Forty-seven years ago — a time of social upheaval, severe racial division and demoralizing urban unrest (sound familiar?) — an incumbent mayor of Baltimore decided to sit out the next election. Before Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s surprise announcement on Friday, that was the last time it had happened.
It was Thomas J. D’Alesandro III, the son of a mayor and brother of a future speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, who decided to walk away after just one term in City Hall. The riots of April 1968, far greater in scope than what happened this year on the day of Freddie Gray‘s funeral, took the biggest toll on his energy and enthusiasm for the job.
“I’ve got news for you,” D’Alesandro told a Baltimore Sun reporter in December 1970. “This is a lonely job. You get a lot of sympathy, but you don’t get any help.” The following year, voters made the president of the City Council, William Donald Schaefer, their mayor.
Looking back, any historian would say Baltimoreans made an excellent choice. Schaefer was completely devoted to the city’s recovery, even as its population losses accelerated. He was tough, demanding, feisty, and hopelessly optimistic about the future. He was a cheerleader who stuck his tongue out at naysayers. He was a man who looked at old piers along the city’s industrial waterfront and saw a tourist destination. He declared Baltimore a city ready for a renaissance.
The rest is history — and, trust me, it’s not all pretty — but Schaefer managed to pull the city out of a tailspin. It was also during the years after the riots that city officials and citizen-volunteers created the City Fair, an attempt to showcase neighborhoods, bring people together and craft positive images of Baltimore. It worked. It worked for years.
This might all sound quaint, but it’s a big part of the Baltimore story: Schaefer’s 15-year run at City Hall and the City Fair. Baltimore — a lot of Baltimore, certainly not all of it — slowly recovered from the fire and smoke of 1968.
Now here we are, nearly a half-century later, facing a similar time of peril and uncertainty, with a beleaguered mayor who has decided not to seek re-election following a heartbreaking spring of unrest and a summer of violence, with thorny divisions between citizens and authority, with possibly months of trials of police officers charged in Gray’s arrest and death, and with a critical municipal primary one year after the West Baltimore riot, in April 2016.
It all seems overwhelming, and endlessly stressful. But it must have seemed that way 47 years ago, too. Thousands of people walked away — ran away — from Baltimore. But those who stayed saved the city from slipping off the map. And here we are, facing the same uncertainty and challenges.
I don’t have all the answers, by any means. As H.L. Mencken once said of his role as a critic: “I’m a pathologist, not a chiropractor.”
But here are a few suggestions:
The Baltimore City Council should immediately vote full confidence in Kevin Davis, the interim police commissioner, and call on the mayor to appoint him permanently. The last thing this city needs is more uncertainty about police leadership as it faces the huge job of reducing crime in one of the nation’s most violent cities while shepherding it through the trials of police officers.
Davis should get an extended chance to turn things around. He has one of the toughest jobs in America and needs all the support he can get. He’s already starting to make some progress.
Last week, during a three-day blow of Gray-related news, you might have missed this: Cases against 14 men arrested last month on gun charges were transferred from state to federal court, where the defendants face 10-year prison sentences far away from Baltimore. No homicide charges, only firearms violations. But that does not diminish the significance of the prosecution of those men.
“These are 14 people who are not in a position to harm people in the city,” Davis said, echoing former commissioner Fred Bealefeld’s memorable focus on “bad guys with guns” as a way of making the city safer.
I bring up Bealefeld again for a reason. The city needs focus, it needs consistency. I’m speaking here not only of the crime fight, but of the ongoing efforts to better educate children, to improve the health of more citizens, to plant seeds for redevelopment and the creation of jobs — all prescriptions for a city in recovery.
By consistency I mean finding something that works and sticking with it. I do not mean maintaining the status quo when the status quo is a bust.
Which takes me to City Hall. That place needs new blood in a big way.
Because so much is at stake in Baltimore’s recovery, voters need to take their hardest look ever — not only at candidates for mayor but also at candidates for every City Council seat in what should be a robust primary next spring. We need stronger, smarter, energetic leadership.
Oh yeah, one more suggestion: Bring back the City Fair.
Dan Rodricks’ column appears each Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. He is the host of “Midday” on WYPR-FM.
