce young people, people in late teens, early twenties to career in the arts in a variety of ways. So we've been really working with them for I think about a year or two years now. um to have their work in the paper. And it's a way of really also, it helps both of us because it gives these young folks things that they can put in their resume and their portfolio. And for us, we are a tiny newsroom. We don't have the money. Like when I worked at City Paper, we had Charlie Herrick, who's an amazing graphic designer who could sit down and like design a cool City Paper cover or put them in together. We don't have that right now. So they're kind of our de facto, you know, graphic design. section. That's really cool. And I mean, everybody likes to see their work in print. uh And I'm also interested, I feel like the beat kind of pulls in and leans into the arts in a way that is not really uh present in other outlets in the city. So can you talk a little bit about why uh sort of you lean in that arts direction? mean, with the small staff you have, you have an arts and culture editor, you have someone who's really dedicated to that. So how does journalism and the arts intersect for you in telling the story of your communities. To me, that's being faithful to kind of our City Paper, Alt Weekly DNA. Baltimore City Paper was very, took art very seriously. I think if you think about like kind of the ecosystem for artists, City Paper was going to all the tiny little grungy shows that nobody knew about to start finding talent. City Paper would write about them and then they'd go from there. You know, maybe go start at City Paper. then go to Baltimore, the Baltimore Sun, and maybe, you know, five, 10 years into this person's career, they're getting a big, fancy, glossy, you know, piece in Baltimore Magazine. But City Paper was the one finding the talent from the very beginning. I also think that if you're thinking about trying to make news palatable and digestible, sometimes it's easier for people to enter through arts and images than sit down and say, oh, here's a like. 5,000 word story. That's a lot, but it's not as much of a stretch sometimes to start off with like, these are really beautiful images, or this is a picture of somebody down the street that I didn't know was doing this amazing work in the community. Here's the work that they're doing. Here's why my community is special. And that's their entry point into news. And so it's just like trying to figure out, like if I had, if someone dropped millions on me, I would still have text stories, but I would go crazy in figuring out all the other ways to get information into people's heads. Like how do we illustrate stories more? How do we put more interesting sound elements? I think that like, again, if we, are in a moment where everybody needs to be paying attention. And I think that sometimes arts are a way of helping people process information in a way that maybe text isn't always. Yeah, I think being open to where people are and how they're sort of primed to see and interact with that information. That's so critical. I think that's great. And so you've just, and I'm sure you're exhausted because that was a huge project to bring the special package about Freddie Gray to fruition and working with the BMA. Once you take a breath and settle in, What's next? What are you, are you working on anything upcoming? Yes, so we want to, last year was when we first started partnering with Wide Angle and they designed two covers for us or two actually issues and they were our youth voter guides. We did one in the spring for the primaries and then we did another in the fall for the big election. And there was all this movement and talk in journalism. I feel like leading up to that election, like that summer, like, oh, we've got to like get people to care about this. By then it's too late. Like, that's too late. And for me, it's important to keep whatever conversation we started with those youth voter guides where we did surveys, we talked to people, we tried to reflect what young people were already saying in the community. We can't then take those ties, say thank you so much for our cool issues, and then not see them in like two more years for primary, four more years. We've got to continue to do that work. So we have another project that we're going to be working on for the fall. around engaging young people in public safety. And then the thing that's really, I think heavily on everybody's minds is money because um we are not quiet about the fact that when you're thinking about forgotten audiences or neglected audiences, a lot of time it's poor folks. A lot of times it's black folks. Baltimore is right now a majority black city. That puts us right in Trump's DEI crosshairs. And what does that look like for funding? What funding might not be available to us anymore? What funds maybe as things in this country change economically that people maybe won't have to contribute in the way that they have. We have a setup where people can just kind of automatically have donations taken out every month. So thinking about how to get creative and think outside the box as far as funding going because We, think that we are invaluable, but also unfortunately I do not come from money. So I gotta, I gotta earn it somehow. We just had a story come out and editor and publisher, a partnership that we're doing with Peabody Heights Brewery and we're have a beer come out. So we're gonna have a big launch party in May and a dollar, I think from every purchase we'll go towards the Baltimore beach. That's terrific. And that'll be a good beer. Peabody Heights is a terrific brewery. And I mean, I think that's also just another example of how rooted you are within the community, that you sort of have the relationships and you have the areas to say, let's kind of collaboratively work together. And that's, it feels again, sort of like that ground swell uh of support. And so I wish you the best on that. I'm excited to see what you do. I more and we'll get to talk about it a little bit more as things develop. So thank you so much for coming on the program and for what you've done to uh memorialize the 10th anniversary of Freddie Gray's passing and the uprising. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity. Great, talk to you soon.