“Before I went to work in the Carter Administration, for a background check, they asked for all my addresses, and I realized we moved every 18 months,” he continues. “Of course, I’d only known all the black neighborhoods.”
In 1956, however—two years after Marshall, a Baltimore native, won the landmark Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision—Gibson entered City College high school. Voted the storied institution’s first African-American class officer, he moved on to Howard University, becoming a student civil-rights leader, motivated, he says, by a basic desire to “fully participate” in life. After Columbia Law School, he was the first “negro,” as the Baltimore News-American reported, appointed to clerk for a federal judge in Maryland in 1967.
And then Gibson clerked for Venable, Baetjer & Howard, one of the state’s two biggest law firms. His goal at the time was to buy his parents, a janitor and a cook, a house. He recalls that period now, before his presentation in the courthouse’s Barr Library, where he spent long hours researching cases as a Venable clerk—and where he was diligently working when he learned Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot.
With Baltimore convulsed in riots following King’s assassination, Gibson instead decided to join the city’s top black law firm, Brown, Allen, Watts, Murphy & Russell, and immediately set out to elect the first black leaders—including two of those partners listed above—to citywide offices. Quickly developing a reputation as a high-energy, no-holds-barred, grassroots organizer, Gibson served as campaign manager for Joseph Howard, who became the first black judge on the Baltimore City Supreme Bench and the first African-American to win a citywide seat in the fall of 1968—just seven months after King’s death. In the next election cycle, Gibson directed the campaigns of Milton Allen, the first African-American elected Baltimore State’s Attorney—and the first to hold a chief prosecutor’s position in a major U.S. city—and William Murphy, who won a Municipal Court judgeship. Paul Chester, whose campaign Gibson also directed, became the first African-American circuit-court clerk the same year, 1970.
Finally, the young organizer and his law firm supported Parren Mitchell, who became the first African-American from Maryland elected to Congress in 1970. In two years, the color of Baltimore’s political landscape had begun a transformation.
“I had every intention of working for Venable; there was an expectation that I would. But then Martin Luther King was shot and I’m thinking, ‘Why am I going to work for the establishment?’” Gibson says. “And I changed my mind.”
Lexington Market
North Howard Street
July 13, 2013
34. Guns for Gigabytes
Inside a velvet rope, on the sidewalk outside west Baltimore’s Cultural Arts Center, an ominous line forms on a hot and eerily quiet Saturday afternoon. A man standing in front reveals that, hidden in a purple Ravens’ blanket, he’s carrying an Armi Jager AP-15 assault weapon. Behind him, a man holds a .22 caliber rifle wrapped in newspaper. Nearby, a woman reaches into her purse and pulls a pistol from a sock. Someone else lifts a firearm from a beer cooler. Further back in line, Frank Lipira takes a revolver—“concealed” inside a manila envelope—out of the waistband of his jean shorts.
Like the others, Lipira’s exchanging his gun for a Dell laptop, courtesy of nonprofit Digit All Systems. Organized with the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice and SWAT team members from the police department, the guns for computers event is believed to be the first of its kind in the U.S.
Lipira, who witnessed shootings growing up in Park Heights, is concerned his children might find his handgun—or that it could be stolen. But he’s not sure who in the family will get the laptop. “My daughter is nine and wants it,” he says. “So does my wife.”
There’s live music, fried chicken, and potato salad inside as the crowd waits to receive their computers. Digit All Systems employee Toni Klatt, handing out laptop vouchers as weapons are turned it, takes the stage for a moment.
“I want to thank everyone who is here,” she says. “My fiancé, my son’s father, was shot to death earlier this year,” she continues, tears coming to her eyes. “I don’t want another 18-month-old child asking where their father is.”
Charles Village
North Charles and 33rd Streets
August 6, 2013
35. School Girls
For the 29th year on this date, Max Obuszewski stands at evening rush hour on North Charles Street, holds up a grainy, blown-up, black-and-white photo of Hiroshima taken shortly after the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” reads the quote from philosopher George Santayana, captioning the photo on Obuszewski’s poster. Two-dozen others, including a mom toting two kids, join the quiet—other than supportive honking horns—annual commemoration. The location near The Johns Hopkins University is meant to simultaneously protest the school’s drone-weapon research and the small event is also an opportunity to highlight the dangers, not just of nuclear weapons, but nuclear power, for example, the ongoing Fukushima radiation leaks.
Still, as Obuszewski glances around at the sparsely attended demonstration, he can’t help but wonder what happened to the anti-war, anti-nuke movement. “I took a bus to New York in June1982 and there were a million people in Central Park for an anti-nuclear demonstration,” he says, with a good-natured laugh. “Where’d everybody go?”
Afterward, demonstrators head to the nearby Friends Meeting House where 81-year-old Setsuko Thurlow shares the horror she witnessed as a 13-year-old Hiroshima schoolgirl: “People walking like ghost-like figures, flesh hanging from their bones, holding their eyeballs in their hands . . . others on the ground, begging for water, stomachs bursting open.”
When she’s finished, Thurlow sits to watch a 15-minute Hiroshima documentary made last year by another schoolgirl, Meher Hans, when she was a Ridgely Middle School eighth-grader. For the project, Hans interviewed Thurlow by phone, but the two are now meeting for the first time as the Hiroshima survivor watches the short film, also for the first time.
In the dark Friends Meeting House basement, Thurlow’s voice suddenly calls out as scenes of the rubbled, desolate city—including a lone stone archway and half-steeple—pan across the screen. “That’s my church!”
Armistead Gardens
Landay Avenue
August 14, 2013
36. Hacking It
Behind the junkyard and strip club, in a cramped industrial garage off Pulaski Highway filled with saws, gears, drill presses, and duct tape, but also a high-end laser cutter, 3-D printer, 5-foot-functional robot, and laptops, Jason Morris ducks his head in the door to “oohs and aahs.” Morris, sporting new Google glasses, happily lets the guys here—it’s all guys tonight except for one woman at the Baltimore Hackerspace’s weekly open meeting—try on his computerized eyewear.
“A hacker space,” founding member Myles Pekala explains, refers to a place where you take one thing or several things and repurpose those things into something else.” It doesn’t mean breaking into CIA computers.