Fifty years later

Remembering landmarks

after half a century

My first front-page byline, 

overshadowed by history

It was 8:30 on a Saturday night when the story began -- a middle-aged man knocking on the door of a Catholic church rectory on Baltimore's Old York Road seeking help, telling a priest  he was being "terrorized by a group of teen-agers."

Another priest called the city police emergency number. And then they waited. And waited. In the ensuing hours, Father Richard T. Lawrence tried to navigate by phone through the chain of command, but was unable to get beyond the patrolman manning the office of the night commander, Maj. George C. Schnabel. When he called again, the same patrol officer informed the priest that the major had flatly refused to send a patrol car to the area.

Two days later, Father Lawrence reached out elsewhere -- calling the Baltimore Sun, where this young reporter arriving for work on a noon general assignment shift was handed the story to check out. It was a Monday, and bigger news was breaking elsewhere in America and Maryland, but the priest's complaint became the lead story of the next day's front page.

Turned out, the police department had stopped responding to calls from areas near the home bases of half a dozen organizations deemed to be black militants. "We're not responding to certain areas on a selective basis," Col. Frank J. Battaglia, the chief of patrol, told me, "in areas where we may have a confrontation."

The church rectory was more than a city block from the home of a group called Making a Nation, on Cator Avenue. The space between was informally referred to as "a gray area" -- and the police were not responding there.

The story won my first front-page byline, and showed a measure of importance for issues of race relations in Baltimore -- which has not really changed much since.

That story appeared exactly 50 years ago today, and can be readily found in a coffee table-size book published by the newspaper in 1999 titled "A Century in The Sun: Front Pages of the 20th Century."

In the context of history, my story was vastly overplayed on what was then an eight-column page. 

Next to it, across five columns, was an eventual Pulitzer Prize-winning photo by photojournalism student John Filo of a teenager, her arms spread in anguish as she knelt over the body of a student killed by Ohio National Guard gunfire during an antiwar demonstration at Kent State University.

In all, four students were killed and nine injured as the guardsmen tried to disperse hundreds of demonstrators on campus. And a story under the photo reported that police and Guard troops had been ordered to occupy the University of Maryland's College Park campus. "College Park Declared Emergency Area As New Disorders Erupt," the headline read. A bottom-page photo showed state police using tear gas to disperse a crowd of demonstrators there.

Kent State and its reaction across America marked a homefront turning point in the antiwar movement, but the Vietnam combat grinded on another five years -- and not the last of ultimately useless wars for this nation, as witness Iraq and Afghanistan.

Likewise for race relations in Baltimore.

My slightly overplayed story on "gray areas" was flanked by an article on state and federal arrest warrants being issued for black militant H. Rap Brown after he failed to appear for trial on riot and arson charges,   and there was a "reefer" under my headline to a back page story on Baltimore's police commissioner denying that arrests a week earlier of Black Panther members caused a rise in tensions.

Gov. Marvin Mandel, who in those days had oversight on the city police chief, ordered an investigation of the "gray areas" incident, which quickly determined that the commissioner had ordered no response to calls from the half-dozen addresses of militant groups without the presence of a ranking officer. The order was misinterpreted, however, as subordinates simply avoided response even to areas nearby.

I was sent to police headquarters to interview the commissioner, Donald D. Pomerleau, but he was having none of it. His secretary said he was too busy to see me, so I told her I'd wait. I sat there for five hours. Came 5 o'clock, and the secretary turned off the lights and told me he was gone.

What has not gone in the 50 years since is the issue of race in Baltimore, as witness the "uprising" of five years ago, after the fatal injury of the arrested Freddie Gray in a police van that still divides the city. And race continues to be a component of nearly every aspect of life in the city -- education, health, housing, economics, politics. The current mayoral election features a handful of credible black candidates, and one white female candidate. A recent political ad for a black candidate purported to show the geographic pattern of her campaign donations as a swath of the city through its predominately white population centers.

And there is the issue of race in public safety, and distrust of police by much of the black community not just because of the Freddie Gray death. It has been exacerbated by the scandal of the police department's rogue Gun Trace Task Force, many of whose members (not all of them white) falsified evidence, stole money and drugs in raids and arrests, and ended up in prison themselves.

Fifty years and running, and what has changed in our society?

Milestones: 40 years down the road

Kent State anniversary

brings back memories

of other front-page news

The anniversary had skipped my mind, but an NPR interview reminded me: Forty years ago this week, my first front-page byline appeared in The Baltimore Sun.

The NPR story had nothing to do with mine, except that its subject – the Kent State University massacre – made the front pages of Tuesday May 5, 1970, historic. Newspapers ran the photo of runaway 14-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio crying out in anguish over the body of Jeffrey Miller, one of 13 students shot by National Guard soldiers during an anti-war demonstration. Miller was one of the four who died.

Disturbances in the college town of Kent, Ohio, had prompted its mayor to declare a state of emergency and ask the governor to send in the Guard troops to restore order. The campus demonstration was one of many across the nation – including the University of Maryland – in response to an invasion of Cambodia ordered by the Nixon administration in what was perceived as an escalation of the Vietnam war.

My story was the result of a similar mindset in Baltimore, except that the issue was policing and race relations.

About the time of the noon-hour gunfire in Ohio, I was arriving at the city desk as a young reporter and being handed an assignment: A priest’s complaint about the refusal of the city police to respond to a call for help from his rectory a few nights earlier. A man had knocked on the door that Saturday night, seeking help because he was being “terrorized” by a band of teenagers.

The priest called the police, but after more than an hour no officer had arrived. He asked a fellow priest, the Rev. Richard Lawrence, who had experience in police-community relations, to check on the situation, and the latter priest told me how he called the Chief of Patrol’s office and was informed the department would not respond to the rectory because it was in “a gray area” with a “racial problem” and police were “afraid that the car would be hit with rocks or bottles or overturned.”

The church on Old York Road was around the corner from a house on Cator Avenue that was reportedly the headquarters of a group called Making a Nation – and one of half a dozen addresses that police had linked to black militant organizations. Police Commissioner Donald D. Pomerleau had issued an order that no patrol officer respond to those addresses without the presence of a supervisor, but the directive was misinterpreted to mean no response to the wider “sensitive” or “gray” areas around them.

Just a week earlier, city police had arrested a dozen members of the militant Black Panthers in connection with a killing, and the day I was working on the “gray areas” story, Commissioner Pomerleau was testifying at a court hearing in opposition to a civil libertarian motion seeking to dissolve a judge’s order that had banned the distribution of infammatory Panther literature.

Baltimore was just two years beyond the rioting that followed the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and Pomerleau, asked in court whether the arrests had the potential to spark comparable civil disorder, replied, “I say no,” according to a story by a Sun colleague appearing elsewhere in the same edition as my front-pager.

My story was the front-page lead, with a two-column headline at the top right. It was adjacent to the image of Mary Ann Vecchio that won then-student photographer John Filo a Pulitzer Prize and added fuel to the growing antiwar movement.

The Kent State account topped the middle of the front page, and under it was the story on the emergency declaration by Maryland Gov. Marvin Mandel that sent Guardsmen to the College Park campus. A downpage photo showed state troopers using tear gas to disperse demonstrators there.

Hardly anyone remembers my slightly overplayed story, which was clearly less important than the Kent State tragedy or troopers firing tear gas at Maryland student protesters who had blocked U.S. 1 in College Park for much of the day. (The war and race relations came together nine days later at Mississippi’s Jackson State, where city and state police gunfire on student protesters left two dead and 12 wounded.)

Forty years ago, Baltimore was a tense city just beginning to find its way in race relations and America was caught up in dissention over the Vietnam war. Much of the response on both fronts, as reflected in the front-page stories of May 5, 1970, seem in hindsight to have stemmed from fear.

Today, strangely, race still colors all too many aspects of life in Baltimore – including education, housing, health care, justice, politics.

And America is mired in yet another increasingly unpopular war.

There was a demonstration, of sorts, at College Park this year that brought a police response -- to quell the boistrous celebration after Maryland beat Duke University in a basketball game.

Prince George's County police were accused of brutality in the beatings of two students that night.

In retrospect, isn't that strange?