Bad Boys of Baltimore

For five weeks, I walked around the streets of Baltimore, or at least the distance between a certain major university known for its doctors, the Inner Harbor, and Fells Point -- especially Fells Point -- with some diversions elsewhere. As I walked, I began to notice landmarks of some very bad guys who have graced the streets of this interesting city.

The first landmark I encountered was Lexington Market:

What's so bad about Lexington Market? Well, nothing, actually. I had actually never heard of it; but as I passed it on my way to Poe's grave, I recognized it. "That's where McNulty had his kids follow Stringer Bell!" I exclaimed. For those of you who have not become obsessed with The Wire, McNulty is the name of one of the police officers and Stringer Bell was one of the drug kingpins. I consider both "bad guys" because drug kingpins are always bad guys, and McNulty was a fucked-up mess who hurt anyone who came close to him.

If you haven't seen The Wire, I highly recommend putting them at the top of your Netflix queue. It's depressing as hell, especially Season 4, which should be required viewing for all teachers. Still, all of the story lines delve into the systemic problems of poverty and crime and the near futility and deep flaws of the institutions such as the police and schools, that are supposed to improve society. All of the characters are complex, even the baddest of the bad guys, regardless of which side of the law they are on. The female characters are fully realized. The acting is spectacular.

To give you an idea of just how good the show is, in our institute of PhDs, half of the people had either seen or were watching The Wire. By week 4, people were throwing out examples from The Wire to illustrate systemic oppression and power relationships. For instance -- and this was my favorite -- when we read the document of "Nat Turner's Confession," we noticed that Turner himself never killed anyone. His sword was always dull. "Hey," said one woman, "Stringer Bell never killed anyone either."

In other words, she suggested that, within the rebellion, there might have been a hierarchy of who could kill who and who did what sort of killing. Stringer Bell didn't kill anyone because killing was the work of lower-level operatives. He had to keep his hands clean, to remain unimpeachable in the actual crime, to keep the whole operation going. Perhaps Turner did, as well. This did not work out for either, in the end, because being an outlaw -- outside of the law -- is dangerous business, and both worked against systems, and many individuals with great investment in those systems would go to great lengths to ensure its survival.

Speaking of individuals willing to go to great lengths to protect systems, here we have a non-fictional bad guy memorialized in the Mt. Vernon neighborhood:

That is Chief Justice Roger Taney: Maryland-born, first Catholic Supreme Court Justice, and author of the Dred Scott v. Sanford decision. Sure, he was a slaveholder who freed his slaves; but really, you have a hard time making his case as a good guy. After all, he was the man who identified the central question of the case as this:

"can a negro whose ancestors were imported into this country and sold as slaves become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied by that instrument to the citizen, one of which rights is the privilege of suing in a court of the United States in the cases specified in the Constitution?"

and decided not only that Dred Scott and his family should be kept in slavery because "Dred Scott was not a citizen of Missouri within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States, and not entitled as such to sue in its courts, and consequently that the Circuit Court had no jurisdiction of the case, and that the judgment on the plea in abatement is erroneous," but also that all African Americans were not and should not be considered citizens of the U.S.* So, I consider him a bad guy.

I found two more bad guys from the antebellum era, as well, but neither are memorialized at all. The first was Austin Woolfolk. "Who is he?" I hear you ask. Well, he was one of the biggest slave traders in the U.S. and operated right out of Baltimore. He's listed on p. 400 of the 1831 Baltimore city directory as a "purchaser of negroes." He lived on West Pratt street "near the railroad. By my estimation, that would be near Camden stadium, which you can see to the misty middle-ground left in this image (that's Pratt Street on the right, and I'm facing west):


A contemporary view (courtesy of the Baltimore World Trade Center, courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society) is this:

That's Pratt Street, facing west, with the harbor on the left. Local historian Ralph Clayton describes a scene in which Woolfolk and his enslaved cargo "...made their way down Pratt Street to Philpot Street and on to the wharf at the foot of Fell's Point" I confess to being a bit dubious as to that specific arrangement, since Camden Yard to Philpot Street is quite a hike, and right past these wharves in the picture above (also, no footnotes in newspaper articles -- I'm working on getting an article about Woolfolk himself from another source). If, however, this was the way the transport within the city operated, then Frederick Douglass saw Woolfolk in action only a block away from his own doorstep. He did write that he saw slaves being sold at the foot of Philpot Street. I would rather like if this were remembered in the landscape of the city. I wonder if any cities or towns -- aside from the Slave Market in Charleston -- mark the site of slave sales.

The other unmarked Baltimore bad guy lies in the Green Mount Cemetery. This is the family monument, dedicated to the actor Junius Brutus Booth:

Junius would be the father of John Wilkes Booth, the Maryland actor whose final performance began with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. "Sic semper tyrranus," he shouted after blasting out the brains of the man who signed the Emancipation Proclamation. After a long and winding chase through the Maryland countryside, Booth met his own end by a gunshot through the neck. His body was transported and autopsied more than once before it ended up here in the family plot, unmarked on the orders of his brother, Edwin:

Yet, it is not uncommemorated. Visitors leave pennies on the monument, all to one side, and some shoved under the edge of the plinth:

I imagine that the purpose (I'd have to go re-check Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation to be sure, because she would know such goofy and pertinent information) is to eventually topple the monument with the tiny images of Lincoln. That's my penny up there on the end on the right.

There are certainly many more bad guys in Baltimore's past and present. Given the poverty-stricken neighborhood surrounding Green Mount Cemetery, parts of which actually served as the locations for The Wire, there are probably many a real life Stringer Bells and McNultys wandering around right now. Some company might make a killing -- not sure if that pun is intended -- offering a crime and punishment tour of the city. It might even give the ghost tours a run for their money.

Sensationalism aside, these bad guys, and the particular nature of their badness -- both real and fictional -- open up the complexity of Baltimore as an illustration of race in America.

* Really, a certain vice-presidential candidate, when asked about Supreme Court decisions with which she disagreed, couldn't even bring this one up? Then, again, she might actually agree with it.