My Journey

From E. Baltimore to Academia

I grew up in East Baltimore in a beautiful brownstone row house on Lafayette Avenue. A tree grew right outside my window. My mother “did hair.” _Down Lafayette Avenue.docx She worked in the cramped confines of our kitchen, straightening and styling, curlers rattling, two hours per customer, for a fee of two dollars and twenty-five cents each. She was very industrious. My father worked at Bethlehem steel. I can still see him bag lunch in hand, on his way to the Sparrow’s point plant, where he worked nights on trains which carried iron ore.

Every family that lived in my neighborhood was black, except for the Rosado family, which lived a block away from us. On the other hand, the police who patrolled our neighborhood were white, the owner of the corner store was white, the man who collected for our insurance was white, the Principal at my school was white, the Mayor was white. Respectability always had a white face.

The psychological reality of the time is perhaps best chronicled by the popular culture it produced. I remember shows like Tarzan, Jack Benny, and Amos “n’ Andy portraying the Negro variously as a native, as a childlike butler, or as a con man long on ambition but short on talent, trying to bilk his friends. These depictions of Negroes in the early 1960’s, in the explicit way in which they walled Negroes out of any sense of human dignity, mirrored perfectly the explicit way we Negroes were walled out of the larger economy and society in those days.

From behind the wall, I would call my parents to the living room whenever a miracle would happen, as they did from time to time – when a Negro would be shown, not as a native with a spear or a con man or a servant, but in a respectable job, perhaps as a high school teacher. These respectable jobs did exist for Negroes, but they were in Negro schools or hospitals. We could be respectable, after a fashion, but we had to stay behind the wall.

The schools in my neighborhood were “failing schools” schools. At my junior high, which was overwhelmingly black and poor, the average reading level was second grade. I would later learn that the neighborhood I lived in with its beautiful brownstone row houses was an urban ghetto.

But I had a big advantage. My mother told me that I was smart and that if I worked hard,” I could be somebody.” So, I did what she said. Every day, through the week, sick or well, I went to school. I never missed a day. After school, every school day, I went to the library to read for at least a couple of hours. And every day the kids in my neighborhood laughed at me for doing so.

By my senior year in high school my grades and my high scores on the SAT got the attention of many colleges and universities who sent many letters and brochures asking me to apply. I would go on to graduate form a highly selective private college and later to the prestigious New York University School of Law. By the time I was hired by the University of Miami as a Professor I had a sense of having made it across the wall, not a physical wall, but a cultural and social divide, as real for me as one made of concrete or steel.

As a Professor , the only black professor at the law school in my early years there, I have had an opportunity to become a member of an elite group of lawyers and social scientists, to have a chance to shape the minds of a new generation of lawyers, to engage with local leaders, the media and often member s of congress in critical conversations about urgent social issues , and to live in neighborhoods with manicured lawns and supermarkets that sell almond milk.

My experience reflects the fact we as a country have made some progress. But there is another side to the story. I represent only a fraction of the masses of black people who grow up in the inner city. Most do not make it out. I represent the even smaller fraction of those who graduate from law school or graduate school. I represent a fraction of a fraction. Sadly, the schools in Baltimore’s inner city, that I went to as a child, are still predominantly one race schools. The issue of joblessness only became worse as de-industrialization and disinvestment too place in the inner city in the latter part of the twentieth century. And it is painfully true that a child born today has one in five chances of going to prison by the time they are 35. The wall is still there.

This is why I write.