This fall’s Critical Social Justice theme is Baltimore 365. We’re excited for the events that will be happening on campus during the week of October 19th… but why wait?! We’re encouraging UMBC community members to engage with and volunteer in Baltimore City at the 4th annual Project Homeless Connect. This city-wide resource fair provides on-the-spot services for thousands of members of the homeless community.

Next Steps:

• Learn more about Project Homeless Connect at their website. Did you know that last year’s event supported 1,450 people experiencing homelessness or poverty received services on that day? Check out the 2014 post-event summary here. 
• Attend UMBC’s Learn & Register event on Friday, 9/11 at 3:30pm in Commons 332. It’s not a mandatory orientation but this is a great way to learn more about the initiative, meet other UMBC students and staff who are going, learn how to get there via UMBC shuttle, and Register for a timeslot.  Let others know you’re going or invite them via this Facebook event! 
• Register to volunteer! Volunteer shifts are needed on September 23rd and 24th.
• Learn about the issues. Here’s some good places to start your research and learn more:
  • What is homelessness? 
  • Check out the issues at Heath Care for the Homeless Inc. 
  • Read about the razing of Baltimore’s homeless encampments (opinion piece)
  • On Baltimore’s vacant houses – a perspective from The Atlantic. 
  • Learn more about YES Drop-In Center – Baltimore City’s first and only drop-in center for homeless youth.
  • This is not an exhaustive list! What resources do you recommend? Let us know and we’ll add them! 

Also don’t forget you can participate in more extended service-learning opportunities in Baltimore City through the Shriver Center. Check out potential sites and connect with the Shriver Center before September 25th to sign up for PRAC 096. 

Critical Social Justice: Baltimore 365 — October 19th through 23rd!

When the unrest swelled again in Baltimore on Monday, April 27th, 2015, UMBC was in the midst of studying for final exams and preparing for the end of the semester. For many, the Uprising seemed well removed from our campus, as a perceived sense of distance from the city belies the significance of the ‘B’ in UMBC. Aside from periodically checking the local news updates or receiving a swell of calls and messages from concerned relatives on Facebook, studying and campus night life went on as usual. For some students, the reality of a Baltimore in chaos mere miles away didn’t sink in until they saw fires burning from the 7th floor of Albin O. Kuhn Library.

But for many others, those fires were burning our city—our home.

As members of the Critical Social Justice team unpacked the events that transpired in Baltimore, we struggled to find balance in the divide between the university and Baltimore. The divide, for example, between staying at home in the city to engage in a movement for Black lives or leaving the city for UMBC to create healing spaces, meet with students in need, and challenge those who had yet to understand the complexities and vast differences between riots and uprisings. The reality of an “us” and a “them” felt very real as we navigated back and forth on campus during those next few days. While on campus, it was easy to think through theory, strategize, and simply talk about Baltimore in the abstract; however, at night with the sounds of helicopters and sirens invading through our windows, we desperately needed our other UMBC community members to think beyond Hilltop Circle.

Baltimore City and the pervasive violence and injustice there can no longer be talked about in the abstract. Whether or not Baltimore is your home, Critical Social Justice calls each of us in this privileged community of higher education to think and engage critically about Baltimore. We cannot only think about the city when we see a fire from the library or when the Ravens win the Super Bowl. Much like Critical Social Justice is a year-long campaign, our critical thinking, action, and care for Baltimore must happen all 365 days a year.

This year’s Critical Social Justice initiative aims to create space and learning opportunities to consider the ways we can cultivate deep and lasting commitments to Baltimore City that are meaningful to us as individuals and as part of the UMBC community. By focusing on Baltimore, we aim to engage with local social justice issues and activism while framing our understanding within the context of larger national movements and ongoing struggles against systemic racism and injustice.

Our campus and our city are not as separate as they may seem at our quiet university—nor are they as readily connected as our proximity and names might lead people to believe. Critical Social Justice: Baltimore 365 knits the UMBC and Baltimore communities together in the hopes of growing into a better UMBC through a better Baltimore.

Critical Social Justice: Baltimore 365 will be held on October 19th through 23rd, 2015. Follow the CSJ blog, Facebook, and Twitter for updates on scheduled events and other news. For more information about the Critical Social Justice initiative, or if you’re organizing a related event that week that might be included on the CSJ calendar, please email womens.center@umbc.edu.

UMBC students, faculty, and staff now have access to a new online collection of Baltimore photographs through UMBC’s Digital Collections. The Baltimore Collection, which includes approximately 96 photographs and negatives, represents contributions from various donors that have been compiled to showcase the rich history of our city.  The original photographs are available for view at Special Collections.

The Baltimore Collection features a wide range of images that capture prominent historical figures and events in Baltimore, as well as scenes from daily life in and around the city. These photographs offer a detailed and vivid look at life in Baltimore in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, highlighting memorable events that have shaped the city’s past and defined its landscape while showcasing the Baltimoreans who lived during this time.

Highlights  

Among the photographs in the Baltimore Collection are several images depicting the aftermath of the Great Baltimore Fire, which took place on February 7 and 8, 1904. Nearly 86 city blocks and over 1500 buildings were destroyed during the fire. Images in the collection portray the extent of the fire’s damage, from crumbling foundations of former buildings to wide expanses of city streets that have been reduced to piles of rubble.

 The Baltimore Collection also features images of the Baltimore Sesqui-Centennial in 1880, which celebrated the 150^th anniversary of the founding of Baltimore. The photographs show streets and buildings throughout Baltimore, including the Washington Monument in Mount Vernon Place and the Baltimore Sun Building, decorated with flags, banners, and commemorative arches.

In addition to images of historic events and daily life, the Baltimore Collection also contains negatives of the iconic Edgar Allan Poe. These images include portraits and magazine photographs of Poe as a younger man and later in life. The collection also features photographs of Poe’s memorial grave in the Westminster Burying Ground in Baltimore.

Access the digital images of the Baltimore Collections here to learn more about the people, places, and events that have shaped Baltimore’s history!

UMBC’s Special Collections is also open to the public by appointment in the summer and as well as Monday through Friday from 1pm-4pm, with extended hours on Thursday until 8 pm during the semester. 

This post was written by Special Collections & Reference student assistant Sarah Klimek.  Sarah helped to digitize, create metadata, produce contextual information for the collection, make the landing page, and publicize it all while volunteering in Special Collections during spring 2015. Thanks, Sarah!

Wondering why and what people in different Baltimore neighborhoods are protesting?

Confused about what caused the peaceful protests as well as violent riots?  

Unclear about the various perspectives on what led to Freddie Gray's death?

Puzzled by the reactions and responses of your classmates and colleagues - particularly those of African descent?  

To begin to explore some answers to these questions and more, we invite you to read a few articles recently shared with us by one of our campus faculty partners Dr. Joby Taylor, Director of UMBC's Shriver Peaceworker Program.  Feel free to share widely.  This is by no means a complete list of what's being written about past and recent events in Baltimore city, so feel free to email us at mosaic@umbc.edu with suggested article links that we can add to this list.  

Link to Marc Steiner Show with a couple of produced videos on Freddie Gray, and Monday's 2 hour radio show (podcast), which gave some solid and important community perspectives that go below the sensational surface of most news reports.

Link to Dan Rodrick's column yesterday on the "Other Baltimore" connected back to '68 scene.

Editorial on Why Freddie Gray Ran in Baltimore Sun published a couple days before Monday's unrest.

Link to Open Society Institute's Statement in Response to the Killing of Freddie Gray posted yesterday on their Audacious Ideas website. 

Link to a short open letter from Viva House, located in West Baltimore, sent out yesterday morning.

So after the longest run of any woman in the history of the United States Congress, Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland is retiring after this 114^th Congress in 2017. And for some reason, I am feeling some sort of way about it.

I have been incensed to write this ever since Senator Mikulski’s retirement announcement, not because she is my policy-making idol or someone who defines what feminism looks like for me. To be quite honest, I have not followed her every vote, nor her every speech. But there’s something to Senator Mikulski that I have always looked up to. She is a symbol to me—a symbol of a woman who is not afraid to take up space. A symbol I have always needed.

On the right, Barbara Mikulski in 1994.

Senator Mikulski has always been known to me as a woman who has stomped forward and demanded her due. Who attested to being “one of those emotional women” on the Senate floor while arguing for pay equity; who, early in her career, was the only other percentage point of women in the U.S. Senate. Women I know, admire, and who inspire me daily—my mother being one of them—have always touted her as their own “shero.” Why? Because, Senator Mikulski did not try to maintain a new sense of subtlety or feminine gentleness when she got to the Senate—no, she made her bombastic nature her signature. Something that just was her essence. She was fiery and passionate about issues, and that’s where her political energy came from.

And it’s not only her personality, but it’s the fact that Barbara Mikulski is also no waif. And I mean no disrespect to the Senator at all—rather, I mean only respect. This woman is small and sturdy. She is not the Claire Underwood or Olivia Pope on our television, but the 4’11” juggernaut who wears pants on the Senate floor when she goddamn feels like it. Senator Mikulski’s visage, like her personality, is unapologetic.

And as a woman who can’t stop muttering “I’m sorrys” to every person who accidentally(?) pushes me on the sidewalk, I need that symbol of unabashed space taking up-ness that Senator Mikulski has always been for me. As a woman who does have wide-set shoulders, wide-set hips, and a loud, wide way of talking about what thing is making her angriest, I need to know that I can succeed with that. As a woman who has always had her fire for social justice doused by naysayers or “realists,” I need someone who is bent on raising hell till her and her loved ones get the rights they deserve. And finally, as a woman who has struggled with body, intelligence, and political insecurity in a patriarchal world, Senator Mikulski has always been somebody who I would look to when I was down, and realize, “I can take up this space, because I deserve it and I am more than worthy.”  

I hope that anybody reading this who faces similar or maybe even more complex insecurities than I do, can hopefully treat this post as a push towards finding that someone—be they a celebrity, a politician, or a peer in class—who makes you realize you are worthy of the skin you’re in and the space you inhabit. Maybe they do it through their ferocity (like my Senator Barb), their creativity, their stoicism, but either way, they help you to be you to the fullest, and they awaken the opportunity to celebrate yourself and the uniqueness that makes you you. Because sometimes, in our weakest moments, all we need is to feel inspired to know that we are worthy.

*And here is my disclaimer on “problematic faves”: I am often one of the first to recognize the problematic nature of anything that exists in the world. It’s not that I am trying to be a dark shadow, a pox upon the happiness of all the smiling people in the room. No, rather, it is simply a personal habit of mine to critically analyze something until its not fun any more (I’ll do it to the Oscars, I’ll do it to your fave, and I’ll keep doing it, I tell you). However, I wanted to add this disclaimer, because I know that Senator Barbara Mikulski has done and said what are probably problematic things to many. I’m certain I could find hurt in what she’s said if I read enough, but I also am not going to let that ruin this moment. I am going to bask in that Senator Barbara Mikulski Sun that always makes me feel like I can carpe all the diems, and I am going to feel positive about it. So, please, allow me the indulgence of stoking the fangirling fire a little longer, oh fellow killjoys, because all of our faves are problematic, and sometimes that’s just gotta be okay.

History graduate student Shae Adams worked in Special Collections this Spring with the Joseph L. Arnold manuscript. She has provided us with this report from the scene!

Intern Shae Adams here with breaking news from your very own Special Collections: Something exciting is happening in Special Collections! (Ed. note: something exciting is always happening in Special Collections.) We are partnering with the UMBC history department to bring you a digitized history of Baltimore that you can access from the comfort of your living room. Over the course of the semester I have begun compiling and editing a manuscript written by the late Dr. Joseph Arnold, a former UMBC history professor. The manuscript provides an overview of the history of Baltimore from its founding in 1730 to the beginnings of suburbanization in the 1920s with plenty of dramatic events in between. Dr. Arnold’s work explores the heroism of Baltimoreans during the War of 1812, the bitter divisions within the city during the Civil War, alongside the triumphs and tragedies of immigrants determined to find acceptance in their new home.

The manuscript is currently in the editing phases. But progress has been made! Only a few months ago, the book existed only as a jumble of chapters and revisions arranged in archival boxes. Now the chapters have been reunited in a single document ready for final content editing. Through the continued partnership with the history department, Special Collections has high hopes that the manuscript will become an integral part in growing UMBC’s presence in the digital humanities following its online publication.

Stay posted for further updates on this story as it unfolds!

Thank you, Shae!